Three short philosophical reflections as 2016 draws to an end.

The world as a simulation:

If the universe is a simulation for the “benefit” of earthlings, perhaps it would not be necessary for the “overlords” designing and creating the simulation, to simulate all of space time. I think this was broached in the Truman Show, where the world of the main character (played by Jim Carrey) was actually a very small region of space, perhaps the size of a small village, but surrounded by solid walls.

Following along with this idea, the seemingly distant and vastly numerous galaxies would not have to actually be objectively there, they would only have to appear to be from earth based observations. Similarly, cosmological time could be greatly truncated to merely the historical times of humans. The Big Bang and the eons of cosmological and geological evolution need only be made to have apparently occurred. The simulation would not need to actually include these eras of time.

Would all of the apparent “creatures” in the simulation need to be conscious? No, as aforementioned, some could be “zombies” (to use the term popular in consciousness writings, robots of a sort with no subjective lives). To introduce a bit of cynicism, this might explain the seeming stupidity of so many people in the world today.

The HBO series “West World” depicts this idea, where, if I am understanding it, only a tiny fraction of the beings within the simulated world are actual sentient beings, the rest being robots. Star Trek the Next Generations’s “Holideck” simulations of past epochs of human history also involve only fractional populations of conscious beings.

Robotic Consciousness:

Today, many AI workers and theorists tend to talk as if this is certain to be achieved by the end of the 21st century (if not significantly earlier). But how will they know for sure that a robotic AI unit is really conscious, and not a “Zombie”? Indeed, we do not know which of our friends, relative, colleagues, and members of the human race at large possess consciousness. We assume that organic humans have it using “Occam’s Razor”: isn’t it the most straightforward assumption that they are conscious, just as we are ourselves? But it is far from certain (for example, consider the point made above in connection with us living in a simulated world).

Yes, there is the Turing Test for intelligence, but this test is not for detecting consciousness. I think it is easy to imagine a platform with intelligence that does not possess subjective consciousness.

However, as so brilliantly and poignantly illustrated in the episode of Star Trek the Next Generation (in connection with the robot known as “Data”), if a robot, or artificial human, seems to be conscious, it seems the only morally acceptable approach is to assume it is conscious. The opposite approach, treating such a being as not having consciousness, runs the risk of treating a conscious being as inanimate, and expendable, machinery. This would be unacceptable morally, horribly so.

Free Will:

It is not only difficult to see how we humans can have free will, it is difficult to even define exactly what it means. Where did the agent supposedly having free will come from? 

The first difficulty comes from “physicalism”, the idea that all motion in the universe ultimately results from causal behavior of elementary particles obeying some kind of “laws” of nature, and nothing can escape from these---certainly not the atoms comprising our brains, or the nerve impulses that seem to represent our thoughts. While quantum mechanics suggests that there is a random element in how the micro-world is realized in the macro-world of our everyday, such randomness does not really seem to be what we want free will to be.

The second sticking point is that “Nature plus Nurture”....i.e., our genetic makeup plus the effects of accumulated experiences would seem to exhaust what could determine the behavior of an individual human. Each individual human begins life as an infant with certain instinctual drives and capacities, but surely decision making invoking free will would only come later after experiences, in conjunction with the physical body,  have molded the character and personality of the human person.

It would seem that a mechanism similar to this would hold even if each person has a spirit or soul that has developed in time (or something like time in some transcendent realm, what we might call “hyper-time”). As long as the decision making nature of a being is formed from some kind of a starting point plus accumulated experiences, whether in this physical realm in another, it would seem that the concept of free will in such a being becomes untenable.

Everything a person does, whether constrained by the physicalist model or the nature plus nurture model, is, at root, just due to random effects. This makes us think that such things a praise and blame, punishment and reward, admiration and condemnation, are all quite unjustified at the deepest level.

There would seem to be a way out of this trap, however---admittedly a highly speculative one, and one that I doubt very many moderns want to entertain for even a moment. But I want to proceed with it here because I firmly believe that each of us do in fact have free will. Furthermore, I think ALL of us believe we do have free will, no matter what is maintained in formal philosophical writings.

So given that I believe we all do have it, a far out idea that is almost surely impossible to prove might compel some degree of acceptance, simply because of the explanatory power of the idea. Suppose that each person has a soul of some kind that is eternal, or at least outside of any kind of time, much in that way that I believe Plato and certain other Greek philosophers imagined.

There are precedents in science for entertaining, or taking seriously, ideas or models that are, at least currently, beyond empirical verification, but that have explanatory power. Examples would be string theory of elementary particles or gravity loop theory, either of which hold out hope of incorporating the gravitational force into the presently incomplete “standard model of particle physics”.

This idea of an eternal soul does suggest that a type of reincarnation might be in operation. Suppose that upon death in this world, your soul goes through some kind of review process in a temporary realm, and that you then maybe even have some say as to what realm you are going to next. Just as dreams fade rapidly upon awakening, so the soul might only very briefly recall or sense fragments of the formal life. Such an idea, if I understand it correctly, is put forth by William Wordsworth in his beautiful poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality....”. The Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany has also toyed with similar ideas in his eschatological short story, The Last Voyage of the King. 

The subsequent realm does not necessarily have to be Earth, or even this galaxy or universe. It could be in a parallel universe, as some kind of a creature such as was imagined by H.P. Lovecraft, perhaps as a tentacled creature with 7 eyes or legs, or as some conscious being wholly unimaginable to us in our present human state. It would not even necessarily be represented or instantiated in an individual manner, maybe the reincarnated being could be composite of several beings, whether former Earthlings or other.

The speculations along these lines could clearly go on for a long time. but having sketched the broad outline of such a (greatly enlarged from the usual popular idea of it) reincarnation model, now want to move on to other topic, perhaps returning to this one at a later date (in 2017 or beyond).

A few random philosophical thoughts on metaphysics, consciousness, and free will.

Does consciousness originate within the brain, or is there some kind of a generalized consciousness “field” that couple to an individual that gives that individual a subjective conscious awareness? An analogy with the “Higgs field’ of the standard model of particle physics would be apt, where in that case elementary particles get their mass by coupling to the Higgs field.

