Human-designed machines are engineered to perform reliably. If we run a computer program twice, we don't want it to turn up different answers. This must be true despite the fact that every transistor relies on quantum effects that are essentially stochastic. The trick used by electrical engineers is to make each transistor just large enough (many electrons involved with every switching event) such that quantum uncertainty almost never plays a role in the outcome. To make this quantitative: In today's microprocessors, each transistor is just a few hundred atoms across, so it contains perhaps a million atoms or less in all. The computer on which I do evolutionary simulations runs at 3.5 GHz, meaning that there are several billion switch events each second. If one of my simulations runs for a few minutes there are more than a trillion events, and any one of them could change the outcome. So the fact that these simulations run reliably means that the probability of a transistor being influenced by quantum randomness is much less than 1 in a trillion.
Contrast this with the way our brains work. Neurotransmitters are molecules that flip between two conformations, two very different shapes, dependent on their chemical and electrical environments. Kaufman has shown that most such molecules are "designed" (meaning "evolved") to be un reliable, in the sense that they jump with maximal ease between the two conformations, and they exist in the brain in a "superposition state". This is quantum jargon for saying that the atoms are in two places at once, their state is a mixture of the two conformations in a way that makes no sense to our intuitions that are attuned to macroscopic reality. The point is that electrical engineers determine to make each tiny component of a computer as reliable as possible, but nature seems to have gone out of her way to make our brains out of components that are as un reliable as possible. Kauffman interprets this to suggest that free will is a phenomenon that exists outside the realm of quantum wave functions (perhaps in a dualistic Cartesian or Platonic world), and that the brain is evolved to amplify the subtle quantum effects where our intent is capable of influence, and thus to allow our consciousness to shape our thoughts and (through neurons) control our muscular movements. This is also the premise of Stapp's books, mentioned above.
Technology
Machines work, by and large. We count on them as a matter of everyday experience. When we put a key in the ignition, we expect the car to start, and when we run a computer program twice, we don't expect to get different answers. But this is weak evidence for the Zeroth Law. Machines are engineered for a level of reliability that serves a specific market, and in critical applications, they have redundancies built in to assure fail-safe performance. The existence of so many high-tech devices that generally work is the source of an intuitive faith in the Zeroth Law, but if we ask more carefully about the meaning of their reliability, we can only conclude that the world is generally governed by physical laws that work with good precision and reliability most of the time.
Macroscopic miracles
"Miracles" by definition are exceptions to physical law, the quintessential counter-examples to the Zeroth Law of Science.
Miracles in the Bible and in stories of Sufis and Yogis and mystics of the East are abundant. It is difficult to verify any one of them, but the persistence of so many stories over so many centuries might be taken as more than wishful thinking by fallible humans. In his recent book Real Magic, Dean Radin makes a strong case (in my opinion) that some of these reports are credible.
A concerted program to test the Zeroth Law
I would never dispute that science is enormously useful. Science has, far and away, more explanatory power than any system of thought that mankind has ever devised. I can say this and still ask, Does science explain everything? Or does scientific law admit of exceptions? If we determine that there are exceptions, then we are moved to ask the next question, Can scientific methodology be expanded to encompass the exceptions? Or will the whole Scientific Project be subsumed in something larger and more broad-minded, in which experimental measurement and mathematical reasoning are two powerful ways of knowing about the world, but not the only ways.
A scientific program to validate or to falsify (or to reformulate) the Zeroth Law is perfectly feasible. It would require modest resources, in the context of today's Big Science. It would be humbling and instructive, and would certainly invite a level of discussion that is overdue, and might prove extremely fertile.
The Zeroth Law of Science is fundamental to our world view, not just as scientists but as people. It affects our concept of life and our place in the universe and what (if anything) we might expect after death. It impacts our tolerance for non-scientific views of the world, and it touches on questions about the limits of what we know now, and what we can know in the future. In this time when the world is so terrifyingly poised on the brink of eco-suicide or thermonuclear disaster or political or social chaos, we may feel that we need a miracle to carry us past the crisis to a saner world. In the words of Charles Eisenstein, "A miracle is something that is impossible from one's current understanding of reality and truth, but that becomes possible from a new understanding."
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* Quote from Richard Feynman: "Philosophers have said that if the same circumstances don't always produce the same results, predictions are impossible and science will collapse. Here is a circumstance that produces different results: identical photons are coming down in the same direction to the same piece of glass. We cannot predict whether a given photon will arrive at A or B. All we can predict is that out of 100 photons that come down, an average of 4 will be reflected by the front surface. Does this mean that physics, a science of great exactitude, has been reduced to calculating only the probability of an event, and not predicting exactly what will happen? Yes. That's a retreat, but that's the way it is: Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed."
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