Poetic naturalism and the pursuit of truth

Does free will exist?

One day, Raghav asked me if I believed free will was real. I thought for a bit, but before I could even respond—like a 5th grader smiling to himself after telling a kindergartener at recess that Santa isn’t real—Raghav cut my thoughts off.

“NO” says particle physics: A naturalist perspective

He told me that from a particle physics perspective, everything is technically deterministic. And given a world with perfect information, we would be able to theoretically predict, with some probability distributions, everything that happens in the future.

Our particular combination of genetics and environment continues to irreversibly destine us to certain fates. So one’s life choices, such as the major one decided on studying in college, or even the blue shirt I chose to wear that day—were not really “choices” but rather a part of a predetermined sequence of extremely chaotic yet predictable events. A series of events which started from the big bang, to the evolution of life, of human life, to my parents, to my upbringing, to someone who chooses to wear blue when it rains.

The utility of free will: A poetry of choice

Raghav went on to explain that although free will may not exist in the particle physics domain, that it is still a useful abstraction in the sociological domain, to describe humans as motivated actors in explaining emergent phenomena. such as the percentage of people who are able to beat alcohol addiction through one method over another.

Raghavendra’s poetic naturalism agenda

All of this blabber, was in service of his agenda of converting me to his life philosophy of poetic naturalism: that there is one true ‘natural’ world but there are multiple ways of looking at it.

Particle physics and Lovecraftian horror

Me as a collection of colliding particles

The naturalist, particle physics perspective unnerved me for the next few days. I thought about how this entity which is ‘me’, is really just a collection of particles colliding around in organized ways.

And how all of my behaviors and habits, my proclivities for procrastination, my grades - how they may have all been irreversibly determined since my birth. That they are not the product of any cosmic notion of “free will”, but rather just the natural course of my molecules doing their thing.

Thinking about it seriously, the thought made me despair. If nothing we do has any bearing on our future, why do we keep trying if the first place?

The brain as a probability maximizing machine

Perhaps influenced by the Machine Learning course I’m taking right now, the conclusion I came to is that my brain is just a probability-maximizing machine. That it’s doing what it thinks is best for the given moment based on a certain set of…

Constraints:

• Energy level
• Environment
• Principles, ideals

And heuristics:

• Career goals
• Social goals
• Personal goals

My atoms are my friends

That my current collection of atoms may be predisposed or ‘fated’ to certain career paths or clothing choices thanks to my particular combination of genetics and upbringing.

But still, that my atoms have my best interest in mind. For example, based on my particular goals I’m not going to purposely do something like sprinkle cinnamon into my MacBook speakers unless I truly believe it will be in the service of some goals.

This assuaged my dread a little in that even if I don’t have “free will” over my atoms, that they are at least aligned with the interests of whatever my “free will” would have wanted to tell them anyways.

On naturalism and forgiveness

When I made this connection, it was honestly a kind of relieving. That though I am prone to many mistakes and shortcomings, that my atoms were still trying their best. And that I am always choosing what I believe is the best choice of action at any given moment, given my personal constraints and heuristics, and information.

The night sky and the pursuit of truth

A couple days after this conversation on poetic naturalism, Raghav and I were walking back home after a long night in the lab office. He was sticking his neck out to the sky, so I looked up too, asking what he was looking at—wondering if there was an airplane flying by or something.

Constellations, stories

He said he wasn’t looking at anything like that; just that he just likes space. The sky was clear, and we could make out a few faint points, alongside a super huge star-looking thing which I was convinced was the north star.

Raghav disagreed, saying it was Jupiter. To prove it, he opened this app, Stellarium, and pointed his phone at the sky. Through stellarium’s lens, it brightened all the faint dots, connecting them into constellations (while also proving that the big “star” was indeed, Jupiter).

It was a sight I had never realized was above us the entire time. This vastness of space, and the poetry of the constellations and stories we create on top of it.

Manifolds and the vastness of space

I thought back to my manifolds class: We were applying linear algebra / calculus on the structure of higher dimensional surfaces (manifolds), eventually working our way up to proving something profound about the topology of a black hole.

I looked back up at the sky and thought about how I had once asked my dad why he chose to become a math professor. At the time, my dad answered it was because he wanted to study the structure of space and time.

While I laughed at him then, I think that day I finally understood what he meant.