**Appendix F. Science, Free Will, and Morality.**

The topic of this appendix is the core topic of the entire book. But it
may be useful at this point to distill out the essence of the argument
presented in the main text, and to expand upon it, by contrasting it
with the principal contemporary alternative approach to the subject.

Advances in the scientific understanding of the connection between our
minds and our brains can be expected to have important applications in
the treatment of medical and psychological aliments. But an issue of far
greater ultimate significance is the impact of the new developments in
science on the foundations of moral philosophy. For at the present stage
of technological development it is human values that largely control the
destiny of our species.

For the past few centuries the main impact of science on moral issues
has stemmed from the fact that the concepts of classical physics entail
a materialist conception of nature in which each human being is reduced
to a collection of cogs in a giant machine. Each of us becomes,
according to that view, a puppet whose every act is controlled by the
motions of mindless microscopic entities, which themselves are ruled by
mechanistic laws. By *mechanistic* I specifically mean "local
deterministic": each elementary entity, at each instant of time, is
located essentially at a point in space, and its immediate future is
completely fixed by the physical states of its immediate neighbors. Thus
the entire course of world history, from big bang to big crunch (or
forever, if the universe lives forever), is fixed already at some early
primordial time. Such a mechanistic universe is, according the way most
people use the words "free will", quite devoid of that property. Thus
just as we normally say that a mechanical robot lacks free will, so must
we say the same of ourselves, insofar as that mechanistic/materialistic
world view is accepted. But how can we reconcile this "conclusion of
science" with the notion of personal responsibility that normally
underlies our moral precepts. That formidable problem is immediately
raised by an adoption of the world view of classical physics.

Certain philosophers have resolutely set themselves the task of
reconciling the mechanistic materialism of classical physics with the
concepts of free will and personal responsibility that underlie our
usual precepts of morality. No one has tried harder than Daniel Dennett.
In his recent book *Freedom Evolves* he views much of his 30-year output
of books, from his 1984 book *Elbow Room*, through *Consciousness
Explained* and *Darwin's Dangerous Idea,* as the construction of the
foundations for his attack on this difficult problem. But, hard as he
has tried, people have seemed incapable of properly understanding his
main points, which are that "Our minds are just what our brains
non-miraculously do,..."(p.xi) and that this premise is compatible with
conscious "free will".

Dennett's main premise is a simple one, namely the "identity theory"
thesis that each conscious thought is the very same thing as some brain
activity, and, moreover, that brain activities can be regarded as
being\-\--insofar as they bear on these issues\-\--governed by the
mechanistic-deterministic laws of nineteenth century classical physics.
But a clear understanding of Dennett's approach seem to be eluding even
his most sympathetic readers. He is frustrated (p. 20) with the
defection of Steven Pinker, whom he had classified as one of the
"responsible, cautious naturalists" like himself, but who, Dennett now
says, continues to dally with what he describes as "mysterian doctrines
of consciousness". Dennett is disappointed also with the fact that
Robert Wright, who he says gives a fine presentation of most of the
ideas that he will be presenting, finds himself unable to fully support
Dennett's "uncompromising materialism". "Mysterian doctrines of
consciousness" appear to be the notion that our conscious thoughts and
feelings\-\--those elements of our the streams of consciousness that are
the only realities that we actually *know*\-\--are non-identical to the
theoretical inventions of that great alchemist, Isaac Newton; and
"uncompromising materialism" appears to mean equating any deviation from
nineteenth century classical mechanistic determinism to "defying the
laws of physics" (p.1), in spite of the contrary findings of
twentieth-century physicists.

Dennett mentions also a book by Richard Dooling that includes an
"insightful and accurate" précis of his (Dennett's) theory of conscious,
but then "gets the part about free will dead wrong, *just the way that
some neuroscientists have done*." (Dennett's italics.) Thus Dennett, in
spite of his intensive long-term effort to explain and defend his ideas,
seem to be unable to get even some very serious and like-minded people
to correctly understand or agree with him.

