The Sacrifice to Occam - Preface

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Do you want to understand the truth of the world? Then you and everyone you know will have to sacrifice something very important to you – your free will.

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This is a concise book with grand ambitions. What I am aiming to present is a simple view of how our universe works. Such an ambition reflects a fundamental tenet of science – the simplicity of Occam’s razor.

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Introduction

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William of Occam was a Franciscan monk* born, perhaps unsurprisingly, in the village of Ockham, Surrey in the late thirteenth century and who later went on to study theology at Oxford University. Unfortunately, his habit of questioning contemporary theological practice and particularly Thomas Aquinas’s proofs of the existence of God, as based on Aristotelian causes, brought him into conflict with the established church and led to a charge of teaching heresy. The feeling was apparently mutual in that when Occam was summoned to face trial before the Pope, he ended up: “in an even deadlier conflict between the Pope and the Franciscans, one that provoked William to accuse the Pope of heresy and led to his flight from the city chased by a posse of papal soldiers.” (McFadden, 2021). Such was the medieval scholarly existence of any intellectual threatening to challenge established worldviews during that period. Of more importance to the current narrative is the nature of Occam’s razor itself, which basically asks for simplicity and specifically that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. The razor is therefore used to “shave away excess complexity” (McFadden, 2021).

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So, the point is, when building a theoretical model of anything, especially the universe, keep it as simple as possible. This idea is, I think, a fundamentally important principal. Often philosophers and scientists are guilty of overcomplicating things to make their models fit their pre-existing worldviews. But what if the common(sense) worldview is wrong? What if we can adapt people’s worldviews and, as a consequence, build a model of the universe which is inherently simple and in accordance with Occam’s razor?

 

The main idea I wish to put forward is that the concept of free will is an “entity beyond necessity”. That is my aim, but scientists, philosophers, and many others often become very attached to their worldviews, to the extent that if they come across evidence for something that challenges their position, they will tend to find a reason to either ignore it or, if that doesn’t work, argue vigorously against it. This is usually the result of cognitive dissonance, which occurs when people are presented with information that contradicts their existing worldview and results in them adopting mental strategies to avoid unwelcome facts.

 

An excellent example of the effect of cognitive dissonance is the way in which many people within the mainstream scientific research community have tended to ignore over one hundred years of evidence for so-called ‘paranormal’ phenomena and exceptional experiences – experiences which tend not to fit within their materialist worldviews and in fact appear to be much more spiritual in nature.

 

I have personally experienced numerous ‘exceptional’ experiences including copious synchronicities, apparent psychokinesis (mind apparently affecting matter from a distance) or miraculous events, and other meaningful communications from a spiritual entity. I will talk briefly about some of my own personal experiences and how they have helped to develop and shape my worldview later, but first I want to introduce a simple model of the universe which fits with all scientific observations, including of marginalised paranormal or spiritual occurrences that have been recorded by organisations such as the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) since the end of the nineteenth century. The model is incredibly simple, which I think makes it a very attractive, parsimonious model of the universe – in accordance with Occam’s razor.

 

But for it to work, the model requires a sacrifice from every reader of this book, and it is a sacrifice that many people will find challenging.

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The sacrifice is this – I want you to reject the idea that you have any free will whatsoever.

 

This is a hard concept for many people to accept. It seems second nature to us that when we decide to move the fingers on our hand or to get up and walk across the room that our conscious decision was freely made. But what I am asking you to consider is that your feeling of free will is in fact an intricate illusion. It is a strong and persistent illusion that generates an apparent ‘impression’ of free will, though that impression is not a genuine phenomenon.

 

But why reject something that seems so intrinsic to who we are? Basically, because if you look at the evidence coming from science and from spiritual phenomena such as synchronicity and precognition, the most parsimonious model for how the universe works is that of the block universe, where past, present, and future all coexist. The idea of the block universe, also known as ‘Minkowski space-time’ (named after mathematician and Albert Einstein’s teacher Hermann Minkowski), is a natural consequence of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which says that time and space are equivalent. Accordingly, the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time can be envisaged as bounding a four-dimensional geometrical block. On paper, the ‘block’ model of the universe is usually represented diagrammatically as a three-dimensional figure where two of the three dimensions, e.g., height and width, represent two of the three space dimensions and the third dimension represents time. In reality, there are three space dimensions, but it is difficult to represent the four dimensions of spacetime on a two-dimensional sheet of paper or computer screen.

 

The main idea is that if, as according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, space and time are equivalent dimensions in spacetime, then all of space and all of time (past, present, and future) can be said to coexist within the ‘block’ of the block universe model. Although it is a relatively simple concept, the block universe does appear to challenge our common-sense notion that future events do not exist and will only come into being as the consequence of causes happening in the past and present. In this model, linear time, like free will, is also a persistent illusion.

 

But is there any need that our common-sense assumptions or intuitions be correct, especially if we can advance a simpler model of the universe that is at odds with those intuitions? The idea that time is an illusion is not a modern concept. In her book Hyperreality: Beyond the horizon where Physics meets consciousness, Johanna Blomqvist (2021) discusses how recent scientific ideas that have been advanced to unite the concepts governing the large-scale structure of the universe (general relativity) and the microscopic subatomic realm (quantum mechanics), such as Lee Smolin’s concept of loop quantum gravity, have much in common with the idea of Vedanta that space is continuously created at every moment and Leibniz’s view that the cause-and-effect relationship we perceive in everyday life is only apparent, not real. This also has parallels with physicist David Bohm’s model, as described in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980), of the explicate (real world) continuously emerging from a deeper implicate order. As I will further discuss in Chapter 9, moving away from our view of the world as resulting from cause-and-effect relationships (even if these relationships might make intuitive sense), and towards a concept of events as (meaningful) correlations may provide us with an expanded but also much simpler and more coherent model of the universe that can incorporate aspects of the world, such as paranormal phenomena, that have been traditionally disregarded by the mainstream scientific community.