It is hard to see how science, neuroscience in particular, can satisfactorily answer this, since science is based on making observations in objective realty, and consciousness is subjective.

Many, if not most, of the questions that concern thoughtful humans are metaphysical questions that cannot be answered, or even broached, by the methods of the empirical sciences. Do we have free will? Is there a God? Does our consciousness in survive, in some form, our biological death? Why does the universe exist, or “why is there something rather than nothing?”.

This last question stands apart from the others in than I don’t think a satisfactory answer can even be imagined. As philosophers like to say, what would an answer even look like? Just imagining an answer makes us realize we would need t make use of already existent things

Now to be sure, for some of us, science can tend to suggest, or hint at, answers to some of the above questions. For example, the amazing design of the universe seems to suggest something like the “Einsteinian God” (or gods?). I think many theoretical physicists like to make reference to “God” or a deity when discussing how these physics laws were made to be consistent, and pregnant with deep complexity, although it is usually couched in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek style.

On the other hand, “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins has pointed out, somewhat plausibly to my mind, that biological evolution tends to imply that there is no God, no Designer. Natural selection seems to satisfy all the questions one might have about how life forms are so wonderfully adapted to the biosphere, and since this selection process is “nature red in tooth and claw” (as Charles Darwin famously remarked), if there is a God He/She seems unnecessarily cruel. But the most straightforward response to this is that there is , in fact, no God, no designer.

But when Dawkins goes on to say that there is no evidence of God, or Nobelist Steven Weinberg says that the “more we learn about the universe, the more pointless it seems”, they are on shaky ground. What evidence of a God, or a purpose to the universe, could possibly be found through empirical study of the universe?

Free will is a topic much “in the news” today, at least among philosophers and neuroscientists. I am guessing that the vast majority of people working in these ares would readily say there no such thing as free will. And more often than not, they would add that “science has proved that there is not”. But of course, they cannot act on this, or even convincingly argue for it consistently, since, if their thoughts and actions are compelled, it seems there is no reason to believe what they say is true. We don’t ascribe any plausibility to the output of a puppet. Strict determinism seems to quickly undermine itself.

But let’s not be hasty here. Neuroscience aside, is seems very difficult to see how to escape from the constraints of “Nature plus Nurture” (NpN) since what an organism does would seem to be entirely dues to its “initial state” (its genetic makeup) and its experiences, which in effect add software to the organism.
So, while it is easy to escape from the “physicalist” form of determinism through the inherent uncertainties of quantum mechanics of the microcosm, NpN is a real sticking point for the free willist. In fact, this is even true if the physical universe is non-deterministic.The real thrust of the NpN mechanism is that since the organism has a beginning in time, there can be no agency associated with its decisions other than what has been added onto its physical make up by its time-ordered experiences.

The fact is, it is even hard to specify exactly what free will would even mean. Free will is one of those things that we all “know”, or at least assume, that we and others have. In a sense it is axiomatic. In a way, we say, it is caused, but it is caused by our reasoning processes in our heads. And this seems correct, since the strict determinist has the onus of explaining why reason would have evolved, if it is not to allow an individual organism how to think and act. In a sense, determinism and reason seem to “over determine” the behavior of an organism. If its behavior is unfolding according to necessity, what possible purpose would reason serve from an evolutionary perspective?

The strict physicalist determents has another problem. Recall Laplace’s argument that if he knew the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, then the later states of the universe would all be predictable. This is usually brought up in writings as being hopelessly naive, in view of chaos theory whereby the slightest uncertainty in these parameters would quickly lead to the universe being entirely unpredictable. But again, not so fast, chaos theory would completely render to predictability argument wrong. But a chaotic system is still a deterministic system. Conceptually, Laplace would seem to be correct, at least with the confines of “classical physics”.

Quantum mechanics,which certainly seems to well describe the micro-world, does seem to change this, although only according to some interpretations of it. For example, the “Copenhagen” interpretations involves separating the observer from the physical system, and the act of making an observation on a physical system cause it to collapse to a classically describable state. Hence, the overall deterministic nature of the physical universe is under cut by this view.

However, one might argue that if the atoms of the observer are included in the quantum state of the universe, physical determinism still holds. Following this line of argument, it would seem inescapable to infer that there really is nothing that could happen that was not preordained. But again, in this picture, what would be the “reason for reason”, and for consciousness? Truth and necessity seem to be incompatible.

(to be continued)

My take on Cognitive Dualism

Understand that this may not be exactly what philosopher Roger Scruton meant in his essay on Cognitive Dualism. What I write here is my interpretation of his idea.

I have always been mystified by the concept of free will. Even though I am firmly convinced that all conscious beings (well, at least humans) have free will, I have never been able to see any way that we can have it, in view of two highly convincing arguments for determinism (that may in some sense be the same):

• Type 1, According to which all motions in the universe are determined by the laws of physics. In this view, the atoms in any brain are determined in a self consistent manner with all the other matter and energy in the universe. There is no room for free will in this mechanistic picture. Not surprisingly, this version of determinism seems to be prominent among physicists.
• Type 2, Which would determine animal behavior even if Type 1 can be gotten around (which I think it can). This corresponds to the complete determination of a person’s actions, behavior and thoughts by a combination of that person’s genetic makeup (“hardware”) and the persons experiences after birth (and the memories of those experiences). Hence there is no room for free will in this picture. This version of determinism seems to often be held by those in the social sciences.
  

It would seem to me that it is hard to escape the conclusion that a person’s actions are entirely determined by Type 2 (I tend to think that Quantum Mechanics (QM), which implies that causeless transitions and motions occur, undermines, and allows an escape from, Type 1 determinism).

But this leaves a troublesome inconsistency. What role would reason and consciousness play in deciding what course of action to take? It seems that a reason for an action is redundant if genes/experience would determine what one would do. It is like an “overdetermined” quantity in mathematics.