So what is going on here? The people Dennett cites seem to be
sympathetic with his ideas, but then, in the end, cannot understand him,
or disagree with him, or even get key points dead wrong. Why are his
ideas so hard to communicate to others?

Dennett (p. 224) quotes Tom Wolfe as noting that he, Dennett, (along
with E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkings) are "presenting elegant
arguments" as to why mechanistic materialism does not diminish our
self-image, but that the message "is not rippling out to the public.
...The conclusion people out beyond the laboratory are drawing is: *The
fix is in! We are all hardwired!* That, and: *Don't blame me! I'm wired
wrong!"*

Dennett notes (p. 226) that he has already discussed this matter of the
status of free will and morality in *Consciousness Explained*, "but that
discussion was obscure and difficult and needs refreshing." However, the
extreme difficulty with Dennett's position, testified to by the fact
that he has written books and books about it yet smart and sympathetic
readers still don't get it, suggests that maybe he is trying, with great
cleverness indeed, to prove true a false idea, namely the compatibility
of (1), the idea that each of us is a mechanically controlled automaton,
with (2), the claim that each of us has a free will that adequately
undergirds personal responsibility and our ability to act morally.
Dennett says (p. 223) that "I've finally come to the conclusion that
some people like the confusion." But the people involved here include
intelligent philosophers and scientist who are diligently striving to
root out confusion. Why are thirty years of books insufficient to get
his thesis across to people such as these?

Dennett's view stems from a basic commitment to the mechanistic
determinism of classical physics, coupled with the idea that
consciousness is not an idle bystander. These commitments lead naturally
to "identity theory", to the idea that consciousness is not a *partner*
with matter, but *is, itself,* mechanistically deterministic
brain-matter in action. His efforts to reconcile this extremely
restricted ontology with rational moral philosophy tend to be self
contradictory. Thus he extols Daniel Wegner's book *The Illusion of
Conscious Will* by saying (p. 224): "I think Wegner's account of
conscious will is the best I have ever seen", but then rejects Wegner's
basic claim, and asserts the exact opposite, in a move he downplays as a
mere *tactical* difference. He says that "Wegner thinks it is less
misleading, more effective, to say that conscious will is an illusion"
but that he, Dennett, thinks the better 'tactic' is "to make *the same
points* by saying that no, free will is not an illusion."

In order to construct a rational moral philosophy concordant with the
precepts of classical physics Dennett wants to say that we are
mechanistically deterministic beings that enjoy free will. This position
requires a twisting of the usual meanings of words that does not seems
to fly: even those who generally agree with him seem unable to go along
with these tamperings with normal meanings attached to the words he
uses.

This commentary on Dennett's efforts to reconcile mechanistic
determinism with rational moral philosophy is meant to emphasize that
this is not a problem that can be justifiably claimed to have now been
well resolved by philosophers. Books and books have been written, it is
true, but great volumes of argumentation, followed by repeated
re-argumentation, are insufficient, by themselves, and are, instead, a
cause for serious skepticism and doubt.

Dennett asserts (p. 14) that his "fundamental perspective is naturalism,
the idea that philosophical investigations are not superior to, or prior
to, investigations of the natural sciences, but in partnership with
those truth-seeking enterprises, and that the proper job for
philosophers here is to clarify and unify the often warring perspectives
into a single vision of the universe. That means welcoming the bounty of
well-won scientific discoveries and theories..." Accordingly, he
welcomes the offerings of (neo)Darwinism, but effectively rejects, or
rather grossly misunderstands, the equally important offerings of
quantum theory.

