Consciousness and free will: the great questions of our age

Part 1, on my passing acquaintance with these profound questions.

Of the many outstanding questions in science, one of the most glaringly significant is the mystery of human consciousness. For each of the past four centuries (at least) we have amassed an understanding of the world we experience — indeed, the universe we experience — that would have been unimaginable a century before. Yet we know almost nothing about our own inner experience: the nature and operation of the entity that sits inside our heads and surveys that incredible universe. Not just that. Understanding the mechanism of consciousness (if it is a mechanism) is essential to answer a philosophical question that lies at the heart of human ethics and, therefore, our entire civilisation: do we have free will?

That was the view I took as a young student, some several decades ago. I wasn't so concerned about free will — it was already clear to me, if not to the lesser minds of my fellow humans, that free will was almost certainly a myth. Could I be absolutely certain? For that we would need to understand human consciousness. I could see no greater calling in life than to pursue precisely that question.

Now, decades later, I am a professor of theoretical physics who studies colliding black holes and gravitational waves. Sure, black holes are cool, but they are unlikely to unlock the mystery of consciousness. What happened?

Put another way: is my supposedly glittering academic career merely a sham pretence to hide a pitiful catalogue of unrealised dreams? Or is it possible to conveniently reframe it as a series of wise decisions? (And if so, can I simultaneously reject the notion of free will, yet still claim credit for my wisdom?)

These difficult questions recently bubbled into my consciousness (whatever that may be), when I stumbled across a SubStack called "The Intrinsic Perspective". The SubStack's author, Erik Hoel, was immediately interesting to me, because he seems to have done exactly what I failed to do. He spent his PhD working on one of the leading potential theories of consciousness, and made several contributions to more general questions of how we might assess such theories. He even claims that some of his work has a direct bearing on the problem of free will. So far, so good: this looks like a pretty accurate picture of the life my 18-year-old self had planned out before him. I also harboured secret hopes of being a novelist in my spare time, and, hey! look! Erik has also published a novel! In my wilder flights of fantasy I might even have dreamed that my writing would be so successful that I could fund my scientific adventures free of the shackles of mundane academia. Fear not, Erik's done that, too: last year he quit a faculty position and lives entirely on his (hopefully) very successful SubStack.

Erik Hoel has now published a book called "The World Behind the World", all about the current state of consciousness research. I enthusiastically pre-ordered it as soon as I heard about it. I then waited patiently for the opportunity to hear what had been happening in the intellectual world I failed to join all those years ago, and perhaps also finally read a knock-down argument for why I was wrong to doubt free will.

When the book arrived I was thrilled to see that the climactic chapter is called, "The scientific case for free will". Not just "A" scientific case, but "The" scientific case: this must surely be the final clincher! My hope was not based merely on parsing definite and indefinite articles. The last sentence of the blurb reads, "... The World Behind the World shows us that, at long last, science is coming to understand the fundamental mystery of human existence, and revealing for the first time the scientific reason why we have free will." Wow! That is very exciting, and at only 208 pages, much shorter than one of those Daniel Dennett books.

Before I talk about the book, or to what extent it transformed my understanding of my inner world, here was my take on the problem of consciousness and free will prior to opening its pages. And, as we modern thinkers like to say, a little of my own journey.

The argument against free will always seemed simple to me. We have learned that the universe operates by a set of deterministic laws. Deterministic means that there are clear mechanisms for cause and effect, i.e., there are equations. If you tell me the state of a system at one moment, and you tell me the relevant equations, I can calculate what happens at the next moment. The universe is like a clock. Humans, and their brains, are part of this picture. Therefore, in what sense can we say that our minds have "free will" to make decisions? It's all just clockwork. And if this is true, in what sense can we judge people for their actions? How can we talk about ethics and morality, if we are all just wheels in the cosmic clock?

If your interest in science extends beyond the 19th century, you may be hopping up and down with objections to this argument. I will dispense with those in a moment.

I should first say that of course many people have been aware of this problem for a long time, and many great minds have banged their heads against it. Occasionally it has even popped up in popular culture. Tolstoy soiled the last hundred pages of “War and Peace” by wittering on about the "differential equations of history", and my repeated use of the word "clockwork" may have resurrected unpleasant memories of Anthony Burgess's “A Clockwork Orange”¹. Besides those few examples, as a young fellow I was disturbed by just how little attention we, as a society, paid to this problem. Every day we talk as if people make free choices, and every day we make judgements on peoples' actions, some tiny and some huge, and the concept of free will and morality are embedded deep into our society and our laws — and yet it is very likely that it is all based on a mistake. Why aren't more people worried about it?

The answer is that people have come up with a host of specious objections to the argument above, which they are happy to believe make the problem go away.

One objection people love: quantum mechanics! Jesus Christ. Seriously? Anyway, here we go: we know from quantum mechanics that the laws of physics are not deterministic. They are probabilistic! In other words: you can calculate what is most likely to happen next, but you cannot know for sure. If two outcomes are equally likely, it is pure random chance which one will actually occur.