We humans are seemingly “programmed” to look for causes of all actions and motions. If I understand Kant in his “Critique of Pure Reason”, he maintains that the idea of cause and effect is built into the human brain. That things have causes is, in a sense, an axiom within the human brain.

But what if not all phenomena have physical causes? As I mentioned, QM suggests that causeless transitions occur, for example the causeless dropping down of an electron in an excited atom to a lower energy state, giving off a photon of light. Of course, there is a cause of the transition in the sense that the electromagnetic interactions is responsible for the transition, it is just that there is no reason why the electron “decided” to make the transition at a given time. It is a statistical thing, just as it is with the familiar idea of radioactive decay and the half life concept.

Another physics consideration: in QM, a photon can manifest either wave or particle aspects, depending on the context of it’s interaction with a given experiment or observation. So we have an example of a hard science being content with two incommensurate models of a physical entity.

OK, perhaps by analogy we could argue that there are two incommensurate ways of looking at the world:

View 1: Cause and effect, the mechanism of physics, the complete determinism of inanimate objects and energy. In this view, animals are collections of atoms all obeying laws of physics, and there is no room for free will. In particular, consciousness itself is a deep mystery__unless as many physicists do, it is argued that a machine of a threshold complexity can lead to the emergence of consciousness. A big problem here is that this latter idea is untestable, since consciousness is subjective, and only resides inside the mind of a given person. It cannot be objectively accessed by methods of science.

View 2: Free will, consciousness, and reason are an entirely distinct picture of the nature of human life (maybe to some extent, animal life also). In this view, some actions of conscious entities are not caused by physics mechanisms. This perspective is separate and obviously incompatible with view 1. Free Will would simply involve the “causing” of an action by the concomitant effects of reason and consciousness on the part of a being. (Of course, no doubt many actions, perhaps the majority of them, are in practice not undertaken because of reasoning, but are undertaken rashly or impulsively without much thought being involved. Perhaps such actions fall under the category of Type 2 determinism.)

Yes, it might seems that the two views have to be relatable, or reconcilable,  in order to make sense to us beings “trapped” in a realm where all things seem to be caused. But, taking the cue from the aforementioned photon’s dualistic nature in QM, isn’t it plausible that the two views must simply co-exist, in full recognition of their incommensurate nature? 

To explore a little further the implications of this cognitive dualism model: Consciousness is not caused by any physical mechanism, but simply is. A conscious being can choose, through its free will, to use, or not use, reasoning processes to decide what to do. 

The physical world, in the absence of any conscious beings within it, is purely, strictly, deterministic. Many process that would occur are chaotic and hence “unpredictable”, but are still deterministic (a coin toss is chaotic, and hence unpredictable, but no one can doubt that the dynamics of the coin is absolutely determined by Newton’s laws). The cosmologist Andre Linde has pointed out that the Schrodinger equation for the entire Universe does not depend on time, but that this changes when conscious beings enter the picture. Novelty in the universe thus requires the decisions of conscious beings.

Bertrand Russell’s phrase in “A Free Man’s Worship” (which has had a very great effect on me all of my life) that we are “accidental collocations of atoms”, is thus dubious, since there are no accidents in a strictly physics-determined universe. Time and chance in such a universe are superfluous concepts.

But what qualifies as a conscious being? Is an amoeba or a slug a conscious being? I doubt it. There must be a threshold degree of consciousness, in some sense, in order for novelty to emerge.

(to be continued)

I want to once again present some thoughts, perhaps a bit rambling, on the issue of Free Will (FW), in the context of the question “Can we hold wrong-doers to be blameworthy?” 

In private conversations, I continue to see what I think is a great deal of puzzlement on this issue. For example, many wonder if FW is illusory, given that all of the processes in the universe presumably follow causal laws of physics. Bertrand Russell, in his brilliant essay, “A Free Man’s Worship”, called humans (and all animals)  "accidental collocations of atoms" (let’s leave aside for the present purpose that it would seem there could be no “accidents” if the universe unfolds in a strictly mechanistic manner). 

It is common to hear people say that quantum mechanics (QM) does away with strict causality, implying that that solves the FW problem in that it allows room for us to have it. I think that is partly right, in that QM seems to allow an escape from strict Laplacian determinism: The apparent randomness, or probabilistic nature, of processes at the quantum, or micro, level, might conceivably be amplified up to macro levels, where the “Butterfly Effect” of chaos theory 

leads to indeterminism in the evolution of the universe, and of all “collocations of atoms” within it. In other words, an organism might not have to be considered “a puppet on a string”, with the strings being pulled only by the iron clad laws of physics. QM does indeed seem to offer a way out of Laplacian Determinism as the sole cause of an person’s actions.

But I think this misses a deeper aspect of the problem: namely, that we human animals seem to be products of nature (genes) and nurture (experiences), and these two factors seem to be exhaustive in determining our choices and actions. What other factors could possibly be involved in these? There do not seem to be any.

Among other confounding aspects, this raises knotty moral issues. If an individual’s genes and experiences are all that make him/her act as he/she does, and there is no one to blame for these, how can there be any justification for punishment? Or for credit, praise, or assigning merit, for that matter.

A new born baby seems to have certain innate, or instinctive traits (as we have learned from Dr. Steven Pinker's persuasive book The Blank Slate); but surely these traits and inclinations are morally neutral. As the baby grows into childhood and adulthood, he/she acquires experiences, which create memories, opinions, loves and hates, desires, prejudices, insights, and so on. At some point in the toddlers development, as surely every parent or guardian must know, he/she is capable of being “naughty”.

Does perhaps each person have an " Adam and Eve"-like "Fall", a threshold in time, where he/she is first capable of knowing good and bad? But there is a problem here. The terms “good and bad” apply to actions that are presumed to be freely chosen, and if the developing person has genes and experiences that determine how he/she will act, the terms “good and bad” seem to become of dubious applicability.

