Tippett returned to that topic in a recent conversation with the physicist Leonard Mlodinow, entitled Randomness and Choice, and as the exchange developed, her deep discomfort with physicists’ viewpoint on free will became apparent. For Tippett, a lack of free will makes a human being little more than a kind of automaton, tightly constrained to think and act in ways that are dictated by the laws of physics.
With Mlodinow, the discussion on free will began with Tippett referencing an earlier exchange she had had with physicist Brian Greene on the topic. (For a transcript of a key moment in that program with Greene, see the post-script to my review of Edward O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence, which can be found here.)
Greene had tried to assuage Tippet’s concerns by noting that the complexity of the human brain makes it effectively impossible to predict our future actions, and that this fact gives us the feeling of having free will even though in reality we don’t. The short-coming of this argument, as Tippett pursues with Mlodinow, is that having the feeling of having free will is not equivalent to truly having free will.
She notes that, independent of however convincing the feeling of having free will may be for us, if we consciously accept that we don’t truly have free will, then it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that we have no responsibility for our actions. A disturbing consequence of this would seem to be, as Tippett points out, that moral qualities such as heroism or cowardess that we might associate with particular actions, suddenly have no meaning, since a person has merely reacted based on the fixed, physical laws of the universe.
Mlodinow attempts to create a path through this thicket by starting from an argument similar to Greene’s comments on the complexity of the mind, but that doesn't satisfy Tippett anyone than it did when Greene presented it. She sees an opening in something Mlodinow wrote, which describes a concept that he refers to as a randomness inherent in our environment and our interaction with others.
Ironically, Tippett — the journalist and author — interprets Mlodinow's writings on randomness in a strict, almost scientific sense, assuming that he means that a fundamental randomness exists in the universe, and that this could be a window through which free will could be considered to exist for human beings. Mlodinow —the scientist — explains however, that he uses the word randomness in a more colloquial sense, and that it relates to an <i>apparent</i> randomness, one that arises directly out of the complexity argument described above; given enough information, that randomness would disappear into the laws of physics.
He then goes on to describe his thinking related to the concept of randomness, arguing that when faced with the constant stream of events in our lives that are, for all intents and purposes, random, we make choices, and that we must make these choices as if we do have free will. Thus, even as he acknowledges his fundamental scientific understanding that the physical laws of the universe determine our every decision and action, he makes clear his belief that we must not use that reality to absolve ourselves of responsibility for what we do.
Ultimately, although Tippett’s fascinating discussions with physicists such as Greene and Mlodinow help us think about many of the deep questions involved in the concept of free will, we are left with no clear-cut answers. It remains for each of us to resolve for ourselves how we understand this mystery of human existence.
MS. TIPPETT: So, I had a conversation with Brian Greene and that still has me thinking and we ended up talking a lot about something that I know is a given for physicists, and it’s there in your writing, although I think you nuance it in interesting ways. And I want to get into this with you. Which is, no scientist in any field claims to be able to predict or understand human personality or destiny, but most physicists do believe fundamentally that nothing happens in the universe that is not the result of fundamental forces and laws of physics. I mean, you’ve wrote this from the birth of a child to the birth of a galaxy. And that is just a really stunning and puzzling fact. [Laughs].
DR. MLODINOW: [Laughs] Yes. And, I could give you a monologue for hours about that, but I’ll try not to.
MS. TIPPETT: Well, I mean, let’s just have a conversation about it, because I haven’t been able to really stop thinking about it, puzzling with it. And as I was reading, getting ready to talk to you, I realized you’re a perfect person to talk to this about. I mean, where would you start talking about that as a puzzle?
DR. MLODINOW: There are a lot of aspects to that question. Maybe the most basic one is really comes down to are there miracles? Meaning exceptions to the laws of nature. Or does everything follow physical law? In a way that’s the essence of the question. You know, Isaac Newton, when he invented his physics, which is to say the beginning of modern physics, the physics of the everyday world, he believed that everything followed his laws without exception, except that God steps in now and then, and sets things straight when they start to go awry.
MS. TIPPETT: Right. Right.
DR. MLODINOW: So he believed in some kind of limited miracles. Pierre Simon Laplace, who proved that the solar system is stable, was very famous for saying something that he actually semi-stole from a Catholic priest. But his statement — very famous statement is that if you know everything, the state of everything now, and you know all the laws, and you have infinite calculation ability, then the future and the past are both determined. Neither is hidden from your knowledge or from your eyes. And so when Napoleon asked him why there was no God in his science, Laplace said, I have no need for that hypothesis. [Laughs].
