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1. sure, consider the Penrose/Hameroff model…..
   http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/skunk.htm

   “One implication of our model relates to a possible scientific basis for secular spirituality (unrelated to any organized religious approach). I should say that Roger avoids discussion of such implications, but I’ve been willing to raise this possibility.

   For me, spirituality implies:

   * Interconnectedness among living beings and the universe * A ubiquitous reservoir of cosmic intelligence/Platonic values in touch with our conscious choices and perceptions * Existence of consciousness after death

   Can these issues be accounted for scientifically? I believe they possibly can.

   Interconnectedness – Conscious minds and unconscious processes may be quantum entangled.

   Cosmic intelligence/Platonic values – Penrose suggested in his 1989 book The emperor’s new mind that Platonic values including mathematical truth, ethical values and beauty were embedded in the fine structure of the universe, specifically in fundamental spacetime geometry at the inifinitesimally tiny (and ubiquitous) Planck scale. In a 1996 paper, Penrose and I further suggested that the precursors of conscious experience were also embedded in Planck scale geometry. In our theory, conscious choices and perceptions are affected by this universal Platonic information which Penrose termed non-computable influence. I liken such proposed influence on conscious choices to “following the way of the Tao”, or “Divine guidance”.

   Conscious existence after death – In my view, consciousness occurs at the level of Planck scale geometry amplified to quantum coherence/computation in brain microtubules. When metabolic requirements for quantum coherence in brain microtubules are lost (e.g. death, near-death), quantum information pertaining to that individual may persist and remain entangled in Planck scale geometry.”

   — matoko_chan · Jul 22, 09:39 PM · #

2. Occam’s razor is certainly one reason not to bring God in when quantum mechanics makes perfectly accurate predictions without him.

   Maybe more importantly, if God were taken as the author of every single microscopic physical event in the universe, wouldn’t the central mystery of the universe then become why God chooses to cause subatomic events — which, to the best of our knowledge, are the building blocks of all macroscopic events — to happen with precise and unchanging statistical frequencies? Wouldn’t he be going rather to extremes in scouring the universe of all reasonable evidence for his own existence?

   Why would God set up the world to work either like clockwork or like clockwork plus a perfect random number generator? Neither one bears the mark of the personal to me, unless God were a very cold mathematical type.

   One can certainly always add additional hypotheses to avoid abandoning the hypothesis of an active, engaged God. The question is not whether it’s logically possible, but whether there’s any motivation to complicate one’s view of life that way.

   — Christopher M · Jul 22, 10:35 PM · #

3. wouldn’t the central mystery of the universe then become why God chooses to cause subatomic events — which, to the best of our knowledge, are the building blocks of all macroscopic events — to happen with precise and unchanging statistical frequencies?

   Isn’t that begging the question? If God behaved differently, then that would be the observed “natural” behavior, and the same argument could be made. I don’t think that there is any way to structure a universe such that the structure will not appear “natural” to a philosophical naturalist living in that universe—since of course the naturalist bases his hypotheses about what is natural on in-universe observation.

   To answer Noah’s question, I think he’s right: perfect randomness isn’t distinguishable from perfectly free will. Information scientists likewise tell us that perfect information is not distinguishable from perfect noise, which may be a way of saying the same thing.

   — JS Bangs · Jul 22, 10:49 PM · #

4. As a religious guy who nevertheless doesn’t try to deny things like evolution, this is generally the tack I take. In the case of God, I think it works pretty well. To get where we are by evolution (as an example), you’d have to be pretty lucky with all the random mutations along the way. If those mutations are being guided, well it works out pretty well. (I realize that this kind of runs afoul of the anthropic principle, but I’m OK with that.)

   This kind of thinking informs my conception of human free will as well, but I wonder if that doesn’t get problematic in that one could argue that your fissioning uranium atom has free will. But perhaps not.

   — Miles · Jul 22, 11:13 PM · #

5. “This kind of thinking informs my conception of human free will as well, but I wonder if that doesn’t get problematic in that one could argue that your fissioning uranium atom has free will. But perhaps not.”

   Maybe uranium does, but it then suffers from a poverty of available choices. “I can jettison excess neutrons right now! But maybe I won’t.” On the other hand, I can respond to this blog post, or make dinner, or give up my life of material vanities and become an ascetic living in a tar shack, or an infinitude of other choices. That makes my free will quite a bit more interesting.

   — Blar · Jul 22, 11:31 PM · #

6. Free Will is most clearly shown by that which we do when we have nothing to do. Or, more aptly, by the choices we make in a limitless consumer society. How can it be pure mechanics that I ordered a particular Thai delivery dish for dinner, when I almost just made a sandwich? Or decided to stare out the window and contemplate life rather than turn on the TV? Or decided to go hiking instead of swinming? etc.
   Free will is evident in the constant choice of little things that have no true moralistic values.
   Trite, but irrefutable.

