The Problem of Identity

There are a number of problems that might be termed “Identity” problems, or issues. Many of these have bothered me all of my life, and I have had trouble even framing some of them in words. But I am going to try here.

Basically, they are all related to “why is something one thing and not another”?

One question is: How does the identity of the whole depend on the identity of the parts?:
I have often heard that our cells that comprise our bodies are replaced every seven years. There is the old classic “Ship Puzzle”, which was apparently posed by the ancient Greek: a ship, lets call it “The Proud Mary”, is replaced one board at a time. As the old boards are taken off, they are placed in a scrap pile. Eventually all of the boards are replaced, so that not one of the original boards is still in the ship. Since this happens gradually, the ship retains its identity as “The Proud Mary” at all times. Then one day, someone goes and puts the original boards all back together and says that one to be the true original ship “The Proud Mary”. The other one, he says, is a copy or duplicate. To some people this seems a frivolous problem, but to me it has always seemed to contain some genuine grounds for puzzlement. This puzzle would seem akin to the issue of how we maintain our personal identity in view of the fact that our individual cells are replaced.

Teleportation of bodies, such as is imagined to be possible in the Star Trek TV show, raises similar, even more daunting, paradoxes. If your molecular configuration is radiated to some other location and reconstructed there, is it really you? What if the original is not destroyed In the process of sending the molecular information? Which is the "real you"?
Consider cloning, which in spite of some the popular misconceptions does not pose an identity problem, any more than does the phenomena of identical twins. A few years back, a sheep was cloned. This caused some controversy. But I do not understand why. I suspect that it threatens people’s underlying concerns about identity, though they do not know that that is the cause of their uneasiness about it. In fact, cloning, in contrast to the teleportation problem, poses no such problems. The cloned organism is a different organism, and as it grows it will have no connection with the cell donating original.

What if my leg were replaced? Would I still be me?--of course, there's no problem with anyone accepting that. What about all of my internal organs being replaced? Again, I don’t think there is any question that it would still be “me”. But what about the brain itself? It appears to be an organ, but it is the one that appears to be responsible for my thoughts, for me being who I am. So if Bob's brain is replaced by Mary’s, isn't the being in Bob’s body now really Mary? That is, the person you would perceive in Bob’s body would in fact be Mary. This would clearly argue that the real me is my brain. Just as the real nature of a computer is defined by its processor and memory. All of the organs and limbs are just “peripherals” that have little to do with the personal identity.

But can we imagine dividing the brain somehow? That is, what if the memories are Bob’s but the processor is Mary’s. Is there some reason why this is inherently a contradictory achievement? Is the person standing in front of you with Bob’s body, Bob’s memories, but Mary’s processor Bob or Mary?

Consider this question: “Can two separate or distinct entities be exactly alike?” In our everyday experience, this is of course not something that would ever occur to us, because compound or complex objects (trees, chunks of concrete, baseballs, rabbits, and so on) always have numerous traits that would allow us to label distinct members of their class. Maybe it is not always evident (as with baseballs where they all look very similar), but surely no one doubts that there are differences that could be discerned upon very close inspection. To carry it even further, we note that even if one insisted that there were no discernible differences, then differences could be added (the basketballs could be numbered, or the owners name etched on the surface somehow, etc.).

I have never heard of any set of parents, or even close friends, who have trouble distinguishing the separate identity of twins (although casual acquaintances may have a great deal of trouble telling them apart). In other words, there are always some small distinguishing characteristics that permit the distinction between them to be made.
But electrons are imagined, in physics, as being fundamentally indistinguishable from each other. The same is true of other sub-atomic particles, and even all molecules or atoms of a given type are identical to each other. But, in our experience, can any entity be exactly the same as all others? What insights into the identity problem can the Pauli exclusion Principle give us? The electrons may be in different states, but in a sense the basic electron is assumed to be in every way identical as every other electron in the universe.

Reflect that physics/chemistry/biology do indeed say that our bodies are comprised of particles, atoms, and molecules. As groups of molecules string together, the possibility of distinguishing the configurations becomes possible.

Is it meaningful to imagine being someone else? Why am I me and not someone else (or how do I know I’m have not been someone else, but have just forgotten?). Maybe the question makes no sense, but why does it seem to arise in our minds? What does it mean when we refer to “being in someone else’s shoes”? We seem to be imagining, at least to some extent, what it would be like to be somebody else? Does this make sense, or can it be in any way imagined to be meaningful? While it seems relatively easy to imagine our selves being positioned somehow in another’s body, that would not really seem to be being them. As Douglas Hofstader asks in his anthology “The Minds Eye”, “What is it like to be a bat”? Does it make any sense to ask this, or related questions, that involve our self being transplanted into some other beings consciousness? Does it depend on whether the transplant involves beings of the same order of complexity and intelligence (i.e., does it make sense among humans, but not between say a bat and a human?). Is it possible that our self will really cycle through all possible people’s lives? Would this be a just eschatology? (sort of an analogy with Feynman’s one electron scattering back and forth in time).
Does this have some bearing on what Christians might believe about the nature of Jesus Christ and the incarnation--that is, is it possible, consistent, or reasonable to imagine that Jesus Christ was God but was somehow limited by having to occupy a physical body?
Ann Rice, in Tales of a Body Thief, simply imagines without dwelling on the difficulties, that such an exchange is possible. In fact, this very ingenious and imaginative author has depicted many variations of the mind-body switch scenario...

Aren’t such moral principles as the “Golden Rule”, and Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” based on the perception that it is possible to imagine being someone else? Maybe even on the possibility that in some sense you are or will be that someone else. You are sympathetic at least in part because you can imagine being them.

Isn’t the Marquis deSade’s arguments that he puts into his philosophical (but perversely randy) villains mouths about how morality is a ruse and that no one really has to care about anyone else base on his perception that we are all utterly removed and detached from each other, that there is no reason to care about another because you will no, can not, could not, ever be that other person.

