4
The problem of Free Will versus Determinism has haunted philosophers and theologians from time immemorial. Ordinary mortals are rarely bothered by the paradox concerning the agency which directs one's thinking, and of the agency behind that agency, because, paradoxical or not, they take it for granted that 'I' am responsible for my actions. In The Ghost in the Machine I invented a short parable to illustrate the point, It took the form of a dialogue at high table at an Oxford college between an elderly don of strictly deterministic persuasion, and a young Australian guest of uninhibited temperament.
The Australian exclaims: 'If you go on denying that I am free to make my own decisions, I'll punch you in the nose!' The old man gets red in the face: 'I deplore your unpardonable behaviour.' 'I apologize. I lost my temper. 'You really ought to control yourself.' 'Thank you. The experiment was conclusive.'
It was indeed. 'Unpardonable', 'ought to', and 'control yourself' are all expressions which imply that the Australian's behaviour was not determined by his chromosomes and upbringing, that he was free to choose whether to behave politely or rudely. Whatever one's philosophical convictions, in everyday life it is impossible to carry on without the implicit belief in personal responsibility; and responsibility implies freedom of choice. The subjective experience of freedom is as much a given datum as the sensation of colour, or the feeling of pain.
Yet that experience is constantly being eroded by the formation of habits and mechanical routines, which tend to turn us into automata. When the Duke of Wellington was asked whether he agreed that habit was man's second nature he exclaimed: 'Second nature? It is ten times nature.' Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.
Another enemy of freedom is passion, or more specifically, an excess of the self-asserting emotions. When these are aroused, the control of behaviour is taken over by those primitive levels in the hierarchy which are correlated to the 'old brain'. The loss of freedom resulting from this downward shift is reflected in the legal concept of 'diminished responsibility', and in the subjective feeling of acting under a compulsion -- expressed by colloquialisms such as: 'I couldn't help it', 'I lost my head', 'I must have been out of my mind'.
It is at this point that the moral dilemma of judging others arises. Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in England -- for shooting her lover 'in cold blood', as it was said. How am I to know, and how could the jury know, whether and to what extent her responsibility was 'diminished' when she acted as she did, and whether she could 'help it'? Compulsion and free will are philosophical concepts at opposite ends of a scale, but there is no pointer attached to the scale which I could read. In dilemmas like this the safest procedure is to apply two different standards: to ascribe a minimum of free will to the other, and a maximum to oneself. There is an old French saying: Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner -- to understand all is to forgive all. In the light of the above, this should be altered to: Tout comprendre, ne rien se pardonner: understand all -- forgive yourself nothing.
It may be difficult to live up to, but at least it is a safe maxim.
XIII
PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS
1
'Half of my friends accuse me of an excess of scientific pedantry; the other half of unscientific leanings towards preposterous subjects such as extra-sensory perception (ESP), which they include in the domain of the supernatural. However, it is comforting to know that the same accusations are levelled at an elite of scientists, who make excellent company in the dock.' Thus the opening paragraph of The Roots of Coincidence. Since then, the 'elite' of scientists has apparently grown into a majority. In 1973 the New Scientist, that much respected English weekly, sent out a questionnaire to its readers, inviting them to express their opinions on the subject of extra-sensory perception. Out of the i,500 readers -- nearly all of them scientists and engineers -- who answered the questionnaire, 67 per cent regarded ESP either as an 'established fact' or 'a likely possibility'. [1]
Even earlier (1967), the New York Academy of Science held a symposium on parapsychology, and in 1969 the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the equivalent of the British Association) approved the application of the Parapsychology Association to become affiliated to that august body. Two previous applications had been rejected; the approval of the third was a sign of the changing intellectual climate; and for parapsychology the ultimate seal of respectability.
Accordingly, it seems to me unnecessary to recapitulate here the progress of parapsychology, from spiritistic seances in darkened Victorian drawing-rooms to a modern empirical science employing computerized statistics, Geiger counters and other sophisticated electronic equipment. In the pages that follow I shall no longer be concerned with the question whether telepathy and kindred phenomena exist -- which, in view of the large body of accumulated evidence, I have come to take for granted* -- but the implications of these phenomena for our world-view.
* Some of this evidence is discussed in The Roots of Coincidence, The Challenge of Chance and several lectures included in The Heel of Achilles.
That world-view, in so far as the educated lamyan is concerned, places parapsychology and physics at opposite ends of the spectrum of knowledge and experience. Physics is regarded by the educated layman as the queen of the 'exact sciences', with direct access to the immutable 'laws of nature' which govern the material universe. In contrast to this, parapsychology deals with subjective, capricious and unpredictable phenomena which manifest themselves in apparently lawless ways, or in direct contradiction to the laws of nature. Physics is, as the academic jargon has it, a 'hard-nosed' science, completely down to earth, whereas parapsychologists float somewhere in nebulous Cloud-cuckoo-land.
