Free Will and Retrocausality

I discussed yesterday's post on retrocausality with a few people and thought I'd make a quick post to explore an analogy that shows what a successful demonstration of the phenomenon would really mean for free will.

Some of you may be geeky enough to remember the Fighting Fantasy books - one incarnation of the 'choose your own adventure' concept. For those who aren't familiar with them, the books are divided into paragraphs (usually a few hundred) which are numbered; after reading one, you're offered a choice of which paragraph to read next to continue the story. Some choices lead to an ignoble death, some lead to the eventual solution.

When you read a paragraph (let's say #150), you take the information in it, plus any previous information you know, and make a decision on which paragraph to read next (we'll say #200 or #60). In fact it's probably fair to say that you pick the option that seems most sensible - given what you know (i.e. the past). That's analogous to any other decision-making moment. If you'd taken a different route through the story to reach #150, you might know that paragraph #60 means certain death - so you'd pick the other option. You do make a 'real decision'. (In reality, unlike Fighting Fantasy, you can't go back and start again, so you only make one decision in practice - this is really what determinism means.)

Now let's introduce retrocausality. This is very easy to include in our Fighting Fantasy analogy - you can just cheat. You glance ahead, read #60, realise it'll kill you, and go back and pick #200 instead.

What may not be so obvious is that back-in-time signalling has exactly the same effect. The signal from the future changes the information you have, so your decision changes. There's no paradox, because at the time you received your signal from the future, it accurately described what the future would be. However, now knowing that, you can deliberately pick a 'different future'. (It's not even a problem that the future where you sent the signal back is now probably not going to happen - although the explanation of that is more complicated.)

This is really the key distinction between determinism and fatalism, so I'm quite excited about it - if we can really send retrocausal signals, we should be able to thoroughly put the latter to rest.

Meditation and right-brain thinking...

I went to a meditation workshop this evening led by Vessantara, one of the FWBO's more senior teachers. Interestingly the meditation itself was fairly simple, but several of the comments he made in response to questions were very interesting.

He discussed how we have a tendency to label things rather than experiencing them - what he called a 'labour-saving habit', because it leaves us more time to think about whatever terribly important thing is currently on our mind. That's nothing novel in itself, but when he pointed out that it partly explains why time seems to go by faster as we get older, I found that much more interesting.

He also described the value of boredom - something he says he invariably feels at the beginning of a solitary retreat. He said one can see boredom as an obstacle, or one can see it as an indication that one isn't paying attention properly. If you really engage with your experience, you rapidly find things about it that are interesting. That point caught my attention sharply, because it's something I'd begun to notice during my recent attempts to revise the less interesting parts of my course. Having it put into words will I think help to remind me that the material isn't really boring - but choosing to be bored with it certainly won't make it memorable.

On a more directly meditation-related front, he mentioned that one can go a step beyond a 'kind and gentle chiding' attitude to discursive thoughts during meditation; one can actively celebrate the moment of awareness when you realise you were distracted. It's as if a spark of self-awareness reignited amongst the smouldering daydreams. (That purple prose, by the way, is my own, and not in any way Vessantara's fault)

All in all, quite a fun evening. I'd attend the second workshop this Thursday, but I've been offered free Wagamama's with Laura and some friends, and I can't honestly pass that up... :)

In other news, I quit smoking (again). Last time I let myself have 'just one' after a few months without and it led to starting all over. This time, stubbornness will prevail.

In the Beginning, #2

Thinking about the 'why anything' problem I mentioned before, it occurred to me today that the idea of zero in the mathematical sense is a purely abstract mental construction: I don't think there's any convincing evidence for it being meaningful in describing anything physically real, only for counting objects (which are themselves arbitrary discretisations of the space-time continuum) or for succinctly describing the situation where opposing forces are conveniently balanced*. That seems to back up the assertion that it's not a good analogy for general nothing.

*A vacuum isn't zero matter either; it's (probably) quantum foam, a suggestion which I find most compellingly supported by the Casimir effect and Hawking radiation (although the latter is somewhat controversial).