Hence, on this view, it seems wrong for society to punish crimes (Crimes being a certain kind of immoral action; clearly there are immoral acts that should not to be considered crimes, such as rude or loutish behavior). But this view leads to an absurdity, or into a circular path, because the individual humans comprising society, and in particular those in a position of prescribing punishments for crimes, are all themselves subject to the same all-encompassing, molding factors of nature and nurture. Hence it would seem that they cannot be blamed for punishing criminals.

It is odd, in a way, that so much political and sociological heat has been vented in the past 50 years or so on whether “Nature or Nurture” are dominant factors in determining or forming a person's moral and intellectual character. Both factors are deterministic, and would of course imply that a what one does is beyond his/her control.

The sad fact is that many contemporary political agendas, especially those on the Left, would like to argue for Nurture dominance partly because it seems to further their agenda of forcing a more active role of the government to install a favorable social environment. The idea seems to be that if we create a "Utopian Society", everyone will be happy ( excuse me for being a bit cynical here: I suspect a hidden agenda of optimizing their own identity-driven political position). In addition, they seem to want to minimize the Nature side of the equation, since that is perceived as being associated with Fascist regimes and/or Racist philosophies.

Let us turn back to the issue of moral culpability. My college Philosophy book on Ethics (Value and Obligation: Systematic Readings in Ethics, ed. R. B. Brandt contains an essay by philosopher C. A. Cambell titled “is Free Will a Pseudo Problem?”  In this, he points out that what most of us mean for a person to be blameworthy, or guilty of some act, is that he/she must have been able do what she/he ought to have done even even being exactly the kind of person he/she was, and all other conditions being exactly as they were. I think this is one of the best ways I have seen the free will and blame conundrum framed. Note that determinism would say that with those stipulations, the person could not possibly have acted differently. His/her behavior would, after all, be wholly fixed by the casual factors related to genes and experience. So if there is somehow some other factor, someone "inside" that is somehow outside of those stipulated factors, the act might have been free (and hence subject to moral blame or praise).

This suggests that one way---can it be the only way?-- out of the nature-nurture deterministic trap is to postulate that a given conscious being has some kind of eternally existing soul, or at least one that is outside of time. Postulating that we have souls, or spirits, that are created and formed as we live and grow in this world do not allow a way out, for all of the reasons presented above; i.e., the soul would still have been formed by causal factors that could not be considered the fault of that soul. 

My own suspicion is that somehow the fact that our subjective consciousness is anchored in time prevents us from seeing how FW can actually be possessed by sentient life forms. But I am not at all sure of that. And by the way, the emergence of consciousness is to me another one of the great mysteries, and is very possibly related to the emergence of FW (if there really is such).

A plausible resolution of the free will paradox?

The question is not so much, “Do we have free will?”, as, “What would free will even mean?" There does not seem to be a way to make the concept of free will coherent. If there is no way to render an idea sensible, then what sense would it make to ask if the idea is correct?

The paradox comes in because I believe we all assume that we have free will, and usually that others do too. And we blame and punish wrongdoers, i.e., criminals, as if they were free do not have committed their crimes. We try to convince others of some idea, or to persuade them to do something, all of which seems nonsensical if their behavior and their thoughts are determined. To complete the paradox, consider that no one can consistently maintain strict determinism, since they would make to make the tacit assumption that they were free to have arrived at that conclusion.

Consider this: you by a new Mac. It comes bundled with software and firmware, that is, an operating system along with a host of standard applications, but of course this all runs on a particular hardware architecture that is presumably identical to all other instances of that particular Mac model. Certain settings are peculiar to your machine, as you fire up the machine and choose preferences and various control panel settings. As time passes, and you begin to use your computer, you create files, and download and install certain additional programs. Very quickly your computer is like no other. The computer acquires what seems to be a “personality”. You yell at it such things as “Oh, come on, I didn’t say to do that”! and so forth, even though you know it is just a machine, doing what its hardware and software dictate it will do. To this, we can in principle add randomness, that is, such things as a power surge, or cosmic ray induced bit flips, and so on, which can cause it to deviate from a predictable path on occasion.

Now I want to make the analogy that the initial state of the machine is like our genetic makeup, with the aforementioned “preferences” added, while the installed software is analogous to what an organism learns and adapts to through experience. So, just as the hardware and installed software entirely determine what the machine will do (excepting the small input from random perturbations), so genetic makeup (“nature”) plus the build up of life experiences (“nurture”) entirely determine how an organism will behave. If you doubt this, please tell me what these other factors might conceivably be.

It does no good to say that there is some kind of “internal you” or “self”, that decides what to do, because we cannot imagine where that self has emerged from other that from experience plus genes. “Nature plus nurture” seem to be the only conceivable process that could have created a conscious self.

Some people have suggested that the existence of a spirit or soul might be injected here to leave room for escaping from the hardware plus software factors. I disagree, because the same problem emerges even then. As long as we postulate that that spirit or soul has a beginning (in some sense, not necessarily temporal), the determining factors would seem to shift to some kind of “supernatural hardware” plus experience (in the natural world plus in the postulated “super-nature” or transcendent realm).

So, what is the proposed “solution”, or “resolution”, I mentioned in the heading? It is, not unexpectedly, difficult to explain. I believe that it is that, to be able to render the concept of determinism coherent, we would have to be outside “the system” of existence we are all in. Only a being outside of that would have the intellectual basis to observe that we are all determined beings, without free will. Since we are all inside, and not outside, nobody can get outside to make the consistent observation that we are all determined. We are trapped, “within the system”, and all have to make (what is at least a consistent assumption) that we are possessed of free-will. But all of us knowing that, at some level of reality beyond the one we have access to, we all have to be determined. In other words, we have no choice but to consider all of human-kind to have free will.

This has perhaps some similarities to the Godelian idea that mathematical systems are either incomplete or inconsistent. Only here we have a concept, “free will”, which cannot really be defined in a coherent manner, but one that we must necessarily assume exists. This appears to be a consistent approach, in that by symmetry everyone can assume everyone else has free will, knowing that our understanding of what it means is fuzzy and incomplete. The opposite position, that everyone is determined, is not a symmetrically consistent ‘solution”, since the person maintaining it would seem be excluding himself or herself as a determined being (since he/she would not have been free to use reason to arrive at that position). This is all an odd state of affairs, to be sure, but we know going in that it has to be, since philosophers have struggled with it with limited success for a good chunk of recorded history.