Before we work ourselves into a froth over all the wild and weird phenomena of quantum mechanics, let's ask ourselves what this statement means, as it stands, for free will. The answer is, of course, diddly squat. Previously our actions were clockwork. Now they're random chance. That does not translate into free will and moral responsibility. If I am a strict determinist, then I am heartbroken, but since I was born later than 1920, I can accept that there is an element of randomness in the picture.

I might also add, it is randomness only at the sub-atomic level. It has been washed away long before we get to the scales of the everyday world, which presumably include biology. This is not my area of expertise, and perhaps brain researchers are now routinely dazzling their students with interference patterns of neurons, or they've determined some funky mechanism by which quantum effects propagate up to brain functions, but unless you've got some rock-solid examples to show me, lay off with the quantum woo. And, as I said, even if you can bring up quantum mechanics without looking silly, you need to show me why it does more than just add a few dice into my clock.

A related weak argument is about predictability. If I don't buy quantum arguments, what about chaos theory? What about the idea that even though everything is governed by deterministic equations, that doesn't mean we can actually make predictions? To predict the next moment in the universe — or just on planet Earth — would require more data than we could conceivably store, at more precision than we can conceivably measure, and a computer that contains more atoms than the system we're trying to predict.

To which I say: so what? It is fundamentally impossible to calculate what my brain is going to do five minutes from now — and therefore I have free will? That is quite a stretch.

This brings us to the final objection, which is impossible to refute: the God of the gaps. Maybe there is a mechanism we are as yet unaware of that gives us free will? You might think this would be even easier to pour scorn on than the other objections, but this is where consciousness comes in. We have this peculiar facility for being conscious of our own minds, and we have no idea how that works. When someone suggests that a brain is like a computer, we can give them the benefit of the doubt, until we get to the question: what about consciousness? That is something qualitatively (and quite possibly fundamentally) different to mere computation and algorithms.

In fact, if you have read Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind", you will know that there are steps of reasoning that are fundamentally impossible for an algorithm to perform, so our brains must be more than just computer algorithms. If we don't know what that something more is, then we cannot claim that it precludes free will.

If we want to fully understand how the brain works, and whether it does have free will after all, or to conclusively reconcile our everyday experience of free decision-making with whatever process is really going on under the hood, then we need to understand consciousness.

Before I move on to the personal navel-gazing, I should say that this was my summary of the state of the free will debate 30 years ago, and in the mean time I have not read a single thing that would prompt the slightest change. And it is not as if people have been silent on the topic — they just don't add anything!

For example. In only the last few months I have read accounts of two new books arguing for and against free will, and the pro-free-will arguments are accepted with (to the mind of this free-will sceptic) atrocious levels of lobotomised gullibility. Here's a line from a particularly fluffy article: "Yes, there is some machinery that we use to make decisions; but it’s machinery we use to make decisions. We’re making the decisions." Dude! It's the nature of the "we" that is exactly the question here; if "we" are entirely the result of a purely mechanistic process, then "we" don't get to step outside of the process and pretend to be in control. Nonetheless, this article was the proof of Fermat's last theorem in comparison to a second article on these recent books. Let's face it, the bulk of the popular discussion of these topics is the intellectual equivalent of doing heart surgery with a plastic knife and fork.

Anyway.

I brought up Penrose's book because that is probably where, as an undergraduate, I learned about the connection between free will and consciousness. Up until that point I was content with the "free will is a myth, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a sap" point of view and, given my penchant for intellectual arrogance, I had naturally decided to pursue a career in physics. From Penrose's book I learned that consciousness was a deep and important problem that was far more convincingly profound than the so-called fundamental problems of physics, except that (according to him) it may actually be connected to the fundamental problems of physics.

Penrose argued that quantum gravity might be at the heart of consciousness. As much as I wanted to believe that physicists were needed to save the day, it was hard to see much behind this idea. In my second year at university Penrose passed through on a lecture tour, and I wrangled an interview with him for the student newspaper, and was able to press him on just this point. It is one of my most excruciatingly embarrassing memories — I had the poor bugger trapped in an office for over an hour, and probably closer to two, while I sputtered ignorant questions at him. My mortification has wiped away almost all memory of the interview (and I can only hope that he has forgotten it entirely), but I do remember him expressing the complaints about his theories far more clearly than I could: "People object that I'm saying, `here is a problem, and here is another problem, and so they must be the same problem'." Unfortunately his response didn't seem to be much more than, "I think there's more to it than that."

Nonetheless, the great scientific question of our age had been revealed to me; it was inherently connected to a crucial philosophical question; and even though I had not studied medicine or biology, or even philosophy (my impression from the one philosophy class I took was that while philosophers were very keen to argue about wonderfully profound questions, they showed no appetite for conclusively answering any of them), maybe as a physicist I could contribute something after all.

When it came time to do a PhD, one of the programmes I was accepted into was interested in consciousness. So here was my chance!

I did not take up that offer. Why not? I will explain why, and how it fits into Hoel's book, in the next part.

Part 2.

1. To be fair to Tolstoy: there is a sad dearth of novels that make even a passing reference to differential equations. I cannot really complain that the one notable exception is widely regarded as the greatest novel ever written.