#7 Consciousness may create reality
Next in our list of 10 most fan-liked articles from The Infinite Universe: how consciousness creates reality. Note: I am not, nor have I ever been, an anti-realist. I do believe in an objective reality, but I also recognize that consciousness shapes our reality into what it is.
Free will is a big open problem in philosophy. Once upon a time, physics thought it had the problem solved: there was none. The French physicist LaPlace championed the idea that, because all physics was pre-determined by laws both backward and forwards in time and because human beings are physical beings, all our behavior must have been scripted from the beginning of time.
That idea vanished with the development of quantum physics. The world turned out to be random. Our decisions appeared to affect the nature of reality itself with what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”.
You can take two approaches to this idea: (1) go back to believing that everything is pre-determined with some tweaks to account for quantum physics or (2) decide that, indeed, our personal will actually does determine reality.
But what does a universe where our own wills determine reality look like?
Long before quantum physics had been developed, in the early 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer developed his philosophy of Will, which he published in a ponderous tome called The World as Will and Representation.
Frequently misunderstood by academics and lay people alike, Schopenhauer’s main thesis is that the world can be divided into two pieces: Will and Representation. Simple enough. But for him these had very specific meanings. Representation is how the world appears to us. That could be either the color of a flower or the spin of an electron. Will is the underlying essence of things.
Schopenhauer’s ideas suggest that the underlying reality of the universe is not one of essential determinism but of will and that will determines how reality is represented to us, even objective measurements like position or momentum of a quantum particle.
One interpretation of quantum physics is that this is exactly true. In quantum physics, we have the mysterious phenomenon of entanglement. In entanglement, two particles are correlated with one another such that when you measure one it affects the measurement that you make at the other. If I measure the spin of a particle like a silver ion, it comes in only two values, up or down. These are aligned with my measurement device, not because the measurement device somehow affects the ions to align with it, but because, according to one interpretation, it affects the reality of that ion. In this sense, my will, which determined the measurement device, also determined the objective reality of the ion.
This gets more complicated with entanglement. So, for example, if you have two entangled ions that have opposite spin and you measure the spin of one ion, the spin of the other will be aligned with it but in the opposite direction. Therefore, if Alice measures the spin of one ion, the spin that Bob measures of the other must be aligned with Alice’s measuring apparatus and likewise for Bob’s. This is true even if Alice and Bob are light years and centuries apart.
Some physicists, not liking this and preferring to go back to determinism, have come up with ideas like superdeterminism, which means that everything, including Alice and Bob’s decisions, were determined from the beginning of time. Others say that Alice and Bob are just one set of many copies in different universes. But a Schopenhauer-ian interpretation is that the Will is the underlying reality. I.e., it doesn’t determine the underlying reality. It is it. The spins are simply the Representation of that Will.
If that is true, then every event that ever occurred in the history of the universe that we can measure is the outcome of Will, either ours or some other being’s.
Schopenhauer believed that we can access the essential, underlying nature of reality through our Will because, while everything that we measure is Representation, we have direct access to what it is like to be us. Everything else in the universe has a sense of what it is like to be it but lacking a mind cannot access it. We can.
So what exactly is Will and why did Schopenhauer choose to call it that?
The key to understanding Will is in examining our own sense of consciousness. We have, in a sense, two levels of consciousness. The first is of experience. We experience a flower’s color and smell. Therefore, we are conscious of it. The second is that we are aware of our consciousness of it. That is a meta-consciousness which we sometimes call reflection. I reflect on my awareness of the flower. It is this second level of consciousness that gives rise to all art and poetry, for direct experience is simply awareness of a thing. Reflection on that experience internalizes awareness and makes it Representation.
Will is unconscious without Representation. Only through Representation does Will become conscious of itself. Likewise, only by measuring the quantum particles and reflecting on those do we become aware of the will we exerted upon the universe.
Representation, therefore, is a mirror we hold up to view the Will.
Cognition becomes a mechanism to view the will but is itself a Representation. Schopenhauer gives us an analogy:
They are related somewhat as the self-luminous is to the reflecting body; or as the vibrating strings are to the sounding-board, where the resulting note would be consciousness.
So, the original thing, the Will, is like the vibrating string or the shining Sun. The Representation is like the body of the guitar or a mirror. It reflects the Will. Consciousness is like the note or the reflection itself, combining Will and Representation to create awareness.
Going back to the quantum entanglement example, therefore, the Will is the underlying essence of the universe. Our immediate experience is of mere sense impressions. Our experience of particles as particles is like the reflection, the sounding board of that Will. And our awareness of our reflection of the particles is our consciousness of the Will.
For 200 years, philosophers have argued about what Schopenhauer’s Will actually is. Some have rejected it as vague mysticism. Others have said it is a universal force.