   — aborabum · Jul 23, 12:42 AM · #

7. Noah, I think you’re probably right that there’s no difference. But I think it might be possible to come up with an extremely far fetched scenario in which one could potentially suggest — if not completely prove — the existence of an external will.

   Consider your second scenarios, but instead of thinking of God in the traditional sense — as an all powerful supernatural being — let’s think of a creator being who is not supernatural but whose existence merely surpasses the capabilities of our senses. I’m thinking here of string theory — which I admit I have only a basic, at best, understanding of — and a higher dimensional being outside of time. If one can conceive of such a being as a creator/ruler who exists within a set of natural laws but beyond the natural world as we can sense it — we may be able to prove the existence of the seventh dimension, but we’ll never interact with it as we do the first three — then it seems to me, vaguely, at least, that there may be a subsequent way to prove, or hint at, anyway, an outside, superior will exerting control and/or influence which is not random.

   </philosophical noodling>

   — Peter Suderman · Jul 23, 01:22 AM · #

8. there is no room for a human telos derived from transcendent values (since we ourselves are only here by chance)

   Your conclusion does not follow from the premise. Even if I am here purely by random chance I can surely subscribe to transcendent values from which I could deduce my telos. The philosophy of Existentialism is constructed on this logic.

   — aldo · Jul 23, 01:42 AM · #

9. There are ways, in principle, to show that a given sequence of events is or isn’t random. Take the simplest model: a incredibly long, possibly infinite series of coin tosses: HHTHHTHTHHTHT… and so on. Any two sequences are equally unlikely, so it’s just as likely that you get HHHHHHHHHHHHH as HHTHHTHTHHTHT. However, one looks much more likely to be random than the other. We can explain that by noting that the information necessary to encode the first is much less than the information necessary to encode the second. Alternately, we can identify a lot of patterns that any random sequence should have if it is long enough. As the length increases, the ratio of heads to tails should approach 1:1, the probability that a heads is followed by a tails should go to 1/2, the frequency of n-length sequences of a single result should be …blah… and on it goes. Not that I know the details, but I believe you can extend this to infinite series. This is only a one-way test: it can identify some non-random sequences. It’s always strictly possible that the process that looks perfectly random was produced by a causal process.

   As for evolution, we lack that detailed sequence of coin-flips. So it’s more a heuristic question: do the mechanisms specified by the theory of evolution seem sufficient to explain the development of complex life-forms. And that’s the whole intelligent-design crap. The truth of intelligent design would be analogous to the first sequence having 30 heads in a row. Without that concrete evidence, it’s still possible that the underlying process is non-random. But if you believe that, you’re just choosing to believe it because you feel like it. Not because you have any reason to.

   As for the hypothesis that the uranium chooses to decay, that’s a lot more speculative, but I think a good preliminary question is “what do you mean chooses?”

   — Justin · Jul 23, 03:06 AM · #

10. Noah,

    I think your account of free will vs. randomness is basically right. The Physicist Theologian John Polkinghorne has made much the same point: certain events at the quantum level are epistemically uncertain—we cannot know anything about them—and therefore most physicists assume that they are ontologically indeterminate: what they ARE is uncertain. He argues that one can just as easily posit that they are ontologically OPEN; that what they are is determined by will, either our own or God’s or some combination of the two. He also draws a similar analogy in the macroscopic world to chaotic systems, which are also epistemically indeterminate; he sees this as a necessary alternative to arguing that the indeterminancy at the micro level sum how “adds up” to the macroscopic observations of what appears to be free will. I must admit that sometimes the physics goes over my head, but if you are interested in these topics, Polkinghorne is an excellent resource. He has a chapter on just this topic in his short collection of essays “Belief in God in an Age of Science” (Yale University Press, 1998), and fuller treatments elsewhere in “Science and Providence” and “Reason in Reality”. Any of these books will lead you to a whole bunch of citations on the matters of free will, randomness, their differences, and the implications for human and divine action.

    — Brendan · Jul 23, 11:03 AM · #

11. Thanks to everyone for commenting.

    Several commenters seem to think I was looking for a way to prove that evolution has a pre-determined “direction” or some such. That’s not the case. The question I asked was: is it possible, in principle, to tell the difference between true random chance and totally free will, whether God’s or our own?

