Table Of ContentIs Science Compatible with Free Will?
Antoine Suarez • Peter Adams
Editors
Is Science Compatible
with Free Will?
Exploring Free Will and Consciousness
in the Light of Quantum Physics
and Neuroscience
Editors
Antoine Suarez Peter Adams
Center for Quantum Philosophy Thomas More Institute
Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies London, United Kingdom
Zu¨rich, Switzerland
ISBN 978-1-4614-5211-9 ISBN 978-1-4614-5212-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5212-6
Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012952284
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Preface
This book is the result of work initiated in a meeting organized by the Social Trends
Institute (STI) and held in Barcelona at the IESE Campus-Nord from October 28
to 30, 2010.
As I said in my invitation to the participants, this conference aimed to discuss the
idea that science today is compatible with phenomena governed by nonmaterial
principles like, for instance, free will and consciousness. I would like to explain
briefly how I came to organize this meeting and edit this book.
To begin with, I have the deep conviction that the three passions governing my
life are compatible with each other: the desire for freedom, my religious faith, and
science. I am not sure whether “a strong Faithful in the Church of the Larger Hilbert
Space” fills that need to harmonize these three elements (see Chap. 4 of this book).
As for me, it would be difficult to live were I to realize that in science there is no
place for freedom or faith.
I believe that my existence cannot be explained exclusively by material
principles: somehow I share in a nonmaterial, spiritual dimension. If I accept this,
I have consequently to accept that the movement of my lips, my tongue, my eyes,
when I am speaking to you, cannot be explained exclusively by a chain of temporal
causes going back to the Big Bang. This means: one cannot claim to be a free being,
or a believer, without intruding on scientific territory. Anyone who believes in God
or a spiritual human soul cannot honestly claim that faith and science are two Non
Overlapping Magisteria. On this point I agree with Richard Dawkins: Even
rejecting any fundamentalism or creationism, as I do, one cannot help
acknowledging that the domain of religion and that of science overlap to some
extent. And if for you, both faith and science are vital, then you will conclude that a
science excluding freedom and religion is likely not to be the last word in scientific
knowledge.
The second part of my motivation for organizing the meeting that is the origin of
this book has been decisively shaped by my encounter with nonlocality. After
reading John Bell’s “Essays on quantum philosophy” (1987) I had the intuition
that the principle of nonlocality made possible what I was longing for: to be able to
describe a world that can be governed by nonmaterial principles. John was not only
v
vi Preface
a “quantum engineer” but also a “quantum philosopher” (His wife Mary Bell used
to joke that John would have very much liked to rent a flat in the so-called
“Boulevard des philosophes” in Geneva). In CERN and in other research
institutions I had the privilege of organizing with him some seminars on quantum
philosophy from 1988 till 1990, the year he died. On the Internet you can find a
video of one such seminar at CERN where John explains his famous theorem.
The discussions with John Bell inspired me to make the proposal for the
before–before experiment, which I published together with Valerio Scarani. That
was in 1997. Research on nonlocality was not main stream at that time. I was lucky
to come into contact with a private Swiss banker in Geneva (Marcel Odier) who was
ready to finance the experiment, and even luckier to encounter Nicolas Gisin and
Hugo Zbinden who took on the challenge of performing the experiment. I will not
enter into details here. Basically, we proposed a temporal explanation of
nonlocality, much in the line of Bohm’s theory (see Chaps. 3 and 5 of this book).
And we expected to prove quantum mechanics wrong. As Hugo Zbinden says, it
was probably the only experiment in his life where he thought quantum mechanics
could be ruled out. I myself was even more convinced. Indeed Nicolas one day told
me quite seriously that the data would be submitted to very strict checking before
publication to avoid any mistakes coming from “wishful thinking.” Nevertheless
Nicolas himself used to say: “if the forthcoming results falsify quantum mechanics
we will have enough work to last until the end of our days.” It was a funny situation:
Even wishing for a science where there is a place for spiritual (nonmaterial) action,
I kept instinctively to a time-ordered causal explanation. On the morning of Friday
22nd June 2001 we attended the regular colloquium of Nicolas Gisin’s group.
Andre´ Stefanov presented the results, which confirmed quantum mechanics and
refuted my temporal explanation: I thought I was assisting at my funeral. The story
took an unexpectedly dramatic turn after lunch: Andre´ and I checked the apparatus
and behold: one of the beam-splitters was wrongly oriented! The measurements had
to be repeated during the next week. On Tuesday June 26th I realized that temporal
causality is a preconception, a leftover of classic physics. I still remember the time:
It was 19.15 h. And the verdict of the measurements some days later was clear:
quantum mechanics prevails.