But where does this stop? That is, how different can the being be before it is clearly impossible to imagine being the other? The old Jewish prayer of thanking God that I am not a woman springs to mind. It seems to assume that “I” could have been either. But does the “I” come into existence after my body, or was it there before? Is this just the issue of whether we have a soul or spirit? (Could this be related to the abortion arguments?)I can imagine being a woman, so it seems to be a reasonable switch. In fact, people even have sex change operations. Does a man really become a woman with such an operation? With the above example involving interchanges or transplants involving Tom’s brain and Mary’s body it seems clear that such a switch is possible or at least plausible.

But what about a being interchanged with another being of a different level of complexity? Of course, this could even be an issue within the human realm: IQs differ (but how widely in an absolute sense?)...But can I imagine being a slug, or a sheep, or any living animal.

What if I maintain that in fact you are always being interchanged with other people? That one moment ago you were John Smith, but now he is you and you are him. He has all of the memories and capabilities of me, and vice-versa. Maybe this just keeps happening, involving large numbers of people (or maybe all people). But his probably makes no sense, as it would be indistinguishable, would it not, from no interchange taking place at all.

And of course the big question: What is it like to not exist? Of course, we have in a sense all known this, as we presumably did not exist before we were born (or if we did, I for one do not remember it). Woody Allen said, “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens”. “To be or not to be” isn’t the only question (even if that is an option, and Hamlet went on to question that)--there is also, what is it like to “not be”?

Related to this is the issue of, or the position of, solipsism, and the question of how this differs from materialism/atheism picture (where death involves annihilation and hence non-existence). In other words (and this is hard to explain, so bear with me), if we are annihilated at death, then for me the universe does not exist anymore. If it is inconceivable or meaningless for me to imagine being another conscious organism or being, then might I just as well argue that for all practical purpose, solipsism is true. At least in a practical sense.

A few random musings

What is more likely? That there are countless billions of universes, and ours just happens to be the one suitable for life?….or that there is some mind behind the one we are in, and that it is in some sense specifically designed to support life? Probability estimates are not of much use here……but somehow to me the latter seems more plausible. Is the Mind, or Designer, the God of any particular religion? Not necessarily….it could be something totally beyond our comprehension, as far beyond our ken as quantum mechanics is beyond a dog’s understanding.

So many on both sides commit the fallacy of arguing for or against a specific religion based on its usefulness or harmfulness. For example, many Christians seem to argue for their belief on the basis that it is needed to ensure moral behavior. On the atheist side, many argue that a religion has harmful effects, and we’d be better off without it. Both are largely wrongheaded….only the truth matters. If a particular religion is not based on it being true, then one should reject it. Similarly, an atheist that argues that a particular religion has harmful effects should, one would think, regard that as irrelevant it were somehow given that the religion is true. It does not seem to me that many think about the truth on both sides. High points must be given, I think, to such atheists as Richard Dawkins (an evolutionary biologist and author of the brilliant book, “The God Delusion”) and Stephen Weinberg (Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist) for clearly stating that truth is the issue. Bertrand Russell, did, I believe, also often evince this attitude in his writings on religion. On the other side, John Polkinghorne , theoretical physicist and ordained Anglican priest, emphasizes the importance of truth, and quotes David Pailin: “Attempts to defend theism by ignoring the question of truth…are fundamentally atheistic. They worship human wishes rather than ultimnate reality”.

Will we ever understand consciousness? I do not see how that is possible, given that it a purely subjective phenomena, locked inside the skull of each of us, inaccessible to any outside observer. For that reason it will never be understood by the canons of objective science, although conjectures will surely continue to be made as to why it has evolved, how it can be created artificially, etc. But if an entity passes the Turing test (that is, gives responses indistinguishable from a human’s), maybe we will have to give it the benefit of the doubt and view it as having consciousness (and concomitant rights). The implications of this are serious: if we do succeed in creating seemingly conscious robotic systems, then to consign them to drudgery on behalf of the human race would seem to be a form of slavery.

It is interesting to consider who among ones friends, colleagues, and family are optimists or pessimists. There are, I guess, two levels to this way of dividing people. The higher level is a philosophical or metaphysical one, where one asks like whether it is a good thing that the human race exists, whether human life is basically worth living. The more mundane level involves a sort of instinctive every day attitude where an optimist might tend to always try to make the best of things that happen and grumble only occasionally, while the instinctual pessimist would always be seeing the bad side of what is going on around him or her. The practical optimist might often, I suppose, be a metaphysical pessimist, and vice a versa, though I am not sure how often this is the case. And there are probably cases where the two levels merge, and a pessimist at both levels might be dour and grumpy and also hold that it is a bad thing that life and the universe exist.
I would think that the practical optimist would tend to come across as “merry”, with a good sense of humor, but also might quite often—even usually—be serious. The practical pessimist might not always have a sour expression, but probably a key trait is that there are a great many grudges that weigh on him, and he may sometimes come across as angry at the world.
I do not think that a person who suffers from depression is necessarily a pessimist…I see that ailment as being more subtle, perhaps largely a physical or medical shortcoming.
Perhaps here is a practical test: one may ask oneself if he/she is glad to be alive…glad to have been born. Is the realization of the mere fact of existence a happy grateful thought, or is it a “gee, I wish I had never been born”. I guess a suicidal mood would be one in which one decides to act to take oneself out of existence….such as was evident in the musings in Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be…” soliloquy.

Will the human race be here for thousands, millions or trillions of years? Will war be abolished? Will all of the present religions of the earth become extinct, and new ones take their place. Or will all religions come to be regarded as relics of the infantile imaginings of our race. Will we become, as many have imagined, intermingled with artificial forms of intelligence? Will we become intermingled with alien races of other star systems, perhaps occupying ourselves regions of the universe vastly removed from our present region (new forms of space-time travel having been discovered)? Will humans go through some sort of spiritual metamorphosis such as Arthur C. Clarke has imagined in his novels “Childhoods End” and “2001”? Or are humans just an intermediate stage that is only useful for creating another more important form of life, one we would call artificial (perhaps silicon based)?

