Too Much of Nothing

[Note:  This title is an allusion to a Bob Dylan song.  Peter Paul and Mary did a wonderful cover of this, which achieved some airtime, some forty-odd years ago.  But I cannot find it on the Web.  The one older (B&W) video you do find   is not the album version, but a performance that is much more up-tempo, sunnier, and, well, shallower.  The haunting version that still echoes in my mind had strange harmonies and blue-notes, and funky harmonica.  As during the verse:

It’s ALL been done be-fo-ore,

It’s all  been  written  in  a bo-oo-k…

When there's too much of noth-innng

No-bod-y should loo-oo-ook!

The melody of the second line is just a monotone, but the way they rendered it, with tensely close harmony, so that the male and the female voice become indistinguishable -- another voice peels off from the crown and weaves its own magic -- more plaintive, more revival-like, than the versions available now. -- Unless, of course, the song has actually fermented in memory, grown richer over the years as I replayed it in my head, ripening and deepening like a fine red wine…

Anyone who can point me to this version  will earn my gratitude.]

~     ~

  

Gorgias presented his nihilist arguments in On Non-Existence; however, the original text is no longer extant.

-- Wikipedia, re the early Greek sophist

Etienne Gilson reports (La philosophie au Moyen Age, p. 196) re the work of one Frédégise (d. 834),

Epistola de nihilo et tenebris, où il soutient que le néant et les ténèbres  sont quelque chose, et non pas seulement l’absence de quelque chose.

So far, a trifling with words, but:

Il serait absurde de dire: nihil désigne une chose, si l’on admettait  en même temps  que nihil  signifie le néant.  Or, c’est précisément ce que nie Frédégise.  Le nihil auquel il pense  est celui dont Dieu a créé le monde, ex nihilo, c’est-à-dire  une sorte de matière commune et indifférenciée…

That final clause might strike us as a quibble, a bait-and-switch; but it is similar to the once-trending view of cosmogony known as Steady State (though here it was particles coming into being out of nothing, here and there on an ongoing basis);  the contemporary "Universe for Free" idea is a modern version.   Further, the affordances of later mathematics  would allow him to stick with his guns, without smuggling in any ontology via the back door.

*

Travaillant au noir,

le détective  se trouve aux prises

avec le Saint-Esprit

C’est quoi, le péché irrémissible ???

*

Thus consider the empty set -- something with which, once the New Math struck, every schoolchild has been familiar.   Concretely, it is nothing;  but abstractly, it is something, and this, by the same necessary motion of the mind, which considers Laurel and Hardy a pair, over and above the separate existence of Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy.  -- So far so vacuous, perhaps; but at least innocent of any theological special pleading.

Yet later mathematicians  contrived to construct the whole of the natural numbers -- and with that, the scaffolding of all that is  or (as it might be) may be -- out of this same empty-set.   One approach (Zermelo) identifies zero with the same; one, with the set containing the empty set;  two, with the set containing that.  Another approach (von Neumann), with more craft, took the empty set, and the set containing (nothing but) the empty set (quite a different thing altogether) -- well, the details are unimportant.  And lest you imagine that such an exercise were the idle fiddling of someone with too much time on their hands, know that John von Neumann was one of the hardest of hard heads; a pioneer of computer science; a mainstay of the Princeton intellectual-social scene; and possessed of clearances  of which you or I can only dream.

The empty set is thus Nothingnes, Reified.  So far -- despite von Neumann’s pulling all of set theory out of an empty hat -- you may be unimpressed.  After all, the use of this term can often be (as Quine likes to put it) “paraphrased away”:  e.g.  “A ∩ B = ∅” means neither more nor less than “A and B have no elements in common”.  But “experience has shown that the admission of ∅ as an actual object  enhances and simplifies the theory” (R. Goldblatt, Topoi , 2^nd edn. 1984).

~

For all its humble nothingness, Nothing has an awful lot of distinct names in mathematics.