More recently, in 2010, I proposed a new experiment aiming to demonstrate
other important implications of quantum mechanics related to the assumption that
the decision of the experiment’s outcome happens at detection (the so-called
“collapse of the wave-function”). The experiment has been completed and
published in May 2012, again in collaboration with Nicolas Gisin and his group
(see Chap. 5, Sect. 5.3). The results demonstrate that the most fundamental princi-
ple ruling the material world, the conservation of energy, requires nonlocal coordi-
nation of detection outcomes, i.e., nonmaterial agency from outside spacetime.
Additionally, the experiment is a natural and most direct demonstration of
nonlocality in a context where the violation of Bell inequalities cannot be used as
a criterion for establishing nonlocality (see Chaps. 3 and 5). In this sense, the
experiment highlights the fact that the principle of nonlocality rules the whole of
quantum physics and the material world emerges from nonmaterial features.
Preface vii
I wonder now why in 1997 I proposed the before–before (and expended
considerable work, time, and money to do it) instead of proposing and doing the
conceptually far more important and technically much less challenging experiment
that I proposed in 2010 and has been done in the past months. A possible explana-
tion may be that the new experiment is important not only because it is about
nonlocality, but primarily because it demonstrates that nonlocality is crucial for the
conservation of energy. To reach this insight, which now seems trivial to me, it was
probably necessary to be defeated by quantum mechanics (in the field of the
before–before experiment) after having very much expected to beat it. Now I really
understand how important the quantum mechanical assumption of decision at
detection is.
Through these and many other experiments in the past 10 years (see Chap. 3) we
have reached a better understanding of what nolocality means: “that quantum
correlations happen without the flow of time,” “that quantum correlations come
from outside spacetime,” “that spacetime does not contain the whole of physical
reality,” “that quantum phenomena cannot be explained exclusively by material
principles.”
These insights were decisive for the project behind this book. I think it is not
necessary to have the psi ability of “clairvoyance” to see that results proving that
“quantum phenomena come from outside spacetime” and “conservation of energy
requires nonmaterial agency” define a new era in science. In fact, they support the
view that nonmaterial principles can steer the material world. So, during these years
I was dreaming of bringing together neuroscientists, quantum-physicists,
economists, and philosophers to reflect about this. This dream becomes fulfilled
with the publication of this book. However, I would like to stress that my original
insights and motivation are not necessarily shared by the other contributors, and
each of them accepts responsibility only for the conclusions he or she draws. And
for sure, this book represents only a first step towards promoting the understanding
that “the world we see is made from things that are invisible,” and I hope very much
that this effort can be continued in the coming years.
I am enormously grateful to STI President Carlos Cavalle´, Secretary General
Tracey O’Donnell, Project Manager Fiona McCarthy, and all the other members of
the Board and Staff of STI for sponsoring and organizing the Barcelona Experts
Meeting, as well as all the participants at the meeting and contributors to the
volume.
I am especially indebted to Peter Adams for his collaboration during the whole
genesis of the project and in particular for assisting with the editing work.
I acknowledge the enjoyable collaboration with Welmoed Spahr and Morgan
Ryan from Springer during the production of the book.
Zu¨rich, Switzerland, December 2012 Antoine Suarez
Foreword: The Social Trends Institute (STI)
The Social Trends Institute (STI) is an international research center dedicated to
the analysis of globally significant social trends. By promoting research and
scholarship of the highest academic standard within four subject areas—Family;
Bioethics; Culture and Lifestyles; and Corporate Governance—STI aims to make a
scholarly contribution towards understanding the varying and complex trends that
characterize the modern world.
STI organizes Experts Meetings around specific topics within one of the research
branches. These meetings are intended to foster open, intellectual dialogue between
scholars from all over the world and from different academic backgrounds and
disciplines. The scholars meet to present and discuss original research papers in an
academic forum. These papers are then reviewed and edited in light of the confer-
ence discussion before publication.
This volume, Is Science Compatible with Free Will? Exploring Free Will and
Consciousness in the Light of Quantum Physics and Neuroscience, is the result of
one such Experts Meeting held in Barcelona in October, 2010 under the academic
leadership of Antoine Suarez to explore the question “Is Science Compatible with
Our Desire for Freedom?”
This query is particularly suited to STI’s multidisciplinary approach. To fully
explore and suggest solutions to the apparent conflict between deterministic science
and the concept of human free will, STI gathered neuroscientists, physicists, and
philosophers, as well as a biologist and an economist.
The results of their investigations are presented in this book. Without endorsing
any particular viewpoint, STI hopes that as a whole, these contributions will deepen
readers’ understanding of this important question.
Tracey S. O’Donnell
Secretary General, Social Trends Institute
Barcelona, 2012
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