Consciousness may create reality
Free will is a big open problem in philosophy. Once upon a time, physics thought it had the problem solved: there was none. The French physicist LaPlace championed the idea that, because all physics was pre-determined by laws both backward and forwards in time and because human beings are physical beings, all our behavior must have been scripted from the beginning of time.
That idea vanished with the development of quantum physics. The world turned out to be random. Our decisions appeared to affect the nature of reality itself with what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”.
You can take two approaches to this idea: (1) go back to believing that everything is pre-determined with some tweaks to account for quantum physics or (2) decide that, indeed, our personal will actually does determine reality.
But what does a universe where our own wills determine reality look like?
Long before quantum physics had been developed, in the early 19th century, Arthur Schopenhauer developed his philosophy of Will, which he published in a ponderous tome called The World as Will and Representation.
Frequently misunderstood by academics and lay people alike, Schopenhauer’s main thesis is that the world can be divided into two pieces: Will and Representation. Simple enough. But for him these had…
