I just came back from a consultancy (an IT assessment – it is nice to be fully focused again on work rather than obscure quantum-mechanical models) and, while flying back, I wrote a small paper on the implications of what I have tried to do (showing that, ultimately, we can understand Nature as being ‘statistically deterministic’, just like what A. Einstein and H.A. Lorentz always said) on epistemology, or the inquiry that philosophers refer to as ‘metaphysics’ (interpreted as thoughts on the ‘essence’ of Nature).
I also detail why and how it does not do away with what is probably the single most important foundation of our society (laws, business, etcetera): the idea of free will. Here is the link to the paper, and below I copy the key conclusions:
What I write above [see the paper] and its explanations of the principle of uncertainty as used in modern physics should not make you think that I do not believe in a religious mindset: conscious thoughts, or some sense or feeling of wonder that we would refer to as religious or – a better word, perhaps – mystical. On the contrary, in my journey to understanding, I have often been amazed that our mind is able to understand all of this. Here again, I appreciate my courses of philosophy – especially Hegel’s idea on the concept of our human mind encompassing and understanding more and more as mankind continues its rather lonely journey on a very small planet in a Universe whose borders we cannot imagine.
Such feeling of wonder – an old teacher of mine said the Greeks referred to this as tauma, and that it fuels our desire for knowledge, but I have not been able to find any bibliographic reference to this idea – is, exactly, what has been driving my own personal journey in search of truth. Whether you call that religious or not, is not of much interest to me: I have no need to describe that experience in old or new words.
Likewise, statistically determinism does not do away with the concept of free will: of course, we are the product of a rather amazing evolution, which I think of as rather random – but I do not attach negative connotation to this randomness. On the contrary, while our human mind was originally concerned with making sense of life or death situations, it is now free to think about other things: one’s own personal condition, or the human condition at large. Such thinking may lead to us taking rational decisions that actually change the path that we are following: we stop drinking or smoking for health reasons, perhaps, or we engage in a non-profit project aimed at improving our neighborhood or society at large. And we all realize we should change our behavior in order to ensure the next generation lives in an even better world than we do.
All of this is evidence of a true free will. It is based on our mental ability to rationally analyze in what situation we happen to find ourselves, so as to then try to do what we think we should be doing.
Reading Feynman 