Some Philosophical Musings

Consider the concept of the “multi-verse” . There are, of course many other equivalent, or at least closely related theories, such as “parallel universes theory”, “the many worlds interpretation”, etc. (the wikipedia site just referenced has some good descriptions of these related ideas). But all of them, as far as I can tell, do not admit of any kind of empirical verification, and hence it is dubious to consider them science. One almost wonders if this kind of speculation should be considered “religion”, since I suspect a strong motivation for it is to avoid the implications of this universe seeming to be the product or creation of some kind of mind (whether a deity, deities, or something not yet even imagined by humankind).
Now, I am not saying that the existence of parallel worlds is necessarily wrong, just that we will never know if it is right or not. It is beyond the methods of science. Perhaps this is a good example of how something like “Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem” has applicability applies to physics and metaphysics as well as to mathematics. That is, there may be truths that can not be broached by the scientific method.
Perhaps this seems a “duh”—but I don’t think it is, because I often find that people imply that ideas that can be shown to be unverifiable are thereby false. Now maybe it is rational to decide that we can’t know whether they are true of false, and therefore decide that they do not matter in our practical everyday lives.

I noted with interest the other day that the Templeton Foundation offers grants to study and make progress on the subject of “Free Will”.
How, I wonder, would one propose to investigate that? I am inclined to think that most people, and even many philosophers, do not fully realize the deep mysteries and paradoxes involved in this subject. Determinism in some form seems inescapable, but impractical, since it seems we cannot act upon it, and we all assume that we are not determined. Indeed, the assumption of absolute determinism seems to render absurd any of moral notions, and hence any kind of blame or punishment. Everyone learns in a college “Ethics 101” that “ought implies can” (a Google search on this phrase will bring up thousands of hits on the topic).
The odd thing is that we cannot coherently specify what the concept of “free will” would even mean. It seems that everything a system does is either the result of its physical makeup (i.e., for animals, genes), external forces, or previously stored information (this latter being the result of delayed external forces). And yet, we all assume in practice, even the “deterministic philosophers”, that we have free will. I am inclined to say that we “know” that we do. This is an odd thing, that there seem to be two all inclusive opposites, free will and determinism, and yet neither seems quite right. Is there some “third way” out of this that no one has yet thought of?

When we ask, “Why is there Something and not Nothing” are we committing a fallacy of sorts? (Again, one gets thousands of hits with a Google search on this phrase, so there are a lot of us that wonder about this question.)
Within our experience, that is, within the part of the universe that we inhabit, we have observed that when something is “there”---that is, in some region of space and time---then there is some reason for it to be there. Someone has put there, some inanimate object has knocked it there, and so on. But can such a cause and effect relationship be expected to hold for “Existence Itself”? No, from a purely rational perspective, it seems we must accept the fact of existence as axiomatic. But this will never satisfy most of us psychologically. And, along the lines of the “multi-verse” idea mentioned above, it may be that there is a reason for “Why is there something and not nothing”, it is just that we can never know, using any kind of exploration or verification methods we have, what that reason is.

The different views about Consciousness

One of the hottest areas in philosophy today (based on the number of books about it) seems to be the “mind body” problem, which I believe is closely related to the study of consciousness. That is, how exactly does the conscious mind interact with the body and make it act? What causes that mysterious subjective sense of self, the feeling of “what it is like to be somebody”? Of course, this is not just an area of philosophy, but merges in many ways with psychology, neuroscience, and perhaps even quantum mechanics (or perhaps I should say the philosophy of quantum theory).

In doing quite a bit of reading on the subject as a layman, I believe we can see several distinct ways of thinking about it.

Behaviorism, perhaps not so important or widely held today, tended to ignore or even deny the phenomena of consciousness, essentially arguing that it is not an important aspect of behavior. Actually, I can sympathize with this position up to a point, in that consciousness is not an observable, and the behaviorist position, interpreted to mean that we should concentrate on aspects of reality that permit observation, seems to have much going for it. However, denying that consciousness exists, and denying that it likely has evolved for an important reason, seems foolish to me. Not that some kind of stimulus and response mechanism isn’t responsible for a lot of what causes some, or even most, human behavior. I suspect that it can go along way toward explaining much of it. It is just that it’s not the whole thing. Surely the quality of consciousness does affect some actions, for why else would it have evolved? Some have argued it is an “epiphenomena”, that is, something that has come about accidentally, that serves no real purpose. But it seems to me that nature does not waste effort in that way. Any trait that is there is there for a reason. Maybe the behaviorist would argue that it is there simply to make the animals that have it feel better about themselves, and perhaps, at the human level, to rationalize what they have done.

Reductionism, or materialism---the view that consciousness will be explained and even artificially created eventually (e.g., via AI or neural net techniques). This view rejects attributing any kind of mysterious aspect to consciousness, and argues that it is simply a quality brought about by natural selection that will soon be completely understood. Leading proponents of this viewpoint, at least in the popular press, have been Daniel Dennett, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Hofstadter. Probably a majority of today's philosophers and evolutionary biologists would be in substantial agreement with them, so this is probably the mainstream academic position, though no doubt there are many variations and nuances within the broader camp. Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis could be viewed as the quintessential argument for this perspective, maybe along with Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. In this view, consciousness does affect action, and in fact that is just why it has evolved, because it helps the organisms that have it survive and procreate, thus getting their genes into the gene pool. This school of thought also suggests that consciousness may have evolved because of the value to survival of there being an agent within the organism that cares what happens to it. I find this way of thinking plausible, but tend to go more with the next group.

