QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

hundred senses of the word ‘free’ have so far been identified. 295 Many thinkers have
distinguished between positive and negative freedom. ‘Positive’ liberty is something else than
just the absence of restraint or impediment to our actions. Our personal autonomy or selfgovernment
cannot thus be guaranteed even if physical laws were indeterministic. From the
framework of natural science, however, lack of determinism may be viewed as a necessary
condition for allowing the real possibility of human intervention and choice.
One result of the abandonment of the concept of final cause is that even the effect of human
goals in influencing the shaping of objective processes of the world has not been clearly
represented. The anticipation of determinism in all events has led to a tendency to ignore the fact
that a person usually has the ability to act in many different ways in any given set of
circumstances. We feel that we are able to make decisions and direct our actions. Ignoring this
impression may be a deficiency that has affected not only physicists, but also biologists,
behavioural psychologists and computer engineers. Even though no-one has disputed the fact
that humans operate within the natural world and that our collective actions change the face of
the world, viewing nature as an objective process has meant that the significance of human
activity in bringing about changes in reality could be minimised for an extended period.
Indeterministic quantum mechanics forces us to address the question of whether the actions of an
individual carrying out experiments can truly be excluded from the world studied by physics. As
will be presented in more detail in sections 4.3. and 4.4.1. of this thesis, it appears that certain
natural phenomena are only observable in specific experimental conditions, so that the form of
the questions we ask of nature essentially defines the answers that it is possible to obtain. This as
such is nothing new. Natural scientists conducting experiments had to interfere with nature even
when observing the deterministic phenomena of classical physics. Experimental situations had to
be simplified and isolated from the surrounding environment in order for it to be possible to
control and modify the factors which it was known would affect the results obtained. The future
behaviour of a mechanical system cannot be predicted before a suitable experimental setup has
been constructed and the system’s free parameters have been assigned the required values. Even
though the deterministic laws of the macroscopic world guaranteed that the same set of
preconditions always yielded the same set of results, it was only conscious action by human
beings that made it possible to repeat experiments and exploit natural phenomena. 296
295
Galen Strawson, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 743-752.
296
Petersen 1968, 150-154. In astronomy, the ideal of external objectivity has been achieved best in cases where it
is difficult to carry out proper experiments.
112