Quantum destiny - On the non-existence of free will

* This text is a machine translation of the original Japanese version.
* Please refer to the Japanese version for the exact wording.
Japanese version     https://ncode.syosetu.com/n8341ht/

Author: opalman Originally published 2016.06.29 Fully revised 2021.08.07 Translation 2022.09.15 Partially revised 2024.01.22

○ Preface

"Life" is the story of how we realize that "we ourselves are not life".

○ Main Chapter

If someone were to tell you that your success in life is not due to your efforts, the average person would be offended. Only those who feel that their lives are not going well for whatever reason would accept this. This article is especially for those people.

Ordinary people would be offended if someone were told that your success in life is not due to your efforts. Only those who feel that their  life is not going well for some reason can accept this. This article is especially for those people.

What follows is a statement that "free will does not exist, and life is automatic. The social system should be built on this premise".

I would like you to seriously consider what it means to "exist," which is the root of everything.
To "exist" is to "interact," in other words, to influence.
If something does not affect us, even indirectly, it is as if it did not exist.
It is only when it affects us in some small way that we need to "consider" it.

As long as it exists, the same thing will happen again and again, just like billiard balls colliding. It is a so-called chain reaction.
The point is that it keeps moving automatically.
Whether the laws of physics are constantly switching, or whether we assume a universe where the amount of matter is so small that it takes a long time for the next interaction to occur, it is still the same.

On the other hand, think about the system that generates free will.
In the case of humans, it would be the brain, but if it can truly be said to generate free will, that system must not contain a single automatically moving object.
The reason is that the outcome would be affected by the automatic actions.

However, as I mentioned earlier, everything that "exists" moves automatically.
Therefore, free will does not exist.
Also, no matter what physical laws of the universe we assume, for the same reason, no being with free will could ever be born, so God does not exist either.

Life is automatic, and whether you become rich or a criminal is all automatic.
There is no "I" or "you" in the sense of having free will.
We are simply natural phenomena.
There is an "I" or "you" as a complex natural phenomenon that moves automatically, but it is fundamentally no different from a pebble or a typhoon.
Of course, there is a difference in complexity, but the difference in complexity is merely a boundary of verbal distinction, not some absolute special difference.

What is needed to understand this issue is not high intelligence, but simply the ability to recognize that humans are not worth anything.
It depends on our ability to make decisions logically and not emotionally.

This fact is unsettling and unpleasant, and therefore creates a strong sense of rejection.
This is because it is an admission that the "beautiful" values that people have cherished until now, such as taking life into one's own hands and living one's life as one pleases, are worthless.
However, I am writing this because I am convinced that this is something of tremendous importance that cannot be avoided if humanity is to take the next step forward.
It is the attitude of a decent member of society to assume that society should be built on this basis if it is far more probable, even if one does not want to admit it completely, at least emotionally.

The following is a list of common mistakes.

■ "The universal physical theory has not yet been solved, so it cannot be determined."
Even if science advances and a more perfect theory is found, what it provides is a "deeper interpretation," but the 'fact' remains the same.
Even if we evolve from the law of universal gravitation to the general theory of relativity, the fact of "gravity" does not disappear.
Even if we make extreme assumptions such as "this world is a virtual world," the fact remains that calculations equivalent to "gravity" are being performed.

■ "We cannot be certain because the functions of the brain have not yet been fully elucidated."
Do we have free will? Or not?' is merely one part of the question about the brain.
Think of a large inverted triangle, the whole of which represents a complete understanding of the brain's functions, and the absence of free will is a small inverted triangle at the bottom of the triangle.
The question is, "Is there free will? Or not?' is all that is needed to prove it, and we already have it.
It is not essential at all, just that it is easier to convince people if brain functions are fully understood.
(The criteria for what constitutes perfection are also blurred in order to postpone the conclusion.)

■ "There is a soul."
Even if we assume that there is a soul, it works automatically as long as it exists, thus introducing fantasy in order to postpone the conclusion does not change the conclusion.
"How can inanimate objects combine to become living things?" is itself a false idea dominated by a real sense of reality.
Consciousness is just one of the remaining structures because it increases the probability of survival.
Consciousness reinforces the retention of episodic memory and increases the probability of survival in the event that we find ourselves in a similar situation again.
Excitement improves fighting ability and aggressiveness, and love creates strong cooperation, which likewise increases survival probability.

Incidentally, whether or not the future is predetermined is not the same as whether or not there is free will.
Bell experiments have confirmed that the future is random. However, whether the future is fixed or not, free will does not exist when it happens automatically.
It is possible that future experiments will confirm phenomena other than quantum fluctuation that bring about randomness, but these also have nothing to do with free will.