The New Mysterians---people who argue that consciousness will never be understood, usually from the point of view that we do not have the mental capacities to solve the problem, and that furthermore, consciousness is entirely subjective and hence not amenable to scientific exploration. In this camp would be Roger Penrose, Martin Gardner, and David Chalmers, to name but a few. Even though I am a great admirer of, and largely a follower of, Dawkins, Crick, and Dennett, my sympathies tend to lie with these New Mysterians. I suspect those of the reductionist persuasion tend to be suspicious of religious motives in this camp, and that is quite possibly the case, in a sense. I think it depends on what exactly is meant by “religion”. I myself would confess to an inkling that there is something mysterious and other worldly about the existence of the “finely tuned” universe and the emergence of conscious observers within it. But that is a far cry from believing that the God of any of the world’s present religions is responsible in any way for it. Some in this broad school of thought would hold that quantum mechanics, with all of its strange entanglements, ghostly wave functions, and bizarre uncertainties may be involved, and would present a barrier to ever fully understanding consciousness. Some would argue that consciousness is even more fundamental that the existence of an objective world, something that certain interpretations of quantum mechanics would seem to support.
The New Mysterians seem more inclined than the other two branches to consider the moral implications of the non-observable nature of consciousness. For example, somewhere Penrose asks if it is moral to turn off a computer system that has passed the Turing test and hence might be regarded as being conscious, this dilemma in part arising for the very fact that consciousness is not observable.

Tied in with the mind-body problem and the nature of consciousness is the issue of whether the will is free. The first two camps would say no, while the third, the New Mysterians, would tend to argue that we can never understand the sense in which we are free or determined. While acknowledging that free will seems meaningless, since action must be caused by a combination of genes and experience, the view that it is caused only by those two mechanisms also leads to paradoxes. For example, the argument of a determinist is under cut and rendered invalid if the argument itself is caused by those factors. A sort of “garbage in, garbage out” argument.

To be continued in a later blog entry.

Determinism Part 3: Laplacian Determinism and how we can imagine animals are not bound by it.

Here I want to indulge in some speculations—admittedly a bit “out there”---on how an argument can be made to escape “Type 1 Determinism”. That type of determinism is the mechanism carried to the extreme, and was first advocated, as far as I know, by Laplace. I think it is also sometimes referred to as “naturalism”. In this picture, the universe is really just a collection of “mechanical” entities (particles and fields in the modern view) that obey fixed mechanistic laws, and any collocations of particles that comprise life forms are really just passive puppets moving in external forces. The apparent existence of choice and the ability to initiate movement are regarded as being just an illusion. All the dynamics of the universe, including the behavior of all life forms, is seen as just a huge extension of a small number of particles bouncing around in a box, but is thought to be, in principle, no different. No novelty will really ever emerge, taking the universe as a whole. Time is just an illusion also, because the future is every bit as determined as the past. The universe, as complex as it is, is really just in a static state.

I should point out that the strength of the mechanistic argument in no way depends on any assumption about how complete our knowledge is regarding the laws that matter and fields obey. Rather, it just hinges on the assumption that there are such laws, which may or may not eventually be exhaustively discovered.

It is not easy to see a way out of this mechanistically constrained picture, but I think a way out can be found: I want to suggest that life originated as a kind of Phase transition, maybe analogous in some ways—although far more astounding----to a phenomena such as superconductivity or Bose condensation. Perhaps it is an inherently quantum mechanical transition, involving coherent interactions among the parts of an incipient life system. Now, the “laws of physics” are not, to my notion, really laws in the sense that the particles and fields must “obey” them. Rather, we human observers have inferred that the particles and fields behave in certain ways that can be described by laws, which usually take the form of equations. These behavioral laws have been abstracted from observing non-living stuff, i.e., inanimate matter, matter that is not in the phase transitioned state we call life.

So I suggest that a living system involves motions of its constituent particles that are partially but not completely described according to the way inanimate matter behaves. When the phase transition occurs to a non living system---i.e., death occurs—then the motions of the parts of the matter that constituted the living system are again entirely mechanistically determined. Now of course the mechanistic behavior exhibited by non living matter always partially—maybe I should say largely---determine the motion of the living system. If an animal decides to jump, its possible motion is still constrained by gravity. If I jump out of an airplane, gravity will pull me down to earth, but by choosing to maneuver my arms and body in some allowed manner and affecting the drag forces I can still affect the trajectory, at least in some small way. I cannot prevent the ultimate disastrous crash into the surface, but I can slightly alter exactly where and when I hit. The centrifugal force of a turning car we ride in will affect our body, by we could decide to stand or lie down, and hence alter the exact manner of how we are pushed or shoved by the apparent inertial force.

Now one might protest that Quantum mechanics is still deterministic, and that postulating that life systems are quantum mechanical does not afford a way out of mechanism. The argument would go that there is still a wave function of the total Universe, and this evolves deterministically when all forces, energies, and fields are accounted for. But as I understand Quantum mechanics, the wave function collapses to a definite state only when a conscious subject interferes with the surrounding physical system, makes a measurement of it in effect, and forces it into some definite state that we can understand ‘classically”. So the point is that we have no reason to think we can apply the ideas of quantum mechanics to the Universe as a whole, since conscious beings are known to be part of the Universe. Only a being outside the Universe could view it as being deterministic. Conscious beings within it can only look at portions of the non living world, and it begs the question to try to imagine that we can talk about the wave function of the universe, as that would require a conscious being or beings outside the universe. It can only be a part of the universe that is described by a wave function.

Once the phase transition to a proto living system occurred, I can imagine that it “gave off fragments of itself” that remain in a coherent state. Rather in the way that a small fire might give off sparks that give rise to other small fires. Evolution, as imagined by conventional evolutionary biology (Darwin-Dawkins) might then occur. Perhaps a contributing factor to the first phase transition to life might have been the radical non-equilibrium nature of the earth-sun interaction, to take an example from earth.

Is this a form of “Cartesian Dualism”? No not really; rather it is just an argument that the laws of physics that apply to inanimate matter only partially apply to living matter, a collection of matter that has gone through a phase transition to a coherent state that can initiate motions not determined by all the rest of the matter and energy in the universe. Maybe we could say that universe is so configured that it permits the phase transition to living, and perhaps ultimately conscious, sub-states.