 

According to the block universe model you can imagine that the universe has been scripted so that everything that has happened and will happen has been written into it from its very creation. We humans are playing the roles of avatars in a ‘computer programme’ that has been running from the beginning of the universe. We don’t know what our actions or scripted lines will be tomorrow, but you can be assured that whatever you do tomorrow has already been predetermined.

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Contrary to what some people believe, determinism is also in accordance with certain ways of looking at quantum mechanics – in particular superdeterminism. In Chapter 12, I will discuss superdeterminism in more detail, but for now it is worth noting that this view offers the potential to move toward a ‘theory of everything’ by uniting quantum mechanics with relativity theory in a single theory of quantum gravity that removes the problem of non-locality (see Chapters 11 and 12), which has been described as “the single biggest barrier to quantum gravity” (Hossenfelder and Palmer, 2020b). Tim Palmer (Hossenfelder and Palmer, 2020b) makes the point by quoting Paul Dirac at the end of his Newton 1665 physics seminar – ‘Rethinking Superdeterminism’ – that the superdeterministic methodology offers the possibility of a “drastically different theory from the present quantum mechanical theory for which there may be a partial return of determinism”. Again, though it may seem counterintuitive, a deterministic model of the universe, in this case expressed through a superdeterministic model of quantum mechanics, appears to be the more parsimonious solution, in alignment with Occam’s razor. This will certainly be the case if it also moves us closer to a theory of quantum gravity by combining general relativity and quantum mechanics. Interestingly, in Palmer’s model, while the concept of superdeterminism is underpinned by a deterministic theory, because this theory is non-computable its outcomes could be treated as random. In other words, in his model, even though there is a deterministic universe, it is non-computable and ‘appears’ to us to be indeterministic in nature. So again, there is the sense of an illusion.

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To summarize, people are very attached to the idea of free will, but that does not mean it is correct. If we are to look at the universe scientifically, we should be prepared to analyse the evidence with an open-mind and if the concept of free will does not fit with that evidence, then we should reject it. One of the aims of this book is therefore to ask people to question whether they really do have free will or if belief in a predetermined and deterministic universe would fit the available scientific data in a more simple, parsimonious, way.

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In the second section of the book, I will discuss the further advantages of believing in a deterministic universe. One of the reasons people cling to the idea of free will is that they fear falling into fatalism. Fatalism is often a negative attitude that can be summarized as: “Well, if free will doesn’t exist and I have no control over my own destiny, then why should I bother at all? What’s the point of making any effort to do anything?” But it is when we are having such thoughts that we should remember the strength of the free will illusion. We feel as if we have free will and most of us have absolutely no idea what will happen in the future (there are some exceptions which I will mention in Chapter 4), so when we ‘feel’ as if we are deciding to do something we are actually following the narrative of the universal script. Our actions in the world are all a part of that underlying script as is every decision and every positive act of creation. We should not, therefore, feel fatalistic even though we live in a deterministic universe.

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I will then ask the question – if we live in a universe where everything has already been determined, then who is the designer of that universe? Who is behind the operating system controlling the ‘computer programme’ we are living within, or, if you prefer, who is the script writer who composed the script of the universe? It is at this point that I will move away from orthodox science and into the realms of spirituality and mysticism to try to find the answers.

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If we accept that we are living in a scripted universe, with a spiritual creator, then it is possible to ask the question: ‘Can we become more aware of the script and the creator?’ My answer to that question is ‘yes’, if we become more aware of meaningful coincidences on a global level and start to recognize the signs. I will also explain that being aware of the spiritual in the surrounding environment is something that came naturally to our medieval forebears and still forms a significant part of tribal societies today, where shamans have a prominent role to play. What I will suggest is that it may be possible to reconnect with the spiritual in the world around us, much as our medieval ancestors connected with their environment. In doing this we may be able to reenchant the world at a time of climate change when humanity desperately needs to re-enter into a balance with the natural environment and wider world. Recognizing the spiritual and reenchanting the universe in this way will therefore help us to enhance our connection with the natural world at this time of deepening environmental crisis.

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Notes

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* When I was writing the first, sketchy, draft of this book in mid-August 2021, the start of this paragraph began: “William of Occam was a XXX”. I realised at that early stage that my understanding of the central principle of Occam’s razor was far more detailed than my knowledge of the man himself and that I would need to undertake further research to discover more about Occam’s life. As you will discover, what happened next ties into one of the core themes of this book – namely synchronicity (meaningful coincidence) – which I will describe in more detail in Chapter 5. But to summarize, an excellent historical account of William of Occam: ‘Life is Simple: How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Unlocked the Universe’, by JohnJoe McFadden, was published on 2nd September 2021. I only learned of the book’s existence through a publicity email from the Royal Institution of Great Britain on 7th October 2021, which was advertising a presentation by McFadden that same day and I only actually began to read his book on 19th October 2021. This episode could be viewed as an interesting and helpful synchronicity; what Arthur Koestler in The Challenge of Chance (1973) described as the actions of a ‘Library Angel’ (see Chapter 5) (though I suspect that JohnJoe McFadden may not actually agree with me about the significance of synchronicities in everyday life). In consequence, a very short summary of Occam’s life, which can be discovered in more detail in McFadden (2021), can now be found in the opening paragraph of this introduction (though subsequent paragraphs and the book title were largely already written before I came across McFadden’s book).

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