Sabine Hossenfelder’s Free Will Folly & The Deadly Sin Of Reification

Sabine Hossenfelder released a video in which she said, “Now that Science told me I can’t make any choices, I make better choices.”

Or words to that effect.

She wants you to know you can’t make choices, either, so that you too will make better choices. In particular, if you know you cannot make any choices, you will choose not belittle or tease people who say you cannot make any choices. But, of course, if you can’t make any choices, you have no choice but to tease and belittle people who say you can’t make any choices. And they, in turn, have no choice but to suck it up and accept such teasing and, yes, belittling, because they know you have no choice but to do as you do.

But those who say you cannot make any choices can still choose to make mean faces about people who say you can make choices, sure you’ve goofed in your reasoning somewhere, but also sure you cannot reason but how you have reasoned.

Now we have teased Sabine before for this, as I had no choice but to do, just as I have no choice this time. But here I won’t tease (any more). Because in her video she made it exceptionally clear what her error is, which is of tremendous service.

If you are the sort that can make choices, or think you can, then you might choose to watch Sabine’s video first: it is only seven-some minutes long. If you can’t make any choices, then nothing I can say will influence you, at least not in ways that were not pre-determined by “laws”, just as what I said was also pre-determined by those “laws”.

Which Sabine is hot on. Physics, she says, tells us what the “laws” of Nature are, the “laws” that everything “obeys”. Now obeys, the word, implies a suppressed freedom. Slaves obey. When HR sends an email saying it’s time for your weekly DIE training, you obey. But most would rather not. You knew you could make the choice not to obey, but there would be consequences. Like hectoring lectures in small rooms on which are small tables on which are small boxes of tissues.

Sabine would deny this use, and likely say her intent is metaphorical. But, to her, it is an impossible metaphor, one that should be unthinkable if her contention were true. It’s impossible to imagine how “laws” would cause the “illusion” (in who?) that freedom is a possibility, while no such thing is possible. It is like the “laws” giving you the notion that you exist, whereas this is also not possible. There is nothing there there, no you to have an illusion, not if all there is are bunches of “particles” obeying “laws”.

She says we are nothing but big boxes of “particles”. She says this talking into the camera hoping to communicate with you, using language and machines men have made, knowing you will understand what she means, insisting we have “no evidence” that we aren’t just bags of particles. No evidence. Ah.

She says “we” “know” “the equations” those particles “obey”. I put scare quotes around each difficult word. We means her and her pals; it does not mean me, nor likely you. I know of the equations, too, but unlike her I don’t claim they have power; indeed, I deny it. “Particles” don’t obey equations.

Again, she might claim she meant “obey equations” metaphorically. But I doubt it. I think she means it literally. And so we have reached the Deadly Sin of Reification. Those equations, some of which predict beautifully, and some not so well, have more than one interpretation. Hers is causal. She believes all things march, with no possibility of deviation save one, according to unbreakable rules. Since we are “nothing but” particles, we march, too.

Those equations are her model of the world, and to her the model is the world. That is the Deadly Sin. Only she doesn’t think her model is a model.

My interpretation of the equations, which gives just as much weight to their predictive ability as hers, and even much to their causal aspirations, is best put as Pro-Reality, which is something closer to seeing physicists’ “laws” as correlational. Their “laws” aren’t laws. The “laws” of the physicist are only idealizations which never hold exactly in Reality. Which means they are approximations of something deeper. Like substances exercising powers, under this-and-such conditions.

Quoting myself quoting Nancy Cartwright’s How The Laws Of Physics Lie:

Speaking more carefully, the law of universal gravitation is something like this:

If there are no forces other than gravitational forces at work, then two bodies exert a force between each other which varies inversely as the square of the distance between them, and varies directly as the product of their masses.

She [Cartwritght] allows that this might be true, “But it is not a very useful law.” Because, as is obvious, of that no other forces bit. Which never happens. The gravity “law” only explains ideal, which is to say unobservable, or approximate situations. Saying the “law” is universal involves an extrapolation in thought, an induction to what cannot be observed; i.e. no observational verification is possible of the situation where only—the word is strict!—gravity between M and m is in play. You must grasp this before moving on.

That is only a small quote from a long article about an even longer book (which is online). So please to read the whole thing. In it you will learn the mistake which gave rise to the notion of “laws” was bottom-up reductionism, which was to suppose that the smallest bits of Reality, put in strange situations and isolated, were somehow indicative of how everything worked. When, of course, physicists can’t even tell us why water exists. I mean why water is unpredictably different than its constituents.

Sabine says the particles are “deterministic” and “random”. To an extent, “determinism” is a truism: it means changes are caused. Very well. Our disagreement arises from what the causes are. Then comes “random”, which at first she gets right: it means, as she says, unpredictable and uncontrollable. Both words refer only to us and our vantage point, which is often forgotten. Sabine forgets.

She says “fundamentally random” means “nothing controls it.” Which is false. As in, it is not true. If nothing controls quantum outcomes, then quantum outcomes cannot happen. You can’t squeeze something from nothing, no matter how big the size of your grant. You get no assistance from calling nothing “randomness”, because that implies something—about which you cannot know, hence the unpredictability.

If you think that’s wrong, then find one of those equations-thingees and show us how Nothing causes Something to happen.

The true lesson of Bell’s theorem (which describes some quantum outcomes) and all that is that Reality is not local, that something deeper than particles obeying “laws” is happening.

This means her chief conclusion that “the uncomfortable truth that Science gives us is that human behavior is pre-determined, except for the occasional quantum random jump that we can’t control” is false. It is true that is what The Science says, but The Science is wrong. The Science is so far from right that The Science is left. She loves her model so hard she has lost sight of Reality.

I warn people often in the Class of how easy it is to fall in love with models, especially when you have done the hard work of producing those beautiful equations. The models become realer than Reality. The Deadly Sin strikes many. Indeed, so alluring are the equations that it takes a will of steel—or, ahem, a tendency to indifference—to be released from their grip.

Sabine also frets about her computer attacking her, which we’ve discussed before, so I’ll pass by all that except for her boast “There is nothing going on in the human brain that a computer can’t simulate.” Which is false. And a Great Bluff. If you think not, ask her, “Hey there, Sabine. Tell me precisely how a brain works, and how it gives rise to consciousness and impossible illusions.”

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