Now, this argument does nothing to escape from Type 2 Determinism---the idea that an information system can only do what its hardware and its experiences lead it to do (and well, we can throw in random, or haphazard influences as well). None of these leave any room for that odd ability we all think and assume we have, namely free will. I want to turn to that next—so, “to be continued”.

More about Determinism

This is a continuation of the last blog entry dealing with the conflicts between the two types of determinism and our commonly held belief that we all have free will.

If we buy the idea that physics applies to everything—that is, that in principle everything is reducible to physics—then Type 1 determinism is inescapable. The universe is just a set of particles and energy fields which evolve according to set rules of behavior. It does not matter if the particles and fields are the ones we think we know of today, or whether the laws of physics that we think we know are even correct, or even approximately correct. The point is that the perspective of physics assumes that there are laws, and that all is mechanism deep down. The “conglomerates” that form, whether they are rocks, planets, molecules, or animals are not only subject to these laws, but all of the behavior of these forms is basically mechanical. The apparent ability of life forms to initiate movement is in this picture an illusion.

This picture is not changed even if we imagine that the idea of parallel universes is valid, for in the sense I am using the word universe it applies to everything that is, all of reality, whether we can see or detect it or not. Nor does anything change in this mechanistic picture if we suppose that the laws of physics or the associated “physical constants” change with time, provided we assume that there is some “meta law” that prescribes how these change.

To formalize this argument in a simple way, let’s denote the universe (in the sense described above) as U. Let’s imagine that a particular object (a clump of “stuff”) within it is X, and further that X is an animal that seemingly can spontaneously decide to initiate movement or action. On the mechanistic view, U’s future state is in entirely determined, as is every portion of it, including the component X. In fact, in a sense, there is no “future’ in this picture, because if we include time as a parameter, U is simply static. Let’s also imagine that there are no other life forms other than X---that is, U-X is non-life, so that from X’s viewpoint U-X is only undetermined because of his own influence on it. That is, X “imagines” that it is free to move and to create a future for itself that is not determined in advance. And since its “stuff” is part of U, it influence through mechanistic interactions U-X. But in the mechanistic view, X is not justified in believing this (of course, this belief is forced on X in the deterministic picture, which is just one of the many absurd aspects): X is just a portion of U, and evolves without any novelty emerging …all is essentially static, time is just a parameter. The future state is entirely fixed, and nothing creative or surprising can happen. The closed system never really changes…nor does any portion of it, such as our subject X.

In particular, as I said in the last blog entry, unless we assume that life forms are somehow different and at least partially outside the mere influence of mechanical forces, this picture is inescapable. Now if we imagine that the U is “tinkered with” on the outside (in some ‘space” or supernatural” realm) then non predictability enters, but it is not really due to the spontaneous motion of the animals(X’s), but rather it is being altered intermittently (or perhaps constantly) by an outside agent. This still does not seem to offer an escape from mechanism with the U….it just means that the U is an “open system”. It might still be closed, but at a “higher level” than U. Maybe we call refer to a meta U, U*, or something along that line.

Now, I argued in the previous blog entry that Type 2 determinism (the view that nature plus nurture plus randomness causes all animal behavior) is incompatible with the above Type 1 determinism. Type 2 tends to be the favored paradigm of the modern person, especially the social scientists of today (who also usually emphasize the “nurture” side of the mix, possibly for “politically correct” motives). If we try to imagine that both Type 1 determinism and Type 2 hold, then the behavior of X would seem to be “over-determined”. That is, the action of X must be “caused” (the premise of both types of determinism), and the action cannot be caused at once by both mechanisms. Either physics mechanisms (broadly understood) or nature plus nurture plus randomness must cause the animal’s action at any given time, not both.

Now, maybe the advocates of Type 2 really believe in Type 1, but think that this is not a useful picture, any more than it would be to try and understand the behavior of a computer purely in terms of the electron motions and currents in the wires and chips. That is, the Type 2 advocate might claim that they are taking a higher level of integration perspective, recognizing that, at some unfathomable level, Type 1 still rules. OK, but this would be beside the point philosophically---the point is that I do not see how one can avoid accepting Type 1 unless one postulates that life is something fundamentally different than the non-life stuff that obeys deterministic (mechanistic) laws. There is no way to get outside of this deterministic picture otherwise.

The key ingredient that is left out of this picture is “consciousness”, which is surely the most amazing and mystifying phenomena in the universe. Does anyone doubt that nebula and planetary system are subject to purely mechanical forces, and in fact would be totally determined by mechanical forces if there were no consciousness in the universe to inject novelty? Now, galaxies and nebula we know from Hubbell can be amazing and surprising to us viewing them, much in the way that fireworks displays astonish and wow us…but no one would claim these is any novelty in the sense of these being anything unpredictable in their behavior.

Somewhat oddly, it seems to be the people in the hard science of physics that tend to speculate that all is not physics. For example, the well known theoretical physicist A. Zee, in his masterful popular science book Fearful Symmetry says

“Ultimately, the discussion [regarding consciousness] comes down to the question of whether science can explain life; that is, whether there is a “life force”, for lack of a better term, outside the purview of rational thought. Is human consciousness merely the result of a bunch of neurons exchanging electromagnetic pulses? Is the thinking brain just a collection of quarks, gluons, and leptons” I don’t think so. Do I have a cogent reason? No, it is just that, as a physicist, I do not have enough hubris to believe that physics can be all encompassing……”.

I am pleased to see that I am in such good company in questioning whether all is mechanism. And today it must be hard for anyone in physics or cosmology to be smugly dogmatic in the opposite direction, in view of the recent discoveries of dark energy and dark matter. Though these do not fall outside the realm of mechanism, they do suggest we might be in for a lot of surprises about the nature of reality. And though I do not want to go into this here, some of the recent work in quantum mechanics suggests non local effects in the universe that seem to violate the classical thinking of cause and effect in a space time continuum.