This concludes the main topic, but then you will come to the question, what is a mind?
As mentioned above, the proof of the non-existence of free will does not require a clarification of this question.
However, since it is a related topic, I shall mention the story of cognition in passing.

So, let's talk about the "Ship of Theseus".
First, let us assume that there is a ship.
The Ship of Theseus" is the question, "If some parts of the ship become old and are replaced, and after a few years all the parts are replaced with new ones, can we say that the ship is exactly the same as the original ship?" This is the question.

Of course, even if the name is the same, the ship is not exactly the same when even some of the parts are replaced.
However, the same thing happens all the time in our bodies.
This is true at the cellular level, and even more so at the subatomic level.
Each Planck time (the smallest unit of time that can have meaning) is strictly speaking a different physical state.
In other words, it is correct to think that in truth we are different people every moment.
However, you think of all of these sequences as "self" on your own.
I call this 'alive delusion,' and the reason why we are stuck in alive delusion is not only that we are governed by our sense of self, but also that if we do not think so, we have to seriously confront the terrible problem of denying our own existence.So we try to ignore this problem by using our sensory judgment as a shield.
But sensory judgments are not evidence of anything.
We have a certain finite structure, so it stands to reason that our arms don't stretch and our brain's cognitive functions are limited.
Given a certain structure, no matter how advanced it is, we can eventually understand only the simplest things below it, and only speculate on phenomena slightly above it on that basis.
This is true even for intelligent life forms that are far more advanced than we are.

In the first place, it is natural that there are limits to one's cognition for the following reasons.

■1. Evolutionary history has not developed a "function for understanding brain activity" because it is irrelevant to survival.
The question arises as to how to grasp the activity of brain regions that have the function of grasping brain activity.
It becomes 'C for grasping B for grasping A...'" (This is the Laplace's demon.
(This area is similar in structure to the Laplace's devil paradox.)

■2. When we compare the brain (unit of composition: elementary particles or superstrings), which is the foundation for the mind, and the mind (unit of composition: cells), which is a function that arises within the brain, the mind is inevitably inferior to the brain in terms of complexity,
The system of the mind is necessarily inadequate to grasp and understand the entire activity of its own brain in real time.
This lack of ability is the reason why we can only understand the total activity of the brain as an ambiguous concept (mind).　

■3. The brain achieves advanced functions by omitting information to increase processing efficiency.
In order to increase the probability of survival, we have no choice but to process data using approximate values.

■4. The uncertainty principle makes it impossible to simultaneously obtain accurate data on the position and velocity of even a single subatomic particle.

In the end, since information can only be processed incompletely in principle, it is naturally impossible to fully understand it, and the mind is perceived as an elusive thing.　

Specific experimental examples include the passive consciousness hypothesis, but even those who support this experiment say that the possibility of free will still remains because it is possible to cancel commands.
I am not saying that this is the case, but rather that it is impossible in principle.
The very concept of free will itself is based on the absurd premise that there is no logic, but the will is determined.
Still, since we can only live by our sense of reality, we have completely eliminated the possibility of saying, "There is no free will, but we are unable to recognize it due to lack of cognitive function.
However, just as the world we see today is nothing more than an image synthesized in our brains based on the spectrum of light, so our sense of reality is only what we interpret as such, and has absolutely nothing to do with the truth of the universe.

It is time for us to face our fears and confront the truth.

○ Afterword

It is not beautiful to write useless things and it only creates unnecessary confusion, so topics off the main topic shall be described here.

■ "The Significance of Spreading Quantum Destiny to All Mankind"
I will write about why it is necessary to promote ideas that are merely offensive and encourage people to face problems they do not want to face head-on.
In a society that is unaware of the absence of free will, there will inevitably be discrimination against people who will be born far in the future with electrified brains, digital life forms that have no gender from the beginning, and people who were originally pets but whose personalities were digitized after they became highly intelligent.
The level at which we treat a person as a person will be determined naturally, but if we do not understand the non-existence of free will, even if an artificial life form becomes sufficiently complex, we will still have the idea that there is something fundamentally different between an artificial life form and our physical selves.
Worse, they will say that they have a soul.
This inevitably leads to discrimination.
By understanding quantum destiny in advance, many people can prepare for possible future changes and prevent discrimination.

It will be next to impossible for a religious country to accept this change, and it will be impossible to change people's perceptions unless we start with Japan first.
Belief in lies is the most powerful weapon available to man to maximize collective cohesion.
The concept of God is the greatest example of this.
I have said what I need to say in this text, but will humans really be able to suppress the most powerful weapon they have in their hands in a few hundred years with the power of logical thinking?

