Sabine Hossenfelder On Free Will

And by total contrast with the last post, some good old-fashioned philosophy. Sabine Hossenfelder, a physics dissident in the mould of Peter Woit, has a blog you should be reading, and recently posted an article about how she lived without the idea of free will. I’ll quote the full opening.

It’s not easy, getting a PhD in physics. Not only must you learn a lot, but some of what you learn will shake your sense of self.

Physics deals with the most fundamental laws of nature, those from which everything else derives. These laws are, to our best current knowledge, differential equations. Given those equations and the configuration of a system at one particular time, you can calculate what happens at all other times.

That is for what the universe without quantum mechanics is concerned. Add quantum mechanics, and you introduce a random element into some events. Importantly, this randomness in quantum mechanics is irreducible. It is not due to lack of information. In quantum mechanics, some things that happen are just not determined, and nothing you or I or anyone can do will determine them.

Taken together, this means that the part of your future which is not already determined is due to random chance. It therefore makes no sense to say that humans have free will.

I think I here spell out only the obvious, and use a notion of free will that most people would agree on. You have free will if your decisions select one of several possible futures. But there is no place for such a selection in the laws of nature that we know, laws that we have confirmed to high accuracy. Instead, whatever is about to happen was already determined at the big bang – up to those random flukes that come from quantum mechanics.

Philosophers, to quote Bordieu, loathe determinism. It’s true. I will discuss this some other time.

Determinism appears in its modern form with a popularisation of Laplace’s Celestial Mechanics, the first modern book of modern theoretical astronomy. Laplace derived the motions of the planets, it seemed, from Newton’s laws and the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, and famously did not need God to keep the whole thing running smoothly or from flying off into the rest of space. This was hype: with the techniques Laplace had, it is impossible to solve for the orbits of the Sun, Moon and Earth simultaneously, let alone all the other planets. Today it can be done with computers, and we have a qualitative understanding about the prevalence of unstable orbits as against stable ones, but we don’t have a neat solution to the three-body problem.

This didn’t stop the hype merchants. Given Laplace’s equations, they said, and the initial position and momentum of all the bodies in a system, the future behaviour of those bodies could in principle be calculated, and even if it couldn’t in practice, the fact was that the future behaviour of those bodies was already determined by the present conditions. Hence determinism.

This is kinda okay for planets and vibrating bridges, but once you add in the idea that people are merely particles of change…orbiting around the sun and so equally the subject of determinism, you get materialist determinism, which says it’s to nobody's fault or glory that they do anything, because it was all arranged at the start of the universe. It’s a tough one to dispel.

So what’s the flaw, and why is it hype, not fact? Let’s deal with those Laplacian differential equations first.

The mathematics says that, for a system of differential equations to have an unique solution between two time periods, and hence determine one and only one world between those points, these boundary conditions must be at the start and the end of the time period. If there are only conditions at the start, we get a whole bunch of solutions, any one of which is possible. At the moment of the Big Bang, to speak in metaphors, the Universe might know where it is, but it doesn’t know where it’s going, so it can’t travel along an unique path to get there. If the Universe depended on looking at differential equations to know what it should be doing, it would have too many choices, and wind up in the physics department at Stanford talking about multiverses.

Fortunately the Universe does not depend on differential equations: it uses the laws of nature. Differential equations are not laws of nature. The wave equation, the telegraphy equation, the Schrodinger, Dirac, and other equations are derived from a description of a physical system and the actual laws of nature. These are, roughly and incompletely:

1. The first two of Newton’s three laws (the third is an scheme for model-construction)
2. Noether conservation laws derived for whatever fields we think the universe has in it
3. Lorentz-Firzgerald co-ordinate transformations for local physics
4. Co-ordinate invariance for General Relativity

All of these describe constraints on spatio-temporally local interactions. Laws of nature determine what happens to certain quantities in individual interactions involving those quantities. There are no consequences for the future.

Speaking in metaphors again: after the Big Bang, the universe carried on as it was, and every time an interaction came along, sorted itself out according to the relevant laws of nature. But there never was a Grand Plan or a Final Destination. The Universe just kinda bumbles along. Sufficiently isolated systems with periodic behaviour will repeat themselves, but the journey of a piece of cosmic dust across the universe is an adventure, not a train ride.

This disposes of the everything-was-already-decided-at-the-Big-Bang (or any other later time) claim. Which leaves materialism.

Materialism insists that this is a material world, and hence that free will can only exist if there is within us something which is a) the seat of our identity, b) can cause us to act, c) cannot be acted upon by the material world, but d) can receive and process information. Sometimes called a mind or a soul, but always assumed to be immaterial. In a material world there are no immaterial minds, and hence no free will.