But after all of this, I have to say that I find it very hard to escape from Type 2 determinism. What other factors could possibly be involved in a mental or physical decision and action? There seems to be no way to even frame the concept of “free will” that involves any factor outside of the nature-nurture-randomness axis. Anyone that is at all interested in this free will issue should read Martin Gardner’s chapter on this in his book “The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener”. In this brilliant essay, “Why I am not a Determinist or a Haphazardist” (the latter being the term he uses for a person believing that human action is caused by random influences), Gardner considers the relevant views of a great many philosophers and artists: Immanuel Kant, William James, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sarah Teasdale, Alfred North Whitehead, C. S. Lewis, Spinoza, Samuel Johnson, and H. L. Mencken, to list just a few. Gardner seems to conclude that the best we can do when considering the issue of free will and determinism is to fathom its incomprehensibility.

[to be continued]

Two flavors of determinism

Imagine a universe that is simply set of particles in a box with hard reflecting walls. Let there be n particles, and imagine that they interact with each other according to some fixed set of mechanical laws (these laws need not be the Newtonian laws we are familiar with). The particles can bounce off each other as well as off the walls, they can be sticky so that they sometime form clusters, and they exert forces on each other and can alter trajectories through some kind of force fields. But it is a closed system, and in a sense it is a static situation: the future follows without any novelty from the state of the system at any given time. The future is an illusion in this mechanical universe, and time is simply a parameter.

For example, suppose n = 1. The simple particle just bounces around like some simple kind of “pong” game, where its collision with the walls is the only thing that can happen. Make it two particles, n = 2, and it isn’t really any more interesting, although now there are some times where the particles might bounce off each other. No matter how big we make n, the situation, in principle, stays the same. It is a strictly deterministic system, closed, and no novelty can emerge.

In such a system, if conglomerates of many particles form, maybe they will appear to make complex motions and would, were anyone watching it from without, maybe appear to be alive and initiating such motion voluntarily. But we can see this is would be an illusion….it is still the forces within the closed system that are completely determining the evolution of the system.

Such a picture of our universe was, I think, what Laplace had in mind. Indeed, here is his famous quote about it (taken from the Wikipedia site on Laplace):

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”


The term “Laplacian Determinism” is often used to describe this vision of the universe, and within this picture all animal activity in particular is imagined to be caused by forces on the particles comprising the animals. The seeming ability of life forms to initiate motion and perform actions is an illusion in such a model. Otherwise the actions of an animal would be over-determined---that is, one could not introduce voluntary action in this model, as it would result in inconsistencies.

Here I am going to call this “Type 1 Determinism”. It is my suspicion that no one really believes in this type of determinism today. Rather the determinists of our age generally seem to subscribe to a “higher level” of determinism.

I will refer to this as “Type 2 Determinism”. In this picture, the emergence of novel forms and animals that can in a sense initiate motion and actions is not contested, but it is argued (maybe even subconsciously in a great many cases) that an animal can only act based on its physical nature in concert with its memory of lessons learned from the past. This is analogous to what we think about the PC’s on our desks or our laptops. They have a certain physical architecture and hardware (which is analogous to the bodies and genes we are born with), but a wide variety of applications (programs) have been installed that make each computer virtually unique. But the computer cannot initiate anything….its behavior is entirely set by its resident programs and its basic hardware (the hardware that the computer was first configured with plus any hardware devices that have been added).

Perhaps we can add the possibility that “randomness” could also be involved. The animal, as well as the computer, could be hit by a cosmic ray that flips a bit or diverts a neuron. Chance meetings and exchanges with other animals could be included here, or they could be counted as environmental interactions.

So hardware plus installed programs plus random interactions with the environment seem to exhaust the possibilities here. How could an animal, in particular a human with conceptual awareness, perform an action for any reason other than these three? Action has to be caused does it not? It does no good to say it is caused by ones free will, for there seems to be no way to even frame that in a way that does not involve these deterministic factors.

In contemporary terminology hardware corresponds to "nature" (i.e., genes), while the acquired experience (analogous to installed software) corresponds to "nurture". There has been an ongoing battle between these two camps in recent decades, although it seems that today most everyone accepts that both nature and nurture play important roles in how people behave. But both of these mechanisms are deterministic, and if they are considered to exhaust the causes of action, leave no room for free will.

Let me add that in no way do quantum mechanics or chaos theory present ways out of either Type 1 or Type 2 Determinism. The former still involves deterministic evolution of a state, while chaos simply limits an observer’s ability to precisely predict the future. And if quantum computers become available, it is not clear how they could escape the limits of hardware plus installed programs.

Yet the odd thing is that I believe that we all assume that we have free will (we may well assume that other people do not, however). I emphasize that this is not a conscious assumption in many cases (though among philosophers and physical scientists it may often be so). As far as I can tell, there is no mass movement to stop punishing crime, although it is not clear how anyone could attach blame to an entity limited by “Type 2” (or Type 1) determinism.

My intent in this particular note is not to solve the problem of how humans might nevertheless have free will---indeed, I do not think it can be solved----rather, I just want to illuminate the fact that the kind of determinism that so many 19th century scientist and philosophers believed in was different than the form generally accepted in our age (especially by those trained in the social sciences).

But the puzzle has some confusing aspects to it: for one thing, I think both types of determinism are plausible and persuasive, and yet they logically collide. That is, they cannot both be true. It would have to be one or the other that specify behavior, because taken together they would over determine it. Type 1, though apparently largely ignored today, really seems to be hard to argue against. Isn’t it just physics carried to its logical, reductionist conclusion? And do we really think there is anything in the universe other than entities that are subject to the laws of physics? On the other hand, Type 2 Determinism also seems very cogent, for what else could determine our behavior, other than our accumulated past experiences acting in concert with our genetic makeup?

So to summarize: we have an enigma. There are two distinct, mutually incompatible forms of determinism. Both cannot be right, because either physics mechanism or nature/nurture must cause behavior. Yet both seem like they have to be correct. And on top of that we all seem to believe we have free will, which is clearly incompatible with both Type 1 and Type 2 determinism. Philosophy----“ya gotta love it!” If nothing else, it should keep us humble, and just reveling in the mystery is enough for me. And, OK, it is fun too!