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.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Where did the universe come from?--- Part 2
When we ask “Why is there something rather than nothing”, we are not necessarily asking the exactly the same thing as “Where did the universe come from?”, or “What caused the universe?”
The last two forms of the questions might, in a sense, be viewed as “physics questions”, whereas the first is a philosophical, or metaphysics, question. Consider this: it might conceivably be possible to someday show that the laws of physics of the vacuum imply that sometimes a universe can spontaneously form. For example, maybe it could be shown that a virtual process like the “vacuum bubbles” that inhabit and comprise the vacuum in quantum electrodynamics could sometimes happen on a grander scale and produce a universe out of something like a “Big Bang”. Once a complete theory of everything (a “TOE”) is arrived at, perhaps it will be evident that a vacuum state, governed by the laws of physics, is unstable, and must “explosively collapse” into a realm of matter and energy.
Today, one can find on the internet many examples of people postulating guzillions of parallel universes, maybe all with different laws of physics. Is it totally unreasonable to suppose that a set of meta-laws exists that can spontaneously determine the form the laws of physics can take in a newly emerging universe? Of course, I do not see at present how we could ever discover these meta-laws using our presently conceived form of the scientific method. Physics, as it is understood by scientists today, is empirically based. That is, it must be verified by observation and testing.
Physicist David Deutsch argues, in his book The Fabric of Reality that quantum theory, well accepted among physicists today and largely verified by experiment, implies that there are parallel universes, comprising the multiverse. But this does not really address why things exist (since these parallel universes just consist of more "things").
The point I want to make here is that when we ask the age old question “Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?” we are asking something quite different than the physics question, even recognizing that there may be meta-laws behind the physics laws of our particular universe. We are asking the fundamental existential question about existence itself. “Nothing”, in this sense, would be absolute nothingness: no laws, no possibility of virtual process, no anything, just a blank everywhere. It is inconceivable what this kind of nothing is, we do not even seems to have the words to describe it, we cannot imagine it, and yet the odd thing is that to those of us that ask the question and wonder at it, it seems somehow logical that that Nothing should be the “default” state of affairs.
Is this existential question a meaningful one? Well, it is not answerable by any conceivable method that we might think of. In fact, we cannot even think of what an answer to it might look like, partly because any explanation we might proffer for anything always uses concepts from a realm where there are things (i.e., there is something).
William James apparently studied, or pondered, the “Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?” question, and referred to the associated vertigo like emotional rush that occasionally comes to some of us as “Ontological Wonder Sickness” . A sort of pompous sounding name, perhaps. But it is, I suppose, rather like the psychological phenomena of “déjà vu”, rather unsettling and bizarre. According to logician and philosopher Martin Gardner the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea experiences the emotion as being darkly disturbing and depressing. For others, such as me, it is not a bad feeling, but rather usually one of astonishment and wonder, intriguing and maybe even awe-inspiring.
Let me return to the issue of whether, intellectually speaking, the question is a meaningful one. I actually think it is, but that it is unanswerable. But just as Godel’s Proof says that there are mathematical and logical questions that cannot be decided (as being true or false), with a given logical system, it seems to me there are analogous metaphysical questions. There may be a reason why there is “something rather than nothing”, but we cannot know what it is. It is fundamentally unanswerable, not because of the accidental limitations of our human brains, but beyond the ken of any physical intelligent entity.
Of course, it is common to hear people say that “God” (or “gods”) is the reason why there is something rather than nothing. In spite of the absurdity illustrated by the “Turtles all the Way Down” story---basically, using God to explain the Universe just shifts the question to “Why is there a God rather than Nothing?”. But does it really, I sometimes wonder? If I understand quantum mechanics at all (and I readily admit I probably don’t, at least not very well) there is a hint that consciousness may be a more fundamental existent than any kind of “stuff”. There are many web sites that attempt to develop or put forward this idea. Unfortunately many of them seem to me to be in the rather kooky sphere, along the lines of the dubious film “What the Bleep do We Know” ; a google search on “the primacy of consciousness” turns up a great many sites that seem to me to be of the same type as that film (for example 1, 2, 3).
However, the late John Wheeler, without a doubt one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, felt that consciousness, if not primary, at least plays a key role in the existence of the universe, and asked “Does the Universe Exist if We Are Not Looking?”
However, it seems to me that his explanation, or intuition, of why things exists is really an attempt at an answer of “Where did the universe come from?” rather than the metaphysical one of “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
The opposite view, that consciousness is not primary, and that things exist independent of our consciousness was propounded by philosopher Ayn Rand (4).
