…Could perhaps the declared indeterminacy allow free will to step into the gap in the way that free will determines those events which the Law of Nature leaves undetermined? This hope is, at first sight, obvious and understandable.
In this crude form the attempt was made, and the idea, to a certain extent, worked out by the German physicist Pascual Jordan. I believe it to be both physically and morally an impossible solution. As regards the first: according to our present view, the quantum laws, though they leave the single event undetermined, predict a quite definite statistics of events when the same situation occurs again and again. If these statistics are interfered with by any agent, this agent violates the laws of quantum mechanics just as objectionably as if it interfered-in pre-quantum physics--with a strictly causal mechanical law. Now we know that there are no statistics in the reaction of the same person to precisely the same moral situation-the rule is that the same individual in the same situation acts again precisely in the same manner. (Mind you, in precisely the same situation; this does not mean that a criminal or addict cannot be converted or healed by persuasion and example or whatnot-by strong external influence. But this, of course, means that the situation is changed.) The inference is that Jordan's assumption-the direct stepping in of free will to fill the gap of indeterminacy-does amount to an interference with the laws of nature, even in their form accepted in quantum theory. But at that price, of course, we can have everything. This is not a solution of the dilemma.
The moral objection was strongly emphasized by the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (who died in 1945 in New York as an exile from Nazi Germany). Cassirer's extended criticism of Jordan's ideas is based on a thorough familiarity with the situation in physics. I shall try to summarize it briefly; I would say it amounts to this. Free will in man includes as its most relevant part man's ethical behavior. Supposing the physical events in space and time actually are to a large extent not strictly determined but subject to pure chance, as most physicists in our time believe, then this haphazard side of the goings-on in the material world is certainly (says Cassirer) the very last to be invoked as the physical correlate of man's ethical behavior. For this is anything but haphazard; it is intensely determined by motives ranging from the lowest to the most sublime sort, from greed and spite to genuine love of the fellow creature or sincere religious devotion. Cassirer's lucid discussion makes one feel so strongly the absurdity of basing free will, including ethics, on physical haphazard that the previous difficulty, the antagonism between free will and determinism, dwindles and almost vanishes under the mighty blows Cassirer deals to the opposite view. "Even the reduced extent of predictability" (Cassirer adds) "still granted by Quantum Mechanics would amply suffice to destroy ethical freedom, if the concept and true meaning of the latter were irreconcilable with predictability." Indeed, one begins to wonder whether the supposed paradox is really so shocking, and whether physical determinism is not perhaps quite a suitable correlate to the mental phenomenon of will, which is not always easy to predict "from outside," but usually extremely determined "from inside." To my mind, this is the most valuable outcome of the whole controversy: the scale is turned in favour of a possible reconciliation of free will with physical determinism, when we realise how inadequate a basis physical haphazard provides for ethics.
The net result is that quantum physics has nothing to do with the free will problem. If there is such a problem, it is not furthered a whit by the latest development in physics. To quote Ernst Cassirer again: "Thus it is clear...that a possible change in the physical concept of causality can have no immediate bearing on ethics."
The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.
So, in brief, we do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it. Not only my own body, but those of my friends, also of my dog and cat and horse, and of all the other people and animals. And this is my only means of communicating with them.
Moreover, my body is implied in quite a few of the more interesting changes-movements, etc.-that go on in this material world, and is implied in such a way that I feel myself partly the author of these goings-on. But then comes the impasse, this very embarrassing discovery of science, that I am not needed as an author. Within the scientific world-picture all these happenings take care of themselves-they are amply accounted for by direct energetic interplay. Even the human body's movements "are its own" as Sherrington put it. The scientific world-picture vouchsafes a very complete under- standing of all that happens-it makes it just a little too understand- able. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it-though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: that, for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.
In particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific worldview contains of itself no ethical values, no aesthetical values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please. Whence came I, whither go I?
Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.
Science, we believe, can, in principle, describe in full detail all that happens in the latter case in our sensorium and "motorium" from the moment the waves of compression and dilation reach our ear to the moment when certain glands secrete a salty fluid that emerges from our eyes. But of the feelings of delight and sorrow that accompany the process science is completely ignorant-and therefore, reticent.
Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great Unity-the One of Parmenides-of which we all somehow form part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God-with a capital "G." Science is, very usually, branded as being atheistic. After what we said, this is not astonishing. If its world-picture does not even contain blue, yellow, bitter, sweet-beauty, delight, and sorrow-, if personality is cut out of it by agreement, how should it contain the most sublime idea that presents itself to human mind?
The world is big and great and beautiful. My scientific knowledge of the events in it comprises hundreds of millions of years. Yet in another way it is ostensibly contained in a poor seventy or eighty or ninety years granted to me-a tiny spot in immeasurable time, nay even in the finite millions and milliards of years that I have learnt to measure and to assess. Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.
Schroedinger