I must say that I am puzzled by rather oft-quoted remarks attributed to atheists Richard Dawkins and Stephen Weiberg. Both seem to have said, in effect, that the universe strongly suggests that there is nothing deep or meaningful behind it. Weinberg has been quoted as saying that the more we learn about the universe, the more pointless it seems. Huh? What has been learned in physics that even bears on it being pointless or not pointless. I wish he had given examples. Dawkins has said that the universe appears to be just the kind of place that we would expect if there is no deity involved in making it. Hmmm, again. What kind of evidence would there be if there were a creator behind it, one wonders? Also, in Dawkins’ generally excellent book, “The God Delusion”, I think he may have misrepresented the religious views of Albert Einstein. While some of Einstein’s writings do suggest that he was using “the mind of God” in a purely materialistic sense, in other places it seems to me that Einstein was open to there being some actual Mind behind it all. But there is no doubt that Einstein rejected the Judeo-Christian concepts of God.

The Problem of Identity

There are a number of problems that might be termed “Identity” problems, or issues. Many of these have bothered me all of my life, and I have had trouble even framing some of them in words. But I am going to try here.

Basically, they are all related to “why is something one thing and not another”?

One question is: How does the identity of the whole depend on the identity of the parts?:
I have often heard that our cells that comprise our bodies are replaced every seven years. There is the old classic “Ship Puzzle”, which was apparently posed by the ancient Greek: a ship, lets call it “The Proud Mary”, is replaced one board at a time. As the old boards are taken off, they are placed in a scrap pile. Eventually all of the boards are replaced, so that not one of the original boards is still in the ship. Since this happens gradually, the ship retains its identity as “The Proud Mary” at all times. Then one day, someone goes and puts the original boards all back together and says that one to be the true original ship “The Proud Mary”. The other one, he says, is a copy or duplicate. To some people this seems a frivolous problem, but to me it has always seemed to contain some genuine grounds for puzzlement. This puzzle would seem akin to the issue of how we maintain our personal identity in view of the fact that our individual cells are replaced.

Teleportation of bodies, such as is imagined to be possible in the Star Trek TV show, raises similar, even more daunting, paradoxes. If your molecular configuration is radiated to some other location and reconstructed there, is it really you? What if the original is not destroyed In the process of sending the molecular information? Which is the "real you"?
Consider cloning, which in spite of some the popular misconceptions does not pose an identity problem, any more than does the phenomena of identical twins. A few years back, a sheep was cloned. This caused some controversy. But I do not understand why. I suspect that it threatens people’s underlying concerns about identity, though they do not know that that is the cause of their uneasiness about it. In fact, cloning, in contrast to the teleportation problem, poses no such problems. The cloned organism is a different organism, and as it grows it will have no connection with the cell donating original.

What if my leg were replaced? Would I still be me?--of course, there's no problem with anyone accepting that. What about all of my internal organs being replaced? Again, I don’t think there is any question that it would still be “me”. But what about the brain itself? It appears to be an organ, but it is the one that appears to be responsible for my thoughts, for me being who I am. So if Bob's brain is replaced by Mary’s, isn't the being in Bob’s body now really Mary? That is, the person you would perceive in Bob’s body would in fact be Mary. This would clearly argue that the real me is my brain. Just as the real nature of a computer is defined by its processor and memory. All of the organs and limbs are just “peripherals” that have little to do with the personal identity.

But can we imagine dividing the brain somehow? That is, what if the memories are Bob’s but the processor is Mary’s. Is there some reason why this is inherently a contradictory achievement? Is the person standing in front of you with Bob’s body, Bob’s memories, but Mary’s processor Bob or Mary?

Consider this question: “Can two separate or distinct entities be exactly alike?” In our everyday experience, this is of course not something that would ever occur to us, because compound or complex objects (trees, chunks of concrete, baseballs, rabbits, and so on) always have numerous traits that would allow us to label distinct members of their class. Maybe it is not always evident (as with baseballs where they all look very similar), but surely no one doubts that there are differences that could be discerned upon very close inspection. To carry it even further, we note that even if one insisted that there were no discernible differences, then differences could be added (the basketballs could be numbered, or the owners name etched on the surface somehow, etc.).

I have never heard of any set of parents, or even close friends, who have trouble distinguishing the separate identity of twins (although casual acquaintances may have a great deal of trouble telling them apart). In other words, there are always some small distinguishing characteristics that permit the distinction between them to be made.
But electrons are imagined, in physics, as being fundamentally indistinguishable from each other. The same is true of other sub-atomic particles, and even all molecules or atoms of a given type are identical to each other. But, in our experience, can any entity be exactly the same as all others? What insights into the identity problem can the Pauli exclusion Principle give us? The electrons may be in different states, but in a sense the basic electron is assumed to be in every way identical as every other electron in the universe.

Reflect that physics/chemistry/biology do indeed say that our bodies are comprised of particles, atoms, and molecules. As groups of molecules string together, the possibility of distinguishing the configurations becomes possible.

Is it meaningful to imagine being someone else? Why am I me and not someone else (or how do I know I’m have not been someone else, but have just forgotten?). Maybe the question makes no sense, but why does it seem to arise in our minds? What does it mean when we refer to “being in someone else’s shoes”? We seem to be imagining, at least to some extent, what it would be like to be somebody else? Does this make sense, or can it be in any way imagined to be meaningful? While it seems relatively easy to imagine our selves being positioned somehow in another’s body, that would not really seem to be being them. As Douglas Hofstader asks in his anthology “The Minds Eye”, “What is it like to be a bat”? Does it make any sense to ask this, or related questions, that involve our self being transplanted into some other beings consciousness? Does it depend on whether the transplant involves beings of the same order of complexity and intelligence (i.e., does it make sense among humans, but not between say a bat and a human?). Is it possible that our self will really cycle through all possible people’s lives? Would this be a just eschatology? (sort of an analogy with Feynman’s one electron scattering back and forth in time).
Does this have some bearing on what Christians might believe about the nature of Jesus Christ and the incarnation--that is, is it possible, consistent, or reasonable to imagine that Jesus Christ was God but was somehow limited by having to occupy a physical body?
Ann Rice, in Tales of a Body Thief, simply imagines without dwelling on the difficulties, that such an exchange is possible. In fact, this very ingenious and imaginative author has depicted many variations of the mind-body switch scenario...