It is all quite confounding. But at this point, the plausibility of this “primacy of consciousness” idea is one of the reasons I deem myself an agnostic instead of an atheist. And I greatly enjoy contemplating “Why is there something rather than nothing”, even knowing that it is surely unanswerable.
The last two forms of the questions might, in a sense, be viewed as “physics questions”, whereas the first is a philosophical, or metaphysics, question. Consider this: it might conceivably be possible to someday show that the laws of physics of the vacuum imply that sometimes a universe can spontaneously form. For example, maybe it could be shown that a virtual process like the “vacuum bubbles” that inhabit and comprise the vacuum in quantum electrodynamics could sometimes happen on a grander scale and produce a universe out of something like a “Big Bang”. Once a complete theory of everything (a “TOE”) is arrived at, perhaps it will be evident that a vacuum state, governed by the laws of physics, is unstable, and must “explosively collapse” into a realm of matter and energy.
Today, one can find on the internet many examples of people postulating guzillions of parallel universes, maybe all with different laws of physics. Is it totally unreasonable to suppose that a set of meta-laws exists that can spontaneously determine the form the laws of physics can take in a newly emerging universe? Of course, I do not see at present how we could ever discover these meta-laws using our presently conceived form of the scientific method. Physics, as it is understood by scientists today, is empirically based. That is, it must be verified by observation and testing.
Physicist David Deutsch argues, in his book The Fabric of Reality that quantum theory, well accepted among physicists today and largely verified by experiment, implies that there are parallel universes, comprising the multiverse. But this does not really address why things exist (since these parallel universes just consist of more "things").
The point I want to make here is that when we ask the age old question “Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?” we are asking something quite different than the physics question, even recognizing that there may be meta-laws behind the physics laws of our particular universe. We are asking the fundamental existential question about existence itself. “Nothing”, in this sense, would be absolute nothingness: no laws, no possibility of virtual process, no anything, just a blank everywhere. It is inconceivable what this kind of nothing is, we do not even seems to have the words to describe it, we cannot imagine it, and yet the odd thing is that to those of us that ask the question and wonder at it, it seems somehow logical that that Nothing should be the “default” state of affairs.
Is this existential question a meaningful one? Well, it is not answerable by any conceivable method that we might think of. In fact, we cannot even think of what an answer to it might look like, partly because any explanation we might proffer for anything always uses concepts from a realm where there are things (i.e., there is something).
William James apparently studied, or pondered, the “Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?” question, and referred to the associated vertigo like emotional rush that occasionally comes to some of us as “Ontological Wonder Sickness” . A sort of pompous sounding name, perhaps. But it is, I suppose, rather like the psychological phenomena of “déjà vu”, rather unsettling and bizarre. According to logician and philosopher Martin Gardner the protagonist of Sartre’s novel Nausea experiences the emotion as being darkly disturbing and depressing. For others, such as me, it is not a bad feeling, but rather usually one of astonishment and wonder, intriguing and maybe even awe-inspiring.
Let me return to the issue of whether, intellectually speaking, the question is a meaningful one. I actually think it is, but that it is unanswerable. But just as Godel’s Proof says that there are mathematical and logical questions that cannot be decided (as being true or false), with a given logical system, it seems to me there are analogous metaphysical questions. There may be a reason why there is “something rather than nothing”, but we cannot know what it is. It is fundamentally unanswerable, not because of the accidental limitations of our human brains, but beyond the ken of any physical intelligent entity.
Of course, it is common to hear people say that “God” (or “gods”) is the reason why there is something rather than nothing. In spite of the absurdity illustrated by the “Turtles all the Way Down” story---basically, using God to explain the Universe just shifts the question to “Why is there a God rather than Nothing?”. But does it really, I sometimes wonder? If I understand quantum mechanics at all (and I readily admit I probably don’t, at least not very well) there is a hint that consciousness may be a more fundamental existent than any kind of “stuff”. There are many web sites that attempt to develop or put forward this idea. Unfortunately many of them seem to me to be in the rather kooky sphere, along the lines of the dubious film “What the Bleep do We Know” ; a google search on “the primacy of consciousness” turns up a great many sites that seem to me to be of the same type as that film (for example 1, 2, 3).
However, the late John Wheeler, without a doubt one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, felt that consciousness, if not primary, at least plays a key role in the existence of the universe, and asked “Does the Universe Exist if We Are Not Looking?”
