A very interesting contraption

A very interesting contraption. Driven by the force of gravity the ball’s movement is forming an interesting trajectory. Consecutive runs show that, however interesting this trajectory may be, it will be exactly the same every time we run it. This device can therefore be considered as a deterministic machine. Every time we produce the same input (the ball), it produces the same output (movement of that ball across a predefined trajectory).

Let’s look at something a bit more common.

Anyone who has ever played this game must have witnessed a situation where 10 some balls are simultaneously moving, bouncing of each other and falling into holes. During this brief moment (until the balls settle down) you can sense a childlike feeling of exhilaration and anticipation because your surroundings are set in motion in such a way that the outcome cannot be predicted. Observing exclusively one of the balls and disregarding everything else gives us no choice but to acknowledge that the ball is moving in a nondeterministic way. Taking, however, the whole table into consideration, it is obvious that it's not the case.

Seeing these two examples being put in the same basket of deterministic systems, a person can say: “Well, in that case everything we observe is deterministic, since everything that happens was triggered by a cause and will become a part of the cause for the upcoming events.”

This attitude is so deeply sown into the fabric of modern science that it has become a standard practice that every observed nondeterministic behavior is automatically accredited to inadequate modeling of natural laws as they are probably not taking all the factors into account. And rightly so. After all, this approach has brought more good to mankind than most of the philosophical ramblings of which some you will find in the following text.

Humans allegedly possess what is commonly referred to as self-consciousness. I tried to define that term as thoughts that lead to behavior that does not match a simple stimulus->reaction model. Stimulus, in this case, would be everything we perceive now and have perceived in our lifetime.

Human race went through various stages in history. Each of these stages was accompanied by self-conscious thoughts about the nature of the world. In these thoughts there was often a rooted idea that the world has two aspects. These aspects were considered to have so little in common that they were often referred to as two worlds: spiritual and material. This was pretty much a constant thing in human history. Only the contents of these two worlds were never finally agreed upon. For example, in prehistory, the material world would include a wooden tool, a rock in a field, a leaf in a pawn… while birds, stars, snakes and moon would all be considered spiritual. Over time, most of the stuff from the spiritual world “migrated” to the material world. These migrations lead me to believe that things and events that are considered unpredictable (nondeterministic) are often associated with the spiritual world. A story about “Once upon a time everyone thought the Earth was flat…” would fit nicely here, but why go that way? There is immeasurable eagerness in revealing all the tricks the universe has cleverly designed to disguise its true nature, but zero in revealing even one disguise in our everyday lives.

Majority of people regard themselves as spiritual because of their self-consciousness, free will and the inherent nondeterminism. If a man were to behave strictly according to stimulus->reaction model that would allude that his behavior is deterministic, therefore he has no free will and his self-consciousness (if he had any) is not of much use.

With development of neurosciences, we acquired some insights about the man’s driving mechanism – the brain. Sensational news saying that scientists discovered regions in the brain controlling motor skills, balance, long term planning, stress management and even the parts that are active during contemplation and meditation. Things started to be a little less abstract so the new protagonists became neurons, nervous system, electric charge inside human body carrying information.
So, I guess a simple version of how-does-human-body-work would be the following. A certain neuron that is designated for arm muscles transmits an electric impulse through nerve pathway to the arm and informs it what to do. Then, of course, we traverse back and ask “Who triggered that muscle neuron into doing what he did?” After that, we find out there is a hierarchy inside a brain, so a “superior” brain region ordered muscle neuron to do its thing. If we continue down this path, we will probably find out that the main perpetrator for arm movement is most certainly something perceived from person’s immediate surroundings combined with long term (probably subconscious) memory. Both of which were stated in the definition of stimulus in the stimulus->reaction behavioral model.

Still feeling spiritual?
“This is all nonsense”, you might say. “I have a free will. I decide whether to turn left or right. I control whether to blink once or twice. I am not a robot with hard drive, RAM, CPU and I/O devices.”
To cut the long story short, there is no way to prove that something is deterministic or nondeterministic. Regarding spiritualism, it might ironically turn out that the word “I” you use extensively to reclaim your spirituality is the one thing that’s keeping you away from it.