Aren’t such moral principles as the “Golden Rule”, and Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” based on the perception that it is possible to imagine being someone else? Maybe even on the possibility that in some sense you are or will be that someone else. You are sympathetic at least in part because you can imagine being them.

Isn’t the Marquis deSade’s arguments that he puts into his philosophical (but perversely randy) villains mouths about how morality is a ruse and that no one really has to care about anyone else base on his perception that we are all utterly removed and detached from each other, that there is no reason to care about another because you will no, can not, could not, ever be that other person.

But where does this stop? That is, how different can the being be before it is clearly impossible to imagine being the other? The old Jewish prayer of thanking God that I am not a woman springs to mind. It seems to assume that “I” could have been either. But does the “I” come into existence after my body, or was it there before? Is this just the issue of whether we have a soul or spirit? (Could this be related to the abortion arguments?)I can imagine being a woman, so it seems to be a reasonable switch. In fact, people even have sex change operations. Does a man really become a woman with such an operation? With the above example involving interchanges or transplants involving Tom’s brain and Mary’s body it seems clear that such a switch is possible or at least plausible.

But what about a being interchanged with another being of a different level of complexity? Of course, this could even be an issue within the human realm: IQs differ (but how widely in an absolute sense?)...But can I imagine being a slug, or a sheep, or any living animal.

What if I maintain that in fact you are always being interchanged with other people? That one moment ago you were John Smith, but now he is you and you are him. He has all of the memories and capabilities of me, and vice-versa. Maybe this just keeps happening, involving large numbers of people (or maybe all people). But his probably makes no sense, as it would be indistinguishable, would it not, from no interchange taking place at all.

And of course the big question: What is it like to not exist? Of course, we have in a sense all known this, as we presumably did not exist before we were born (or if we did, I for one do not remember it). Woody Allen said, “I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens”. “To be or not to be” isn’t the only question (even if that is an option, and Hamlet went on to question that)--there is also, what is it like to “not be”?

Related to this is the issue of, or the position of, solipsism, and the question of how this differs from materialism/atheism picture (where death involves annihilation and hence non-existence). In other words (and this is hard to explain, so bear with me), if we are annihilated at death, then for me the universe does not exist anymore. If it is inconceivable or meaningless for me to imagine being another conscious organism or being, then might I just as well argue that for all practical purpose, solipsism is true. At least in a practical sense.

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!

Would you do it all over again?

A friend of mine recently asked me if I would live life all over again if I had a chance. Clearly an academic question, but it leads to some interesting speculations, and of course some juicy metaphysical questions.

He first phrased the question, or maybe I should say “posed the thought experiment”, in a way that suggested that I might be a baby again, identical to what I was at birth. Well, of course, right away that brings up the questions, “what is meant by identical”, and “would I know as a baby what I know now?”. Otherwise, I might note, I would probably repeat many of the mistakes and committed the same foolish acts that I have in this life. But what would it even mean, to have the knowledge that one has now? Surely, there is no way to model how a baby, in the true sense of that term, could have the conceptual knowledge that an adult has. A baby has to learn language and concepts, and so there just seems to be no way to make sense out of that idea.

It also raised the question of, “would the world go back to being the exact state it was in when I was a baby?” (we are having fun here, remember, not taking the possibility of this return to a baby thing seriously, but just dancing around some peculiar conceptual problems of identity that I want to return to in a minute). One might imagine, or for the present purposes model, one’s life as a movie, and this would amount to rewinding the film and having it played again. It seems like this would be a meaningless action to choose to do even if one could. What would be the point?…..wouldn’t everything just unfold again the same way (well, maybe, or maybe not, given the possibly chaotic nature of such a historical re-enacting)?

And one might even say, how do I know that hasn’t in fact been done, many times or an infinite number of times, already, in some sense (think of Nietzsche’s idea of “eternal recurrence”). But there would seem to be no point in it……and who would be behind it (what entity or being), and to what purpose? Improvement in one’s character? Hmmm---but without any memory, or at least faint recollections, of the previous cycles, how could one “learn from ones mistakes”?

Some of this territory was explored, or maybe I should say suggested to the philosophically minded viewer, in the film “Groundhog Day”, where a man (Bill Murray) lives one particular day over and over, only seemingly dimly aware that he has done it before, and has repeatedly botched it in some way (the idea was to get him to improve to a point where he was worthy of the female star that he hoped to win over, an unfortunately rather trivial spiritual “chick-flicky” motive for bettering oneself).

Now suppose one agreed to become a baby again, but without the amassed knowledge or memory of his life up through adulthood, and placed in the world in its present state. Well, now we move into a more practical area, as it is interesting to note that one could almost do that now (or probably would be able to in the not too distant future): one would simply have oneself cloned, then one would immediately commit suicide. The cloned cell would develop eventually into a baby, very nearly identical to what you looked like at birth (some inert gestational induced variations might be present, but these would presumably be very small). This illuminates the identity issue that of course your clone would not have your personal consciousness, and would not in any sense of the word, be “you”. But wouldn’t it be essentially the same kind of transformation of somehow magically returning the present you to a baby state, without implementing any of the acquired knowledge or character into the baby?

The same kind of issues arise with the concept of human teleportation, such as is depicted in “Star Trek” (“Beam me up Scotty”). How would one ever know that the teleported human had the essential consciousness, the same sense of being oneself as the original being had? This raises the question of what is consciousness, and what constitutes the peculiar fact of conscious identity. This even arises when we realize that our cells are replaced every so often, such that after several years we are not exactly the same person we were earlier. I suspect this is what bothered the ancient Greeks in their “ship paradox” (although they would have known nothing about cell development and replacement, they would have known that people change over time). In what sense do you retain your identity as your body sheds and acquires new “building blocks”?

These issues are explored very insightfully in Chapter 1 of the book “Riddles of Existence” (by Conee and Sider). In my opinion, they do not “solve” the myriad identity problems, but they do rather thoroughly explore the issues.