Materialists prefer to denounce free will, decision-making and other mental acts, especially those playing a role in rational action and thought, as illusions, delusions and confusions. Or at least the ones writing pop-science best-sellers do.

If this is only a material world, then what we thought were immaterial mind-acts like remembering, deducing, judging, guessing, and all those other thinking- and feeling- acts, are still done, but by the body and brain. Some philosophers get very snotty about brains, which are after all organic computers, doing anything mental, because someone programmed the computer and so that doesn’t count. They forget they were trained to know where A-sharp is on the top string of a violin, and to calculate zero-th cohomology groups, and that training and learning is the model for ‘training’ AI programs. That means they might be computers, which makes them feel a bit squirmy.

Descartes and those mad white-coated scientists in black-and-white 1960’s Sci-Fi TV programmes regarded the body as a useless hindrance to the mind, which if put into this glass dome would be able to think unthinkable thoughts… okay. You get the idea. The mind-body duality is silly, and entrenched in our culture. As enlightened materialists, we don’t think like that. Brains are part of our bodies, and our bodies are, like the book title said, our selves. The ‘I’ that learns, considers, has goals, and makes decisions, is my brain-body.

However the brain-body is constituted, it must be able to adjust itself to what it receives by way of information. In some cases, that adjustment can be huge (birth of children, adolescence) and in others it can be small but significant (not going near chicken again for a while after that food poisoning), and in others can be almost instinctive (way too cold out there, get the coat and scarf). What the materialist determinist claims is meaningless causation, the brain-body sees as information on which it will or won’t act. My material body deals with facts, sets goals, decides what to do, learns from mistakes and changes its behaviour to better achieve those goals. Explaining how that happens is the real challenge for brain psychologists.

So what is it to decide? It’s a brain process, shaped by our brain’s training and learning, which we would call experience, education and any number of other things. Because I am my brain-body, those processes are what it is for me to decide, not some evil bit of mechanics that then fools my conscious mind it did the thinking.

Is my decision free? There’s a thing about ideas like ‘free’, ‘real’, ‘genuine' and some others. What these kinds of words signify is the lack of their opposites, rather than any particular quality. Something is genuine if it isn’t a fake: what it is to be a fake is clear. A decision is free if it isn’t forced: if it wasn’t influenced by external factors we would think of as constraints, restraints, threats, and other undue influences? If it wasn’t forced, it was free. Some people find that unsatisfying, but that’s how the concepts work.

In summary:

Were our lives set out in the instant of the Big Bang? No. A unique solution to the hypothetical Differential Equations of Everything relies on a given end-state, which isn’t given. Only the start state is.

Do we lack free-will because this is a material world? Yes, because free-will as defined by an immaterial soul cannot exist.

Does this mean we are the puppets of our immediate circumstances? No, because the human brain can learn and adapt. Sometimes within the moment of an interaction, sometimes when it is thinking of the wisecrack as it goes down the stairs afterwards, or sometimes a lot later after discussing what happened with someone else.

If you want a puppet of its circumstances, think of a tree. It’s got to put up with whatever happens to it, from the moment the seed hit the ground, to the moment a lightning-induced forest fire burned it down. That’s not having free will.

If I Stop Living This Life, Everything Bad Comes Right Back

The Cost of Living Like This is a novel by James Kennaway, published in 1969, and set earlier in the 1960’s. It has a protagonist I identified with immediately. He’s called The Economist and he’s a forty-something married man having an affair with a nineteen year-old secretary in his Civil Service office. He has terminal cancer. The novel is a fine, understated but hard-hitting portrayal of what it is like to carry on a regular life with a pain that won’t go away, and every now and then takes over your whole being with its intensity. When we meet The Economist, even the morphine cocktail he carries with him won’t do the trick. Read the novel.

Why would a young man at university identify with a middle-aged man dying of cancer? I had no idea then, but I do now.

For a lot of my life up to age about forty-something, despite whatever emotions I seemed to be having on the surface, my underlying state was emotional confusion, pain, emptiness, and loneliness. Sometimes it would subside, perhaps for days, but then it would come back as distracting and all-encompassing as ever. Kennaway’s character is the only one I have read who goes through that cycle of feeling.

(Sure, if you want, make rude noises about an old man comparing his indulgent adolescent feelings with the genuine suffering of a cancer patient. You have a point. You’re also missing one. You can stop reading at any time.)

I have no idea where that state of confusion, pain and emptiness came from, though there are several candidates: the trauma that happens to some infants when they are circumcised, or a distant father, the family alkie genes, moving schools and homes when young, a bad reaction to the hormones of adolescence… who knows?