Basically I think my answer to the question is that something and nothing (in the sense one thinks of when one says "why something rather than nothing") are not actually in the same class; one is a physical entity, the other a mathematical construct (maths is generally very good at describing reality, but it still remains a description, not the same thing). It's this error of comparison which renders the question meaningless (rather like "why the square root of minus one, not butterscotch flavour?").

If we do away with zero as a physical reality, it seems tempting to suggest we should also do away with its inverse, infinity. Perhaps that could help explain why the speed of light is finite? It seems like it must also have implications for black holes.

The remaining physical question - which is not necessarily simplified - appears to be "why is the universe not homogenous?"

p.s. After writing this I had a wander on Wikipedia looking for related items and found this, which I'm not sure I completely agree with, but which is nonetheless clearly a related chain of thought. Interesting that it comes out just as I'm considering the issue...

In the Beginning

I've been pondering the question of "where did we come from" recently. I'm not talking about humanity, obviously, but rather the more fundamental question of where the universe came from. The Big Bang theory doesn't actually answer that question - it provides a useful model for the very first few moments of the universe's existence, but it doesn't offer any answer to the question of why or how - i.e. it merely pushes the question back to "where did the Big Bang come from" (or perhaps more helpfully "what caused the Big Bang").

It's only as I write this entry that I realise what a ridiculous phrase "Big Bang" is. Wikipedia informs me the name was coined sarcastically by Fred Hoyle to describe the theory (in opposition to his own steady state model). Somehow I'm not surprised to discover it was originally a pejorative label...

I've seen various suggestions to answer that question - brane theory, etc. - but all only extend the causal regression, rather than tackling directly the question "why something, rather than nothing". I find that curiously many people seem to consider this question "scientifically [not tackleable]"; that point of view may be true but it certainly seems to be a pessimistic starting point.

We tend to believe 'ex nihilo nihil fit' (from nothing nothing is made), and this is certainly the other part of the paradox (the first part being the existence of the universe). I'm quite happy to agree with Ayn Rand that 'existence exists', and simple logic tells us that no thing can be extracted from the empty set (a common concept of 'nothing'). I began to wonder, however, why we should consider the type of nothing that pre-dates existence (which I will hereafter refer to for convenience as 'the pre-universe') as the same kind of nothing as the empty set.

Let's consider the fact that in quantum theory (which generally seems to be a better model of reality than our classical, intuitive predictions) the initial state of a value is commonly not zero, but rather 'undefined'; the value only becomes one or zero after some measurement or interaction. This leads me to the thinking (which I admit I cannot defend with any rigour, but hope you will humour me anyway) that perhaps the 'undefined' state is a much more natural place to begin than a 'zero' state as one typically imagines the pre-universe. In a rather abstract way, one could think of the pre-universe as an array of qubits, all of undefined value. As time has passed, those qubits have fallen into the defined values that describe our particular universe.

This might seem like a very vague and unhelpful place to begin a scientific enquiry - even a thought experiment - but consider that three thought-provoking points can already be drawn from the idea described:

1. If the pre-universe was all that existed (as it presumably must be, since the presence of anything else would push the question back to the origin of that other) it cannot exchange anything with any 'external' entity. If a metric exists for something that cannot be created or destroyed within the pre-universe, the total of that metric must remain constant. This sounds intriguingly like conservation of energy.
2. The concept that the original state of the universe was undefined, and that therefore it is becoming increasingly defined over time, offers an alternative to the many-worlds type interpretations of quantum events. Any given quantum event where a 'random choice' occurs may be a genuine choice; analogous to the irreversible collapse of a single qubit of the universe from an undefined state to a defined one.
3. String theory is frequently criticised because it describes not one universe, ours, but rather a vast range of universes. This seems less problematic if our universe fell out of an undefined state by random chance - a slightly different result for the final choices in that falling-out would be expected to lead to a similar universe, and hence one potentially also describable by the same or a very similar theory.

Perhaps one day I'll have the time to study enough maths and physics to explore this idea in more detail... if you have any such training, please do post your comments, I'd be very interested to hear them. (Of course comments are also welcome if you don't have any such training!)