Free Will and Determinism with Ruth Kastner

Ruth Kastner, PhD, is a member of the Foundations of Physics group at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is author of The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: The Reality of Possibility, Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles, and Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality.

Here she maintains that quantum indeterminacy is not quite the same as “randomness” and that it does allow for the possibility of free will, which is otherwise incompatible with a completely deterministic universe. Physics, however, has nothing to say about consciousness — a term that is not defined precisely in any physical theory. However, it is interesting to note that the “iceberg” metaphor used by Freud to describe the human subconscious can be equally applied to the ontological realm of possibility or “Quantumland” as defined in the Transactional Interpretation.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is a past vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology; and is the recipient of the Pathfinder Award from that Association for his contributions to the field of human consciousness exploration. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “Parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, 1980).

(Recorded on October 21, 2019)

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