This view of physics was indeed perfectly legitimate and immensely productive during the roughly two centuries when the term 'physics' was practically synonymous with Newtonian mechanics. To quote a contemporary physicist, Fritjof Capra:
Questions about the essential nature of things were answered in classical physics by the Newtonian mechanistic model of the universe which, much in the same way as the Democritean model in ancient Greece, reduced all phenomena to the motions and interactions of hard indestructible atoms. The properties of these atoms were abstracted from the macroscopic notion of billiard balls, and thus from sensory experience. Whether this notion could actually be applied to the world of atoms was not questioned. [2]
Or, in Newton's own words:
It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that these primitive particles being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first creation. [3]
If you leave out the reference to God, the above quotation, dating from A.D. 1704, still reflects the implicit credo of our educated layman. Of course he knows that the formerly indivisible atoms can be split (with sinister results); but he believes -- if he gives any thought to the matter -- that inside the atom there are other, truly indivisible billiard balls called protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. However, if he were sufficiently interested, he would also discover that the giant atom-smashers have made mincemeat of protons, neutrons, etc.; that the ultimate (to date) elementary particles are called 'quarks'*, and that some quarks have a physical attribute called 'charm'. The exotic terminology of sub-atomic physicists also includes 'the eightfold way', 'strangeness', and the 'bootstrap principle' -- which goes to show that they are well aware of the surrealistic nature of the world they have created; behind the schoolboyish humour there is the awed recognition of mystery. For on this sub-microscopic level the criteria of reality are fundamentally different from those we apply on our macro-
level; inside the atom our concepts of space, time, matter and causality are no longer valid, and physics turns into metaphysics with a strong flavour of mysticism. As a result of this development, the unthinkable phenomena of parapsychology appear somewhat less preposterous in the light of the unthinkable propositions of relativity and quantum physics.
* A term borrowed from Finnegans Wake. 'Quark' in German means curds or soft cheese of a pungent and generally evil-smelling sort.
One such proposition I have already mentioned: the Principle of Complementarity which turns the so-called 'elementary building-blocks' of classical physics into Janus-faced entities that behave under certain circumstances like hard little lumps of matter, but in other circumstances as waves or vibrations propagated in a vacuum. As Sir William Bragg put it, they seem to be waves on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and particles on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. We have seen that some of the pioneers of quantum physics, as well as their contemporary successors, regarded the Principle of Complementarity as a fitting paradigm for the mind-body dichotomy. This was cheering news to parapsychologists; we must remember, however, that Cartesian dualism recognizes only the two realms of mind and matter, whereas the present theory proposes a series of levels, equipped with 'swing-gates', opening now this way, now that. Both in our daily behaviour and on the sub-atomic level, the gates are kept swinging all the time.
2
The concept of matter-waves, launched in the 1925 by de Broglie and Schrödinger, completed the process of the dematerialization of matter. It had started much earlier, with Einstein's magic formula E = mc² * which implies that the mass of a particle must not be conceived as some stable elementary material but as a concentrated pattern of energy, locked up in what appears to us as matter. The 'stuff' of which protons and electrons are made is rather like the stuff of which dreams are made, as a glance at the illustration on p. 246 suggests. It is an example of the type of events which takes place all the time in the physicists' bubble chambers, where high-energy 'elementary' particles collide and annihilate each other or create new particles which give rise to a new chain of events. The particles in question are of course infinitesimally small and many have a lifetime much shorter than a millionth of a second; yet they leave tracks in the bubble chamber comparable to the visible trails which invisible jet-planes leave in the sky. The length, thickness and curvature of the tracks enables the physicists to decide which of the two-hundred-odd 'elementary particles' has caused it, and also to identify 'particles' previously unknown.
* Where E stands for energy, m for mass, and c for the velocity of light.
Diagram tracing a bubble-chamber photograph of subatomic events, from a Photo CERN -- courtesy of European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Geneva. The caption (which leaves non-physicists none the wiser) reads: 'interaction in the heavy liquid bubble chamber, Gargamelle. At A an incident antiproton which enters the chamber at C (see plan) annihilates a resident proton giving rise to a +ve and -ve pion, a neutral pion, and two gamma rays each of which converts (at D) into an electron positron pair. A second event is recorded where a particle entering at E interacts at B and produces two antiprotons and two +ve pions, one of which collides subsequently twice with resident particles.'
But the fundamental lesson which the bubble chamber and other sophisticated instruments teach the physicist is that on the sub-atomic level our concepts of space, time, matter and conventional logic no longer apply. Thus two particles may collide and break into pieces, but these pieces may turn out to be not smaller than the original particles -- because the kinetic energy liberated in the course of the collision has been transformed into 'mass'. Or a photon, the elementary unit of light, which has no mass, can give birth to an electron-positron pair which does have mass; and that pair might subsequently collide, and by the reverse process transform itself into a photon. The fantastic events in the bubble chamber have been compared to the dance of Shiva, with its rhythmic alternations of creation and destruction.*
* Capra (1975).
