Why free will is beyond physics

"Why free will is beyond physics" is the title of a comment article in the January 2021 issue of Physics World, the member magazine of the UK Institute of Physics. It can be accessed on the site physicsworld.com here.

The argument of the article, which is offered in response to a newly published book which argues that free will is a mirage which hides outcomes of deterministic physical law, is summarised in its strapline:

Philip Ball argues that "free will" is not ruled out by physics - because it doesn't stem from physics in the first place.

 In Ball's account of the newly published book, each level of complexity in our world provides the underlying explanation of the next level - a constructionist approach which believes that the explanations of the more complex systems in the physical world can be found in applying the  fundamental laws of the simpler systems which in a sense precede it. This is the fundamental idea that Ball sets out to refute in his article.

The most interesting aspect of Ball's article is his reference to an article entitled "More is Different", by P. W. Anderson, a condensed matter physicist,  published in the journal Science in 1972. The full text of that article can be found here; it is a more challenging read than Ball's own article! Ball summarises Anderson's article thus:

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. The behaviour of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviours requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.

 What Anderson does in the body of his article is argue this case across a range of examples, suggesting that at each successive level of complexity the symmetry (in a more precise scientific sense than the everyday understanding of the term) of the preceding level is broken and a new symmetry needs to be adopted to provide successful explanation at the new level of complexity. Particularly interesting are Anderson's (to an extent speculative) suggestions about the types of broken symmetry which occur in living things. The spatial regularity/symmetry of the DNA molecule contains information, not because of the spatial symmetry, but because each section of the molecule (gene) can vary in the way it combines four bases and so code for different proteins. He also identifies regularity or pulsing in time as a feature associated with living things. This appears to be associated with the way in which living things gain energy from their environments to establish a stable existence; and it provides a means of handling information. Anderson cites human spoken language as an example of this latter. 

It is thought provoking that, as scientific understanding reaches the levels of complexity associated with living things, it encounters a coding of information that is determinative, firstly, of physiological outcome and, secondly, of communication. [See my posts from some time ago here and here, if you want to explore this thought further.]

Those who are familiar with the thought of Fr Edward Holloway and the FAITH Movement (see here) will recognise in this an echo of two things. The first is the idea that the universe has developed in a way that is, at each point in time, equational and balanced; that the evolution of each new physical or biological phenomenon occurs in a directed way, and is determined by, an environment to which they are entirely relative. The second idea is that of a discontinuity in this determined evolution which occurs with the coming of humankind. At this point, the proportion between the capacity to act with freedom over and against determination by the environment demands the existence of a spiritual principle of action.

Returning to Philip Ball's article, he observes before his reference to Anderson:

There is good reason to believe that causation can flow from the top down in complex systems...

After noting that an understanding of what he terms volitional decision making in animals requires an understanding of how brains work, Ball points out that this understanding does not share the same epistemic language as Newtonian and quantum mechanics:

To talk about causation in science at all demands that we seek causes commensurate with the phenomena: that's simply good science and good epistemology.

But when he applies this principle to free will, and the moral responsibility for human action that follows from it, Ball's conclusion is a little infelicitous:

Moral responsibility is not a physical principle but a construct of human psychology and society. It expresses the view that we must strive to choose some behaviours and reject others.

Philip Ball's article usefully defends the notion of free will against the incursion of the notion of determinism, and even, through its citation of P.W. Anderson, hints at a certain directedness in the steps to increased complexity in the universe. As the strapline to his article says, free will doesn't stem from physics in the first place. But, in concluding that moral responsibility is a construct of human psychology and society, he fails to do justice to the phenomenon of human conscience. Psychology and sociology do not provide an explanation that is commensurate with the phenomenon of human conscience. For that a newer, and higher, symmetry is required.