In his chapter 4 Dennett does consider the idea that the indeterminism
of quantum theory might open the door to the entry of a free will that
can aid in the construction of a rational moral philosophy. He poses the
key question: "How can the indeterminism of quantum physics be harnessed
to give us a clear, coherent picture of a human agent exercising this
wonderful free will?" But he then poses the question in an essentially
different way: "How, exactly, could subatomic indeterminism yield free
will?" Then, rather than considering quantum theory itself, he goes on
at great length to discredit a model constructed by Robert Kane, who
introduces a *random element* of indeterminism to break the absolute
determinism of classical physics in the hope of thereby exploiting
quantum theory to open the way to a satisfactory concept of free will.
However, the replacement of conscious choices by random or whimsical
choices certainly cannot provide a rational basis for morality. What is
needed is not the injection into human behavior of pure whimsy. It is
rather what quantum theory so beautifully and adequately supplies,
namely the *suppression* *of chance and randomness* by choices stemming
from a process arising, not from either mindless motions atoms or
meaningless bits of noise, but rather from the wholeness, the meanings,
and the physical efficacy of our conscious thoughts.

Later on (p. 223) Dennett asserts that he believes there is a morally
important non-supernatural free will, but that it is "just not what you
probably thought it was." But what does the scientifically knowledgeable
reader think a non-supernatural free will is?

Nature certainly contains non-supernatural thoughts and feelings: they
are non-illusory *real* parts of the natural world. Both Dennett and
quantum physics agree that they are causally efficacious, and are in
some sense "free". But it is Dennett's own *pre-judgment*, not
contemporary science, that insists that each of these components of a
stream of consciousness is *identical* to some mechanistic material
processes. It is his rigid commitment to the ideology of classical
physics that is the basic source of the difficulties Dennett encounters:
it is that choice that foists upon him the impossible task of showing
that mechanically deterministic automata possess conscious free wills
that can underlie rational moral philosophy.

The bounty offered by quantum theory is not the introduction of
meaningless whimsy. It is the introduction of immaterial causes. The
indeterminism introduce by quantum theory comes in two forms. One
consists of the random "choices on the part of nature". These conform to
certain statistical laws linked to the quantum theoretical structure
that *replaces* the material structure postulated by classical physics.
The other form of indeterminism stems from a physically efficacious
conscious will that is "free" in the sense that it is not fixed by any
*yet*-*known, or mechanical,* laws These consciousness-based choices are
perhaps the most *real* elements in quantum theory: the whole theory is
built around these conscious "free" choices on the part of human agents.
They are the *least supernatural* element in science. Mathematical
representations, formed in our endlessly creative imaginations, of some
assumed-to-exist objective world 'out there' can come and go, and can
morph in strange ways. But our choices about how we act will probably
remain a stable element of science, because we can, by acting in diverse
ways and observing the feedbacks, discover many more aspects of nature
than we can by mere passive witnessings. Our consciously activated
probing actions are fundaments of human life, and of both science in
general and quantum theory in particular.

Dennett correctly poses the key question: "How can the indeterminism of
quantum physics be harnessed to give us a clear, coherent picture of a
human agent exercising this wonderful free will?" The basic thrust of
the present book has been to give a specific answer to this question,
together with the background needed to understand that answer. The
answer in brief is that the quantum Zeno effect provides a nonlocal
consciousness-driven process that permits a person's conscious
volitional choices to exercise significant control over the activities
of his or her own brain.

Left unaddressed, however, was the task of specifying the causal origin
of these conscious choices.

Pursuit of this important question takes us beyond the realm of
contemporary physical theory. I have taken great pains to keep the
content of this book securely in line with orthodox contemporary
physics, by which I mean the main-line Copenhagen interpretation, extend
by the work of John von Neumann to cover the activities of human brains

But now, in this final appendix, with a strong advisory that I am
venturing into a realm of speculative philosophy, where contemporary
physics provides no orthodoxy, I shall tackle this remaining issue in a
way that appeals to my own personal intuitions. No claim is made that
these speculations represent the best thinking of physicists or of
philosophers. They are simply my own best guesses, for what they are
worth, unsupported by any new confirming data. Still, educated guesses,
*compatible* with what is already known, are an important element of
science.