    If the answer to that question is, “no,” as I suspect and several of you agreed, then, pragmatically, there is no difference between God and random chance (and, similarly, no difference between our own free will and random chance), because a difference that has no consequences in the actual world (and therefore cannot be distinguished by experiment) is, pragmatically, no difference at all. The only difference is how we feel about the universe, not in how the universe works.

    In effect, there’s room to believe in the God of the Book of Job, but I’m not sure how far that gets you if you are the sort of person who wants to believe the sorts of things that Job believes at the start of the book.

    — Noah Millman · Jul 23, 01:27 PM · #

12. It seems to me that, in both cases, the answer is no because you have allowed one of your two viewpoints to be very vague. In the first case, I don’t see how you can distinguish randomness from the idea of God achieving some sort of purpose. But as soon as person (b) claims that God is trying to establish justice, or create beings who will worship him, or make creatures of extraordinary beauty, you can ask whether the observed history of mutations seems to be directed towards this end.

    Similarly, in the second case, a lot rests on how strictly you construe “just like any Newtonian laws”. If a Newtonian law is any mathematical rule which deterministically describes the present in terms of the past, I don’t see how you could theoretically rule that out. However, if a Newtonian rule is a deterministic rule where what happens here and now is only determined by what has happened near here in the recent past, that can and has been ruled out by Bell’s Inequality. (I don’t see this as very relevant to the question of free will, though.)

    For those to whom they would be useful — the best elementary explanation I can find of Bell’s Inequality is
    http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/kenny/papers/bell.html

    — David Speyer · Jul 23, 04:49 PM · #

13. In your second example, I focused on the question of whether quantum-like and Newton-like theories can be distinguished in general, not whether they could be distinguished as explanations for human actions. I don’t think that there is any evidence that quantum effects are significant in the human realm but, since the two theories can be distinguished with regards to electron spins, I could hypothetically imagine some sort of way of distinguishing them as explanations for human behavior. Again, though, this doesn’t feel much like free will to me.

    — David Speyer · Jul 23, 05:02 PM · #

14. Noah: The question I asked was: is it possible, in principle, to tell the difference between true random chance and totally free will, whether God’s or our own?

    From the outside looking in, maybe not. With perfect randomness, all outcomes are equally likely. An accurate word to describe such a system is “capricious.” An absolutely free will, unmoored from an innate nature or essence, with no “primary wants” to channel the flow of activity? — sure, it’d be as capricious-looking as an alpha particle decay.

    However, there is a substantive difference between randomness, on the one hand, and free will qua agency on the other. Its basis is akin to Fichte’s “I/not-I” distinction in The Science of Knowledge and his thoughts on the frustration of the subject by the object. Throw in our short and long-term memory, our meta-enabling self-reference, our executive capacity to force and inhibit behavior, and our sophisticated neo-cortical world-modeling, and what you end up with is something that looks, smells and tastes and plays a whole lot like classic free will.

    — JA · Jul 23, 05:58 PM · #

15. It would help if you clarified what you mean by “random”. If you mean that all outcomes are equally likely (i.e., the uniform distribution) then you can determine whether a person or group of people are choosing randomly, as long as you get to watch them make multiple decisions. On the other hand, if “random” means “generated according to some probability distribution”, then it can be hard to distinguish randomness from determinism: for example, it you use a distribution that chooses X 99.99999% of the time, and Y the remaining 0.00001% of the time, the resulting random behavior will look deterministic.

    — Jim · Jul 23, 06:23 PM · #

16. I forgot to include the substantive distinction. With uncertainty qua entropy, each outcome is logically shallow. With free will qua agency, each outcome is logically deep.

    — JA · Jul 23, 06:24 PM · #

17. Noah: You’re saying (I think) that as we sit here and watch these physical events unfold (at the subatomic or any other level, say), there’s no way to tell whether they are truly random or shaped by the will of God (or someone else). And that’s perfectly true. If I roll a 6-sided die 5 times and get 2, 3, 1, 1, 2, there’s no way to PROVE that God didn’t specifically select that exact sequence of numbers. But if you want to believe that he did, you’re suddenly faced with another, very difficult, problem — namely, why does God always, always cause these things to happen with perfect mathematical randomness?

    Okay, not quite perfect in the case of the die, because no die and no toss are perfect. But at the subatomic level, as best we can tell, these things really do obey extremely strict probabilistic laws. The physical system follows the possible paths with (as we can see in the aggregate) certain probabilities, utterly regardless of whether its physical unfolding involves (through whatever physical mechanism) the deaths of a million people, or a baby born deformed, or a person thinking false thoughts, or whatever. (This isn’t just the problem of evil: it’s also the problem of why morally NEUTRAL things happen with such physical regularity.)

