Quantum physics has been called 'revolutionary', presumably because of the way in which it has 'overthrown' some of classical physics' most basic assumptions and formulas. Whether or not the term 'revolutionary' really can be applied to quantum physics, I have noticed that its approach to discovery and understanding has somewhat paralleled recent trends in the field of Psychology (of course to speak of 'Psychology' as if it were a thoroughly consistent monolith is misleading and inaccurate; such a gross generalization is used only for the comparative purposes of this essay, and I have no doubt that the depictions contained herein might be misrepresenting a good deal of current work in 'Psychology). Though I will explain this trend in greater detail, it could be described as a departure from the philosophical orientation of 'causal determinism' and from the use of visualizable models of what happens between observations in the past and present. This paper will start out by examining the ways in which discoveries in quantum physics have shown the old classical assumptions (and predictions) to be flawed. I will then point out some similarities between these advances and those in Psychology. Finally, I will examine the recent 'advances' of psychology and physics in relation to the question of human free will, and in light of the concrete effects of these two sciences.

Despite the fact that Newton believed that his theories were based on rock-solid, indisputable empirical observations, classical physics was in fact based on a number of assumptions. One such assumption was the causal mechanical view of 'reality'. Basically, this philosophical grounding of classical physics is summed up by Einstein's remark (though of course Einstein is not a classical physicist), "God does not play dice." In this approach, if somehow we could know all the factors involved in a system (i.e. mass, momentum, etc. of all particles involved) at a given time, we would be able to predict with perfect accuracy what would happen at any later time. This view of physical workings was used because reality was thought to operate in the manner that we usually think a clock or other machine does: one object acting upon another, causing a particular change to result in the affected object. This is one reason why classical physicists believed that they could (at least in theory) make completely accurate predictions.

It seems that nowadays, most quantum physicists do not make the causal mechanist assumption. In my understanding, in general it is not considered permissible to make a statement about something causing something else to happen. Likewise, it isn't considered permissible to make statements about what happens in an experiment between subsequent observations. It is only permissible to state the results of experiments, and to say whether or not such results were predicted by a theory. The mathematics of quantum physics make statistical predictions of what the results of an experiment will be, and to my knowledge, they have never been shown to be wrong through experiment. Though we may be able to make 'precise' predictions on the macroscopic level of classical physics, when we get down to the atomic level of quantum physics, such assumptions fall apart. This is because the behavior of atomic particles is (supposedly) inherently probabilistic, as sheer numbers of atoms involved in an event predicted by classical physics 'even out' the quantum uncertainties. Thus we get what appear to be accurate non-statistical predictions in the larger, 'classical' world. Ironically, the only way to predict events on an atomic level is not to require precise predictions.

A similar switch has gone on in the field of psychology. Freud's theories were based on a l9th century model of causal determinism. To Freud, it was important to see what early events in a person's life caused later personality traits, neuroses, or psychoses. Treatment involved 'going back' to the psychic cause of a problem through introspection and psychoanalysis. Modern psychologists no longer use the models of past events causing present ones, but instead try to find statistical correlations between behaviors and traits: essentially, they try to find 'formulas' and relationships between what is observed about people. And treatment no longer involves some mysterious return to the cause of a psychological ailment. Behavior therapy, for example, uses experimentally and clinically proven methods to improve people's conditions: to proceed from an undesirable state to a desirable one. Along the same lines, few clinicians care how or why such treatments work; they just care that they do work, and try to come up with more and more successful treatments.

This statistical, non-causal view which now seems to be 'in vogue' (reminiscent of Hegel's Zeitgeist ) in at least two fields of science makes a strange kind of counter-intuitive sense. Take for example the physics of billiards (for some reason billiards always seem to be used as an example of 'real-life' events in the literature of quantum interpretation, though I've never actually played). Though it is true that we can observe the physical events of balls hitting each other, and that we can make predictions about where a ball will go if you hit it in such and such a place with a certain amount of force, is it really fair to say we can understand or explain 'how' this actually works? To do so would involve one in an infinite regress of causal explanation. This is, of course, not to say that the cue doesn't in some 'real' way affect the ball, and the balls each other, but it is just to question whether any kind of physical equation is really an explanation, not just a description of certain events. Presumably we have played pool so much that we expect the balls to behave according to the laws of physics, and we have a kind of intuitive understanding of one event 'causing' another event to occur. I would be awfully surprised if I hit a ball and it stayed perfectly still, but does this say that I know why my stick should affect it, or just that it does? The latter seems to be the modern (although I suppose not necessarily the correct) way of talking about 'causality'.