Moral issues raised by artificial consciousness

I wonder if many people have thought about ethical issues that may be raised by systems that embody artificial intelligence, and that are possibly conscious (but I would guess that anyone who has seen Spielberg & Kubrick’s AI might have). There seems little doubt that humans will eventually, perhaps even soon (on a time scale of tens of years), create artificial systems that exhibit intelligence. The issue will be, of course, are they conscious?
Now, as everyone who has taken a college philosophy class knows, we only infer the consciousness of other humans (and, to some more questionable extent, that of other animals). Each of us only directly knows our own consciousness (thank you, Rene Descartes). Consciousness is subjective, and I do not see any way it can be objectively proven to exist in another entity. While we may all infer it as being virtually certain that biological systems have it, it is by no means clear how we can determine whether a human-made system is conscious. That is, if it has a sense of self. Or, to put it in the terms that present day students of consciousness use, whether a system has that peculiar feeling of what it is like to be someone. But no doubt it will eventually come to seem that some artificially produced systems do have it. How then will we deal with them? Will it be ethical to deny them the rights that humans have? Will it be right to use them as servants or as slaves? Will it be right to terminate their existence, scrap them, and interchange central processors (or whatever would serve as a brain). Can they be punished for “crimes”, or will they be considered as lacking free will and hence be immune from punishment? These questions are just a partial list of any of the issues we could all come up with. Spielberg & Kubrick’s entertaining film aside, how many philosophers have begun to address these issues?

Some Random Thoughts about "What I Believe"

To a reasonably high degree, I believe the following things to be true:
We humans are animals--apes, basically---with brains that have evolved to solve certain mental tasks better than any other animal. This enhanced mental capability is the human animal’s tool of survival. But, reason is very hard for most people when it comes to thinking about things of a more abstract nature, or in the heat of emotion. Our brains are only wired for reason or critical thought in certain kinds of circumstances (e.g., understanding how mechanical things work, predicting danger, how to acquire food or how to obtain sexual gratification).
Everyone is by nature selfish (although the appearance of altruism can be very convincing in some cases, it ultimately serves a genetic succession purpose—or in some cases a socially egoistic purpose).
Biological evolution, per Darwin, Dawkins, etc---has occurred, and explains most of the biological world, including human traits and tendencies.
The “Hell” many religions have imagined to await unbelievers and evil doers does not exist. If there is an afterlife and a God, Hell is not part of the package, at least not in an eternal lasting sense. Rather, Hell is something that certain human institutions have dreamed up to try to scare people into their camp, or in some cases, to enjoyably imagine themselves having the “last laugh” (yes, I fear some people can be that spiteful, although to be fair I don’t think they have really thought about how cruel a wish that is on other people—at least, I hope they don’t). Institutions that have subscribed to the concept have in some cases thrived, because it serves as "an offer you can't refuse" (if you were to be convinced that Hell is real), and hence membership in, and associated donations to, the religion tend to be obtained.
Humor and joyous merriment are great boons to humankind. But humor can sometimes turn nasty, mocking, and cynical, and hence can serve evil purposes.
Morality is not relative. Rather, it is based on human society, the nature of the human being, plus on something along th elines of the “prisoners dilemma" of game theory.
With a somewhat lesser degree of certainty, I am inclined to believe that our brains are not designed to (i.e., have not evolved to be able to) solve the “big metaphysical questions”, for example, that of existence: “why is there something rather than nothing?”; The riddle of free will vs. determinism: “do we have free will, what is free will, etc”; and the mystery of “consciousness” ---who/what has it, how does it emerge from biological tissue, can we create it artificially, etc.
With these issue it seems it is very likely beyond our mental capabilities to even frame the right questions. Rather, the human brain is limited to practical things That is, questions and issues that can be solved by engineering, science, and technology. This we are potentially superb at.
Regarding politics, I think that the “Libertarian” view of limiting the power of the government to securing "negative rights" is correct in most respects. But it will be a long time before most of the earth’s population can be converted to this view. And, there may still be improvements to be made in framing a fully consistent libertarian political philosophy. Socialism in it’s various forms and degrees is wrong, but is at least partly driven by a prevalent human strategy of trying to manipulate other people for one’s own benefit. In particular, it is usually attractive to an “elite class” (many academics, for example) because they resent the success of the practical humans, and sense that a strong central government will actually lead to privileges for the elite class. Of course, Orwell exposed these motives in 1984 and Animal Farm.
My strong suspicion is that the world’s religions are wrong, in most respects. While some may have intuited or captured some of the truth, they have not got most of it right. Among the theistic religions, Christianity is the most plausible and highly developed theoretically (i.e., theologically), while, from the little I know about Buddhism, it seems a reasonable "philosophy" about a lot of things. Hinduism also seems insightful in some ways, from what I have read about it. Islam I would give almost a zero chance of being true.
Now for a few predictions for the distant future. What the human race will likely come to understand, accept, or do eventually.
First, my optimistic, hopeful perspective (my pessimistic, fearful side in a moment): in this first perspective, in most respects, life on the planet will eventually become much much better: It will become widely and generally accepted that religious dogma has no place in the state (government), and should never be coerced, and never be the cause of war (5 to 10 thousand years).
And it will become generally accepted that war is an intolerable evil, and peace will prevail for all the earth (but this will take perhaps 5 to 10 thousand years). Science will learn how life began, and it will be widely accepted and understood (5 to 10 thousand years).
Much more will be learned about whether there is life elsewhere in the universe, but this may not be for a very long time, perhaps eons. New, as yet unimagined, modes of communication and travel will eventually be discovered to make this possible.
Crimes, such as murder and robbery, will become exceedingly rare, if not altogether vanished (this also will take a very long time, something like 5 to 10 thousand years).
Science will continue to progress and learn. In particular, physics, the most basic science, will progress to a point that we can not even imagine right now. A physics book from the year 2500 would completely mystify our most brilliant physicists of today.
Artificial life will be perfected, and robotic forms of life will be virtually indistinguishable from natural. The human body parts will be intermingled and replaced by artificial forms as they wear out or become diseased or injured; at some point, where what is a human and what is a robot will become blurred, as parts are intermingled. Perhaps only the brain will stay organic--or maybe even not that.
The natural life span will be dramatically increased, and disease made much more rare (I doubt that it will be eliminated entirely). Accidents will become less rare, and less fatal due to the availability of artificial parts.
Biases and prejudices (ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) will eventually vanish, on a time scale of perhaps hundreds of years.
Music will merge into other art forms, although the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart (and others) will remain effective and emotionally edifying to humans (and robots?).

