Authors: Lewis Perdue
Stone, Professor, University of Mississippi School of Medicine, and Ms. Jasmine Thompson, Chair and Executive Director, Advocacy Foundation for Mississippi Justice. Welcome.
THOMPSON: Thank you.
STONE: Good to be here.
CORBEIL: Before we begin, I must confess to our viewers that this is a very
special segment for two reasons. First of all, it is the first interview that Dr. Stone and Ms. Thompson have given following the stunning jury verdicts in the cases of Darryl Talmadge and Clark Braxton. I am very grateful for this exclusive interview.
Secondly, this is a reunion of sorts. I began college as a biology major at UCLA too many years ago to count and was fortunate to take an undergraduate course from Dr. Stone. During this time, I worked as an intern on a science series for the PBS station in L.A., KCET, and then made the transition to a news intern at the same television station that Jasmine flew helicopters for when she was a student at our crosstown rival, USC.
STONE: Not at all.
CORBEIL: Good. Let's start by discussing your controversial notion that free will
exists and that consciousness has a reality that transcends biology and matter. You've
upset a lot of experts in the scientific mainstream.
STONE: People get upset when their pet notions turn out to be wrong. They
usually have a vested interest in one notion or another and the truth be damned. Oops!
Am I going to be bleeped for that?
CORBEIL: Not in the new world of MTV and hip-hop.
STONE: Okay. I'm not sure that's a good thing.
CORBEIL: Please continue. Free will? What's so upsetting about your position? STONE: Right. Well, I think its clear that the continuing faith in outdated
science—classical physics—allows reductionists and behaviorists to say that
consciousness is an incidental illusion arising from the collection of matter between our
ears, which produces another illusion, that of free will.
CORBEIL: Why should that matter?
STONE: It matters because over the past few decades, society has let their view of
the world govern our criminal justice system. And—
CORBEIL: That matters why?
STONE: Because that notion has eroded the notion of personal responsibility.
After all if we are all meat-based automatons, how can anybody be guilty of anything? CORBEIL: They argue that science is on their side.
STONE: Everybody does. Their problem is that the science they use was modern
back when the horse-drawn, muzzle-loading cannon was state-of-the-art.
CORBEIL: That's pretty harsh, don't you think?
STONE: Truth can be harsh. Look, this isn't just some dry philosophical debate.
Free will goes to the heart of what it means to be human and governs our every interaction
with other people from law to personal trust. The idea we can know right from wrong and
that we can choose one or the other forms the bedrock of human society.
CORBEIL: But isn't lack of free will what you argued in the murder trials of
General Braxton and the cold-case lynching in the Delta? You and Ms. Thompson got
those guys off by convincing the jury that free will didn't exist.
THOMPSON: Actually, we argued that free will existed but both men had physical
impairments preventing the complete expression of their free will.
STONE: Think of space-time as the ultimate computer, the omnipotent CPU of the
universe, and think of consciousness and free will as software. Finally, think about your
brain, the fabric laid down by DNA and modified by the environment, accidents, and other
physical phenomena, as hardware—something like an input-output device on your
personal computer, maybe the printer, the monitor, or a sound board.
CORBEIL: Words like "the omnipotent CPU of the universe" sound like a
euphemism for God. Isn't it true over the centuries that whenever people can't explain
something, they abdicate to some sort of deity—you know, eclipses, earthquakes, the
seasons, crop fertility. We've eventually answered all those questions with science. Why
put God in this equation when we've kicked him out of all the rest?
STONE: Why not allow God in? We can understand that the long-standing
persecution of science by the Vatican and other religions has a lot to do with scientists
being antireligion. I happen to be antireligion as well, but I believe in God and science as
well.
CORBEIL: But—
STONE: Look, quantum physics proves that what we perceive as "substance" is
composed, ultimately, of the nothingness of space-time. I see God there, right at the
intersection of infinity and nothing.
CORBEIL: I see an unsolved problem in science.
STONE: Good for you. You choose to believe in science instead of God. I can't
prove you wrong. All I ask is you offer me the same courtesy.
CORBEIL: Fair enough.
STONE: Okay, getting back to the original question. You can deduce from my
computer analogy that the brain's CPU can be working fine and the software be robust and
hug-free, but still observe some strange behavior in the input-output device. CORBEIL: But where does free will come in here if the hardware is damaged?