THE MYTHS OF PRECISE

MEASUREMENT

AND THE "OBJECTIVE OBSERVER"

In any case, another assumption that classical physicists were making is that precise measurement (of momentum, position, etc.) is theoretically possible. As we said above, this was one of the assumptions that classical physicists made in postulating 'causal determinism'. But, as Heisenberg points out in Physics and Philosophy, this assumption that we can simultaneously know position and momentum of any (even classically 'predictable') object to arbitrary accuracy is just untenable. To measure position, we must interfere with momentum, or vice-versa. For some reason, however, classical physicists overlooked this problem. I assume that they did so because they were able to achieve very accurate and impressive results, despite the slight logical incongruity in the notion of "simultaneous knowledge of both position and momentum of an object to arbitrary accuracy." But in any case, there never has been and never will be even theoretical perfect accuracy in measurement.

The famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that our simultaneous knowledge of the position or momentum of a particle is limited to Planck's constant divided by two. As Heisenberg himself says, "The error in the experiment does --as least to some extent-- not represent a property of the electron, but a deficiency in our knowledge." (p. 45) So simultaneous position and momentum might exist in the electron; we just can't know them perfectly both at once. And, if one thinks about it, this limitation has always existed; it is just that up until quantum mechanics was invented, it was more convenient to ignore it in making formalisms and predictions. But, as with other classical physics' basic assumptions, the observation of atomic particles has forced us to be more accurate (and paradoxically less 'exact') in our assumptions about simultaneous measurement.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle makes sense. Though it is often posited as a kind of dogma in the literature on quantum interpretation, the way which we observe certain atomic phenomena has inherent limitations. For at present we can only observe the position of very small objects with electron microscopes, which operate by shooting a beam of electrons as the object, and 'seeing' how the electrons 'bounce off' the object after collision. And of course such a collision affects the momentum of the observed object. A similar limitation is involved in the measurement of momentum: there's a trade off between greater accuracy in determination of momentum and the simultaneous determination of position. We can see that there is a big difference between 'observing' and 'tampering with' phenomena. Observing is what we do when we look at a set of data on a sheet of paper, there is pretty much no influence of the observer on the sheet of paper. However, just how she arrived at those data is another story. As far as I can figure, it is only possible to acquire quantitative data through "tampering with" the thing under study.

Psychological research nowadays consists of essentially two approaches: laboratory experiments and correlational studies. The results of laboratory experiment probably doesn't really tell us what happens in the 'real world' outside of the laboratory. This, at least, is the attack the psychologists who do correlational studies make on the methods of the laboratory-based psychologists; for they know that being watched and monitored by other people in a strange, forced, and artificial setting must affect how we act. Conversely, laboratory psychologists attack correlationally-oriented psychologists for only being able to determine correlations between variables; correlational studies have no way of determining what factor leads to ('causes') another factor. Thus we see that in psychological research we have a situation analogous to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: we sacrifice the ability to manipulate a single independent variable (thus getting an idea of 'causal direction') for the ability to see how people really behave in the real world'.

This leads us to another basic, but faulty assumption made by classical physicists: the myth of the 'objective observer.' This assumption goes something like the following: I can make theories and devise formulae 'in here' (in my head, or on paper) that accurately explain what is going on 'out there' (in the objective world). But, not only is our data about the outside world inherently imperfect, the 'answers' we get depend on the 'questions' we ask, which depend in turn upon the theoretical or ideological framework we're operating in. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the 'complementary' resolution to the wave/particle paradox. If we perform an experiment to determine whether an electron is a particle, we get an affirmative answer. But still it is possible to perform another experiment in which we get the interference pattern characteristic of waves. The only solution seems to be that both the descriptions of electrons as waves and as particles are correct, and the two taken together give us a more complete and accurate idea of the electron than either view taken separately.

So we see that the classical assumption of an objective observer, which somehow gleans 'pure' information about things 'out there', based solely on 'innocent and 'value-free' experiments, is a myth. It is true that quantum theory arose in response to experimental data which conflicted with classical physics, but it is also true that behind any experiment (and especially implicit in any interpretation of any anything) lie assumptions. Such is the view of humanist or 'phenomenological" psychologists such as George Kelly. The philosophy of "constructive alternativism," which underlies Kelly's theory, states that each person has an equally valid set of constructs (a kind of lens through which each person views reality) in the terms of which he interprets ('explains', or 'makes sense of') his personal experience. Though Kelly believes that, though there is some kind objective reality 'out there', each person understands it in a different way. And this 'phenomenological' view fits in very nice with the discoveries made by quantum physicists: that the experiments we perform, the way we measure what goes on in the experiment, and especially our interpretation of these results is a very 'subjective' matter. It is possible to have different accurate views of the same reality.