Now, an alternative, Pessimistic view (in this perspective, life on the planet will get worse): The religious dogma will prevail, become embedded in the state (government); at present, it seems like many Muslims would do this if they could.
A nuclear war might occur, or a nuclear device will go off, triggering a catastrophic war, and the state of human society will suffer a great setback.
Governments will gain more power, and a statist world will prevail. This may be driven by an evident human tendency toward envy, which tends to want to create sameness, and equality in all things (like Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House vision).
Some natural catastrophe (like an asteroid) will decimate human civilization, and humankind will revert to a more primitive state.
While I view it as dubious, it is possible that the ecological doomsayers are right, and mankind’s activities will bring about disaster for the planet.
What I definitely do not know or understand:
Why there is anything rather than nothing? (my long time psychological obsession).
If there is a purpose or plan for humankind, by some outside agency…and if there is, what it might be.
If we survive death in any sense…and if so, what might that be like.
If there is a God or gods, how to imagine or model Him/Her/Them.
How to make any sense out of the concept of free will; how to make any sense out of the concept of strict determinism; how to imagine any reasonable alternative, since these seem all inclusive.

Deism-Theism-Agnosticism-Atheism (Part 1)

There is much hub bub these days about the spate of books extolling atheism. Specifically, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, The End of Faith by Sam Harris, and God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I very much like these books, and can go along with them for the most part. But not entirely. I call myself an "agnostic", and though I think all of these books plausibly attack that position as weak and to some extent cowardly, I want to hold to that label. I think it is justified, and believe that I can defend it..
To believe that it is justified, one might ask if there is any reason at all to say that you don't know whether something exists when there are no clear reasons for thinking that it does exist. The "it" in this case is a God, a set of gods, or a Deity...some kind of being or beings that in some way brought about the Universe.
First consider the "Deist" position. This was I believe held by Thomas Jefferson and others during that era we call "The Enlightenment". The idea is that there was some agency, or God, that designed and created the universe---but after doing so, he backed off from it, set back, and did not interfere with it. In particular, such a position rejects the organized religions, and the Abrahamic religions, and usually argues that the Creative Being does not concern Itself/Himself/Herself/Themselves with the doings of humanity.
The theist position, by contrast, adds to the Deist creation idea with the postulate that the Creative Being does continue to interact with the world, in particular, with the goings on of the human race. The Abrahamic religions would be, of course, theistic religions. Examples of such interactions might be selected "miracles", the dictating of certain rules or codes of conduct (e.g., The Ten Commandments), the Incarnation of Christianity, and so forth.
While I can not say that I subscribe to either of these positions, Deism or Theism, I do not agree that there are absolutely no reasons for considering the beliefs to be plausible.
I want to give two examples. One is the evidence, admittedly weak, for Theism. The other is somewhat stronger, to my mind, arguing for Deism.
The Deistic argument first, and I will here be very brief, hoping to enlarge upon this in a later post. This is based on the observation that the universe not only exists---itself a bizarre and vertigo-producing fact---but also that physics seems to suggest that the fundamental laws and parameters of the universe seem to be fine tuned to allow life and consciousness to form. Furthermore, the prevailing theory that the whole thing started with what is called the "Big Bang" seems to suggest that something started it. I know, of course, that there are alternative theories here to Deism---the parallel universes and such. But common sense---dubious in this context, it must be admitted--- seems to that the whole thing was created and designed by someone or something. There is no element here for me of "faith" at all, rather it is just a sort of intuitive feeeling. And I honestly don't know if the modern "Design" argument is very convincing to others, as there is some subjective judgement here.
The other argument, the one for Theism, is I admit much weaker, and much more subjective. This is based on art and music that has been inspired by one particular theistic religion, namely Christianity. The music, in particular, seems to me to be inspired beyond human capability. I think especially of the music of Bach, Palestrina, Handel, and Victoria. There are of course many others, but Bach stands out above all the rest, in my estimation. As I have said, this is a weak argument, but nevertheless it has some weight with me.

Some of the Big Questions. Amenable to being answered by Science?

The Big Questions
1. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there a universe, or why anything at all? Wouldn’t one expect the “lowest energy state” to be simply “nothing”?
2. Is there a God or gods, or anything agency of beings responsible for the universe? Where did they come from? If there can be such beings that are uncaused and eternal, couldn’t it just as well be the universe that is that.
3. What started life on Earth? Did it arise spontaneously, without any “supernatural” involvement? Has it arisen elsewhere in the universe?
4. Did Consciousness evolve through natural selection, or is there something “supernatural” about it? Can we humans engineer conscious systems (robots, computers, spacecraft, etc)? How would we ever know if such a fabricated entity was conscious?
5. Do we humans, or any conscious entities in the Universe, have free will? But how can it even be defined or understood, since all systems seem to be either hardware caused, software program caused, or randomly driven?
6. Do humans, or any animals in the universe, have any kind of life beyond the natural one? If so, what is the nature and duration of such a post life existence? Is there any external purpose to existence, or, perhaps as honest common sense would suggest, is the animal life all there is?

It is interesting to consider which of these questions the methods of Science might be able to answer. I am inclined to think that only #3 is amenable to being answered by Science. Some might add that #4 is, but I doubt it. The reason for my skepticism has to do with how consciousness is by its very nature a subjective experience. We use “Occam’s Razor” (the simplest explanation of something) to infer the Consciousness of other humans, but that will not work for other “platforms” or artificial systems.The other questions we cannot know the answers to (although of course we cannot stop speculating about them, and even having our own opinions and beliefs about them).