According Schopenhauer, however,
Will constitutes what is most immediate in [our] consciousness, but as such it has not wholly entered into the form of Representation … it makes itself known in an immediate way in which subject and object are not quite clearly distinguished
Thus, Will is the first level of consciousness before it has been re-represented in our minds. This is not unlike the Buddhist concept of “emptiness”, awareness of things in themselves without reflection.
We can experience the Will directly, therefore, through practicing emptiness or void as in meditation, for example, but also in flow states where we are only engaged in a task and not in reflecting upon that awareness.
Repeatedly Schopenhauer indeed equates the Will with phenomenal consciousness.
Why call it Will, then, if it is mere perception or consciousness? Consider what Schopenhauer says about moral conduct:
virtue and holiness [i.e. forms of conduct] result not from reflection, but from the inner depth of the Will … Conduct, as we say, happens in accordance with feelings …we are quite wrong in calling pain and pleasure Representations, for they are not these at all, but immediate affections of the will
Feelings are experiential states that are part of or equal to the Will, not Representations. Therefore, our moral responsibility for our actions, which is the primary concern of free will, comes from our feelings which are Schopenhauer’s Will. Again, there is a concordance with Buddhist thought: feelings are not reflections but manifestations of a deeper reality. That is why we cannot control them, only our awareness of them.
Therefore, volition, which is a feeling, is Will. If I want to do something, then that comes from feelings which precede all of reality.
Note this is different from solipsism which supposes that reality is simply a manifestation of my own perceptions and there is no extrinsic reality. Rather, Schopenhauer is saying that the underlying essence of reality is Will and we access that through feeling and direct, immediate experience. Representation is our reflection on that reality. We represent the particle spin to ourselves as up or down, we do not directly experience it.
Schopenhauer’s ideas of Will, therefore, extend to all of nature, including subatomic particles. All dynamics derives from a Will to move and act. We even talk about iron filings in a magnetic field “wanting” to align with it. Schopenhauer takes this from mere analogy to reality. What underlies all of nature is volition not only to move but to exist and experience itself moving and existing.
The difference between how nature experiences Will, however, and how it manifests in human beings comes down to reflection. Humans reflect on experience and then make plans, use knowledge, and employ reason. This reflection then creates more experience and volition. With nature, there is no reflection. Volition is always raw. So you have to extend what you understand volition to be.
Schopenhauer uses the example of a stone falling to Earth. There is a Will in the stone’s fall, but no reflection. The stone isn’t obeying some motive here. It is blindly following its Will. The stone experiences itself falling but cannot reflect upon it. It doesn’t know it is falling.
While this interpretation of the laws of nature has been much abused as absurd, there is a clear logic to it. In the context of quantum physics, a particle has a Will to align with our detectors, yet no motive or ability to reflect upon that alignment. What informs that Will is the Wills of the human beings who set up the detectors in the first place.
Idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, who has a science and engineering background, takes this to a whole different level. He suggests that Will can resolve quantum paradoxes through a transpersonal mind that underlies reality, extending mind beyond and between human beings. The transpersonal mind can create correlations between people and particles that resolves the paradox. This cosmopsychic interpretation challenges the physicalism of standard interpretations. Mind underlies all.
Cosmopsychism simply states that there is a single universal consciousness and we all derive our consciousness from it, forming our personalities by fracturing it into many from one. That is different from, say, panpsychism which attributes mind to all matter. Kastrup says rather that matter as we know it are abstract mathematical concepts and that consciousness is the true underlying reality. Thus the particle has no mind or will because it doesn’t really exist. The reality is Will not matter which is mere Representation.
Kastrup’s interpretation is intriguing but cosmopsychism is not necessary to talk about Will and consciousness determining reality.
The Will of conscious beings determines reality in the past
Superdeterminism says that our actions are correlated with particles and one another because of pre-determined states at the beginning of time. You can reverse this and say that our will could just as well determine the state of the universe at the Big Bang because physics is time reversible. While we assume that the past causes the future, definitions of causality break down when you look closely. All you can talk about is correlation. If the future is correlated with the past, then the future might as well cause the past as the other way around.
Thus, in our entanglement example with Alice and Bob, the Wills of Alice and Bob may determine the hidden state of the universe in the past, which then determines the states of the particles they both measure. Since these states are hidden until they make their measurements, there is no way to measure that their future Will has determined the present or past, and even after the fact it is a matter of interpretation which determined which. Moreover, there is no faster than light transmission of information because information travels into the past at or slower than light, just as it does the other way.
From a physics perspective, this argument is just the reverse interpretation of the standard superdeterminism argument that all our decisions are determined by some hidden states at the Big Bang. Rather, our decisions, emanating from underlying Will, determine those states. Our Will is essential and reality manifests around it.
This would be a universe that is, in a sense, constructed by the inhabitants that it manifests — a self-building universe created by consciousness. That may be a universal consciousness or it may not be. Whatever the truth is it is a powerful argument against physicalism.