WHERE TO, AND WHY?

In order to make this point, it will be necessary to describe one of the most famous and dramatic quantum physics experiments, the "double-slit" experiment. As classical optics predicts, when a beam of electrons is projected through two holes (slits) in an otherwise impenetrable material onto a sheet of photographic paper, the electrons hit the photographic paper in such a way as to produce a characteristic "interference pattern" on it. This is due to the way that the electrons, which travel in wave-like formation, come through the two slits and interact and interfere with each other. The 'interference' pattern generated by a two-slit experiment can be contracted with the simpler pattern generated on photographic paper by an experiment in which the beam of electrons is projected through only one slit. No interference pattern is generated in the single-slit experiment because there is only one wave-like beam of electrons hitting the photographic paper; with no other beam to collide with, there is no interference.

The famous 'double-slit' experiment involved projecting electrons onto the photographic paper through two slits; however, in this experiment, the rate of emission of the electrons is slowed so much that there is virtually no chance that there could ever be two electrons going through the slits at the same time. With such slow emission of electrons, there should be no interference pattern generated, because the electrons in one wavy beam should never have a chance to collide and 'interfere' with those in another beam. But the surprising thing about the experiment is, that there is in fact an interference pattern generated, even though there shouldn't be. It is as if the waves of the electrons' travel were colliding with each other, and not the actual electrons which travel in these waves.

The results of the double-slit experiment cannot really be predicted by a physical explanation. How can electrons make a pattern as if they were colliding when they can't be, due to their infrequent emission? But still, quantum mechanics, (using the idea of electron waves) is able to make extremely accurate predictions of how a lot of individuals will behave in the 'double-slit experiment'. Quantum mechanics is also able to predict how a lot of electrons will behave if we change the conditions of the experiment (i.e. slit width, distance from slits to photographic paper, distance between slits, etc.) But at the level of the individual electron, predictions can only be statistical. There is as yet no way to say what a certain electron will do.

The aim of Psychology could be said to be prediction and control of behavior. I'd say that the same is true of physics, just that the things 'behaving' are often much larger or much smaller than people. Let us look first at the statistical notion of behavior. Given a good theory, we can say that a certain observed phenomenon is likely to 'behave' in a certain way.

Psychologists have devised various personality tests, such as the MMPI, which can determine how a large group of people with the same scores on the test are likely to behave in a certain situation. But at the level of the individual person, there is as yet no way to predict what the person will do. In psychology as in quantum physics, prediction of the individual can only be probabilistic. So much for the 'prediction' side of these two sciences. Now for the 'control' side. Control consists of manipulating the present situation so as to maximize the likelihood of the occurrence of a certain desired behavior. Of course control can only be probabilistic. If anyone doubts the possibility for control, however, let them talk to a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, or someone whose acrophobia has been successfully treated by behavior therapy. I'm sure that they would be convinced of the efficacy of scientific control. And that's more than a little frightening. For physics, like psychology, as such is supposed to be 'value- free'. Thus it can be used for destructive as well as for constructive purposes. Of course that's something we have to think about.

FREE WILL?

It is sometimes said that people have free will. It is sometimes said that they do not, that this is an illusion based on ignorance. It is sometimes said that quantum phenomena are truly random. It is sometimes said that they are not, that this is just a technical problem with our ability to observe them. The discoveries of quantum physics and of psychology, interestingly, do little to answer the eternal question of free will. In this way, neither physics nor psychology has contributed much philosophical illumination. As has been said, each science can make predictions of likely behavior based on present data, and each science seems to be tending to favor predictive formulae over causal explanations. Each science is finding it more efficacious to employ the notion of 'conditioning' (in both the philosophical and the psychological sense) over the notion of 'causing'.

In conclusion, I suggest that the question of whether or not humans have free will or whether or not physical phenomena in their most fundamental (subatomic) level is neither useful nor likely answerable. Far more useful questions can be asked. For example, in the service of whom and towards what ends (whether conscious or not, or explicit or not) is research being conducted in physics and psychology? Rather than focusing on the philosophical question of free will, perhaps we should critically examine the real effects of scientific praxis. It could even be suggested that philosophical deliberations over free will is a way to avoid seeing the real and sometimes insidious effects of scientific inquiry. Recent 'advances' in physics and psychology which seem to undermine the notion of causal determinism do not change the fact that specific future events can be occasioned, or conditioned, by certain present manipulations. (Scientific) knowledge is power, as the familiar cliché goes. Whether humans have a modicum of 'uncaused' power to decide which of a number of possible behaviors they will perform is, to me, less important than whether or not their ability to act without coercion is improved or impaired by the many and various fruits of physics and psychology.