Some fun speculation on "life after death" and other eschatological issues

We must have all wondered at some time or other whether there is some kind of “life after death”. Well, on that topic (“eschatology” I believe it is called in theology) I would like to undertake a little bit of fun speculation, nowhere even close to being exhaustive, of course, but I hope any that might read this will find it interesting (and perhaps might stimulate any such reader to add more ideas and variations).
Is it necessarily eternal? It is usually assumed to be so, but what if instead it is finite? What if “eternal darkness” (non-being, or utter annihilation) then follows that? Or, what if there is an after life to that, and so on? These might go on forever, or a length we might arrive a final one that is either eternal or of finite duration.
What if, as Farmer brilliantly explores in Riverworld fantasy/science fiction series of novels, there is an after life, but it has been technologically produced? (this seems related to physicist Frank Tipler’s “Omega Point” philosophy also)? Or what if this world is some kind of simulation, or video game, where the "pawns" (us) are conscious?
What if Christianity is largely true, but God is finite, or just one of many Gods, or is somehow just in a hierarchal chain of Gods? Perhaps He is infinite, but is still in the middle of a hierarchy, as we believe infinities can have different orders.
What if we are God or gods, somehow fragmented into billions of entities for the sake of enjoyment in experiencing life? Though not the usual interpretation, this could kind of jive with the "Son of man" term Jesus used. Maybe, in this view, after death we are reabsorbed into “The One”, but can still remember all of our individual lives.
What if the above is true, but it is a final kind of thing, for maybe eternal life as a single entity was boring, and this is the swan song of existence? What if it is some kind of punishment, where a great supernatural entity had to be fragmented and incarnate in a tangible world for some duration?
What if we are all really only one being, somehow “partitioned” to actually experience the life of everyone, ultimate reality being somehow outside of time? This is rather like Wheeler's idea with there only being a single electron that is scattered forwards and backward in time to create the impression that there are ~10^90 electrons in the universe a given time even though in a sense it is all the same one.
What if each of us really lives in his own separate universe?--a kind of combining of solipsism with the branching many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The others in each persons own branch are "dummies", that actually do have their own universe. In Bob's universe, Bill is not real, and vice versa. Or it can be made even more complex, where Bill in Bob's universe is coupled to the Bill in Bill's universe in a very complex indirect way.
What if we are some kind of ranch animal, being put out to pasture by either a supernatural agency or an alien civilization of this tangible universe? This might be like the way we keep sheep for their wool or cows for dairy products. For example, what if it is art that Man produces? Maybe after producing art over some time interval, Man will be destroyed (or even eaten or consumed in some manner, as we might cattle or sheep) and the art will be taken by the gods for their amusement or enjoyment. Or maybe it is only enjoyed by them in real time, like a play (as in Russell's opening to A Free Man's Worship"), where once it is over that's all there is; the art dies with Man. Or maybe the Universe is to find those spirits which can produce art, and they are kept alive in some manner. This prolonged life might be of finite or of infinite duration (seemingly finite if the ranchers are tangible, however). There are other possibilities besides art: what if it is war, or sporting events, that these gods or aliens like to see. Maybe we are a sort of enormous gladiator arena for the cruel amusement of bloodthirsty gods (in some ways, this would seem to be the perspective in Greek mythology).
What if there is a supernatural realm, but it is empty, i.e., unoccupied. Perhaps it has never been occupied, or possibly it has been but the gods have left it or died (or have become us). Perhaps it is waiting for us, either as gods returning, or as newly made ones--in a way, the Christian religion seems to be a variant of this (except it doesn't say the supernatural realm is empty), where it seems to be maintained that man (or some subset of them) will be made gods through "The Christ."
What if Man is “Satan”? This is perhaps consistent with the Christian view. Perhaps the Christian mythos of the fallen angel really involves Man collectively. Or perhaps there was a fallen created being, perhaps an "angel" Satan, and he was fragmented into smaller divided entities.
There is a whole array of possibilities along these lines: that Man is some intermediary that will give rise to something higher. This is the kind of thing often explored in the works of science fiction, especially Arthur C. Clarke. The something higher may be a development of man (as in Clarke's 2001), or it may be another unrelated entity or race altogether (perhaps involving the eventual disposal of humanity as no longer needed once its midwife role is done). Consider the robots preparing the world of Rama for the Ramans in Rendezvous with Rama--we may be like that for a race-to-be, or for a race that periodically appears, or awakens to some mode of existence. Perhaps we are creating this higher form of life in the direction we are taking with computers, as a silicon based life form. Or perhaps this is only the practice drill, and a later--and better--form of life will evolve from man's technology. In this view, in the spirit of this exercise in speculation, I am suggesting it not be an accident that man produces these, but rather the unfolding of a plan.
Related to this is another class of possibilities involving the earth as a giant organism, that perhaps man is serving or helping to fully create. The Internet comes to mind. Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell also, where he argues that the earth is like a giant cell. The "Gaia Principle", much beloved of the New Age set also enters our minds here. Of course, the idea of man as a kind of cancer or malignancy arises also.
Another rich, if dubious idea, centers around that of “reincarnation”, perhaps through other galaxies in this universe, or in parallel universes. But I will postpone exploration of that for a later time.