What I wanted was for it to stop, and if it wouldn’t stop, then I wanted some distraction or something to make it go away for a time. I didn’t do that consciously, but it was what I was doing.

One distraction is drugs, and I’ve never been near them. Without really knowing it, I realised when I was a teenager that if I ever found a drug that got me out of it, I wouldn’t be coming back in again. Heroin is that drug. So I knew once I started with drugs as a painkiller, I’d wind up on heroin. Junkies aren’t cool. Junkies are, well, junkies. Somewhere in all that pain, I had self-respect enough to not want to be a junkie.

Another distraction is religion, and as a young man I did the Billy Graham thing for a few weeks, until, I think, the guide or whatever they call them, decided that I didn’t really get it. I don’t. I get religion as an intellectual and cultural construct, but not as an emotional experience and certainly not as a social thing. It’s like marriage and following football: I know people do it, I just have no idea why, and never will, because I just don’t understand the words they use when they try to explain it.

Another distraction is people. I did not understand it at the time, but I was using people to try to make the pain, emptiness and confusion go away. People can’t do that for me or anyone else: what I might do with them, from playing Risk! to having sex, might be a distraction, but just hanging with the Bros and Hos can’t. When I met The Crowd at the Dog and Duck Friday night for a drink, The Crowd were just an excuse for the drink. I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s what was happening. After all, only sad alkies drink on their own at home. Using people as painkillers is morally suspect: people are supposed to be treated as ends, not means.

All I wanted was for the pain to go away. That and the practicalities of paying the bills were the two aims I judged everything by. When a combination of sobriety, exercise, ageing, and cultural consumption eases the pain and smooths the logistics of life, that counts as a win.

I have two things I do.

The first is physical exercise. Like all boys of my generation, I thought nothing of a two-hour bike ride in an afternoon, just because. It was what we did. There were a few years I didn’t do any exercise, until I started swimming again in my mid-twenties. This was before gyms were a readily accessible thing. I started weight training when I was thirty-three, and with the exception of about four years or so, when I paid the price in elevated blood sugar levels that turned my head to a fog, I have exercised ever since. Self-respect again.

The second is culture and entertainment: reading, movies, TV, music. I’m good at that. My culture is pretty darn heavy and involving - I have Schiff playing Bach as I write. Jollies the brain up. Not so sure about Bordieu’s book on Manet though, that’s a bit of a wade.

But here’s the thing.

The pain never really goes away.

If I stop living this life, everything bad comes right back. There is no cure for alcoholism, or drug addiction, or poor eating habits, or any of a dozen other things: at best there is a way of living in a way that minimises the impact, denies the habits a chance to get started. Emotional fracked-up-ness is the same.

So when I hear people suggesting that the best thing in life is human relationships, that having sex when I want it will make me feel like a man, that there are other people who can understand what I’m feeling and thinking and that time with them is the best time ever, and all that other stuff… this may all be true, but it doesn’t make the pain go away, and that’s all that matters.

Bye-bye Tidal, Hello FTTC, Bye-Bye Yolt

The Highly Significant Birthday is approaching. I have booked the week before and after off. In case I get some uncontrollable emotions, or just don't want to get out of bed. Sometimes, though, I'm not sure I can tell what is actual emotion and what is pollen and too little sleep. So my posting is going to be a bit erratic.

In other news, I dropped Tidal. Listen, I searched for "Shoegaze" and it came back with about three entries. A colleague at work searched on Spotify, and it returned pages of the stuff. So I cancelled Tidal and signed up for Spotify.

The king of shoegaze compilations on You Tube seems to be the unlikely-moinkered Tabitha Mustang. If you've never heard any shoegaze, try this



I finally gave up on my old-school copper broadband service from Talk-Talk, and upgraded to their FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) service. Which has churned out 40Mbs down and 10Mbps up so far since. I even speed-tested it, and got pretty darn close, even though the route included the wireless-ac to my laptop. 40Mbs down by the way, is slightly more than what we old telecom folk used to call a DS3 (34Mbs). Back in the mid-1990's I am told, selling a DS3 across the Atlantic meant celebrations involving champagne and nightclubs. Now every home can have one.

And then one day my Yolt app demanded my passport number and other KYC (as we in the retail banking trade call it) details. And it would not let me get to the control panel without it. I was upset by this, because I don't like software strong-arming me, found the Contact Us email on their site, and asked them to DELETE MY ACCOUNT several times in all caps. Which they did without any fuss. My suspicion that they were about to launch actual banking services via the app was confirmed a day or so ago in the news.