The empty set itself is known also as the void set.  The set on which a function is zero is its zero set, and the complement of this is its cozero set.
The nullity of an operator is the dimension of its nullspace (or, in the case of a homomorphism of groups, the rank of its kernel).  More exotically:  the Nullstellensatz is a foundation of algebraic geometry.
In an algebraic structure, an element is termed nilpotent if it can be raised to a power to give zero.  This doesn’t mean that the element is ‘powerless’, as the etymology might suggest.  Thus, in the cyclic group of order p^2 (p a prime), p itself is nilpotent since its square is zero;  but it maps every other nonzero element to something nonzero.

Further:

critical point: one where the derivative of the defining function is zero.

zero set: the set of all points mapped to zero by a function

singular (matrix): one whose derivative is zero

closed (differential form): one whose differential is zero

annihilator (of a subspace): the set of all functionals that map the subspace to zero

Cf. also the notion of a “set of measure zero”, which is not quite as zero-y as it sounds, since the ones we are interested in are generally infinite.

~

Etymological footnote.

In his memoirs, Souvenirs d’apprentissage (1991), André Weil, who has much larger accomplishments to his credit, takes a certain satisfaction in having introduced a new symbol for the empty set, which stuck:

Ø

He explains that he took this from the Norwegian alphabet, “et j’étais seul  dans Bourbaki  à le connaître”.

In his droll conspectus of mathematical history, David Berlinski, Infinite Ascent (2005) adds:

To the empty set is reserved the symbol Ø, the figure now in use in daily life to signify access denied -- a symbolic spillover, I suppose, from its original suggestion of a canceled eye.

Note:  A more profound comment  than might initially appear, given the Mediterranean context of the "Evil Eye" ...

 ~

In later Chomskyan linguistics, of the Government-and-Binding variety, "nothing" came to play a very large role indeed.  It came in different flavors -- trace and PRO -- and boasted the Empty Category Principle or ECP  as one of the pillars of the theory.

Yet such Nothings are as rich  as any Something:

So-called ‘empty’ categories  are not devoid of properties;  they are specified for syntactic features.  The term ‘empty’ refers [merely] to the fact that these categories are not associated with phonetic content.

-- Liliane Haegeman, Introduction to Government and Binding Theory (1991),  p. 288

Cf., indeed, Whorf’s celebrated treatment of the phrase/concept “empty gasoline cans”.

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"Were I alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I would be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(I am Benjamin Lee Whorf, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

Epigrams re le néant:

What we understand about God is not nothing; it may even be infinitely much;  but it is a set of measure zero in the larger space of what is true.

-- Dr J, Tischreden

A literary forerunner of the playful paradox “too much of nothing”:

We used to sing together -- in my case very tunelessly. I had inherited a plentiful lack of musical genius from my Mother, who had neither ear nor voice.

-- Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907)

Tiens !  Ceci vient à propos:

“The Power of Nothing”, by the aptly-named Michael Specter, in the current issue of The New Yorker.

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

I am currently reading a book by Russell Standish, called Theory of Nothing -- basically a way of referring "by duality" to a Theory of Everything.
Rather wittier  is this epigram from a detractor of string theory (as it reaches its Landscape dead-end):  the theory has "gone from being a Theory of Everything, to a Theory of Anything."  I.e., where predictive value is lost, because Anything Goes.

[Update 21 Feb 2012]  And now this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/science/space/cosmologists-try-to-explain-a-universe-springing-from-nothing.html?src=me&ref=general

~

In his substantial general survey of modern philosophy, Roger Scruton is obliged to take notice of the existentialists and phenomenologists.   Appropriately, even delightfully, he places these in a chapter titled “The Devil”.

Heidegger … famously argued that there is something that is true of Nothing, namely that it ‘noths’ (Das Nichts nichtet.)

-- Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (1994), p. 458

(Heidegger fiddles with words  like an imbecile playing with his faeces.)