More on the free will vs determinism issue

Let me say right off that I assume that we do, somehow, inexplicably, have free will. That is, I assume in practice that we do have it, while admitting at the same time that it is very hard to avoid the philosophical conclusion that we are determined.
I believe that we must assume that people have some spark of it, and I think we all do assume this in practice, even those philosophers who deny free will. For who, otherwise, than a rational being who is “free” to change his mind, are they trying to convince when they argue about it? We can retort to the determinist, “You are just saying that (the argument for determinism) because you have to!” If they think that I, for example, am “determined”, then isn’t all argument, and attempting to convince me futile? But of course, they can say they can’t help trying to convince me, that of course it is futile, but they can’t help saying it, just as I can’t help responding as I did, and so on and so forth--it all degenerates into an endless sequences of determined thoughts, and is hence totally absurd. Hard core determinism makes such a mockery and absurdity of everything. Isn’t it simpler to just postulate that we don’t know how it can be, but there is some spark inside of each of us that is free (but acknowledging that, sure, most of everyone’s behavior is probably determined by blind forces).
The problem with this, though, is that it seems to be very hard to even imagine how any behavior at all, even a “spark”, can be “free”. Consider this: a “system” can perform an “act” (using the term very broadly to refer not only to physically observable actions, but to thoughts as well, even when they are not spoken or otherwise observable by another party) from three basic causes: (1) something has been stored in the systems “memory” from past history (related to “nurture”, or experiences), (2) something was in the system from time “t = 0” (e.g., “nature” or genetic cause), or (3) a random causation mechanism is at work. The first would be what we would call “learned behavior”, and would seem to be well represented by imaging the system as a computer that is programmed, and has its data base built up from, what experiences the system has. Without allowing any element of free will to it, it is thus simply passively scooping up such experiences and data, and cannot be blamed for anything (note that free will seems inherent in the concept of blame--”ought implies can”). The second refers to what might be called “hard wired” data and data bases. The system (the person) inherits this from conception, and hence there can be no free will involved here. To make an analogy with a personal computer, there is some software wired into the basic machine when the user receive it, and some software is added to the computer during its useful life (only there it is added by the user, whereas in our argument it is added by the world/environment around it as it has experiences. There would seem to be no reasonable objection to some behavior being random (such as might be generated by a random number generator, even though this could be argued to be deterministic at base), but this is clearly not what the free will advocate wants as escaping from determinism. So in a nutshell, behavior seems to be exhausted by saying it stems from past experiences, genetic makeup, and random fluctuations. To say, no there is a fourth, “you” decide, begs the question of when there started to be a “you” that was not created through one of the three types of causes described above.
I would define “strict determinism” as being the theory that everything is absolutely determined. (Note added later: I believe this is often referred to as “hard determinism, and contrasts with “soft determinism”). Some determinists might actually, when pressed, admit that there is a spark of free will, but that they just claim that most human behavior is “determined”. I would probably have a minimal quarrel with this type of determinist, and maybe even put myself in this camp.
Why does it seem so important to us that we have this spark of freedom within us? Obviously this was a major factor or incentive in Immanuel Kant’s ethical writings. One major reason for the interest has to do with punishment, justice, and blame. “Ought implies can”, so why blame or punish people if they cannot help what they do. But of course this is silly, since if strict determinism were really true we couldn’t ourselves help blaming and punishing them, and so on.
Bertrand Russell often wrote that he did not believe in free will. He argued somewhere that if a protozoa did not have free will, and no one would argue that it did, how could people have it. That argument seems to me to be weak, for why could there not be the emergence of totally new phenomena in more complex or evolving organisms? Indeed, it seems plausible that free will could have evolved along with consciousness and reason, all of which are connected and related somehow.
Free will seems to be inextricably bound up with rationality, or reason. Somewhere the philosopher Ayn Rand has written that free will amounts to the free choice of whether to think or not to think, apparently implying that if one chooses to think, then he is free to go where the argument leads him. But of course this seems to gloss over the issue of whether one really is free to choose whether to think or not. But a determinist would say this choice itself is determined causally.
The argument that free will consists of the freedom to choose whether to think or not to think--i.e., whether to use reason or not--seems highly plausible to me. Maybe that is the reason that rationality evolved. Why would it evolve if it were not something that the organism would use? If we are just following nature, wouldn’t reason seem to be superfluous, a meaningless byproduct of evolution? And we all recognize that whatever features and organism evolves usually has some key function in the organisms survival (Darwin and all). There also seems to be a sense in which human action is “overdetermined” is reason is mechanistic.
Determinism is based simply on the idea that events are determined by physical laws, that all is mechanistic nature. There is no room for will in this picture, though quantum mechanics would perhaps make room for randomness, and chaos theory would preclude the practical possibility of actually predicting the evolution of the universe in all details (“Laplacian Determinism”).I think that “common sense” recommends free will to us. The fact that we cannot even say what it could possibly be does not deter us. Note that by saying we cannot even say what it could possibly be, is not the same as saying that we cannot say what causes free will. As I have argued above, there seems to not even be any sense to the concept of free will. But neither does there seem to be any sense to the concept of rational being without free will. Determinism could be mapped onto the idea of all beings simply following a “script”, the script here being ultimately just the events unfolding according to natural law.

Do we have "Free will"?

Consider one of the “Great Philosophical Issues”: that of Free will versus Determinism.
Do we humans have free will? Are our choices and actions determined by outside forces (or even inside mechanical forces not having to do with the results conscious choice. Well, maybe the point is that we can do what our conscious mind decide to do, but what they decide to do is determined).
By determined, I mean one of three agencies causes the action: (1) mechanical or physical forces (biological "hardware" is included here, e.g., genetic causes), (2) randomness, or (3) past experience. It is interesting that it is (3) that many social scientists refer to when they say we are determined ("nurture" rather than "nature").
One of the problems with arguing against determinism is: What does free will even mean? If an action is not caused by mechanical forces, randomness, or past experience, what can it be based on. Doesn't it really seem that these include every cause we can think of? I mean, when the "you" decides to do something, isn't that due to your physical state and your past pattern of action (your character). Even postulating the existence of a soul or spirit whereby one's consciousness transcends nature doesn't seem to offer a way out, as the same possibilities seem to exhaust things there too, (since “hardware” would now the stuff of that world). It is often thought hat quantum mechanics suggests free will because of the random nature of things in its view, but it is not clear to me that this is the case because what comfort is it to think that randomness is a factor in our choices. surely this is not what free will means. True, quantum mechanics does suggest a way out or room for free will, but it doesn't seem to help understand what it is.
There are problems with determinism also. Why can't we say to the advocate of determinism "you are just advocating that position because you have to!"? In other words taking and defending a position seems to assume we're not determined by any of the above three things. Or you wouldn't be trying to convince me since my position is determined too. In other words, how can an automaton arrive at the truth that it is just a robot; then it would think that because it was programmed in (or it was programmed in as a possibility to be thought in case of certain random triggers), and we would then ask if the program were "validated" against the real world.Perhaps, as philosopher Martin Gardner has suggested, the whole problem is insoluble to us beings that experience their reality "in time". In other words, maybe the paradox is only resolvable "outside of time"…..if there is such a thing.