A Copenhagen story about the problem of suffering before human sin

It sure looks like there was a lot of suffering in the animal world prior to the advent of humanity, and hence before any sins of humanity. Yet it would be attractive, both theologically (at least for Christians) and philosophically, if one could say that evil entered the physical world through the free choices of persons. One could invoke the idea of angels who fell before the evolutionary process got started and who screwed things up (that might even be the right story). Or one could invoke backwards causation (Hud Hudson's hypertime story does something like that). Here I want to explore another story. I don't believe the story I will give is true. But the story is compatible with our observations outside of Revelation, does not lead to widespread scepticism, and is motivated in terms of an interpretation of quantum mechanics that has been influential.

Begin with this observation. If the non-epistemic Copenhagen interpretation (NECI) of Quantum Mechanics is literally true, then before there were observers, there was no earth and hence no life on earth. Given indeterministic events in the history of the universe, the world existed in a giant superposition between an earth and a no-earth state. The Milky Way Galaxy may not have even existed then, but instead there was a giant superposition between Milky-Way and no-Milky-Way states. And then an observation collapsed this giant superposition in favor of the sort of Solar System and Milky Way that we observe. There are difficult details to spell out here, which we can talk about in the discussion. But note that the story predicts that we will have astronomical evidence of the Milky Way existing long before there were observers on earth, even though perhaps it didn't--perhaps there was just the giant superposition. For when such a superposition collapses, it leaves evidence as of the remaining branch having been there for a long time earlier.

Now to make this a defense of the idea that suffering in the animal world entered through human sin, I need a few assumptions beyond the above plain NECI story:

1. the observations that collapse the wavefunction are observations by intelligent embodied observers
2. quantum states only come to be substrates of conscious states when the wavefunction is strongly concentrated on them (think of a very narrow Gaussian)
3. prior to there being humans on earth, there were no highly concentrated quantum states of the sort that would be substrates of conscious states
4. humans were the first embodied intelligent observers of the earth (or of other stuff relevantly entangled with it)
5. God set up special laws of nature such that if humans were never to make wrong choices, no wavefunctions would ever collapse into the substrates of painful states.
6. optional but theologically and philosophically attractive: the unsuperposed existence of humans comes from a special divinely-wrought collapse of the wavefunction (this would solve one problem with NECI, namely how the first observation was made, given that on plain NECI before the first observation there was a superposition of observer and no-observer states before it; it would also help reconcile creation and evolution)

One might even connect the giant superposition with the formless and void state mentioned in the Book of Genesis, though I do not particularly recommend this exegesis and I don't believe the story I am giving is in fact true (and I am mildly inclined to think it false).

Objection 1: The story makes standard paleontological and geological claims literally false. There never were any dinosaurs or trilobites, just a giant superposition with dinosaur- and trilobite-states in one component.

Response: So does the plain NECI story, without any of my supplements such as that it is intelligent observation that collapses the wavefunction. And just like the plain NECI story, my extended story explains why have the evidence we do.

Objection 2: Like the worst of the young-earth creationist stories, this story involves a massive divine deception.

Response: Not at all. Consider Descartes' attractive idea that what we expect from God is not that we would always get science right, but that we would be capable of scientifically correcting our mistakes. And the discovery of quantum mechanics, with the invention of the NECI interpretation, came within a century of Darwin's work. As soon as we had quantum mechanics with the NECI interpretation, we had good reason to doubt whether prior to the existence of observers there was an earth simpliciter or just an earth-component in a giant superposition.

Objection 3: There are better interpretations of quantum mechanics than NECI.

Response: Weighing the pros and cons of an interpretation of quantum mechanics requires weighing all its costs and benefits. This will include weighing the theological benefits of this interpretation, given the evidence that there is a God.