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
DR. MLODINOW: If you believe that there are no exceptions, whether they be big miracles or minor deviations from the laws of physics, whether you look at the quantum laws that are fundamental or Newton’s laws. Whichever laws you look at, neither set of laws has room for deviations or choice, let’s say. Conscious choice. So, if you believe that the brain follows those laws, as everything that — in the laboratory that we’ve ever looked at, does, then it’s not a question for scientists.
MS. TIPPETT: But the totality of our lives and circumstances at any given moment is the result of so many more — like we imagine choice and we imagine we have an intuition of purposefulness. Or the need for that. But one thing that was very striking to me about, you know, getting into the way you think about this is, I think, one thing I said to Brian Greene, you know, his title — his book title that’s so well-known is The Elegant Universe and you physicists use that language of elegance and beauty together with truth, right, in terms of, you know, the equations that are true are elegant and somehow this picture of the laws of physics being as tyrannical as any medieval God was…
DR. MLODINOW: [laughs]
MS. TIPPETT: …this is what really troubles me. At the extreme edges of talking about the laws of physics this way, you could just substitute the way the most primitive human cultures have used the word God, and we are so reduced.
DR. MLODINOW: Well, this is interesting, because now we’re coming to the difference between theory and practice. [Laughs]
MS. TIPPETT: [Laughs] Yeah.
DR. MLODINOW: And, the idea that we have no free will is an interesting philosophical question. In reality, we do have free will. Because in reality a system as complex as the brain with 100 billion neurons and I think 1,000 to 10,000 connections between each of them on average, is so complex that not only could one say that one can’t, in principle, model it or predict exactly what it’s going to do next, but almost in principle you can’t. Because in very complex systems, small changes in the state of the system produce large changes in the output.
MS. TIPPETT: Right. DR. MLODINOW: It’s called — that’s called chaos. But that’s typical of very complicated, non-linear systems. And…
MS. TIPPETT: The human beings are…
DR. MLODINOW: …the thing about the brain is…
MS. TIPPETT: …I would say every human being…
DR. MLODINOW: …that even…
MS. TIPPETT: …every human being is a complicated, non-linear system. [Laughs]
DR. MLODINOW: [Laughs] Yeah, hey the ones I know are.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
DR. MLODINOW: Of course, not me, I’m very straightforward, and logical, and always right. [Laughs ]. But other people are like that. And, when you look at their brain, there’s no way, even if you put the equations of physics, it’s an infinite possibility. And with something as complicated as the brain, I believe that errors in these measurements are always going to ruin your predictions. So in physics you have these things called effective theories, which are saying okay, there’s some other theory underneath it, but that’s too complicated. This one works. And this, but we’re still even going farther and saying almost in principle that the brain is too complicated to apply Laplacean determinism and so, the free will that we feel that we have is really — does defy the God as you say, the rulers or the despots of determinism. [Laughs]. So that’s just another way of looking at it. That’s probably as far on the spectrum toward free will as most scientists are willing to go.
MS. TIPPETT: Right. Well, I mean, and let’s just bring it down to earth. You know, your father, resisting the Nazi’s in Poland, if you took this blanket statement that there is no choice, there is no free will, somehow this was all determined by forces beyond our control or comprehension. Your father’s life there and his action meant nothing, and had no nobility, and no meaning, and there’s just something — everything in, I don’t think just me, but most scientists as human beings, would rebel against that thought.
DR. MLODINOW: Well, to me, even with my own view of free will and feeling that the laws of nature don’t have exceptions, what my father did, or what anyone does, is meaningful. Because if you think of this way, that he’s a biological organism that I don’t know his — the layout of his brain or how that produces whatever he does, so I judge him by his actions. And what he was doing with those heroic actions was revealing who he was. And, there are other people who revealed who they were and, you know, it wasn’t, in my mind, as attractive of a person. [Laughs]. So, I don’t think that there’s a difference between he’s on the spot making a decision do I take the fall for this or do I try to blow up that or whatever his decision was, is any less heroic if the decision was meant to be based on who he is as a person.
MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm. I mean, it raises the question of whether there is such a thing as courage, or maybe it’s just that our definition of courage is like isolated acts, but…
DR. MLODINOW: Well, of course there’s…
MS. TIPPETT: …you’re saying maybe it’s…
DR. MLODINOW: …or maybe the courage is who you are. And the courage isn’t that decision at that moment, the courage is that you’re the kind of person who would make that decision.
[Music: “Oblivion” by Ahn Trio]
MS. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today with the physicist Leonard Mlodinow. He’s reflecting with me on the puzzling dissonance between our human sense that we choose and shape our lives, and the scientific observation that free will is an illusion. He is a child of two Holocaust survivors, and someone who’s written books with figures as diverse as Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra. He’s been sharing the nuanced way he reconciles his life experiences with modern physics faith in randomness.