If a human being is a deterministic system, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the entire universe is also a deterministic system?

This would imply that if someone knew the exact current state of the universe, he/she would know the exact state of the universe in any given point in time. This first person to formulate this idea was Pierre-Simon Laplace so this hypothetical all-knowing creature was later given a name – Laplace’s demon.

Quantum physics deals with the smallest known building blocks of the universe - quarks. Oddly enough, nondeterminism turned out to be not only accepted but an integral part of this science. Werner Heisenberg was the one who has proven that it is physically impossible to determine both exact position and speed of a quark. This is known as the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and as Steven Hawking put it: “It is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world”. Since these particles are the fiber from which everything is built, uncertainty principle is, in a way, applicable to the entire universe.

There is no agreement in the scientific community as to what is really going on in the microscopic world of quantum mechanics. There is agreement with the results of quantum experiments and observations. The problem comes when those results are interpreted. (Herbet, 1985.)

Quantum physics went on and discovered that not only is the world fundamentally nondeterministic, but also that the observation of quantum-scaled experiments affects the results of those same experiments.

My study of quantum physics made me realize that it is a psychological science as well as a physical one. This realization followed from the fact that the observer had a dramatic effect, as a result of choosing what to look for, on the results of his observations. (Wolf, 1984.)

The world of quantum physics in a large part still remains a mystery. One thing we can be sure of is that on a certain level our world is interconnected in such a way that we cannot anymore perceive reality as a set of separate objects interacting in accordance with a bunch of strictly predefined laws. Quantum physics reintroduces nondeterminism in human understanding of nature, at least for time being. Curious thing is that this nondeterminism takes place on a tiny scale and seems to have a very limited (if any) effect on a “normal” scale events and objects. Nevertheless, if humans wish to pursue their identity of self-conscious, spiritual beings, this is where they should look for clues. If they possess any nondeterminism in them, this is where it’s coming from. How would that be possible? As we said, quantum effects are limited to the atomic scale and we as humans are operating on a scale where quantum random glitches have no influence.

Well, I guess what we would need is sort of an amplifier that can transform a tiny quirk into an avalanche of consequential events. Something like this.

A tiny push in the beginning managed to produce a drastic outcome. It wouldn’t have been possible if the entire machinery hadn’t been set up the way it was. Each of the machine's parts is very unstable and sensitive to any kind of stimulation.

As you might have assumed, we already possess such a device. It is the human brain. Or any brain for that matter, only the human brain is the most sensitive of all we have encountered. It operates by transmitting information using electric charges and its neurons therefore must be pretty sensitive to the random glitches occurring on the electron level.

Like science has taught us so many times before: “If it’s nondeterministic, we are not looking at the whole picture.” We can abstract the quantum level nondeterminism as the influence of another dimension(s) that are not a part of our space-time continuum on the ones that are observable to us. If we wanted to be poetic, we could say that these “random” glitches are in fact messages from that other dimension. It is clear that these messages are happening everywhere across the universe, only we (life forms, especially humans) are capable of amplifying their effect on the observable dimensions. Like the complex machine from the video above amplified a slight push of a metallic wheel into something much more noticeable.

Like I mentioned before, the word “I” might become a stumble stone in your quest for spirituality. It is difficult to assign a meaning to that word if you start seeing yourself as a “mere” amplifier. Quotation marks on “mere” imply that everyone should still prefer to be a amplifier instead of a guy banging on his chest quite deterministically: “I am a master of my own destiny!”

The shift in the perspective causes you to see that the life is living through you and not that you are living a life. Death no longer seems to be a big deal. If life is not mine, then I cannot lose it. Life will always be the same across the universe and in some way I will always be a part of it.

Looking at other people as "portals" to other dimensions also changes both your attitude towards strangers and your current relationships. Suddenly you feel privileged to sit in the bus next to another person instead in the empty section. Even if the person is an ugly, fat, sweaty, homeless guy. Because you know that he is essentially same as you, a self-conscious stream of unobservable life into our observable universe.