Variant: If we want, we can reinterpret the paleontological and geological claims about how things were before observers as relativized to a component of the wavefunction, while exempting consciousness from this relativization--only where there are highly concentrated states is there consciousness. The Everett interpretation basically does this relativization for all claims. The present relativization is, I think, less problematic than the Everett one. First, it doesn't branch intelligent agents or conscious states in the way the Everett interpretation does, a branching that generates the severely counterintuitive consequences of Everett's theory. Second, I do not think it has the well-known serious philosophical problems with the interpretation of probability that the Everett interpretation suffers from: the probabilistic transitions all happen with intelligent observation, and are objectively chancy transitions with the probabilities being interpreted according to one's favorite view of objective chances.

Final remarks: Why don't I believe this story? Well, for one, I find myself incredulous at it. Second, we know that either quantum mechanics or relativity theory is false, and I see little reason to assign more credence to quantum mechanics. Third, I do want to preserve the claims of the special sciences, like biology and geology, without implausible relativization. Fourth, I am sceptical of (1), the idea that only intelligent observation collapses the wavefunction.

More on science and theism

One of the puzzles in the scientific explanation literature is how it is that one can genuinely have explanation in the special sciences—chemistry, biology, geology, etc.—given that the facts in the purview of the special science in question appear to reduce to facts of physics, and hence it seems that only physics-based explanations are appropriate. One strategy is to resist the reduction move. I am happy to resist the reduction move for biology, but to me reduction seems exactly right for geology and probably for chemistry.

The theist, however, has a neat story, like the one in my previous two posts. The patterns that the special science identifies are valuable. They are valuable intrinsically—they exhibit an aesthetic good (and scientists talk of the beauty of theories, though admittedly they do so less in the special sciences)—and they are valuable instrumentally as they make it possible for us to make predictions and organize our knowledge. Because these patterns are valuable, God intends them and their presence is causally explicable. This holds whether or not the given generalization in the special sciences rises to the level of laws or not.

What happens, though, when one pattern is subsumed into a wider pattern? As long as the narrower pattern is still there, it can be correctly used for explanation. But explanation in terms of the wider pattern is better, because the wider pattern is more valuable, and hence more explanatory of God's creative action. Thus, early on we may have learned that all mammals have hearts, and later on we learned that this is true of all vertebrates. It is still correct to explain the presence of the heart in Socrates by his mammality, but better to do so by reference to his being a vertebrate.

A similar move explains why it is that when there are two formulae that equally fit all the data, the simpler is the one to be preferred in explanation. This is relevant to both the curve-fitting problem and the problem of which of two mathematically equivalent formulations is the more explanatory.

Furthermore, that some simple theory approximately fits a body of phenomena is also of value. Hence, theories that are mere approximations can yield genuine explanations. And that is how it should be. In particular, Newtonian mechanics continues to be explanatory, and not simply because of classical-limit stuff in quantum mechanics.

The theistic story also explains why it is that Lagrangian mechanics was genuinely explanatory, despite not fitting well in the mechanistic model of explanation. This is, of course, an application of Leibniz's discussion of teleological explanation.

Geological reductionism

One way for a naturalist to respond to arguments from, say, morality (such as this argument) is to either deny that our moral perceptions are veridical or to reduce the moral to the non-moral, say to a sentiment.

One should see moves that deny the veridicality of a large class of our perceptions (illusionism), or that reduce apparently objective truths to subjective ones, as epistemically costly. One way to see this is to consider parallel responses that a straw man young earth creationist might make to geological arguments:

1. Illusionism: Of course, the earth looks like it's billions of years old, but that appearance is non-veridical, being the result of Satan's work at deceiving us into thinking creationism is false.
2. Reduction: If t is more than 10000 years ago, to affirm that a geological state S of affairs occurred at t is just to affirm that right now it looks as if S occurred at t.

On the correct epistemology, moves such as these should be quite costly. (The above are only straw man versions of young earth creationist responses. In fact, apparently the Satan response is in disrepute among young earth creationists and I have never heard anybody make the reduction response.)