MS. TIPPETT: I find a bit of an opening, also, in the way you think about this and the way you write about randomness. So here’s something you wrote and I think these two things went together. I mean, you write about your father’s — a story he told you about how he got the job in the bakery at Buchenwald, the concentration camp. His sense that this is just random but tell that story.
DR. MLODINOW: Oh, that was in The Drunkard’s Walk.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
DR. MLODINOW: And the book is about randomness and life. And to me, you know, when I was thinking about writing that book, I was almost shaken by the realization that I’m, you know, a random effect of something very bad. And I hope that for me, I’m glad I’m here, but I’m only here because Hitler or the Nazis killed my father’s previous family. And that led to my being here.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
DR. MLODINOW: And that was a very hard to thing to face, in a way, that — what’s the meaning of my life, when it arose from something like that? And in that story, he was in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and he had stolen — he stole a loaf of bread from the bakery. And, the baker, I guess there were a certain number of people who had access. They lined them all up and brought the guys with the guns. And they said who stole the bread? And my father didn’t say anything. And then they said, okay, we’re going to start at this end of the line, and we’re going to shoot everybody, until either you’re all dead or the thief steps forward. And so he puts the gun to the head of the first person. So my father, at that point, steps forward, and admitted that he stole the bread. And, he told me that it wasn’t a heroic thing that — he didn’t do it out of heroism, he did it surely practical that these guys are all going to die, and I’m going to die, too, or I’ll just be the only one. So he stepped forward. And instead of killing him, though, the baker acted like God, and somewhat arbitrarily took him under his wing and gave him a job as his assistant in the bakery. And so, he had a much better job after that, based on that incident. And it just shows you that even in the midst of all this cruelty, there’s randomness, or I don’t know what, whim? I don’t know if the guy — I don’t know if he was being human and let some of his humanity peek out, or he wanted to play like God, I don’t really know what was the person’s motive, but that’s one of many things that happened to my father. If it had happened differently, I wouldn’t be here, and my kids wouldn’t be here. And everything would be different in, you know, that lineage.
MS. TIPPETT: You know, one of the things that’s so fascinating is how quantum physics has presented a picture of the world that is so much more of reality, the way things work — that is so much less ordered, more — there’s chaos, there’s randomization, and it wasn’t there for Newton or even for Einstein or they didn’t want — you know, Einstein didn’t want those things to be there. And, you know, one of the things you say is anything that is possible eventually will occur. [Laughs]. Just wait long enough and strange things will happen. But still, there’s an order to it.
DR. MLODINOW: Doesn’t your life work that way? [Laughs].
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. [Laughs]. But here’s the out I — here’s the opening I feel you give. Here’s something else you wrote. “The outline of our lives, like the candle’s flame, is continuously coaxed in new directions by a variety of random events that, along with our responses to them, determine our fate.” You know, you say that we are driven to see patterns and create patterns where the patterns aren’t there, but essentially there’s so much randomness. But, you — seems to me that you’re also presenting our responses as mattering. There is randomness, and then you talk about that even though that is true, you know, the number of at-bats, the number of chances taken, number of opportunities seized does make a difference. It does shift things. Can you explain that in scientific terms?
DR. MLODINOW: [Laughs]. Yeah, I was thinking about Brownian motion, so that says it all.
MS. TIPPETT: [Laughs].
DR. MLODINOW: No, I’m just kidding [laughs]. The — so The Drunkard’s Walk, which is the title of that book, is sometimes called The Random Walk and it comes from a jagged path that particles in Brownian motion seem to take for no apparent reason. In Brownian motion, people look at — this in the 19th century, they noticed that little grains of pieces of pollen would jiggle around for no apparent reason in liquid. And they thought at first maybe that was a life force, because there was no force on it. Maybe that’s what was jiggling, because it’s pollen. But they eventually figured out, and Einstein actually is the one who explained it, that this jiggling comes from the impact of the molecules on the pollen, pushing it this way and that way. And I saw a parallel with our lives, because when you look at your life, if you had to sit down and think about, and I’m talking about in detail, not just the headlines, if you think about all the details of what happened to you, you will find that there was a time where you had the extra cup of coffee, where if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have met Person A.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
DR. MLODINOW: Or you probably don’t realize that if you hadn’t done this, you would have gotten into crash which you — car crash but you didn’t, because you were a little bit later than and the guy — the drunk guy hit someone else or whatever. When I look back in my life, or I looked at the life of certain celebrities, I could find so many instances like that. And I had fun tracing some of them. How little things make a big difference, and — but the little thing that happens to you, other than if it’s something random like getting hit by a car, but in other ways, the little things that — what they really do is they raise opportunities for you. Or they raise challenges. And the course of your life depends on how you react to those opportunities and challenges that the randomness presents to you. So that’s what I meant by that. That if you’re awake and paying attention, you will find that things happen. They might seem good, they might seem bad at first, you don’t even know. Or you’re wrong about whether it’s good or bad. But, in time, it becomes clear whether the thing was good or bad, but the important thing is how you reacted to it.