All this is a long way from the beguilingly simple Rutherford-Bohr model of the beginning of our century, that represented atoms as miniature solar systems, in which negatively charged electrons circle like planets around a positively charged nucleus. Alas, the model ran into one paradox after another. The electrons were found to behave quite unlike planets -- they kept jumping from one orbit into another without passing through the space between them -- as if the earth were instantaneously transferred into the orbit of Mars in a single jump, ignoring space. The orbits themselves were not well-defined trajectories, but wide blurred tracks, appropriate to the wave-aspect of the electron which was 'smeared' all over the orbit, and it became as meaningless to ask at what exact point in space the electron was at a given moment, as it was meaningless to try to pin down a wave. As Bertrand Russell has put it:
The idea that there is a hard little lump there, which is the electron or proton, is an illegitimate intrusion of common sense notions derived from touch. [4]
The atomic nuclei in the model did not fare better than the orbiting 'planets'. The nuclei turned out to be compounds of particles, mainly protons and neutrons, held together by other particles and forces which defy any visual model or representation in terms of our sensory experience. According to one hypothesis, neutrons and protons race around inside the nucleus with velocities of about 40,000 miles per second -- a quarter of the speed of light. As Capra put it:
Nuclear matter is thus a form of matter entirely different from anything we experience 'up here' in our macroscopic environment. We can perhaps picture it best as tiny drops of an extremely dense liquid which is boiling and bubbling most fiercely. [5]
3
In earlier books [6] I have discussed some of the most notorious paradoxes of quantum physics: Thomson's experiments which made the same electron go though two minute holes in a screen at the same time (which, Sir Cyril Burt commented, 'is more than a ghost can do'); the paradox of 'Schrödinger's cat', which can be shown to be both alive and dead at the same time; Feynman's diagrams in which particles are made to move for a brief instant backward in time (which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1965); and the 'Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox' (or EPR paradox) to which I shall briefly return. The situation has been summed up by Heisenberg himself, one of the chief architects of quantum theory:
The very attempt to conjure up a picture of elementary particles and think of them in visual terms is wholly to misinterpret them . . . [7]
Atoms are not things. The electrons which form an atom's shells are no longer things in the sense of classical physics, things which could be unambiguously described by concepts like location, velocity, energy, size. When we get down to the atomic level, the objective world in space and time no longer exists. [8]
4
Werner Heisenberg will probably be remembered as the great iconoclast who put an end to causal determinism in physics -- and thereby in philosophy -- by his celebrated 'Principle of Indeterminacy' which is as fundamental to modern physics as Newton's Laws of Motion were to classical mechanics. I have tried to convey its meaning by a rather simplistic analogy. [9] A certain static quality of many Renaissance paintings is due to the fact that the human figures in the foreground and the distant landscape in the background are both in sharp focus -- which is optically impossible: when we focus on a close object the backgrowid gets blurred, and vice versa. The Principle of Indeterminacy implies that in studying the sub-atomic panorama the physicist is confronted with a similar predicament (though of course for quite different reasons). In classical physics a particle must at any time have a definite location and velocity; on the sub-atomic level, however, the situation turns out to be radically different. The more accurately the physicist is able to determine the location of an electron, for instance, the more uncertain its velocity becomes; and vice versa, the more exactly he is able to determine the particle's velocity, the more blurred, i.e., indeterminate, its location becomes. This indeterminacy is not caus
ed by the imperfection of our techniques of observation, but by the inherently dual nature of the electron as both 'particle' and 'wavicle', which makes it both practically and theoretically impossible to pin down. But this implies nothing less than that down on the sub-atomic level the universe at any given moment is in a quasi-undecided state, and that its state in the next moment is to some extent indeterminate or 'free'. Thus if an ideal photographer with a perfect camera took a picture of the total universe at any given moment, the picture would be to some extent fuzzy, owing to the indeterminate state of its ultimate constituents.* Because of this fuzziness, physicists' statements about sub-atomic processes can only refer to probabilities, not to certainties; in the micro-world the laws of probability supplant those of causality: 'nature is unpredictable' -- to quote Heisenberg once more.
* It can be shown that however short the exposure time, the Indeterminacy Principle will still blur the picture.
Thus for the last fifty years, since the advent of quantum theory, it has become a commonplace among physicists of the dominant school (the so-called Copenhagen School) that the strictly deterministic, mechanistic world-view can no longer be upheld; it has become a Victorian anachronism. The nineteenth -century model of the universe as a mechanical clockwork is a shambles and since the concept of matter itself has been de-materialized, materialism can no longer claim to be a scientific philosophy.