    In other words: If God is really pushing and pulling the levers behind what looks to us like the bare unfolding of atomic probabilities, then why does he always, always choose for things to turn out in a way that is utterly indistinguishable from those bare probabilities?

    It seems sort of like looking at a field of daisies and hypothesizing that someone went through and carefully planted each daisy, and laid down all the surrounding dirt and grass, exactly so as to create the impression of natural growth. You can’t exactly prove that no one did so — but wouldn’t it be a weird thing to think?

    You could, of course, decide to think something like that, on a complete, Kierkegaardian leap of faith. The question is, what is the intellectual motivation to do so?

    — Christopher M · Jul 23, 08:54 PM · #

18. Noah, if you’re still reading…

    You write, “…would person (a) be provably right or wrong? In theory, I mean . . . My intuition says, “no” – that there’s really no room for the concept of an independent entity possessed of “will” in a worldview shaped by cause and effect.”

    I think you are asking too much. How would you define an independent entity? Does it have to be “independent all the way down” for us to have free will at the level of thought and behavior?

    From everything I’ve read and seen, we are genetically determined to be consciously and therefore behaviorally under-determined (I’ve said this before, I think). Instead of carrying around a grab-bag of fixed action responses, our genes code for tools which, when put together, allow us to observe, orient, decide and act; to reflect on, force and inhibit behavior; to switch, recall and chew on thoughts. And so on. (That we believe we can do these things is inarguable; we’re just trying to figure out how and why).

    Just because our capacity or inclination to do these things emerges out of (determined) physical processes does not mean our thoughts and behavior are determined. It just means our independence is dependent.

    — JA · Jul 23, 11:14 PM · #

19. Of course, the vagaries and necessities of evolution underwrite our freedoms; insofar as they exist, they are calibrated to the realities.

    — JA · Jul 23, 11:22 PM · #

20. Noah:

    Great post, as per usual.

    You say that:

    there’s really no room for the concept of an independent entity possessed of “will” in a worldview shaped by cause and effect

    This is my intution as well, as long you implicitly meant shaped completely by cause and effect.

    You then say:

    the only place for “will” to retreat to is the zone of true randomness, of complete uncertainty, which means that truly free will as such must be completely inscrutible.

    This seems like a compound statement. I mostly agree with the last part, that free will must be inscrutable to an outside observer, though not necessarily completely inscrutable. That is, we may have free will in the natural language meaning of the term, yet still almost always pull our hand away from a hot stove. If all behavior was completely predictable based on known physical piror conditions, however, it’s hard to see what free will would mean.

    But I don’t think this means that free will must “retreat to the zone of true randomness”. I find the concept of randomness, when applied to a physical system, pretty slippery. If it means our lack of knowledge as observers of causal laws that are really “there”, but that we approximate with some distribution (even if its the uniform distribution), that’s pretty clear. I’ve argued in National Review that is what is meant by random in the context of evolution. If it means cause-and-effect laws simply do not apply, OK, but then what is really going on? I’m as capable as the next guy of using statistical laws of quantum mechanics, but it does produce a kind of philosophical quandry. If you mean randomness in this sense, there is no predictability and laws of cause-and-effect do not govern the outcome, then, yes, I agree these must be characteristics of what we mean by free will. But if you mean some kind of philosphical purposelessness, then no, not only don’t I think this is required for free will, I think it’s a lot closer to the Triumph of the Will. Long story short, I need a more detailed efintion of what you mean by “random” to react.

    — Jim Manzi · Jul 24, 12:39 PM · #

21. Our common-language understanding of free will is closely tied to concepts of character and morality and doesn’t imply random behavior at all (in the sense of a uniform distribution.) We would expect a person who was exercising free will to behave in predictable ways: for example, an honest person will (freely choose to) tell the truth in most circumstances, precisely because he is honest. Certain strands of existentialism occasionally portray freely chosen behavior as close to random (e.g., the murder in The Stranger), but that has not been the common understanding of the term most of the time. In general we would view a person who behaved absolutely randomly as not free, but subject to some sort of dementia. I would be tempted to try to wittgenstein my way around the issue by observing that ‘free will’ is used in one kind of discourse, while ‘cause/effect’ (in the scientific sense) is used in another, very different, kind. We therefore shouldn’t assume that the sense of ‘causality’ that we would meet in a discussion of free will is the same as that used in a scientific description of people qua machines.

    — Jim · Jul 24, 08:46 PM · #

22. I think you may be very interested in Daniel Dennet’s “Elbow Room” (http://www.amazon.com/Elbow-Room-Varieties-Worth-Wanting/dp/0262540428), which discusses this issue in great and well-thought-out depth.

    — jdbo · Jul 24, 10:14 PM · #

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