Megascopic Quantum Phenomena
305
One must admire Maxwell’s brilliant insights observing how he mentions teleological principle: principle which is extra physical but not extra natural; principle
acting without exerting any force or spending any energy! Certainly, classical physics
was unable to incorporate such a principle, but it begs the question: Is it possible to
accomplish this task in quantum physics? Unfortunately most physicists are reluctant
to tackle the problem, perhaps being victims of “causal fundamentalism”, a wording
introduced by Norton [52]: “Nature is governed by cause and effect; and the burden
of individual sciences is to find the particular expressions of the general notion in
the realm of their specialized subject matter.”
Norton continues with a pessimistic feeling of vanity and emptiness that hovers
over the current debate on the subject of teleology: “Aristotle described four notions of
cause: the material, efficient, final and formal; with the efficient and final conforming
most closely to the sorts of things we would now count as a cause. The final cause, the
goal towards which a process moves, was clearly modelled on the analogy between
animate processes and the process of interest. In the seventeenth century, with the rise
of the mechanical philosophy, it was deemed that final causes simply did not have
the fundamental status of efficient causes and that all science was to be reconstructed
using efficient causes alone. Although talk of final causes lingers on, this is a blow
from which final causes have never properly recovered.”
Here lies a profound challenge for all of us. Until the teleological principle is adequately implemented in the mathematical formalism of quantum theory, the whole
program of quantum decoherence, based on universal Darwinism, suggests nothing
more than many years of squandering time. It imparts, e.g. that the von Neumann–
Wigner interpretation can never be removed and that the causal Born rule cannot be
replaced by einselection, the latter being inspired by teleological Darwinian adaptedness. Instead, the Born and einselection rules should coexist side by side, but first
after the true teleological meaning and quantum origin of the einselection have been
revealed.
8 The Paradox of Free Will
What is meant by the notion of free will? Does free will really exist at all? Observe
that in the era of classical physics it was generally accepted that all things in the
universe do evolve in a strictly deterministic manner, and hence there was obviously
no room for any justification of a free will. But what happened after the arrival
of quantum mechanics, and the knowledge of the indeterministic laws of quantum
physics? Is this agreement sufficient to give a reasonable explanation of free will?
As will be seen below, the problem of a proper understanding of our free will still
remains.
The information philosopher, Robert Doyle summarizes, in his 2011 book “The
Scandal in Philosophy” [53], in great detail the whole history of opinions of famous
305
One must admire Maxwell’s brilliant insights observing how he mentions teleological principle: principle which is extra physical but not extra natural; principle
acting without exerting any force or spending any energy! Certainly, classical physics
was unable to incorporate such a principle, but it begs the question: Is it possible to
accomplish this task in quantum physics? Unfortunately most physicists are reluctant
to tackle the problem, perhaps being victims of “causal fundamentalism”, a wording
introduced by Norton [52]: “Nature is governed by cause and effect; and the burden
of individual sciences is to find the particular expressions of the general notion in
the realm of their specialized subject matter.”
Norton continues with a pessimistic feeling of vanity and emptiness that hovers
over the current debate on the subject of teleology: “Aristotle described four notions of
cause: the material, efficient, final and formal; with the efficient and final conforming
most closely to the sorts of things we would now count as a cause. The final cause, the
goal towards which a process moves, was clearly modelled on the analogy between
animate processes and the process of interest. In the seventeenth century, with the rise
of the mechanical philosophy, it was deemed that final causes simply did not have
the fundamental status of efficient causes and that all science was to be reconstructed
using efficient causes alone. Although talk of final causes lingers on, this is a blow
from which final causes have never properly recovered.”
Here lies a profound challenge for all of us. Until the teleological principle is adequately implemented in the mathematical formalism of quantum theory, the whole
program of quantum decoherence, based on universal Darwinism, suggests nothing
more than many years of squandering time. It imparts, e.g. that the von Neumann–
Wigner interpretation can never be removed and that the causal Born rule cannot be
replaced by einselection, the latter being inspired by teleological Darwinian adaptedness. Instead, the Born and einselection rules should coexist side by side, but first
after the true teleological meaning and quantum origin of the einselection have been
revealed.
8 The Paradox of Free Will
What is meant by the notion of free will? Does free will really exist at all? Observe
that in the era of classical physics it was generally accepted that all things in the
universe do evolve in a strictly deterministic manner, and hence there was obviously
no room for any justification of a free will. But what happened after the arrival
of quantum mechanics, and the knowledge of the indeterministic laws of quantum
physics? Is this agreement sufficient to give a reasonable explanation of free will?
As will be seen below, the problem of a proper understanding of our free will still
remains.
The information philosopher, Robert Doyle summarizes, in his 2011 book “The
Scandal in Philosophy” [53], in great detail the whole history of opinions of famous