Then on to Sartre and L’Etre et le Néant  (a book I discovered in high school and seized eagerly, having heard that it was hip and rebellious and edgy and kewl -- and was baffled to find that it sux):

Nothingness, he tells us, lies ‘coiled in the heart of Being, like a worm’.  I can encounter Nothing at any juncture:  for example, when I look for someone in a café where I expect to meet him, and he is not there.  The world is suddenly colured by his absence;  and this negative fact has a peculiar reality   all of its own.

But however strange this experience, it is surely not an archetype of evil.  Entering Les Deux Magots to find that Sartre is not there  is one of life’s blessings.

-- id.

~

There is a real sense in which “too much of nothing” applies to basic physics.

Most macroscopic objects behave in ways that do not tip us off to their quantum nature (save as what, for classical physics, was the paradox of the stability of atoms, was ultimately solved or at least frozen by the notion of quantization as applied to electron orbits).  But when we get rid of such objects -- when we attempt to get rid of everything, all matter whatever, and scrape down to the bare vacuum … the striven-for Nothing rebels, and that in the most violent way imaginable.  As a result of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- here, not as an epistemological limitation on ourselves, as (given its title) it is often taken to be, but as a literally creative faculty at the heart of Nature -- the classical featureless vacuum becomes instead the Quantum Foam:  a riot of virtual particles, and topologically  perhaps some nightmare analog of Alexander’s horned sphere.

One stroke of Alexander’s sword

will *not* undo this knot !

Update 25 III 2012]   And on that very topic… a book review in this morning’s NYTimes:  A Universe from Nothing, by Lawrence Krauss.  No new information or argument in this book, apparently;  it all comes down to what the meaning of Nothing is.

The book offers the sort of thing we have repeatedly polemicized against -- and with a “Nyaah nyahh I told you so” Afterword by Richard Dawkins, no less -- but as the reviewer, David Albert, does a fine job himself of polemicizing (“Let me put those niceties aside  and try to be quick, crude, and concrete” -- You go, guy, gloves off!) your correspondent can maintain his decorous Sunday Lenten silence, and merely link.

(The online site unaccountably buries the article, so this is something of a public service.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=1&sq=&st=cse&%2334;david%20albert=&scp=1&%2334;%20krauss=&pagewanted=print

The subtitle of the book under review is “Why there is Something Rather than Nothing”.

Our own remarks on the matter  can be consulted  here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-is-there-something-rather-than.html

[Update 7 April 2012]  Krauss provides a summary of his views here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-krauss-cosmology-design-universe-20120401,0,4136597.story

Arts & Letters Daily provides a typically bone-headed teaser in its link to the article:

"Physics has undermined logic. Even nothingness is not what it seemed. The universe is devoid of meaning. That’s not such a bad thing."

*     *     *

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*     *     *

[Update  25 April 2012]  They’re at it  again…

ALDaily, shilling for nihilism, links to an interview with Krauss in the Atlantic , with this come-on:

More and more, physics is encroaching on philosophy. No surprise that philosophers feel threatened. They should, says Lawrence Krauss. Science progresses, and philosophy doesn’t.

As for the actual article … you can’t make this stuff up.  Their roving reporter just happened to hook up with the distinguished nihilist as he was coming from … a memorial service for professional atheist Christopher Hitchens.

If I were to write that, you’d think it was unfair satire.

[Update 10 June 2012] Jim Holt on l'affaire Krauss:

Physicists, Stop the Churlishness

A KERFUFFLE has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe’s existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it “moronic” and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless.

 [Update 30 September 2012]   Crashaw, “On Hope”:

Dear Hope! Earth’s dowry, and Heaven’s debt,

the entity of things that are not yet.

Subtlest, but surest being!  Thou by whom

our Nothing hath a definition.

(Note for scansion:  definition is here quinquesyllabic.  -- As is, indeed, the word quinquesyllabic itself.)

 ~

More on the vicissitudes of Nothing in mathematics.

In  the introduction to Timothy Gowers, ed., The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 14, we are presented with the following syllogism:

* Nothing is better than lifelong happiness.

* But a cheese sandwich is better than nothing.

* Therefore, a cheese sandwich is better than lifelong happiness.