The issue here is the causes of the conscious choices made by the human
agents about how they will act. My own prejudice is that nothing happens
without a sufficient cause: there is no pure whimsy and, moreover, the
next step in basic science will embrace the idea of a process of a
"coming into being" that converts "potentialities" into "actualities",
as suggested by Heisenberg. But nothing definite can come into being
simply "out of the blue". So these choices must have some reason to be
what they turn out to be, instead of something else. Indeed, we seem to
be at least dimly aware of some of our reasons for making the choices
that we make, and psychiatrists\-\--and more recently
neuroscientists\-\--have made claims about such cause that are not
completely at odds with empirical evidence. How can such causes be
understood in a way concordant with quantum theory?

I begin with the supposition that the "conscious choices on the part of
the human agents" that quantum orthodoxy is built upon do indeed exist
(or at least that a rationally coherent science-based understanding of
the structure of human experience is possible in which these choices do
exist) and that these volitional choices have necessary and sufficient
causes, i.e., have reasons to be what they turn out to be, instead of
something else. In other words, I am starting with orthodox contemporary
quantum theory, and trying to complete it in a way that makes it part of
an ontology that explains the nature of the factors that determine the
"free choices" of orthodox contemporary physics.

I assume that our choices do not pop out of nothingness, and are in fact
influenced by our prior experiences. This influence, or correlation,
must be accounted for by a complete theory of nature. Quantum theory is
not a complete theory *of nature*, because it does not explain the
causes of our so-called "free choices".

The mathematical structure of quantum theory asserts that whereas the
evolution of the quantum (i.e., physical) state of a system in
accordance with von Neumann's Process 2 is essentially mechanistic
(i.e., locally deterministic), the interventions of Process 1 are
essentially non-mechanistic (i.e., nonlocal): the effect of each such
intervention acts instantaneously over an extended spatial region, and
it can have, moreover, instantaneous (i.e., faster than light) subtle
effects far away. Each Process 1 intervention represents an
"observation" or "actualization of a particular potentiality from
amongst the multitude specified by the prior quantum state".

The simplest way to impose a modicum of regularity on this structure is
to suppose that there is a variety of elementary properties that can be
combined in a variety of possible ways in a Process 1 event. Each such
event "occurs" at some instant of time and covers some fixed region of
three-dimensional space. Some of the elementary properties involved in
such an event may be completely describable in terms of mathematical
properties localized essentially at space-time points, whereas some
elementary properties can combine to give, for example, the experiential
quality of greenness, or the sorrow at the death of a beloved companion.
These latter qualities are conceptualized in psychological or
experiential terms. That is, certain elementary properties can combine
to give experiences of the kind that populate our streams of conscious
experiences.

Each Process 1 event, or happening, or actual occasion, is a gathering
together, or prehension, of a generally large number of properties in
some fixed region of space at some instant of time. Each such event
fixes, or actualizes, in that region, a certain combination of
properties that serve as potentialities for future events. Each future
event will re-actualize, in a newly combined novel way, various
properties\-\--or parts of properties\-\--previously actualized in
certain prior events.

This general structure is very similar to the structure found in
contemporary physics, where the dynamics can be understood as built out
of a series of "scattering events", each of which gathers together and
combines certain physical properties, drawn from a certain set of prior
scattering events, and then serves as a source of properties that can be
drawn upon by subsequent scattering events. One key difference between
classical physics and quantum physics is that in the former the entire
sequence of happenings is fixed by initial conditions, whereas in the
latter the *physical* constraints permit, *for any possible initial
condition*, a huge blur of subsequent possibilities: the *physically
described constraints* specify only a collection of subsequent future
possibilities, each with a statistical weight. They do not fix what
actually happens, or is experienced by observers. Another process,
Process 1, is needed to specify what actually happens. It involves
properties not entering into classical dynamics.