And over Easter, I listened to Parsifal and Gotterdammerung on Spotify. Probably not quite CD quality, but it confirmed to me why I'm not rushing to get Wagner in my collection. The first movement of Parsifal is musically astonishing, whether you understand German or not. But the second act is a lot of singing, and the music probably means a lot more if you know what Kundry just tried to suggest to Parsifal.

Heavenly Glory (this is a Michael Porfirio Mason in-joke)

I would have published this then, but the pollen knocked me flat on Easter Monday

Longford River

I have an earlier post about the Longford river, and here's what a bit of it looks like between the DPD depot and the culvert across the Air Park. I imagine someone who knew their willow from their oak would see in a flash that this was an uncultivated mess in dire need of some sensible pruning and shaping, but... oh wait, that much is obvious, even if you don't know what kind of trees those scraggly things are.

A Baroque Binge

Towards the end of last year I read two histories of music: Burkholder et al A History of Western Music, and Sadie and Latham's Cambridge Music Guide.

A while later, thinking over what I had read, I realised that the music I really, really like comes from the Baroque period - though I dislike Baroque architecture and am not too keen on Baroque painting.

But the music… tuneful, rhythmic, complicated in an ear-catching way, endlessly creative, and clearly written for performance by near-virtuoso musicians. It is at once familiar and novel, rewards attentive listening and yet fades politely into the background when you want it to. This is because much of it was written for audiences who were often talking, dining or dancing, and so the composers could pull all sorts of musical tricks that their fellow musicians would admire but would go straight over the heads of the audience. It's musicians' music, yet still entertaining and sometimes sublime.

J S Bach, G F Handel, and Antonio Vivaldi are the Holy Trinity of the Baroque, and I have a bunch of music by them. I also have some Purcell, Monteverdi, Couperin, Rameau, Geminiani, and Hasse from earlier years. So over a few weeks I treated myself to something I knew I would like, rather than something (like Schumann symphonies) I know I should try to appreciate. This is what I picked up:

 (And the first three volumes as well)

I'm so glad I did. Lovely stuff.

All from Foyles, which has a small but perfectly-formed music section. It's not as sprawling as the much-missed classical department of Tower Records, Piccadilly, but they make good choices. Once you get past the piles of compilation box sets.

Why I Don't (Yet) Have Any Wagner on CD

Richard Wagner wrote thirteen operas, of which there are no recordings I’ve seen of the first three, Rienzi is regarded as an apprentice-piece, and The Flying Dutchman as the first where Wagner comes into his own. The Dutchman stands with any nineteenth-century opera by any of the other big names, and the remaining eight are as far beyond the rest of the operatic repertory as Shakespeare is beyond the rest of theatre. Those nine are:

Tannhauser (210 mins)
Loengrin (235 mins)
Rheingold (160 mins)
The Valkerie (235 mins)
Siegfried (250 mins)
Gotterdammerung (275 mins)
Tristan and Isolde (235 mins)
The Mastersingers of Nuremburg (275 mins)
Parsifal (245 mins)

I have seen all nine, all at the English National Opera. I got started on Wagner with Solti’s recording of Parsifal on Decca, and I borrowed that from Richmond Library because I was reading Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, and Popper hated Wagner, so I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I was sucked in from the opening bars. Parsifal is a lot of twentieth-century music that slipped into the mid-nineteenth century.

I do not own one of his operas, and I have a boxed set of Ligeti and all of Berio’s Sequenzas. Recently I thought of buying a couple. I haven’t got round to it.

For one thing, Wagner operas cost upwards of £35 each, though there’s a recent Ring cycle for £45. For another, it really matters who is performing, especially for those of us who started with Solti. I’m not buying a live recording, because it’s just not possible to get the depth and precision of sound a studio can provide. If I’m paying that money, I want to put the headphones on and hear the details. There are not many interpretations available, since recording Wagner costs a lot more than even recording Mahler.

It’s the sheer time needed to listen to Wagner. It’s not background music to focus in and out while writing blog posts. It’s sit-down-and-listen-and-don’t-do-anything-else. So is a lot of that 19th-century orchestral stuff, and that doesn’t always suit me. Those running times, and those are without fifteen-minute breaks between acts, and in some cases, an hour for an evening meal. The Mikado clocks in around 130 minutes, and Carmen at 155 minutes. I’m pretty sure the mid-week performance of Mastersingers I went to started at 4:00PM, and a Tristan at 5:00 PM.

My life at the moment is more suited to the pleasant complexities of the Baroque. When, if, I ever stop working, I will buy Wagner’s operas and spend the whole day listening to one, as it should be.

And remember, if you're married, and there was music when she walked down the aisle to you, it was written by Wagner: