Thinking about thinking about physics, part 2...

In my introductory post of this series, I noted how Roger G. Newton is what I call a "chaste realist" (C.R.) and that, as such, his instinctive realism is at odds with his crypto-Kantian idealism. As I noted in the introductory post, Newton's thinking about physics is largely deflationary, in the sense that, at the end of the day, even the strangest scientific discoveries and theories can and should be reconciled as closely as possible with common sense (i.e. realism about the world and our knowledge of it). The following are informal characterizations, but I think they will make my basic point.

A C.R. is someone that, so to speak, wants realism to be true, but who is also aware of how far from reality scientific theories can be and are. Secretly, a C.R. knows science is on the right path and that normal science tells us important, lasting things about the real, mind-independent world. A C.R. cannot bring himself to subscribe to scientism, since he admits the ontological limitations of scientific claims are tied up with their origin in human cognition. C.R.s recognize that idealization, pragmatic selectivity, aesthetic bias, and so on, effect scientific paradigms, but they insist the general thrust of scientific inquiry tracks reality better than most, if not all other, methods of reasoning. On the other hand, a C.R. rejects constructivism and most of the non-progressive, anti-realist theory of science (as espoused by Duhem, Carnap. Hempel, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Van Fraassen, Giere, et al.). Scientific standards and conceptions may be relative to human "users" of science, but that does not entail the former are relativistic and fictional. In effect, C.R.s say to the regnant anti-realist regime in the philosophy of science, "If we promise not to claim too much for science as a 'truth engine', can we be allowed to accept scientific findings as 'true enough'?"

So, I'm calling Newton a chaste realist. I'll begin by noting his realism. First of all, Newton has i) ambitious aims for scientific explanation (Se). Se must not be mere description. For instance, Newton argues, even if we discovered that physical constants changed, as Paul Dirac and others have suggested based on the expansion of the universe, "we would still have to search for an underlying time-independent law that would account for the specific way in which these constants vary with time. Physics never regards history itself as a sufficient explanation of any fundamental change" (Thinking About Physics [TP], p. 10).

Likewise, ii) Se is about more than the pragmatic success of science. "What justifies our confidence in the basis soundness of the entire [scientific] structure," Newton writes, "is its coherence, an intellectual coherence that includes consistency with all the experiences and expectations founded on it, the fulfillment of precise, far-reaching predictions implied by it, and the functioning of all the technology built on its basis" (p. 19, my italics). Newton's claim contains a number of overly realist quantificational implications, which ultimately are at odds with the chastity of his realism, about which more later.

In any case, Newton continues with a point which strikes, wittingly or unwittingly, against a main pillar of the crude scientism prevalent in much of Western society, namely, the 'argument' that "Science Works, Bitch!" As Newton says, however, "[t]o point out that science works, in the sense that we readily watch television..., is, of course, the most banal of the answers we can give to those who question the truth of science... [though] it is an important component of the coherence of physics" (p. 19). These claims indicate how, for Newton, scientific truth is not merely a matter of technical success or "better living through science," but rather derives from the ambition of making sense of the world by way of science itself. Coherence, as Newton describes it in "the broad sense above... is the basis for claiming truth as the goal of physics-- not as an attainment, but as an aim" (p. 20). Lawrence Sklar, in Theory and Truth, makes almost exactly the same claim, so I hope to discuss both authors in tandem at some point.

Lest the above seem too theoretical, I should note that "the philosophy of science" is not Newton's focus. Rather, his focus is largely on how to reconcile the oddity of quantum theory (QT) with the mainstream of historical scientific claims. For instance, he denies that QT undermines good ole fashioned Newtonian determinism in the popular "spooky" way many people think, since "[q]uantum mechanics is as deterministic as classical mechanics" and that the truly weird things about QT--namely, entanglement--"originates in the wave-particle duality" (pp. 22-23). Indeed, "while part of what is meant by entanglement would obtain for any probabilistic theory... other parts [of QT] go further and are caused by phase correlations" (p. 23). Such entanglement, free of the wave-particle duality, does not strike us as odd for wave dynamics proper, so, as I mentioned in the introductory post, it is Newton's implicit aim to demystify the weirdness of QT by situating it in the larger context of physical statistics as such. A crucial premise in Newton's deflationary QT, is that "reality at the everyday level has to be distinguished from reality at the submicroscopic level" (p. 26).

This is a striking claim, and one with profound philosophical implications. Since, as always, my time is running short before I must head to class, I will close this post without getting any deeper into Newton's own claims in TP. In the next post I will connect Newton's premise about the macro-/microscopic cleft in reality (or the MMC) with its larger philosophical implications from an Aristotelian perspective (mainly by citing Wolfgang Smith's The Quantum Enigma and David Oderberg's Real Essentialism).

Stay tuned.

The halting halting halting halting halting halting…

…problem.

This an argument I think I devised while teaching this morning. I say I think I devised it, since it is still so tentative that I need to present what the strands to see if it is even an argument, or rather just an observation, sprung, like so much, from my endless ignorance.

So.

I was thinking about the halting problem (HP) (I'll save you the click):

In computability theory, the halting problem can be stated as follows: Given a description of a computer program, decide whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever. This is equivalent to the problem of deciding, given a program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt when run with that input, or will run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist.

(Here is a delightful proof of the halting problem, for those of you seeking reading materials for your children.)

Now, here was my wondering:

Assuming that "the mind is the brain and the brain is a computer"––a thesis which I do not accept (cf. e.g. Schulman, Searle, Tallis, Dreyfus, Ross, Bougis, et al.)––, but for argument's sake, say that the thesis of the computational mind (TCM) is true.

If TCM is true, then there is nothing in the brain itself qua algorithmic engine, to halt its own computations. A stop would only come from outside influences, say, if all sensory input were blocked, or if so many portions of the brain were mangled that the brain simply shut down.

Which brings us to a second prong of the inquiry: the modularity of the mind (MoM).

I think that TCM nearly goes hand in hand with MoM these days, since it is a lemma of TCM that the "programmer" of the mind is blind natural selection, and therefore there is no "central programmer" for making a unified mind. This lemma is extended in research programs about the modality of the mind. What biological sub-systems still exist in the human nervous system and comprise the modular mind? Apart from the different lobes of the brain (visual, somatic, motor, etc.), there are also cognitive modules that are all vestiges of earlier cognizant organisms, and just happen to be confined in one space––the human cranium––by natural selection. The mind is a "kludge", as some would put it. The mind is actually just a quilt of neural-cognitive modules which have tended to increase reproductive success in humanoid populations over time.

Fine. We'll take TCM and MoM as true for the purpose of argument. What follows?

If the mind is the brain and the mind is a computer, then the mind:brain is subject to HP.

If the modules of the human brain:mind are themselves kids-of-minds by virtue of being algorithmic engines, differing from "the human brain" on in degree, then human neural-cognitive modules (hNCM) are subject to HP. This is modus ponens.

If, however, the brain, either as an agglomerate of hNCM or as any one hNCM, is subject to HP, it (or they) should never halt in any algorithmic state. hNCM do/does not, however, endlessly "fail to halt", therefore…. This modus tollens, but I must elaborate on some conditional conclusions.

Since human cognition does not endlessly fail-to-halt––otherwise, how do we perform any action?––, but our behavior is governed by hNCM, then something peculiar is happening in our mind:brain. Enter my hypothesis.

Even if we grant humans are governed wholly by hNCM, we can see why humans have free will. If each hNCM is its own little non-halting Turing machine (á la TCM), then none of them should ever halt in a concrete decision. Halting is a function of decidability, but purely algorithmic halting is undecidable. So, how does/do our hNCM ever halt? From MoM, we must treat each hNCM as an external environment to every other hNCM. It is because our hNCM mutually interact that they can halt in ways that produce our unified-modular behavior.

The upshot is that there is a radical indeterminacy in the total hNCM nexus known as our consciousness, yet one that does not generate simple randomness––and this is the basic meaning of free will: non-random indeterminacy. The competing pre-halting computations of our hNCM lead to a dynamic series of non-random but non-deterministic actions aka our selves. Interestingly, even research into the irrational biases of hNCM itself relies on a standard of rationality that surpasses those very biases: we are not determined by our modular biases, although our modular mind is wholly physically deterministic. Even the mind:brains of cognitive scientists defending TCM indicate the non-random, non-deterministic nature of human consciousness.

This is akin to Robert Kane's account of free will, in that at any moment of conscious decision (note that MoM-TCM accounts for unconscious decision processes), we are literally an indeterminate, yet wholly physical, complex of unhalted, unweighted decision variables. Once the mutual interference among hNCM generates a halting state which propagates non-centrally but uniformly through the mind:brain, we act freely. We act because hNCM halt; we act freely because there is nothing deterministic about hNCM qua computational algorithm engines. The understanding of chance qua the overlapping of otherwise disparate causal chains goes back to Aristotle, and it is that sense of indeterminate causality which I invoke here. We are free because––assuming TCM-MoM––there is an intrinsically indeterminate congeries of hNCM which could not function unless they mutually limited each other. A jumble of indeterminate rational engines produces a stream of rational action.

So, I propose that free will is intelligible even on a materialist account of the brain, and certainly intelligible on a non-materialist account of human existence. Regardless which ontology of persons is true, the doctrine of rational, human free will is true.

How the future shapes the past…

1. Retrodictively

2. Counterfactually (Retrodictively*)

3. Spatiotemporally

4. Ethically

In more detail…

1. Cf. Aristotle and Diodorus on the master argument.

What happens tomorrow makes true or false what you say today.

2. Cf. Nick Huggett's Everywhere and Everywhen, Hempel's theories, Musser's Scientific American article on free will, etc.

I think Musser's invocation of the block universe to explain retroaction is probably fallacious. I'd have to re-read the article, but the problem basically is this: the whole point of the (Minkowskian) block universe is that time is static, and therefore it's illicit to say action a at time t', after time ti, alters the conditions for action C(A) at time t. In a block universe, nothing changes.

Even so, it is not all that startling a claim that we can alter prior conditions. It is a possible property of our universe at time t-alpha (the putative origin of spacetime as we know it) that from the initial conditions Ci, there will occur X number of sandwich-eatings. It is also a possible property of the universe at time t-alpha that it will contain X' number of sandwich-eating events. If tomorrow I eat a sandwich, and then at some time t-omega the universe ends and the sandwich-eatings are tallied, I'll have brought the number to X. If, however, I don't eat a sandwich, the number will end up as X'. So whatever I do , I will decide a property of the universe at time-alpha, even though I am vastly far removed from it in spacetime.

His point about the impossibility of copying oneself, due to quantum indeterminacy, was, however, extremely apt. Down with Moravec! Down with Kurzweil! The singularity will not be televised!

Further, in any case, there is this worry: if a natural law's "authority" is based on its holding good at all times (i.e. ∃x∀t(Lx(t))), then a law can only said to be lawful if it holds at all times including all future times. Therefore, a law's putative lawfulness depends now on its holding-good at any and all future times. So a law's present status depends on future conditions.

In addition, Huggett discusses how a (hypothetical) future state of affairs (SoA), accessible by a time machine, would render certain SoA in the present impossible. E.g., my going into the time portal now at time t would be rendered impossible by my future self's persuading my past self not to enter the time portal at time t–x. Likewise, my entering the time portal in a red T-shirt at t would be rendered impossible by my future self deciding and succeeding to prevent my past-self-in-a-red-T-shirt from entering the time portal at t–1.

3. Some of what makes STR true is the general theory of relativity (GTR), but what makes GTR true is the total state of the cosmos at any formulation or enunciation of GTR. Thus, the truth of GTR depends on factors in the universe to which STR says no one can have access. In other words, we know GTR is true because it extends to the STR-relative states of the universe anywhere, but knowing GTR is true in that way transcends the limits STR says we cannot transcend. To be more precise, GTR's truth-being-made depends on factors operant in the cosmos even at times beyond which we could possibly observe. On earth we never see the sun immediately (without telescopes, etc.), but are always seeing it as it was about eight minutes earlier. This means the sun's current SoA is in the future relative to us. The same holds for cosmic factors even farther removed than the sun. GTR is true in the present based on the operant actuality of future phenomena.

4. What I do now can easily be modulated or negated by its impact on the future. Being green, for example, has (perhaps) everything to do with being ethically responsible towards our progeny (i.e. towards the future as an ethical condition on the present).

Reasons ≠ causes ∴ rational will is free

Reasons are not causes. Inhalation of propane beyond inhalation of oxygen was the cause of John's death. The reason for John's death was his desire to commit suicide. The "desire (reason) to commit suicide" results in innumerably diverse states of affairs, but an innumerable diversity of results is not a sign of a true cause-effect relationship. Nor does it follow from "wanting to kill oneself" that one will 1) walk over, 2) touch the oven, 3) turn on the gas, etc. But inhalation of propane beyond intake of oxygen is a cause of human death. Reasons are not causes, therefore the will is free.

Integrity is not a given, but gives freedom...

"Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that it usually does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen."

-- Flannery O'Connor, author's note to *Wise Blood* 2nd ed.

Integrity is the making-whole of many. Freedom is the "quantum collapse" of many possibilities--sheer potency--into a unified new whole. That humans are determined at every moment in their physiology and sensation is a given. That the power of free will does not derive from physiology and sensation is the thesis of libertarianism. For it is not without the integrating power of will--as an ordered appetition--that there is a human subject to be determined.

I borned...

I reach for a jar of marmelade.

On a compatibilist reading, I am unfree but not unnaturally coerced to perform this action. It springs from my every impulse, which springs from my ever-conditioning environment. I would not choose to eat the marmelade without my determined background, but, crucially for compatibilists, my marmelade would not be chosen to be eaten without me being the transeunt agent.

I emerge from my mother's womb and then enter a grave.

On a compatibilist reading, I am unfree but not unnaturally coerced to perform these actions. I would not undergo these changes apart from the determining factors behind them, but, as well, they would not occur except by me (qua transeunt agent).

Yet birth and death are not actions we perform, therefore compatibilism is false.

For,
if the conditions for a "free and rational" action, on compatibilism, are equally satisfied by my birth and death and by any choice (e.g. my choice of condiments),
but birth and death are not properly actions,
then compatibilism's account of actions is fatally flawed,
and compatibilism (qua theory of action) is defeated.

Ease as mark of truth…

"I decided to be a determinist because it's just easier. I can stop analyzing "why" I did this or that and simply accept the fact that my willing at any moment is the confluence of countless prior influences, conscious and unconscious. In a clip of Christopher Hitchens discussing global warming, notice how the phrasing of the question––"missing the boat"––leads to him using the word "boat" in his reply (or should I say leads him to using the word?). If challenged about his lack of rhetorical ingenuity, Hitchens would probably just shrug and say, "Well, there's determinism for you." Determinism, therefore, is true because it allows us to mesh most naturally with our environment."

Class, discuss.

I will suggest the following, though: the above comments make what I think is the deepest ontological error in determinism, namely, the claim that there is some puny, passive subject, which is constantly influenced by its environment, yet which does not add anything to that environment. The "self" in determinism is like the beam of light reflected in a mirror: a reality which allegedly only exists at its entry and exit points in the visible spectrum.

Also, while there is some truth (!) in the pragmatic thesis that "the true is the workable", since goodness is an analogue of being and both are unified in truth (and vice versa in all three directions), the very difficulty of "working out" certain interrelated claims is a sign of their truth (quantum mechanics, trinitarian theology, the "place" of the will [as if it were a spatiotemporal entity to begin with!], etc.). Further, the harmony, the functional resonance, which we experience in grasping the true does not mean the true is the useful; for some things are known to be true by their beauty, a beauty which of itself preempts pragmatic lechery. What is "it" good for? Shut up, philistine, and accept that its pragmatic vacuity is precisely the sign of its alethic dignity. A remaining snag is how to meet the utilitarian claim that even the "purely beautiful" is 'useful' in the utilitarian sense. Then again, that seems to be so much a concession to the classical view of beauty qua truth qua goodness as to be more a surrender than a challenge to metaphysics.

P.S. A clue that pragmatic success does not amount to truth: doping in the 1980 Olmypics.

Wer kann solch ein abgekartes Spiel nicht spielen?

(Or, loosely, "two can play at that game.")

I believe the citation is to be found in Robert Kane's introduction to free will, which is not with me at the moment: Nietzsche once called free will the greatest self-deception of all time. Nietzsche, as you may or may not know, wrote a lot about "self-deception" and its role in normal human behavior. By normal, of course, Nietzsche meant only dubious convention, the socially triangulated willfulness of some to control and shame others. Free will is a self-deception partly because it sunders, in Nietzsche's eyes, the eternal unity of each of us with everything else. "Die Lehre von der Freiheit des Willens," Nietzsche asserts, "ist eine Erfindung herrschender Stände" (Werke I - Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, "Der Wanderer" 9, 6. Aufl. Frankfurt/M u. a.: Ullstein, 1969, S. 877 (II, II)). ["The doctrine of the freedom of the will is an invention of the ruling classes."]

Recent experiences had me pondering the dubious motives behind that other great self-deception––if we're going to play the "philosophy by suspicion" game, I mean––, namely, determinism. For, if we can treat all viewpoints as but fragile shells of rhetoric placed over deeper, self-serving motives, how can we not see determinism––the denial that one has freedom to form one's own character in certain instances––as the peak of self-serving rhetoric? How convenient it is to be able to say, "It was not I, but my genes, not I, but my upbringing, not I, but my environment"! I know a retired lawyer who now believes the entire legal-penal system is just a social sham, a power game, and should be radically reformed, if not totally scrapped, in light of the truth that humans lack free will. Awfully convenient: the legal-penal system is a scandal only after one has completed one's very lucrative career in it. Fortunately, of course, not even that bit of self-deception is blameworthy, since our man had no choice but to be a hypocrite.

My critique is not, I believe, a very novel insight, but it is something worth keeping in mind. The usual slant in these debates is that hard determinists are actually more compassionate, more reasonable, more cutting-edge, and the like, since they seek to dissolve musty old conventions like "morality," "guilt," "responsibility," "law," "punishment," etc. with more humane ideas like "reform," "acceptance," "quarantine," and so on. It's always hip to be Buddhist, and, allegedly, the Buddhist thing to do is simply to accept everyone's so-called failings, without adding punishment and social rage to their already pitiful fate (cf. this Wiki link and this essay [PDF!] for some corrective data). The problem, though, is that even this tack resolves back into the schema of praise and blame, since compassionate determinism is proposed as the morally praiseworthy course of action. The self-deception does not stop there, however, for another major benefit of compassionate determinism is that one is granted a pardon for all one's failings. Adultery? No problem! We know you didn't mean it: we know you could not have done otherwise. Fraud? Same pass. Murder? Pass. Holocaust? Er, well, uh….

This ambivalence about "forgiving oneself" and yet making just condemnations of "truly evil people" (like Hitler) ran through Einstein's life. Consider these quotations from Einstein:

"An Freiheit des Menschen im philosophischen Sinne glaube ich keineswegs. Jeder handelt nicht nur unter äußerem Zwang sondern auch gemäß innerer Notwendigkeit. … Schopenhauers Spruch: 'Ein Mensch kann zwar tun, was er will, aber nicht wollen, was er will', hat mich seit meiner Jugend lebendig erfüllt und ist mir beim Anblick und beim Erleiden der Härten des Lebens immer ein Trost gewesen und eine unerschöpfliche Quelle der Toleranz" (Albert Einstein, Mein Weltbild. Zürich: Ullstein, 2005, S. 9).

["By no means do I believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense. Everyone acts not only from external compulsion but also from internal necessity. … Schopenhauer's dictum: 'A man can certainly do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants', has (ful)filled my life since youth and has always been a comfort in the face of suffering the hard things in life, as well as being an inexhaustible source of tolerance."]

Never mind that Einstein also vocally condemned the Nazis during and after the War for their moral wrongdoing. Somehow, "our" lack of free will is a pitiful fact, while "their" misuse of freedom is an onerous truth. Either way the polarity is a useful fiction for those who wish to be among the morally ruling class ("ist eine nützliche Erfindung der, die dem sittlich herrschenden Stände gehören möchten").

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An addendum to a post I wrote earlier about determinism and astrology:

"Unser Handeln sei getragen von dem stets lebendigen Bewußtsein, daß die Menschen in ihrem Denken, Fühlen und Tun nicht frei sind, sondern ebenso kausal gebunden wie die Gestirne in ihren Bewegungen."

["Our behavior is borne by the always living consciousness that humans are not free in their thinking, feeling and doing, but rather are as causally bound as the stars in their motions."]

–– aus Einstein sagt. Alice Calaprice (Hrsg.), München/Zürich: Piper, 1997, S. 177.

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An related addendum, c/o a reader:

Freedom…

Freedom perfects nature.

This was an epiphany.

Perhaps the most vivid and obvious example: Saving sex for marriage, as a free sacrifice of one's natural and good urges, perfects the natural enjoyment of sex.

Ein voller Bauch studiert nicht gern –– also an epiphany, but of the more "cynical" flavor.

If human nature (h) is wholly and merely a combination (result) of one's environment (e) and one's genetic inheritance (g), then the determinacy of h is but a function of the determinacy of e and g.

Since e is radically indeterminate with respect to teleological embodiment (i.e. rational control), h is radically contingent. Further, since g is contingent upon e–-e.g. the manifestation of "lung cancer genes" based on the inhalation of urban pollution or many cigarettes––, h is as indeterminate as g.

Imagine e, h, and g as the corners of a triangle, the triangle of real human existence (r). There is an inverse proportion between the indeterminacy of any corner and the other two. (Does Newton's three-body problem further accentuate the indeterminacy of r? I have the impression that the three-body problem is more tractable in quantum mechanics… that that mechanics is itself rife with indeterminacy, by most accounts.)

□e ∧ □g ⊃ □h

(~□e ∧ □g) ∨ (□e ∧ ~□g)

∴ ~(□e ∧ □g)

∴ ~□h

e ∧ g ⊃ h

◊~g ∧ ◊~h ∴ ◊~h

∴ h is not determinate

+++ an HTML addendum +++
& #9633; is □
alt+shift+v is ◊
& #8226; is •

& #9744; is ☐

And you may find yourself...

"…you will encounter words like 'encairned', 'decensive', 'quotha', 'perforce', 'wroth', 'guerdon', and 'aye '(used like pepper throughout the text), all of which may be summed up in Haines' funniest quote, 'Man, what art thou at?'"
-- from a review of Aurelius' Meditations at Amazom.com

It reminded me of this song, though I don't know why:



Which song reminded me of these fellows, though I have a slightly clearer reason why:

In other news, tonight as I ate my dinner I realized arguments/writings for free will before the advent of quantum indeterminacy and stochastic processes would be much more entertaining. The recent deluge of evidence for indeterminism has made things almost too easy, don't you think? Granted, elite indeterminists like Peter Van Inwagen and Robert Kane, et al.,––did Van Inwagen really coin "indeterminism"?––avoid relying on quantum indeterminacy for their accounts of freewill, which is why I respect them so much. Someone like Stanley Jaki, by contrast, entirely rejects the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and yet still defends freewill in a deterministic universe. That's my mentor, them's balls! (For the record, Jaki and I both did crew in high school.)

Determinism is held, despite the evidence, based only on the cognitive limits of our current understanding of science. "Even though a coin toss is spoken of as proabiistic, in fact, each specific coin toss has a deterministic outcome. If only we could know enough about its initial conditions, we could know its outcome exactly. We're just waiting for science to catch up with man's deepest, deterministic intuitions." The problem is that, even aside from the quantum indeterminacy we would face at the (…admittedly only currently…) lowest level of analysis, this Laplacian insight would still be subject to human finitude, since a skeptic could just as reasonably argue, "Even though a coin toss is spoken of as deterministic, in fact, each specific coin toss has a stochastic outcome. If only we could know enough about its initial conditions, we could know its outcome is probabilistic, like all of physical nature. We're just waiting for science to catch up with man's deepest, indeterministic intuitions."

Show…

Show that (1) human nature is not reducible to its natural components, then show (2) how human agency flows from human nature. (3) Call the view "natural freedom" or "substance compatibilism". This would be slightly different from mere agent-causation, since a great deal of natural freedom occurs subconsciously, but does not, from (1), thereby reduce to irrational mechanism. Free will is not about doing, or being able to do, whatever is imaginable, but about the grounds for action which accords with a nature that is suffused with rational entelechies.

The fourth step, which could be mounted before (1), actually, or anywhere after it, is to show that (4) determinism is false as such. It's simply not true. Where we go from there depends on whether we have a viable theory of nature and causation, which is where (1)–(3) come in. What an agent is, is not reducible to its material genesis, even if such materiality were deterministic and, in turn, what an agent does can only be explained by what it is. So, if an appropriate agent is substantially rational––i.e. his rational teleology informs his material existence even apart from concrete acts of conscious reason––, then his action is substantially free.

Only one possible…

…necessary contingency?

Read the words again: "only one possible [X]" means necessarily one X.

Let us define determinism (D) as the doctrine that

at time t there is only one possible configuration of the world (C:W) after t (C:W_t+). Everything at time t_C:W is a direct and necessary result of the C:W at t.

Tonight I smelled a difficulty in this notion, which I want to address briefly. I need more time to ponder it in depth.

If we accept D, as defined above, we deny it is possible for C:W at t to result in anything other than C:W_t+. The problem I detect is twofold, however.

First, if D is true, then necessitarianism is true, and necessity exhausts modality, which makes possibility a vacuous notion (and an unreality). As such, D should be restated as D*, namely,

at time t there is only one configuration of the world (C:W) at any time other than t (C:W_t*).

Notice the absence of both the word "possible" and the removal of any sense of futurity.

Second, what is the ontological status of the future in D? If C:W_t+ is not yet actual, then D* entails that C:W necessarily results in a non-actual (i.e. merely potential) state of affairs (SOA). As such, C:W necessarily entails complete potentiality, in which case D is false. The future does not yet exist, and therefore does not really exist, which means D can only posit a world that engenders nonexistent SOAs, if it engenders anything at all.

Now, if the reply is to grant the existence of the future as an eternal dimension of the 4D spacetime manifold (á la Minkowski space), then we raise enormous questions about how valid it is to say geometric models literally embody the world. "The map is not the territory," as Korzybski would have it. Geometry may be useful for making sense of broad swaths of data, but that does not mean the geometry is really "the way the world is." After all, Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics are still valid in most contexts, but that does not mean we (should) believe they truly, literally, indexically manifest "the way the world is." So it is with Minkowskian geometry: useful in practice, provisional in reality.

Thus, once again we are thrown back to the radical freedom of the explorer, even in his acts of "scientifically demonstrating" the truth of D. It is up to him (!) which 'dialect' of geometry he will use, what standards of rational warrant to which he will hold himself, which data he will favor or ignore, and so on. If such exploration is not really up to him, but is instead a blind clutching at the only paths he can cognitively tread, then either his (scientific) rationality is a sham (cf. e.g. this abstract) or it is but a tiny rivulet of the cosmos' total active consciousness, both conclusions which seriously undermine materialist scientism.

+ + +

On a different front, I realized today I want to make it a habit to use the following expression, "Ours is a world which is currently described by most scientists as x, y, and z." A mouthful I know, but the more compact, more 'obvious' locution is just a bumper sticker for scientism: "Science proves the world is x, y, and z."

+ + +

Another thought I had, modus tollens: if humans are determined by what they perceive, but if perception is indeterminate, then humans are not psychologically determined.

I ask you to give me the value of √-2. You say…?

I ask you to describe the angles and dimensions of a Necker cube.

You tell me…?

I ask you to identify the highest staircase in an Escher house.

You tell me…?

In each case, what you sense does not, in principle, determine how you perceive it. Indeed, all perception is transcendentally rational. Therefore, perception––stimuli––cannot simply determine your behavior. You are a generative locus of perceptual uniqueness. You are free.

+ + +

Have been brainstorming about my lecture this Sunday. I have been asked to answer the question, "Do humans have freewill?"

There are two ways to answer this question (in the affirmative).

First, assuming that freewill is incompatible with determinism, show that determinism is false and therefore freewill abides by default. In other words, if determinism were true, our experience could not be what it is, but our experience is manifestly what it is, therefore determinism is false. This is, I gather, Van Inwagen's approach in An Essay on Free Will, a copy of which I hope to have by next week.

Second, take stock of broad, consistent features of human behavior and then see if they are coherent without freewill. If not, then freewill follows as manifestly as the features of human consciousness by which it functions. Determinism would be a function of freewill, as the proof for determinism would be among the other dimensions, or fruits, of free human consciousness.

Well, if they gots it...

...I know I gots it!

Old news for the doggedly intellectual but still interesting.

Defending free will: A fruit fly makes choices (Reuters, By Julie Steenhuysen, CHICAGO | Wed May 16, 2007)

Lacking external input, Brembs said he had expected a pattern of entirely random movement or noise -- akin to static on a radio that is tuned between stations. Instead, the flies showed a pattern of flight that was generated spontaneously by the brain and could not have been random.

"The decision for the fly to turn left or turn right, which it changes all the time, has to come from the design of the brain," Brembs said. ...

George Sugihara, a mathematical biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego..., said the pattern of variability shown by the fly's choices revealed a non-linear signature -- something typical of many biological processes.

"We show free will 'can' exist, but we do not 'prove' it does," Sugihara said.

"Our results eliminate two alternative explanations of this spontaneous turning behavior that would run counter to free will, namely randomness and pure determinism," he said in an e-mail.

He said the results address the middle ground between simple determinism -- the brain as an input-output machine -- and utterly random behavior.

"We speculate that if free will exists, it is in this middle ground," he said.

On the other hand, if I think I don't gots it, you better watch your wallet, or I'll gets it!

Scientists say free will probably doesn't exist, but urge: "Don't stop believing!" (Scientific American, Jesse Bering | Apr 6, 2010)

One of the most striking findings to emerge recently in the science of free will is that when people believe—or are led to believe—that free will is just an illusion, they tend to become more antisocial. ...

Vohs and Schooler’s findings reveal a rather strange dilemma facing social scientists: if a deterministic understanding of human behavior encourages antisocial behavior, how can we scientists justify communicating our deterministic research findings? In fact, there’s a rather shocking line in this Psychological Science article, one that I nearly overlooked on my first pass. Vohs and Schooler write that:

If exposure to deterministic messages increases the likelihood of unethical actions, then identifying approaches for insulating the public against this danger becomes imperative.

Perhaps you missed it on your first reading too, but the authors are making an extraordinary suggestion. They seem to be claiming that the public “can’t handle the truth,” and that we should somehow be protecting them (lying to them?) about the true causes of human social behaviors. ...

If [a] deterministic understanding of [a licentious] man’s behaviors leads you to feel even a smidgeon more sympathy for him than you otherwise might have had, that reaction is precisely what Vohs and Schooler are warning us about. How can we fault this “pack of neurons”—let alone punish him—for acting as his nature dictates, even if our own nature would have steered us otherwise? What’s more, shouldn’t we be more sympathetic of our own moral shortcomings? After all, we can’t help who we are either. Right?

In fact, a study published last year in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Roy Baumeister and his colleagues found that simply by exposing people to deterministic statements such as, “Like everything else in the universe, all human actions follow from prior events and ultimately can be understood in terms of the movement of molecules” made them act more aggressively and selfishly compared to those who read statements endorsing the idea of free will....

Dream job?

A couple weeks ago my girlfriend (yes, I have a girlfriend, it's not a secret, nor is it a subtle metaphor) notified me of an ad at an online classified website seeking... wait for it... a tutor in philosophy with... wait for it... both a focus on Kant's thought and... wait for it... the freedom-determinism debate! And the pay is more than adequate. I thought it was a prank. How much more fitting could it be? "Must speak good Chinese and excellent English... a background in humanities or philosophy or law... Etc." Long story short, after some flirting about an answer and providing samples of my writing, I and the contact arranged a meeting this morning. Well, sort of a meeting. (Who is Keyser Söze?)

Good news: I got the gig!

It's a week(end)ly 2.5-hour lecture-seminar that will be held at the man's house, with his daughter and her boyfriend, and perhaps the mother, in attendance. After the "heavy vetting session" this morning--during which I did not meet the man himself, but only his daughter and her boyfriend, and during which we spoke for over two hours on the fly without a single text--, I headed to a bookstore to get a few resources. I ended up getting a small book in Chinese on Kant (since I want to be clear on his terminology in Chinese), Pockett, et al. (eds.) Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?, and Mele (ed.) The Philosophy of Action. Needless to say (...), I have numerous other texts on my bookshelves and in my hard drive which I shall study and use for the seminars.

They mentioned that Powerpoint-style lectures would be nice (that's Asian politeness for "Use Powerpoint or die," I believe). Tonight I was also told I am to lecture in Chinese, though I know their English is good enough to read and understand my notes or desperate forays into English as I try to explain things I already barely grasp in a foreign language. I realized how worthwhile it will be to start assembling such lecture materials now, which I am sure I can use in the future, during grad school and beyond. Meanwhile, these seminars will sharpen my dialectical skills, give me constant material for my book(s) on these topics, and improve my Chinese by having to lecture and debate in that tongue, albeit with those occasional desperate trench-dives into English. So? I'm basically the research assistant for a seemingly very well-off retired man with a tickle, I suspect, to be convinced that determinism is wrong. Next week's topic is twofold: 1) Do humans have free will? 2) What have scientists (esp. in the past 100 years or so) said about determinism?

I now want to record a few notes from this morning's discussion (the conversation more or less followed the order below, though I have streamlined it to cut out the usual back and forth recursion of such conversations):

• The fourfold nature of the debate [not that this begins to capture all the nuances!]: 1. incompatibilist determinism (ID), 2. incompatibilist indeterminism (II), 3. compatibilist determinism (CD), 4. compatibilist indeterminism (CI). (I think I invented the fourth category rather on the spot.) If these views could talk, they would say:

1. ID: All things in our world, including humans, happen by necessity from antecedent causes, therefore human action happens by necessity from antecedent causes and free will is at best an illusion.
2. II: While it may be true that all things in our world happen by necessity from antecedent causes, certain dimensions of human action are exempt from this principle, therefore free human action does not happen by necessity from antecedent causes.
3. CD: While all things in our world, including human actions, happen by necessity from antecedent causes, human action is still "free" in the sense that if and when it emerges from humans as genuine members of the causal matrix.
4. CI: The world is not determinist in the way ID, II, and CD suppose, but human action is not therefore free: things just happen.

• If determinism (D) is the doctrine that all states of affairs (SOA) necessarily result from antecedent causes, then from what SOA did the initial conditions of the whole world (C_i:W) result? If C_i:W is supposed simply to exist from all time, then D is not true for all SOA. If C_i:W simply comes to be for reasons we do not know, and which perhaps we cannot in principle articulate, then why can't other SOA (such as my own actions) result in the same way?


• The IDist wants to corner me between two articles of faith: first, that all my actions happen for compelling psychological reasons which "overrun" my rational free will, and, second, even if we don't know what such causes are for any case, they still exert their power on my will by 'occult' means. Imagine my consciousness as the hub of a cartwheel: it is frozen in place by the n psychological factors impinging on my power to act. For some reason, though, some spokes are "thicker" (i.e. stronger) than others, and therefore induce my will to move in line with their perceived vector. The problem, however, is that we must now ask what factor accounts for the greater thickness of some spokes (call them ego-spokes) versus others. So... we posit more occult spokes (them id-spokes or meta-spokes) around the dominant ego-spoke supposedly manifested in my action. But, then... what induced those id- or meta-spokes to influence the dominant ego-spokes? And so on, ad infinitum. Eventually the IDist will just say, "It's the universe, stupid," in other words, it's the entire SOA of the whole world which caused my action. This, unfortunately, is no more illuminating than saying, "You chose what you chose because you are the kind of person who chooses such things, and you live in a world which generates people like you." Oh. I see.


• Add to this the problem that, every time you nudge me to explain how my decision is determined by psychological factors beyond my control, you thereby expand my self-awareness and sharpen my rational agency by allowing me to be even more keenly, and thus freely, introspective, about my motives. If by such means I asymptotically reach a reflective equilibrium, which includes a humble awareness of my savory and less-than-savory inclinations, and make a full self-aware decision F, and yet you still insist I did F for some motive that's not even possible for me to be aware of... well, this begs the question: Are motives which are not consciously felt and not even unconsciously detectable really "motives" at all? If I act based on occult factors which plague me despite my best rational efforts, you might as well say I have demons. Actually, being told I have demons would be better, since at least then I'd have even more radically expanded self-awareness and publicly rational means for exorcising them and augmenting my freedom. If D can be true based on a promissory complete science which we only asymptotically achieve, then by the same token, ID can be true as a promissory, asymptotic victory. If it's only rational to accept beliefs based on adequate, if not compelling, empirical evidence, could it ever in principle be rational to espouse D (especially considering free will informs not only the myriad of normal human encounters, but also pervades our self-consciousness as agents)?


• Gödel. Say I devise a system S of five axioms: 1. A = A. 2. A ≠ B. 3. B = B. 4. A = D. 5. A = D. Fine. But then for S to be consistent, I need to add an axiom that no other axioms can be added which might compromise my axioms under different conditions. So then I have axiom 6: This is the last axiom of S. How would I secure this finality without a seventh axiom, though? On the completeness side of things, notice that I did not give an axiom for the sequence of 1-->5, nor that D in axiom 4 is the same D as in axiom 5 (or that A in axiom 1 is the same as A in axiom 5). I need more axioms, ad infinitum... or not, since it's up to me to decide when and where S "ends." So it is with every system of deduction: we decide its limits. As the boyfriend put it, "We are not limited by the tool if we don't want to use it." If human action supposedly falls out from deduction from its own assumptions, then there's good reason to think such deduction is actually subject to the agent's usage of them, not vice versa.


• Who says multiple layers of explanation are incompatible? I may say my nephew is being cranky because "his atoms are out of whack," my friend may say it's "because of a chemical imbalance," my neighbor may say it's "because society warps kids with TV," while his mom may just say it's "because he's hungry." They're all true, but only the latter account "maximizes intelligibility" (as Kant likes to put it in reference to natural teleology) and provides us with an efficient, rational course of action: put a sandwich in his mouth.


• Here's another tenet of ID: Science resorts to probability due to ignorance, not due to an actual indeterminacy in an event E's microconstituents. Imagine E is the flipping of a coin on a cool spring morning. Even though we say there is a "fifty-fifty" chance of the coin landing heads or tails, in fact, unseen by our pinhole eyes, there is strictly only one possible outcome for the coin. If we could implant a supremely cognizant observer (SCO) at the time of the coin toss, he could predict with total certainty how the coin would land. Unfortunately, however, his presence would alter the initial conditions of E (C_i:E), which would render invalid his prediction of E. We would then need a higher observer (SCO') to account for the influence of the SCO on C_i:E. But then we'd need an observer (SCO'') for C_SCO:E, and so on ad infinitum. It turns out then that D is only coherently possible if we grant there is an omniscient, immaterial agent who puts total attention on our world. In other words, D is just Calvinism with some serious Father Issues.


• Certainly we can retrospectively reconstruct the causal chain of events that led to an event G--say, a man finding a winning lotto ticket in the gutter after he storms out of an unforeseen feud with his girlfriend--, but this is not logically equivalent to saying that before G, there was only one possible chain of events which could lead to that SOA. The problem for the scientifically inclined IDist is that, while he wants to defend ID based on the elegant rigor with which science constructs causal accounts of events like G, he also must admit that our science is riddled with uncertainty--recall that it is only "human" weakness/ignorance which generates probability. The tools of science, which include probability, are supposed to vindicate determinism, which excludes probability, by providing an absolute, logically incontestable explanation for G. Here we see, though, how D is more of a theological superstition, a dogma, than a logical deduction. If the IDist says my defense of freedom is a "will of the gaps," then I can just as easily say his defense of D is based on a "determinism of the gaps." For imagine if one day science discovered a randomizer--a genuine cosmic gizmo that randomly altered the micro-principles of natural law--, science would prove not-D. This eventuality aside, the key point is that the 'deterministic' rigor of our scientific reconstructions of causal chains is a function of the exactitude of our science(s), and insofar as empirical science is always revisable, always provisional, always falsifiable (or so they say), always statistical, etc., so too are "deterministic" reconstructions revisable and probable (viz. not deterministic).


• On a camping trip. My friend is across the lake using his flash light to tell me, in Morse code, "Hurry, fire, help." I go there and help him. That night we are drifting off to sleep in our only slightly singed tents when it starts to rain. I hear a pattern of raindrops on the canvas which sounds exactly like "Hurry, fire, help." Why don't I get up to rescue the sky? Well, we "know" that my is rational and "know" the rain is not. How do we know this, though? Presumably, because we have "access to" a level of cognition which includes both people and raindrops and Morse code and our own appropriate action. It is this "higher level" of cognition, however, which is at the heart of rational freedom. Human freedom means that we can "take a step back from" our options and rationally deliberate about a course of action. Moreover, we can take another step back from this primary mode of deliberation (d:d1) to deliberate about the worth of deliberation (in d:d2). We can even "take a step forward," so to speak, and choose to "deactivate" our rational deliberation (in d:d0), such as in the movie Yes Man.


• In any event, a retort I've heard before about the raindrops/Morse code scenario is that a human is more complex than a series of raindrops, and therefore rightly amenable to a rational interpretation. By this logic, rationality is a function of complexity. (As one of my philosophy professors put it when challenged by the incredible complexity and spontaneity of human behavior, "Yeah, well, lots of weird stuff happens when billions of atoms jiggle together.") If this were true, I should credit more rationality to more complex things. (I should also view Rube-Goldberg machines as monuments of reason... but I will leave it to you to ponder why that's crucially absurd.) By all accounts, a weather system, such as the one raining on my smoky tent by the lake, is at least as complex, if not much more complex than, the system of a man's thumb on a flashlight and some photons hitting my eye. At the extreme we'd have to say that the entire universe is the most rational thing in..., well, in the world. But then "stoically reductive hard science" just gets us pantheism and gross anthropomorphism. Add to this the scenario that, when I was a small child, my big brother trained me in Morse code precisely by training on the pitter-patter of raindrops (like a music buff who challenges his friends to "name that clip" before he can). Despite my years of education, I never really shook the profoundly beautiful idea that, when it rains, "the world is talking to me." And so I listen when it rains. You never know what the world might reveal. Fortunately, I've learned to block out most of what people say, since we all know everything people say is just neurologically determined sea spray from the waves of their genetic rise and fall in spacetime. Oh. Wait....


• The bottom line is that, if I and the rain and the coin to be tossed are in principle equally subject to the same single set of causal constraints (i.e. if ID is true), then I either have just as much reason to treat rain and "triple rainbows" as complex rational agents as I treat my friends and family, or I have just as little reason to treat my friends and family with rational deliberation as I have to respect the rational interests of rain and black holes. If I can always in principle reduce anyone's decisions to the occult ramifications of their psyche and cognitive defects, then I not only have no obligation to listen to others as genuinely rational coins, I mean, people, but also have no grounds for faulting anyone for rejecting D. If it is irrational to base one's career choice on a coin toss--and, indeed, sadistically irrational to decide the fate of another person on coin tosses, as seen in Dark Knight and No Country for Old Men--, and if people are just as mechanistically determined as those coins, then it is irrational to base one's actions on the behavior of those pathetic bundles of tossed coins, those paragons of Kludgedom, known as human beings.

Above I linked to Bob "The Information Philosopher" Doyle's website about the nuances of this debate and I happened to discover his excellent Flash tutorial for his own thesis.

Joked, joking, will joke...

• A priest, a rabbi, and a nun will walk into a bar, the bartender will look at them and say, "Is this a joke?"


• A hiker will be walking through the Irish countryside but will not be able to find his way by the map. So he will ask a local cobbler he meets, "How can I get to Glendale from here?" And the cobbler will say, "Well, I certainly wouldn't start from here!"


• What will be black and white and red all over? A penguin in a blender.


• What will go up and down but will not move? Stairs.

I present these futurised jokes based on comments I just read in Michael Frayn's The Human Touch (ca. p. 270). Why are jokes only told in the present and past tenses? Why does telling jokes about the future seem to deflate their comedic value? I suspect it has to do with the indeterminacy we associate with the future, which makes all the punchlines merely tentative. They are not punchlines: they are ideas which we must be prepared to laugh at if they are imagined really to have happened. Hmm...

"A sailor went to sea sea sea…

…to see what he could see see see

But all that he could see see see

Was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea"

One of the most famous arguments in Aristotle's corpus is found in De Interpretatione 9, and it concerns the logical status of future contingents (C•f) and fatalism in general. Fatalism is the doctrine that whatever happens, happens necessarily (not, mind you, the more bland idea that whatever happens necessarily happens). Aristotle draws upon the Greek-Persian battle of Salamis (20 September 480 BC) to mount his discussion of fatalism.

A month or so ago I read Richard Sorabji's rich book, Necessity, Cause and Blame, which refreshed my engagement with the famous "sea-battle" discussion (SBD). Today I was reading Robert Nozick's Invariances and he also discusses the SBD, though only in passing. Meanwhile, of course, for the past month or so, I have been worrying the freewill and determinism debate (FDD) more than usual. This afternoon a few ideas came together.

Prior to the sea-battle, on 19 September, say, as the Persian ships converge and the Greek ships secure defensive positions, two citizens of Salamis make a bet. X says that B* the battle might not happen (due to contrary winds, acts of the gods, a change of the Persian heart, etc.), while Z says that B the battle will take place. Night falls and the next day the battle does take place. Z collects his winnings.

Aristotle's question is, "Since B is true, and since truth is by definition incorrigible (i.e. unchangeable), was it necessary that Z would win? Was it even possible for X to win?" For, if B is unconditionally true, then B* is unconditionally false, viz., ⊃ ⊤B ∴ ⊥B*. The opposite logical content of B and B* entail that their truth values entail the necessary falsity of each other.

This was troublesome to Aristotle, since he realized that if all C•f are necessarily true, even before they happen, then everything necessarily happens. Aristotle challenges this fatalist logic by denying all C•f have truth value at all. It was, therefore, possible for B* to be true prior to the battle, even though it is necessarily false once the battle takes place. Since B, prior to SB, had no truth value at all, its truth could not be used to defeat the possible truth of B*. There is no shortage of discussion of this topic, so I will limit myself to remarks about how this scenario relates to the FDD and, as you might have guessed, how Aristotle's point undermines determinism.

The crux of the matter is this: what about the world in which B was true made it the case that B was in fact true? What were the grounding conditions (C•g) for the truth of B (B•T)? On the day of SB and afterward, the C•g for B•T were simply the fact that the battle took place. B could not possibly be false in correspondence with a world in which SB actually happened. At time t_SB, and at all times t_SB+, therefore, ⊤B. Aristotle grants all this.

But what about at a time prior to SB (t_SB-)? What about or in the world made it the case that ⊤B? Here is where determinism comes into the picture, even if the determinist were willing to jettison fatalism. For the determinist might grant that SB did not have to happen unconditionally (i.e. he might grant ~⊤B). There is nothing unconditionally necessary about B, rather, for the determinist, B is only conditionally necessarily true. The conditions for the truth of B (i.e. C•(B•T)) are simply the prior causal factors that led to SB (i.e. C•SB-). Presumably those C•SB- need not have happened unconditionally; after all, suppose the universe had never existed, or had existed with very different physical laws.

Hence, the determinist can agree with Aristotle that fatalism is false by granting that ◊~⊤B ∴ ~⊤B (i.e. since B is possibly only conditionally true, B is not unconditionally true). Instead, argues the determinist, ◊~⊤B ∧ ◊□​B ∴ □B (i.e. since B is not unconditionally true but is contingently necessary, therefore B is conditionally necessarily true). Further, since C•SB- grounds B•T, then, given ◊C•SB-, □B•T ∴ □B (i.e. the absolute contingency of C•SB- still entails the necessity of B•T, the latter which entails that B is true). If (…yes, if only…) we had adequate knowledge of C•SB-, asserts (…asserts…) the determinist, we could have predicted B––nay, we could have seen its truth as a necessary consequence of C•SB-.

Here's the problem, though: if the C•g for B just are C•SB-, then C•SB- just is the complete description of SB (i.e., C•SB- ≡ C•T). This is absurd, however, since numerous other C•g are required for B•T, namely, the fact that the battle and the events in the battle actually take place! C•SB- may be the case, but they do not of themselves entail B•T, since B cannot be true if not a single arrow were fired, if not a single sword was swung, if not a single command was given, if not a drop of blood was spilt on 20 September 480 BC. So, while C•SB- grounds (B ∨ B*)•T (i.e. the truth of the disjunctive between B and B* prior to SB), it is only SB which grounds B•T.

A truly complete account of the C•g for SB will necessarily include the things in which a battle actually consists, things, crucially, which could not possibly fall under C•SB-. The problem for the determinist is that he believes C•SB- is 'already' an adequate account of C•g for B (i.e. C•SB- ≡ B•T). If determinism is true, there can be nothing which adds to the causal efficacy of C•SB- to bring about SB. For if any other causal factors were needed for C•SB- to entail SB, then C•SB– are not of themselves C•(B•T), and SB does not necessarily and wholly follow from C•SB-, which means that determinism is false.

I tried to make a similar point a couple years ago in my postling about "the steps taking you", but I have been horribly remiss in not expanding that post to make the full anti-determinist point. This post is meant to redress my negligence, though that other post intends to discuss the problems determinism creates for scientific explanation. In a nutshell, if it is a necessary result of the physical features of, say, your left foot at time-place t•p_lf that you end up at, say, Marston's Deli, then a proper scientific account of the physical features of your foot would have to include reference to Marston's Deli. The same theoretic gerrymandering effect would apply to all objects of scientific study and scientists would not be able to do that most essential operation for formulating scientific laws, namely, abstracting the ideal ratio from particular deviations and data. To say more, I shall have to live to codgitate another day.

A stab at determinism…

[UPDATED 12 Feb 2011]

Here's a stab at a definition of determinism (D), and a subsequent takedown:

D is the claim that all states of affairs (SOA) at any time t+ in a closed system (S•c) are necessarily the result of a prior SOA at time t. No SOA at t+ can fail to result from the SOA at t. There is not––and, on D, cannot be––any causal 'slack' between any SOA and the initial SOA of the universe as a whole (S|U). If D means that 1) all effects 2) necessarily follow from antecedent follow from antecedent SOA (SOA(t)) 3) in S•c, the either nothing accounts for for the initial conditions of S|U and D is false (cf. 1) & 2)), or S|U is not a closed system and again D is false (cf. 3)). Therefore, D is false.

Now, if the claim is that the SOA for S|U is simply 'autonomous', in need of no prior causal determination, then D is false at least for S|U. S|U may "simply be from all time", but, if D is consistent, what determines this is the case? Once we grant that at some kind of SOA can possess causal powers not wholly determined by some antecedent SOA, then we can only ask how far D applies to all SOA's, not claim that it in fact does apply universally. Only if we grant that there is a cause for S|U which is not determined by anything, and is thus radically free, can we account for S|U as a S•c.

This does not mean D is false per se, only that it is possibly true only if theism is true. Without a Creator, nothing can account for the SOA in S|U, which means at least one SOA violates D. Then again, if something can antecedently account for the SOA of S|U, then S|U is open to a causal power exempt from the constraints of that very SOA, in which case, again, D is false.

Distill…

Here's a stab at expressing one of the key points I wanted to make in an earlier post:

In so far as all descriptions of physical law are at best probabilistic, all attempts to make real descriptions of the physical world indicate the merely probabilistic nature of the world. As such, the most that scientific nomology can deliver for determinism is a picture of a generally deterministic world, which is to say, science does not avail to support determinism.

Along similar lines, I encourage you to watch the following lecture on neuroconsciousness by Gerald Edelman. Edelman's remarks do not begin until about the 30-minute mark, but once he begins, note his admission both of the stochastic, radically neuron-individualistic (my term of art) nature of the human brain and of his rejection of reductionism. Here are two syllogisms to keep in mind as you listen:

1. If Edelman is right that each neuron is literally unique, and

2. since scientific laws are generalizations about classes which do not apply to individual cases, then

3. there may be literally no formulable laws of neuroscience.

Further,

1. the brain is patently both a stochastic and natural entity, and in so far as

2. stochastic causation undermines determinism, then

3. the brain compromises the deterministic closure of the natural world.

Can't… "Can't"… Kant…

[UPDATE, 20 Jan 2011: I had a flash of intuition but expressed it so cryptically that now I'm trying to decrypt it for myself. I have made small revisions to the original oracle and added explanatory glosses after the three + signs.]

Because the cognitive "can't" is performatively equivalent to the metaphysical "can't", therefore determinism is false. "I can't tell you who killed your wife" because I don't know "who" he is and "I don't know who killed your wife" because "who" he is lies outside my total set of causal experience, are equivalent on determinism. Yet they are not really equivalent, therefore determinism is not a theory adequate to the real world.

+ + +
Cognitive inability: "I can't answer your question because I lack the relevant knowledge/experience."

Metaphysical inability: "I can't answer your question because there is no means by which I can discover the answer." Imagine if I were asked what the happiest man in the world on 8 March 1928 ate for breakfast.

Cognitive inability: "I can't get in the room because I don't know where the key is."

Metaphysical inability: "I can't get in the room because it is bursting with flames and I am chained to the wall."

If I say, "I can't tell you who killed your wife," my inability is due to the fact that I don't know who the killer is, not to an intrinsic lack of power on my part. If I knew who the killer is, I could tell you. My response-performance would follow from my modified cognitive state. As it happens, "I don't know who killed your wife" because who he is (i.e. anything relevant to identifying him), is outside my total set of causal experience. My cognitive deficit is based on the limitations of my causal career. On determinism, my cognitive deficit is intrinsic to me, since I cannot alter my character contrary to the total causal complex which determines me. If determinism is true, nothing is intrinsically up-to-me, but only proximately inclusive-of-me in its determined ocurrence.

Yet, clearly, my cognitive deficit is not intrinsic to me, for I could perhaps acquire the knowledge I need to answer your question. This is a problem for determinism, though, since, if my cognitive (and therefore volitional) state is totally and intrinsically dependent on my total antecedent causal complex, while it is not metaphysically impossible for my cognitive state to change, it is metaphysically impossible for me to alter my cognitive state. As such, the cognitive inability manifested in my response is performatively equivalent to a metaphysical inability intrinsic to my (wholly determined) character. The cognitive "can't" is performatively equivalent to the metaphysical "can't", therefore determinism is false. An observer would have no way of differentiating a cognitive deficit from a metaphysical inability in me, since he could only go by my performative career.

Further, since determinism stipulates that there is no autonomous "self" which can function in any way independently of an agent's encompassing causal Umwelt, it follows on determinism that there is no metaphysical principle by which the agent could determine for himself how to alter his cognitive states. The alteration of his cognitive states would not be a function of his rational agency, but rather a function––or perhaps an integral?––of the causal complex which comprises both the agent and his semiotic milieu. His cognitive and metaphysical inabilities would derive from one and the same set of causal factors. Hence, on determinism, the agent's inability would be metaphysically and cognitively equivalent. Yet these modes of inability are not really equivalent, therefore determinism is not a theory of the real world. In so far as determinism confuses, or simply elides, an important distinction in reality, determinism fails as an important theory of reality.

ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM:

I'm not just conjecturing about the denial of the "self" on a materialist espousal of determinism. Consider the following excerpts from "Denying the Little God of Free Will: The Next Step for Atheists? An Open Letter to the Atheist Community" by Tom Clark, Director of the Center for Naturalism.

With a little help from added emphasis, I will let the usual contradictions and fallacies speak for themselves (yuk yuk yuk).

A few points to keep in mind are that a) speaking of what determines human behavior begs the question, b) it is a false dichotomy to treat substantial rational agency as distinct from "nature" simply because it is not mechanistic, and c) in so far as the evidence for or against naturalistic claims is neither apodeictic nor deductive, such indeterminacy reinforces the need for a choice on our part for or against those claims.

With that, have a looksee:

In atheist circles it’s conventional wisdom to doubt God’s existence on empirical grounds: there’s no good evidence that such a being exists, so we don’t waste time believing in it. But there’s an equally suspect, supernatural entity that often lurks at the heart of commonsense ideas about human nature: the freely willing self.

We have, it is widely believed, the power to think, choose, and act in some crucial respect independently of those causal factors that create us as persons, and that surround us each moment of our lives. Unlike anything else in nature, human beings have a special contra-causal freedom to cause things to happen without themselves being fully caused in turn.

Sound familiar? It should, for such causally privileged freedom is a characteristic of God – the uncaused causer, the prime mover, who acts without himself being at the effect of anything. The assumption of free will, so widespread in our culture, in effect sets us up as supernatural little gods, and it’s this assumption that a thorough-going naturalism upsets. We should doubt the little god of free will on the very same grounds that atheists doubt the big god of traditional religions: there’s no evidence for it.

Just as science has radically altered our view of cosmic reality, replacing the static earth-centered heavens with the Big Bang, and supernatural human origins with Darwinian evolution, so too it replaces the soul with the fully physical person, shaped in its entirety by the complex interaction of genetics and environment. Rapidly accumulating evidence from biology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive neuroscience suggests we are not causal exceptions to nature. There is no categorically mental agent or soul-essence floating above the brain which can exert a choice-making power that’s independent of neural processes. There’s nothing supernatural or causally privileged inside the head, just as there’s nothing supernatural outside it. …

How can we take or assign credit and blame? How do we justify punishment or praise? Without free will aren’t we just puppets, mere mechanisms playing out our fates as determined by impersonal forces?

As pressing as such questions are, they have no bearing on the truth of the matter, which, if we are naturalists, we decide on the basis of evidence, not on what we suppose must be the case. And indeed, looking at the world and ourselves dispassionately and scientifically, there really are no evidential grounds for supposing we have supernatural souls, or any categorically mental, immaterial self that makes us freely willing little gods here on earth. …

Supernatural contra-causal freedom really isn’t necessary for anything we hold near and dear, whether it’s personhood, morality, dignity, creativity, individuality, or a robust sense of human agency. We may be fully caused in our choices and behavior, but that doesn’t render us ineffective in getting what we want, nor does it upset our moral compass: we can still tell right from wrong, and we’re still fully motivated to create a world in which we flourish, not perish. As Duke University philosopher Owen Flanagan argues in his ground-breaking book The Problem of the Soul, without free will we still have self-control, self-expression, individuality, rationality, moral accountability, and political freedom (see chapter 4, “Free Will”). …

[T]he realization that we are not little gods has considerable benefits, both personal and social. First, by accepting and illuminating our complete causal connection to the world, a consistent naturalism leads to a compassionate understanding of human faults and virtues. Seeing that we aren’t the ultimate originators of ourselves or our behavior, we can’t take ultimate credit or blame for what we do. This reduces unwarranted self-righteousness, pride, shame, and guilt. And since we see others as fully caused…[,] we become less blaming, less punitive and more empathetic and understanding. …

In denying supernatural free will, naturalism focuses our attention on what actually determines human behavior. This increases our powers of self-control, and encourages science-based, effective and progressive policies….

Lastly, by showing we are fully included in nature, naturalism provides the basis for a satisfying approach to concerns about ultimate meaning and significance. Since we are not little gods, we find ourselves completely at home here on earth, part of an awe-inspiring universe, full-fledged participants in the unfolding natural order.

Get down to brass tacks…

From the Wikipedia entry on (mathematical) "Deterministic systems" (emphasis added by me):

In quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, which describes the continuous time evolution of a system's wave function, is deterministic. However, the relationship between a system's wave function and the observable properties of the system appears to be non-deterministic.

