Hypothetical scenario: At lunchtime you email your partner, “Fancy watching a film tonight.” Partner replies, “Nice idea, can you pick up a DVD on the way home”.

So after a bitch of a day at work you forget to go to the shop and come back empty handed. But your partner has their heart set on a film so you have to pick something out of the collection at home. Your day’s been hard on the brain so you don’t want anything too challenging, and you’ve done a lot of screen-time so can’t hack anything with subtitles. Your DVD collection, mostly built up when you were both pretentious twenty-somethings, is full of arty foreign nonsense, so is a bit light on dumb Hollywood bilge. Also, your partner vetoes anything superhero related, because she has spent most of her day reading comics to a one year old.

Back at lunchtime you literally had the choice between every film ever made, but by 7pm the possibility space is already reduced to only ten or twenty films. She says pick a comedy, instantly you suggest a Steve Martin, she groans but consents, you saw Man With Two Brains not long ago, the only other one you’ve got is The Jerk. So you end up watching The Jerk again. Your possibility space has zeroed in on one film and that is the one you will watch.

Reverse Causality

When you emailed your partner at lunchtime you had no idea what you would be watching that night. You had the whole world to choose from, but you were always going to end up watching The Jerk. The chain of events, influences and thought processes were perfectly deterministic – every factor followed a linear path which could only end at one point. There was a reverse causality predetermining what you’d be watching as far back as lunchtime, in fact reverse causality predetermined what you’d be doing that night before you’d even had the idea.

But this doesn’t mean you could have emailed at lunchtime to say you’d both be watching The Jerk that night. The chain of causality was so complicated that it couldn’t be predicted – that is to say that there wasn’t a faster way to work it out than playing through the chain itself in real time. Perhaps, at 7pm, after you’d missed the video shop, your eyes were tired and you’d seen your partner was in a good enough mood to consent to watching something of your suggestion, you might have been able to forecast upon where the causality was converging. But that’s doesn’t make you Nostradamus.

Ignore your seer superpowers for now and consider the philosophical consequence of this. If we accept that the world is entirely deterministic, i.e. every action is the inevitable consequence of preceding events/actions, a chain of cause and effect, and that every factor along the way – the bad day at work, forgetting to go to the shop, the collection full of art-house rubbish etc – all has a reverse causality too, it means that at lunchtime we might have thought we had the choice of hundreds of thousands of films to watch, but we didn’t, there was only ever one we would be watching that night. We didn’t have free will; we only had the illusion of free will.

“But the world is not that way, I’m not a robot”. This is the point where you mount your enraged attack on the notion of determinism. The idea that we don’t have free will is never a popular one. Unfortunately there is some evidence this may actually be the condition of our universe, coming from the world of .. ulp .. Quantum Mechanics.

The Schrodinger’s Cat and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradoxes

You are probably already familiar with the Schrodinger’s Cat paradox; it’s a nice way of explaining the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. The family cat has been placed in a box with a phial of poison gas, the gas is triggered to release based on whether a single quantum particle decays or not. Because of quantum uncertainty, until a particle is observed it can be in multiple states, it exists as a wave before settling into a steady state only upon observation. The paradox of the situation is that, until the box is opened, and the observation takes place, the cat is both alive and dead.

This has been a difficult paradox to resolve, and has been the basis for parallel world hypotheses, with a universe endlessly splitting to accommodate all these quantum paradoxes. But there is a more recently observed phenomenon which suggests another interpretation. I first heard of this in the same place I get most of information about the universe, a comic book. JLA issue 19, June 1998 to be precise. I’ll quote you Mark Waid’s explanation:

“In 1997, a physicist at the University of Geneva divided photons and, using optic-fibre cables, sent the pairs of light particles over six miles apart. Reaching the ends of these fibres, the two photons were forced to randomly choose between alternate pathways. Uncannily, in every case, the choice of any one photon mirrored its partner, even though there was no physical way for them to communicate with one another.”

This is a demonstration of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, two particles which cannot communicate faster than the speed of light, somehow stay entangled, by some crazy sub-quantum force beyond our understanding. The best explanation that physics has offered to explain this phenomenon is that the two particles are linked by reverse causality, that they are sending messages to each other back in time to a point when they were still entangled. It’s called the Transactional Interpretation, and it seems to be the most consistent (i.e. paradox free) theory of Quantum Mechanics we have at the moment. Seriously, this is the best they’ve come up with.

Do We Care?

This is reverse causality demonstrated under laboratory conditions, and could perhaps be ‘proof’ of a deterministic reality. In case you haven’t realised it yet, what I’m wittering on about here is my favourite theory, Universal Automatism, the idea that everything is computation, that there are algorithms to describe everything from the flow of a river to the movement of the planets. Unfortunately, a consequence of this theory is that if we know the state of the present, the future is predetermined. It is as fixed as the past. And the consequence of that, as we might ponder as we watch The Jerk tonight, is that it means there’s no such thing as free will, only the illusion of it.

But ultimately, free will or not, does it make the damndest bit of difference? We’ll still spend ages deliberating over decisions, we’ll still feel like we’ve got free will – its part of the process. Also, just because the world is deterministic, that doesn’t mean it’s predictable. It still holds plenty of surprises for us with our limited temporal perspective.

Free will or no free will, the world will still feel exactly the same, so who cares? It’s a win-win situation – if you end up watching a good film you can take credit for the decision, if it’s a stinker blame Universal Automatism. Hah.

tags: universal automatism, quantum mechanics, reverse causality, determinism, free will, philosophy

if you liked this article, please digg it, thanks.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 9:23 pm and is filed under philosophy, universal automatism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.