MS. TIPPETT: And, how is that acceptable for you as a physicist in a way that the notion of free will is less convincing? I’m just trying to figure out what the distinction is.
DR. MLODINOW: Well, if I were to describe your every atom, then there wouldn’t be this randomness. I mean, there is still quantum randomness, which I don’t — I think just as a red herring here, but randomness is really a context-dependent term. So imagine you’re flipping a coin. That’s one of the archetypical random event in our culture. We always flip a coin. And it comes out, if it’s a fair coin, 50/50. But actually if you control very carefully how you put the coin on your thumb, and how you flip it, and where it’s going to land, you can — it’s not really random. It’s going to come out heads every time, or tails every time. So, whether it’s — the coin flip is random or not really depends on what you know and how much control you have. And so what I’m saying about life is you don’t know a lot, even if you think you do [laughs] and you don’t have a lot of control, even if you’re a control freak. So a lot of things that happen to you in that sense are random and the same thing with your reaction to it. Yes, maybe a god-like person who knew what the state of all the atoms in your body could tell how you’re going to react, but since none of us are that, it really does matter, and you do have a choice. And that determines your life.
MS. TIPPETT: Okay.
DR. MLODINOW: It doesn’t sound like you’re very satisfied, though, I think.
MS. TIPPETT: No, no. I just wonder, I mean…
DR. MLODINOW: Hmm, another scientist answer, ha. [Laughs].
MS. TIPPETT: [Laughs] Well, I feel like this could be a few hours, but I mean, I do hear, I mean, the words…
DR. MLODINOW: So, the quality of your voice tells a lot, doesn’t it. [Laughs]
MS. TIPPETT: [Laughs] Yes, it does. It does. I just wonder if there’s a vocabulary thing here. Do you know what I mean? Like that the notion of free will doesn’t work for science, but, I mean, you used the word choice, and I suppose that would be subject to some debate, but I feel like there’s a way in which you’re saying, you know, that what we do matters. Although you might say it, and describe it, and see it in a very different way that humanity has said that kind of thing up to now. Knowing what we know now about the universe. Is that fair?
DR. MLODINOW: Yeah. I definitely think that my decisions matter.
MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm.
DR. MLODINOW: Now, it’s more of a philosophical question, I guess, whether I was destined to make that decision.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah.
DR. MLODINOW: In my life, that question doesn’t — is something to ponder at times, but the effective theory is that yes, if I step off the building, I’m going to fall off the roof, and bad things will happen. And I don’t know whether I was destined to decide not to step off or not, but I take the decision as if I have a choice.
MS. TIPPETT: Mm-hmm.
DR. MLODINOW: And I think you have to live your life that way. And no one — whether or not you can argue that theoretically there’s a choice or not, no one knows enough to tell you what choice you’re going to make.
MS. TIPPETT: Right. Right.
DR. MLODINOW: Not even yourself, I think.
[Music: “Halcyon” by Jon Hopkins]
MS. TIPPETT: I’m Krista Tippett and this is On Being. Today: physicist and writer Leonard Mlodinow.
MS. TIPPETT: There’s a way in which this thing that physics is pointing out and that you point out in your books and on — they subliminal, the way our subconscious is kind of influencing us in ways we aren’t aware of and randomness. I mean, you — there’s a way in which that pointing out how little control we actually have over so much of what happens to us is a piece of truth that the spiritual traditions have carried forward in time. And that philosophy has known for a long time. I also sense that there’s — the way you take that in, even the science of it is that’s real power in that knowledge. Does it change the way you kind of move through your everyday life knowing about your lack of control? I mean, how does that — how do you work with that as a human being?
DR. MLODINOW: Well, certainly it does change, I certainly don’t mean to say that the unconscious is not you and there’s someone else [laughs] pulling the strings.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah, yeah.
DR. MLODINOW: But what we don’t realize is how much of our feelings, our actions, our beliefs, are coming from our unconscious mind. And I think that when we raise our consciousness about our unconscious, you’re knowing yourself better and to know yourself better, I think, is a good thing. You understand how you’re going to react, and you understand why you did things. And you just have more understanding for yourself. So it not only helps you make in a way better decisions, economically, but it helps you make better decisions, I think spiritually, because you have, in a way, more tolerance for yourself, as well as more understanding.
Other reviews / information:
My review of Leonard Mlodinow's book written with Stephen Hawking, <u>The Grand Design</u>, can be found here.
My book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
No comments:
Post a Comment