The systems studied in chaos theory are deterministic. If the initial state were known exactly, then the future state of such a system could be predicted. However, in practice, knowledge about the future state is limited by the precision with which the initial state can be measured.

My question is, if Heisenberg uncertainty is not only a deficit based on limitations in our measurement apparati, but is also inherent to any observed quantum state, then is there any means by which "the initial state" could be "known exactly"? If not, then the determinism of chaotic systems is still only promissory, as I complained in an another post recently. The larger point that I (think I) want make (as indicated in the same prior post) is this:

If determinism is simply the doctrine that for any state S that occurs, S has an antecedent cause C sufficient to explain S, then I suppose "indeterminism" about the rational will is 'deterministic' in so far as it is the will W which is a mode of C to explain any S that arises from the action of an agent A suitable for W. But that seems to be argument by definition, not by demonstration. In other words, if the choice is between a denial of causality per se and determinism, then I affirm determinism. The issue, however, is not about causality, but about mechanism and teleology. And teleology seems to be an irreducible category of rational action not sufficiently explained by mechanistic descriptions. If "determinism" is rigged to include rational agent causation, then determinism enjoys a merely Pyrrhic victory. For by including rational agency under the head of determinism, the determinist would grant that rational agency is a legitimate form of causation. But that would be a very perverse form of determinism, historically speaking.

A further worry I have––and I use "worry" in the philosopher's sense of "an abiding academic quandry"––is how determinism is supposéd to be empirically grounded (about which I worried in the previous post cited). If a major part of the basis for determinism is the success of practical prediction, then the theoretic success of determinism rests in large part on its adequacy in prediction. (I dealt with this worry to some extent in a previous post about baseball.) If, however, prediction itself collapses at certain points, whether because of our cognitive impairments or because of inherent limitations in what is physically observable, then determinism is beset with the same faults. Meanwhile, indeterminism with respect to the deliberative will W of a rational agent A faces no parallel limitation, since the theoretical adequacy of teleological accounts of behavior maintain their value even when perfect prediction fails.

Along these lines, a commenter recently suggested that determinism, while perhaps not demonstrable––though I would go farther and say it is in principle not even utterable––, is still a good "theory" for us in order to navigate our existence in the world. The commenter likened determinism to a perfect circle: while both a circle and determinism can be defined, neither ever perfectly shows up in nature. While it might suffice to note how devastating such a concession is for determinism––namely, that the world is never perfectly deterministic!–– I would like to add two further objections.

First, positing determinism as a formal guide is exactly the worst move a determinist could make, since formal systems, of which I think the definition of geometric shapes (like a circle) is one, are, after the discovery of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, fundamentally indeterminate, or at least permanently incomplete (which is just to repeat the concession that got me to this first objection). If determinism is a formal principle, sort of like a perfect Platonic notion of Seamless Causality, and if such formal principles are not actually instantiated in the empirical world, then determinism is no more a feature of the "real world" than is a perfect circle. Both are pure abstractions, not empirically determinate realities. In addition, the very 'supernaturalness' of such formal entities suggests that Determinism qua Seamless Causality manifests cognitive access to a world beyond empirical reality, namely, the world of immaterial abstraction. Significantly, it is the traditional position of "free will" indeterminists that free will basically resides in our natural power of immaterial abstraction. In so far as intellection––i.e. the cognition of abstract reality––is in principle incommensurate with any material organ, our grasp of determinism as a formal but not empirical truth would itself ground our ability as non-deterministic agents. For if determinism is just a formal set of axioms for analyzing phenomena, then it is Gödel-indeterminate, which of course patently undermines determinism.

Second, I deny that determinism is a superior "working theory" of action, since, as I have already noted, teleological (i.e. agent-based) accounts of change are integral to human existence, and in a way that determinism cannot afford. As Professor Sandra LaFave notes in her online article about free will and determinism:

"The notion of mechanical causality applies to things but not to persons. When we account for the behavior of persons, we must use teleological explanations. …

Most philosophers nowadays acknowledge the necessity of teleological explanations of human behavior. One standard argument for teleological explanation comes from Kant.

Kant says persons are like things in the sense that physical laws apply to their bodies; the indeterminist might even admit that psychological “laws” govern some of people's consciousness events. But persons are NOT like things because they can be conscious of the operation of these laws. (A thing is just subject to laws; it is not conscious of being subject to laws.) Even the hard determinist must admit this odd characteristic of persons. People can thus be aware of physical and psychological laws as observers, from the outside.These laws are viewed as things that can operate on me, but there is always a sense in which I view myself as apart from them — for example, right now, when I am reflecting about them.

When I think about how to behave, I consider reasons. I never think about causes, because insofar as I am an agent, they are never relevant. I have to make choices, and I choose on the basis of reasons. In other words, the model of physical causation does not fit at all when you try to apply it to human choices. Even if all human choices were determined, the HD [i.e. hard-determinist] model would still be completely inadequate to describe the perspective of the agent, which is what really matters for morality. The HD position is simply at odds with human experience because it continually asserts that as far as human experience is concerned, things are not what they seem.

I should add that LaFave, in the latter paragraph, is not saying that determinism is wrong because it is counter-intuitive, or because it flies in the face of "everyday experience". If that were all we needed to refute someone, Einstein would be a madman, not a genius. Rather, LaFave's objection cuts much deeper, because she says HD does not account for all the data (as scientists like to say). Here's a syllogism, reminiscent of my recent syllogistic disproof of the claim that Darwinian natural selection explains human nature (cf. infra), to capture LaFave's worry:

1. Human action is an irreducible metaphysical category in the real world.

1a. If not, the action of human advocates of determinism is an accidental metaphysical category and not a genuine feature of real-world cognition. In other words, the noises determinists make aboue the truth of determinism is as superficial to a rational grasp of the world as their burps are.

2. Human action is meaningful only in teleogical terms.

2a. Even if we speak only of desires, we still must speak of them as more than bare causal states, to speak nothing of indeterminately complex desire-matrices.

2b. If perceptual desires are reducible to and identical with "bare causal states", then even falling rocks and rising flames 'desire'––which would be an astounding concession for the determinist to make to Aristotle after all these centuries!

3. Determinism does not have any theoretical 'space' for teleological action: it excludes teleogical agent-causation.

4. Therefore, determinism does not provide a metaphysically satisfactory account of the world, which of course includes der menschliche Umwelt of perceptual reasoning.

5. Therefore, determinism is false in the real world.

The point is that even if we espoused determinism merely as a "working theory", or as a "functional model", of the otherwise 'unknowable' world, it would not suffice as a working theory of what we encounter all the time, namely, our own rational agency as an irreducible category of making sense of our own existence. Indeterminism is therefore superior to determinism even in merely pragmatic terms.

In any event, another worry I have is why, on determinism, specific cases of action could not be subsumed to vintage scientific laws themselves. For if every instance of a falling apple 'perfectly' manifests (though, of course, it is hardly formally perfect), then why could not an instance of my choosing to buy one book rather than another be an instance of a natural law in its own right? Presumably, if in an otherwise gravity-free universe––a universe occupied by only one microscopic object––an apple were introduced near that molecule for an hour, the universe would, for one hour, 'have' the law of gravity. Interestingly, in the entire history of that cosmos, the law of gravity would have applied only for an hour. It would be a transient, particular event, not an overarching principle of natural action.

Presumably, as well, "the laws of physics as we know them" (how's that for a pleonasm!) did not hold prior to a certain point (i.e. the Planck epoch) in the inflation of the primeval cosmos. Did, then, other laws hold, or no laws at all? If they were laws of nature, it seems odd that they could simply fail to hold, and after a mere few nanoseconds, to boot. If they were not abiding laws of nature, however, then the cosmos began and was inflated by no knowable laws. As such, the cosmos could not be accounted for by reference to its own immanent laws, but would indicate the radical contingency of the universe. Further, if the primal conditions were only "transiently nomic", why do we presume our cosmos operates under "laws" now? Whether they last a couple nanoseconds or a few billion years, if laws of nature are incidental to the actual operation of nature, then why call them laws of nature?

The upshot as far as rational agency is concerned is that, if we can stipulate laws that apply to something as mercurial, inscrutable, unrepeatable, and transient as the birth of the cosmos, could we not also stipulate laws of action, which, while not 'violating' other principles of natural generation, included as their truthmakers the immanent action of the very agent being described by physical law? If a law could apply in the cosmos for an hour, or even just for a few nanoseconds, and then be 'sublimated' by passage into a different state of affairs (SoA), subject to distinct causal parameters, then presumably a law could exist at the junction of an agent A's deliberative choice A(c) and other laws which grounds the means for A(c).