■ "About human Evolution"
If the electric brain develops to the point where it can reproduce an echo structure in which the electrical signal of a single synapse exerts an influence on its surroundings, such as an electric field, and this influence has a new and further impact on the surrounding environment, then the human brain will be able to reproduce the same kind of structure.
In the future, by digitizing the personality, there will surely come a time when the differences in gender and age, which we now consider absolute differences, will become meaningless.
Gender differences will only seem absolute due to the lack of science and technology.
There will be highly intelligent dogs that are grandmothers, people who are born without the concept of gender from the beginning, and beings that integrate multiple personalities, as well as the trading of memories.
The question of what constitutes a person will become increasingly ambiguous.

The optimal structure for each environment will naturally differ, but as far as evolution in general is concerned, evolution is the convergence to an ultimately more efficient structure.
In order to be efficient to the limit after the digitization of the personality, people will create new efficient languages and will communicate with each other while predicting what each other will say.

Emotional things are considered human and wonderful now, but in the future they will converge so that more and more people will be more calm.
As we can see from current business and life instruction books, what they end up saying is that we should do what has a high probability of success mathematically and without being distracted by unnecessary blurring of the mind. Emotions will not disappear for the time being because they are necessary to increase the probability of survival, but if we converge on an efficient structure, it is inevitable that we will be able to control our emotions more perfectly.
The real stage of human existence will come when we are able to abandon the preconceived notion that emotionality is human and wonderful.

About disparities in Society after Personality Digitization
If we can digitize our personalities, ordinary people will be able to become much more sophisticated, whether they use complete cyborg bodies or connect their flesh to the network.
Of course, if multiple bodies are used, a pseudo-teleportation lifestyle would be possible.
However, since some rich people are capable of independently evolving their own data at a frightening speed, the capability gap between them and the average person would open up to an order of magnitude larger.
However, the destination of those who have fully evolved beyond them is the choice of whether or not to abandon personality.
For example, there is the question of whether quantum teleportation should be considered a transfer or a copy.
If the time comes when quantum teleportation becomes necessary in relation to survival, those who hesitate to use quantum teleportation will be eliminated.
Thus, what is necessary for ultimate evolution is to accept all changes.
If one continues to modify one's own structure in order to evolve without limit, one will have to abandon even one's own personality at some point, and whether one can abandon oneself is a major obstacle.
Of course, most people will stop evolving there, but some will overcome even that barrier.
However, I think we can say that this is the initial stage of assimilation with the universe.

■ "About the Universe"
I would like to write about my view of the universe.
I support the holographic theory and the idea that this universe is the interior of a black hole.
After all, inflation & the Big Bang seem to be synonymous with the creation of a black hole.
The point is the difference between looking at it from the inside or from the outside.

It may just be my lack of study, but I don't know anyone who has mentioned the following, so I'll specify it just in case.
The more a black hole sucks in surrounding matter, the more the surface area of the event horizon expands.
Naturally, the amount of matter it sucks in is also increasing.
I think this correlates with the increase in the expansion rate of our universe.
In other words, in my opinion, the apparent appearance of our universe in the mother universe is a black hole, and if that black hole sucks up all the matter around it, the expansion of our universe will stop.
Of course, in the process of moving in the mother universe, if it starts swallowing new substances again, it will start to expand again.
Of course, eventually our universe will return to the mother universe by Hawking radiation.
The mother universe will also move back to the grandmother universe and eventually back to the first Eve universe.
Of course, there will be countless Eve universes.
Currently, the string theory predicts a pattern of 10 to the 500th power as an inference from extra dimensions, but whether this is correct or not, there are practically an infinite number of possible worlds, since the same physical law does not result in the same world due to quantum fluctuations that produce randomness.

The ultimate question is, "Why is the root state of being, not nothingness?" is the ultimate question, "Why is existence, not nothingness, the primordial state?
Of course, there will never be an answer to why? But if there really is nothing, then there is no beginning, and since we exist, we can only say that nothingness is the primordial state in the quantum mechanical sense of "zero but not nothing," where the positive and negative cancel each other out.
The important thing is that the things that exist are allowed to change their energy.
This means any physical condition is a possibility, but it also means that eternity in the same state is impossible.
Personally, however, I have the impression that what exists is always forced to change, rather than being allowed to change.
At any rate, even if all the eve-universe returns to zero, another eve-universe can be born, so I would say that eternity in this sense is possible.

○Finally.
At the beginning of this article, I wrote, "What follows is my proposal that free will does not exist and that society should be based on it, and it is up to you to decide what you think.
I apologize that this is a lie, and that it is just a writing technique to make it easier to be accepted.