Nobody buys that;  but it’s hard to put your finger on where the reasoning goes off the rails.   The author rewords the first proposition as

For all x, lifelong happiness is at least as good as x.

Here the seeming noun nothing was covertly a quantifier.   Whereas  “the second sentence cannot be rewritten in these terms  because the word nothing is not playing the role of a quantifier.  Its nearest mathematical equivalent is something like the empty set.”

~

In a single review from March 25, 2001, the New York Times Book Review treats together  the following three titles:

THE BOOK OF NOTHING

Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe

By John D. Barrow

ZERO

The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

By Charles Seife

THE NOTHING THAT IS

A Natural History of Zero

By Robert Kaplan

Free Will

Rather than await full fruition, I have put up a stub of a post, on the key subject of Free Will. 

This subject is key, in the first instance, (psycho)logically.

A denial of the existence of God is something like a denial of the validity of induction, or of deduction.  You feel that something’s not right, but you cannot roundly refute the assertion.

With Free Will, however, the plain man knows where he stands.  The neuro-Darwinian blunderbuss that takes potshots at the Deity, typically wings Free Will in the process.  And now we know that something doesn’t add up.

It is central, in the second instance, theologically/morally.

Beginning with that apple in the Garden -- nay, before that, when Satan sinned by Pride -- the freedom of our Will has been central in our Judeo-Christian understanding of the Deity.   Hope, responsibility, even sanity, depend from this entirely.

 ~     ~     ~

The most that the believer in free will can ever do  will be to show that the deterministic arguments  are not coercive.

-- Wm James

We beg to dissent.

The existence of Free Will is not, after all, some abstruse hypothesis:  it is the rock-bed experience of each one of us. -- Suppose that scientists rose up in a body to deny the existence of the planet Earth.  Remarkably, all the other planets turn out to exist, just not Earth.  As proof, they hand you a thousand pages of equations, and another thousand of computer calculations, the whole tersely commented here and there in Chinese.  In a moment of doubt, you might, like Doctor Johnson, experimentally kick a stone;  but then you would go serenely on your way, more inclined to doubt the existence of this cloud of scientists (something you ate?)  than the planet you have always lived on.

~     ~     ~

The hidden preparation of mental activity gives the illusion of free will.  Free will [is] a side product of illusion

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p .119

What the illustrious entomologist is referring to is the apparent neuroscientific fact (we would not dream of disputing it) that any undoubtedly free-will action, such as my hurling this pie into the face of the nearest neuroscientist, is both preceded and followed by various electrochemical blurps and blips  of the sort that make no especial sense, but which form the meat and drink of their sad science.
 

In the matter of ants, I would not dream of challenging that eminent authority on any point whatsoever.   Quite possibly the individual ant in the colony does lack free will;   I do not know -- indeed, have no way of knowing, since, unlike my esteemed colleague Doctor Dolittle, I have not mastered the ant-language.  (Whether the colony as a whole has some sort of glimmer of free will, is less clear.)  Evidently the celebrated professor has mastered the ant-language, despite its many difficulties (rumor has it that every single verb in the ant language is irregular), and concluded that they are naught but ... myrmidons (to coin a word);  I salute him for it.  But when it comes to that species unto whom the gift of reason was granted, and the volitional capacity to apply it for good or ill -- well, perhaps our professor has been studying ants too long.

An omniscient mind with total commitment to pure reason and fixed goals  would lack free will.

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998)

Before I say anything -- Does anybody spot the red herring here?   ‘Pure reason’  is neither here nor there:  Similarly committed, you might freely decide to devote the remainder of yours days to the solution of the Riemann Hypothesis, or the Goldbach Conjecture.  Its evocation here functions mainly as a distractor, so that you are less likely to focus on the petitio principii of smuggling in “fixed goals”.   The logical structure of Wilson’s argument here is:  If a trolly must run on a fixed track, than it cannot wander abroad.  (And yet such nonsense makes it past the copy-editor.)

