Block Universe and Free Will

Hi,
Now that the Shat team has really waded into the deep water of free will debate and brought up the deterministic model of the Block Universe I thought I’d take off my face covering for a minute and add my two cents. The Block Universe interpretation of free will, that all choices in time are actually already frozen so free will is impossible, is based on a basic misunderstanding of how scientific ideas apply to the Universe. The theory derives from both Special and General Relativity theories of Einstein. These are “classical” theories that extend Newtonian physics and are based on the belief that scientists can observe and measure properties of the universe but their rulers and clocks are “outside the box” and do not participate in the observations. The scientific term for this is that they are “background dependent” meaning they use the clocks and coordinate systems of the Universe itself to make their observations relative to the observer. This lead to Einstein’s determination that “simultaneous” events are dependent on the relative location/motion of the observers and the finite speed of light. This, along with the principle that all observers must agree that causal events are the same and deterministic (or else the Universe degenerates to chaos) creates the Block Universe concept. The “true” causal structure of reality must exist for all observers regardless of their relative location/motion and so time itself must be an emergent dimension of the Universe and not an initial condition. Our memory creates the illusion of a direction of time but its not “real”.

This background dependence is the fatal flaw to these theories. You can’t measure the Universe this way because there is no “background”, there is only the Universe. This is the crux of the attempt to unify Einstein’s General Relativity classical theory with quantum mechanics into a Quantum Cosmology theory. In General Relativity gravity becomes infinite at extremely short distances which means it is missing something fundamental.

In quantum gravitational theories (like loop quantum gravity) the fundamental property is frequency which is just change per unit time. Time is an initial condition and all the other 3 dimensions of space emerge from it. At very high frequencies (high energy and infinitesimal space like at the Big Bang) all the particles exchange photons directly but as the Universe expands and cools the connections begin break like ice crystals forming in liquid water. The photons must then traverse connections between local particles at the finite speed of light to communicate with other non-local particles which becomes what we experience as “spacetime” defined in Special and General Relativity. In lab experiments and quantum computers we can reverse this process through quantum entanglement.

All of this is a long way to say that time is fundament and real. This means that everything evolves and changes relative to a non-observer dependent clock (big bang = time zero) and our choices among the 3 dimensions of space (but not time) are not predetermined by a fixed set of causalities in a Block Universe. Whether we still have “free will” is subject to other evolutionary processes and is still to be determined. The clearest book I’ve seen on this subject is “Time Reborn”, by the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin.

Love the show and hope everyone is safe and healthy,
Dave Wright
San Diego

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