However, it seems to me that his explanation, or intuition, of why things exists is really an attempt at an answer of “Where did the universe come from?” rather than the metaphysical one of “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
The opposite view, that consciousness is not primary, and that things exist independent of our consciousness was propounded by philosopher Ayn Rand (4).
It is all quite confounding. But at this point, the plausibility of this “primacy of consciousness” idea is one of the reasons I deem myself an agnostic instead of an atheist. And I greatly enjoy contemplating “Why is there something rather than nothing”, even knowing that it is surely unanswerable.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Where did the universe come from?
Where did the universe come from? Why is there anything at all? Why is there something rather than nothing?
Well, you won’t find out from me…..in fact, if you know, please tell me. It is a well know argument from philosophy 101 that postulating that “God” made the U out of stuff from a higher supernatural dimension doesn’t really quite cut it as a satisfactory explanation, because one must then ask the same question about where did God come from…that is, who made God? The old joke Bertrand Russell told was that someone said that the earth rested on an elephant, and when asked what help up that elephant answered that it was another elephant. On being asked what held that one, the person sidestepped with, “suppose we change the subject”. The more recent “It’s turtles all the way down” is an amusing variation on this.
For example, this website seems to confirm what I recall about Stephen Hawking giving this fictional account in A Brief History Of Time:
“A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady atthe came up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist replied, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You're very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it's turtles all the way down.’”
Here is a kind of crazy metaphysical idea that does in a sense say “it’s turtles all the way down”: Suppose that God A made the universe we inhabit. Now, let’s suppose that God A was made by, or is in some was subservient or dependent upon God B. And so on, an infinite succession of higher Gods, God C, D, E, F….on to an infinite number of Gods. Now let us imagine something analogous to “renormalization” in quantum field theory, where the infinities are not considered an absurd result, but rather lumped into a single infinite God that subsumes in some sense the infinite sequence of Gods.
Consider a sort of analogous argument from elementary particle physics. For example, some scientists have speculated that the level of elementarity never really stops. That is, perhaps there is no smallest building block: atoms are made of electrons and nucleons, nucleons are made of quarks, quarks are made of some even smaller more elementary particle, and so on…it keeps going, never getting to the bottom. Why couldn’t this be true on the other end of the scale, and in a supernatural sense, as described above, where there is an infinite succession of “Gods”, all of which can be in a sense lumped, or renormalized, into a single infinite God?
Of course, can we imagine such a “being” as the kind of personal being that, for example, the Abrahamic religions believe in? I do not know. Nor do I necessarily believe that such a succession of Gods or even a single God in any sense exists. I simply put this forward as what seems to me to be an interesting idea, and one that I do not recall seeing mentioned as a possibility in any other speculative theological writing.
Well, you won’t find out from me…..in fact, if you know, please tell me
For example, this website seems to confirm what I recall about Stephen Hawking giving this fictional account in A Brief History Of Time:
“A well-known scientist once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady atthe came up and said: ‘What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.’ The scientist replied, ‘What is the tortoise standing on?’ ‘You're very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady. ‘But it's turtles all the way down.’”
Here is a kind of crazy metaphysical idea that does in a sense say “it’s turtles all the way down”: Suppose that God A made the universe we inhabit. Now, let’s suppose that God A was made by, or is in some was subservient or dependent upon God B. And so on, an infinite succession of higher Gods, God C, D, E, F….on to an infinite number of Gods. Now let us imagine something analogous to “renormalization” in quantum field theory, where the infinities are not considered an absurd result, but rather lumped into a single infinite God that subsumes in some sense the infinite sequence of Gods.
Consider a sort of analogous argument from elementary particle physics. For example, some scientists have speculated that the level of elementarity never really stops. That is, perhaps there is no smallest building block: atoms are made of electrons and nucleons, nucleons are made of quarks, quarks are made of some even smaller more elementary particle, and so on…it keeps going, never getting to the bottom. Why couldn’t this be true on the other end of the scale, and in a supernatural sense, as described above, where there is an infinite succession of “Gods”, all of which can be in a sense lumped, or renormalized, into a single infinite God?
Of course, can we imagine such a “being” as the kind of personal being that, for example, the Abrahamic religions believe in? I do not know. Nor do I necessarily believe that such a succession of Gods or even a single God in any sense exists. I simply put this forward as what seems to me to be an interesting idea, and one that I do not recall seeing mentioned as a possibility in any other speculative theological writing.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
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”.
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”.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
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]
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]
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