Doesn't that mean there's no free will?
STONE: Maybe in some cases the hardware is damaged beyond repair. But current
experiments with cognitive behavior therapy—CBT—show that while genetics and the
environment offer us merchandise between our ears which is faulty to some extent, we can
think our way past the problems in most cases. This is also at work, I believe, in the socalled placebo effect, where a sugar pill can cure fatal diseases. It is an example of
belief—something immaterial affecting physical processes. Classical physics says this
can't happen. But I believe we have quantum mechanisms that allow this to work. CORBEIL: That's very interesting, but how's this so different from the
reductionists? After all, you got those guys off by showing they didn't have free will. THOMPSON: In court, what I had to show was a diminished ability to exercise
free will. I argued it and Professor Stone scientifically established the nonvisible physical
impairment.
CORBEIL: But how far can you take things? Isn't it theoretically possible to
excuse almost any crime from shoplifting to mass murder using the same argument? THOMPSON: There's a big difference between excuse and explain. The first
implies that criminals go free. The other should make us reexamine how we treat people
who commit crimes.
STONE: Society has a right to protect itself. But the real issue is whether we
should treat people guilty of the same crime differently merely because one has a
physical—visible and detectable—brain defect and the other does not.
CORBEIL: That's what the big national debate is all about. Having someone like
Braxton melt down shocked people into thinking about it. So, were those guys really
guilty? Is Braxton really crazy or did he get off because he's rich?
THOMPSON: Yes on the first two parts of your question and on the last as well.
Despite that, I believe that what we should be asking about Braxton and Talmadge,
beyond the question of whether or not they committed murder or treason, is whether they
acted as best they could given the damaged hardware. And how the justice system should
handle them.
CORBEIL: Thank you very much for coming. Coming up next, the next
installment on careers and success. How manicures can make the difference.
PROFESSOR
BRADFORD STONE
Lecture Notes
University of Mississippi School of Medicine Consciousness Studies 532:
Dark Energy and the Mistakes in Quantum Physics
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says the act of observing a quantum-level system alters the system itself.
This means that we cannot know what the precise state was of any system or particle prior to our observation. Obvious parallels in consciousness studies because any attempt to study consciousness alters the consciousness in the person being studied.
Hold Heisenberg and the quantum paradox in ready memory while you consider the convoluted and tortured mathematical switchbacks involved with attempting to reconcile particles and waves, the most famous and convoluted being Schroedinger's equations for the collapse of the wave function.
What we can observe about the behavior of quantum-level particles and waves comes through the clumsy filters of the experiments we devise to study them. At a fundamental level, this means our senses and the way we perceive the world are tuned in such a way that we cannot observe our experiments directly. Rather we see the
results
of experiments, which we must interpret to the best of our ability. This means we cannot actually
know
something at the quantum level. The best we can do is interpret some indirect observation produced by an experiment.
And this is where knowledge breaks down and Schroedinger slips into increasing irrelevance.
This means the wave-particle duality and the spaghetti mathematics needed to reconcile the two are artifacts produced by distorted interpretations of badly designed experiments.
[Whiteboard graphic 1, circle, set up one experiment, in it light appears to be a particle.]
[Whiteboard graphic 2, circle, another experiment, light looks like wave.]
Do same thing with electrons, get same result, leads us to conclude light can act like a particle of what we think of as matter and matter—the electron—can behave like a light wave. And this paradoxical duality results in the contortionist math that plagues quantum physics—and along with it, needlessly complicates our ability to understand the quantum-level connections with consciousness.
Significantly, these experiments showing wave-particle, matter-energy duality are designed and constructed with the purpose of proving some theory that we already believe in. And when you believe in a theory, then consciously or not, you design the experiment to verify your preconceived belief. As soon as you believe in a theory, you shut all the other possible doors. Then you take your experimental results and make them fit the paradigm of the day. Why do you think scientists discard so many data points that don't fit the predicted curve?
[Whiteboard graphic 3, X-Y axis with arc starting at the intersection; scatted vicinity of the arc with a hail of dots.]
You've all seen this: very few experimental observations fall right on the curve, and yet we somehow believe that the curve is precise despite the fact that it's an inexact compromise that gives us a pretty good rule of thumb for what seems to work. But "pretty good" makes for messy equations when you try to force-fit it into the precision of mathematics, and this is why the equations are such a rat's nest.