During the twentieth century theoretical physics has generated many
important properties beyond the simple space-time and energy-momentum
properties identified and used in classical physics. These new
properties are "internal" properties of particles, which, however, can
combine to form important macroscopic (i.e., large-scale) properties.
Physical theories certainly need not be limited to the use of properties
identified and applied in classical physics.

There are two big differences between the classical and quantum models.
The first is nonlocality. The Process 1 reduction (or actualization)
event is nonlocal, in the sense that it happens instantaneously over an
extended region, and integrates the various properties brought into that
region from certain prior events. Process 2, on the other hand, is a
local process. However, it generates only "potentialities" for what
might or can happen, not a definite fixing of what actually does happen.
The *Potentialities*, like their classical counterparts, evolve
according to local laws, but the *actualities* are determined by a
process that is *not* locally deterministic: it is not "mechanical", in
my terminology.

The second big difference is this distinction between (1), the
*potentialities*, which are governed\-\--between the interventions of
the Process 1 actions\-\--by purely physical laws, and (2), the
*actualities* which are created by the Process 1 interventions, which
can involve experiential qualities. The physically described features
governed by Process 2 specify only the *necessary* conditions for a
possible event, in the sense of a statistical weighting of the various
possibilities, whereas experiential or proto-experiential qualities
enter into the *sufficient* conditions for the occurrence of some
particular one of the many physically allowed events. In the classical
theory the necessary and sufficient conditions for an actual event to
occur are not separated in this way.

Each quantum Process 1 event draws upon past experiences as the grist
from which it forms its own experiential nature. Our human experiences
are *examples* of the experiential aspects of Process 1 events. But they
are very complex examples, associated with very complex physical
systems, which have evolved to take advantage of the existence and
properties of this process. But Process 1 events can occur, and
presumably do occur, also in conjunction with far simpler physical
systems. In these physically simpler cases the "experiential" aspect can
be something far simpler than anything we human beings would recognize
and describe as an experience.

This brief sketch does not describe or constitute a physical theory: it
is merely a general outline of how quantum theory might someday be
extended from its present pragmatic form into a coherent idea of how
Nature works. It is a rough blueprint for a future endeavor. I include
it here only to dispel the idea that we must be dealing with some
super-natural phenomena that are anthropocentrically tied to human
beings, or to biological entities, or that "defies the laws of physics".
We are dealing, rather, with a real aspect of nature that is neglected
by, and excluded from, classical physics, but that constitutes an
essential constituent of the actual world in which live and consciously
act.

This loose sketch of a conceivable quantum ontology is in overall
general agreement with the basic ideas of Alfred North Whitehead
(1929/1978). Many physicists, including Abner Shimony (1993), Rudolf
Haag (1996) and myself (Stapp, 1975, 1977, 1979), have noted the
suitability of Whitehead's ideas as a foundation for an ontological
completion of quantum theory. But the incorporation of such ontological
speculations into empirically backed science awaits the arrival of
secure pertinent data.

The morality that emerges from science will depend upon what science
reveals about our connection to the universe that sustains us, and upon
our judgments about how to orient ours lives in relation to it.

But an appreciation of the established fact that the natural world
enjoys a deep interconnectedness that goes far beyond what the precepts
of classical physics can permit, and that the course of physical events
can, according to contemporary physics, be influenced by the
intervention of physically effective personal actions that stem from our
conscious reflections on the meanings of our actions, arms us with an
image of ourselves that allows us to be far more significant parts of
the scheme of things than the classical-physics-based image of ourselves
as lonely bits of protoplasm, spawned by some freakish accidents of
nature, and existing only because we serve as a vehicles for the
survival of our genes. That impoverished self-image leads rationally to
the meaningless of it all, and, inevitably, to the downward spiral of
humanity into a society of machines that is even now being erected by
zealous seekers of a simplified and more controllable social order that
will bring our lives into alignment with the "established"
classical-physics-based conception of what we human beings are.