Human Beings and Their Environment in Terms of Quantum Mechanics and the Unity of All Things

Richard Schlegel

Martín López-Corredoira

Since quantum mechanics (QM) was formulated, many voices have claimed this to be the basis of free will in the human beings. Basically, they argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological indeterminism in the natural laws, and that the mind is responsible for the wave function collapse of matter, which leads to a choice among the different possibilities for the body. However, I defend the opposite thesis, that free will cannot be defended in terms of QM. First, because indeterminism does not imply free will, it is merely a necessary condition but not enough to defend it. Second, because all considerations about an autonomous mind sending orders to the body is against our scientific knowledge about human beings; in particular, neither neurological nor evolutionary theory can admit dualism. The quantum theory of measurement can be interpreted without the intervention of human minds, but other fields of science cannot contemplate the mentalist scenario, so it is concluded that QM has nothing to say about the mind or free will, and its scientific explanation is more related to biology than to physics. A fatalistic or materialist view, which denies the possibility of a free will, makes much more sense in scientific terms.

Stephen M. Barr

Abstract It is widely acknowledged that quantum mechanics may have profound philosophical implications, but what those implications are has been debated for nearly a century. The question addressed in this chapter is whether it has any implications that touch upon the truths of Christian revelation. The short answer is that quantum mechanics does not say anything directly about revealed truths but does have implications relevant to certain philosophical truths that the Church regards as entailed by Christian revelation. These include the truths that human beings have free will and that human beings are not entirely reducible to matter or explicable in purely physical terms. Before getting to these questions, the chapter makes some preliminary remarks about quantum mechanics for context.

Ulrich Mohrhoff

Linfan Mao

The universality of contradiction implies that the reality of a thing is only hold on observation with level dependent on the observer standing out or in and lead respectively to solvable equation or non-solvable equations on that thing for human beings.