Many make things fit better by tossing out the data points that are too far from the needed approximation. Discarding these is rationalized away as experimental error, random misfits, equipment malfunction, or some such thing. But what comes out of that process is not the truth of something but a rough approximation of what they hope to prove.
Put another way, the experiment we design determines what result we get. Design it one way and you get particle; another way, wave. And we continue to design experiments according to theories that will only give us those results.
We are stuck answering today's questions with yesterday's experiments and theories and equations.
Third path not explored. Look at discarded data points, find a way to answer why they don't fit the curve. We then have to fashion theories and mathematics to embrace all that orphan data. Invent new technologies and experiments designed to test this third way.
I think that when we do, we will find that the wave-particle, matter-energy paradox vanishes with the realization that they are merely the tail and trunk of a hidden elephant that we've never discovered because we have failed to look in the right places, ask the right questions. When we do that, I think the math will get considerably simpler and more elegant.
It's a very human thing to try and devise experiments that reinforce the paradoxical dualities.
We perceive the world the way we do because our senses have evolved in such a way as to present us with one view—the one which maximizes our chances of survival. This shapes our thinking about the nature of reality, and we design experiments to prove our thoughts. Dark energy quantum entanglement, uncertainty, and the ultimate characteristics of space-time, which might show we live in an 11-dimensional world, all indicate that our commonsense notions of reality are flat-out wrong.
Our senses evolved in a way that makes it easy for us to intuitively comprehend things as matter and as energy. If it feels solid, it's matter; if we feel the heat, see the light, then it is energy. We accept those as the defining elements of our reality, and it is simple human nature to define our scientific search in ways that confirm this.
But we now know that at the quantum level, matter and energy are also particles and waves all at the same time, which means that they are not matter, energy, particles, or waves but something entirely new, something else deeper, hidden, and more fundamental.
Our observations are flawed because the experiments we have devised so far only return data defined as matter, energy, wave, particle. We have to find ways of devising experiments that can offer us data points we can understand that are defined in different and currently unknown terms.
Reconciling the nonconforming data points linked with dark matter (23% of universe) and dark energy (73% of universe). All physics, all science, based on incomplete knowledge of just 4% of universe.
The current state of knowledge about the nature of matter and energy is a lot like the old joke about the simpleminded person who lost his keys somewhere in the dark, but insists on looking for them under a streetlight half a block away because that's the only place he can see.
If we persist in designing only those experiments that give us predictable data about the 4% of matter we can easily grasp, then we will forever be denied the truth—as best we can comprehend it—about the other 96% of the universe.
Are the aberrant data points we currently discard actually pointers to that dark matter and energy, pointers that tell us to look beyond the penumbra of the streetlight?
When we finally look there, will the math we develop to describe it offer us the simple path out of the maze of complexity that Schroedinger and others have drawn?
And what will it tell us about dark matter and energy? We know scientifically that they exist, but we can't detect them. Do they coexist within or around ordinary matter? Does it influence consciousness? And how do we design an experiment to find something about which we know nothing?
Nobody has those answers. And because we are woefully ignorant about the 4% we can comprehend and clueless about the rest, it's not only arrogant for any scientist to claim certainty about physics, but its also astoundingly ignorant.
This is particularly relevant to the field of consciousness. Quantum theory has proven that every particle, every quantum of energy—whatever you want to call it—exists only in an undefined state of infinite possibilities
until
it is observed. When that happens, the particle experiences a collapse of its wave functions, which reduces all the infinite possibilities to a single observed state.
I submit that what our consciousness defines as the future is the set of all possibilities. The "present" which we experience is the infinitely small razor edge of time in which we experience the collapse of the wave function. In a sense, our consciousness surfs the continual wave-function collapse and propels us from the past toward the future.
Each decision we make collapses a set of wave functions and closes off all possibilities save one. But that one introduces us to yet another infinite series of possibilities, and another and another, each one of them engraving its permanent and indelible mark on space-time.
In conclusion, what does this mean to us as human beings? It means that we are the condensation of all the collective probability waves of all the quanta which compose us. Inside us, many of our electrons and protons, neutrons, are winking in and out of existence billions of times per second. And all the rest exist as probability waves. That means that we probably exist, but we can never prove it.