Wilson then indulges in the Laplacian fantasy (by now exploded even for billiard-balls) that knowing the state of every neuron at t = 0 would in principle allow us to predict its state at t = 1.   What prevents our carrying out this program  is no freedom within the man-machine, quotha, but “… mathematical chaos… noisy legions of cells … discordant patterns … the cells are bombarded every instant by outside stimuli …”

Rembrandt -- storm on Sea of Galilee

Our free will is like a ship sailing straight and true  across the sea.  The neuroscientists who wish to reduce this to physics, are as whoso should calculate the trajectories of all the water molecules impinging on the ship from below, and all the air molecules buffeting it from above.  Yet for all the chaos to which it is exposed, the ship sails calmly on:  and every so often, ever so gently, responds to a touch of the tiller.

~     ~     ~

The “problem” of free will  is largely the problem of defending it against far-fetched philosophical or eliminative-materialist attack.  We know perfectly well that we have it – we know this with far more certainty than we know of the existence of this coffee cup:  For the existence of my will  survives intact  the disaster of the unknowability of noumena (the coffee cup itself, poor fellow, survives this in, as it, were, a sort of crestfallen and spectral state), and even survives the hypothetical disaster of the brain-in-a-vat:  for in my vat, sloshing around as happily as a fat man in a bath,  I still will  to bring this (as it turns out, virtual) coffee-cup to my lips;  I still will-to-sip the revivifying French Roast therein (virtual, to be sure, but freshly ground), I still smack my (virtual) lips in satisfaction; and should the gnome at the controls someday (curse him) so tweak the meters that, when I will that cup to rise, it sinks or dematerializes; or switches the taste-sensation to that of some wretched instant de-caf, I shall, though deprived of any non-imaginary members wherewith to express it, be pissed as hell.

            The problem resides, then, not in any doubt of our own, but in the curious importunacy of proctological philosophers, moonlighting scientists, and the odd asylum escapee, claiming that, according to their own recondite theories, or their precise calculations, or oracular revelations, or something some guy said in a bar, our free will is but an illusion.  It is rather as though some tractate-mongers kept showing up at the kitchen door, or popping up from behind the hedge, informing us  with no little severity  that, say, cats do not exist.  For a moment we are startled – could this possibly be true? – then hark to the meow, and feed Fluffy.  Still, the nay-sayers are persistent, and from time to time we are irked by doubts – didn’t Putnam say something along these lines (and he’s a sensible man)?  Yes, something about – certainly, cats might just come from Mars; nay, they might (though with less probability than the usual asylum-story) just be automata:  but in any event  these hypotheses stand in the line-up besides other hypotheses, such as: That cats are not really mammals, but actually therapsids, who have convergently evolved a fur-like pelt (I have heard something of the sort maintained as fact, as regards platypuses); or, that cats have such hypnotic powers (just look at those eyes…) that they have convinced us that we are priviliged to have them as pets, whereas in fact they are exploiting us (the jury will consider the case of Arbuckle v. Garfield;  massive evidence for this view may be found documented at icanhascheezburger.com);  or that they, like dogs and rabbits and woodchucks, are pretty much   as they seem.  The hypothesis of the hedge-hoppers does not enjoy some special privilege that excuses it from lining up with the others, merely because it is radically skeptical;  and in that line-up, it does not fare well, its probability score languishing dismally below that of the therapsid hypothesis.  Still the cat-deniers continue to importune:  our Infelinity Theory (they say) is absolutely and provably incapable of demonstrating the existence of cats!  Well then, we are tempted to reply, so much the worse for Infelinity Theory; and fondly pass Fluffy another morsel. 
[Update] For a rather intricate and original take on all this -- difficult to summarize -- cf. the thread that begins here:  You Choose.

*

*     *     *

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*     *     *

Steven Pinker,  The Blank Slate (2002), p. 74, re the surprising results of the Human Genome Project:

Some editorialists  concluded  that the smaller [-than-anticipated] gene count  refuted any claims about innate talents or tendencies, because the slate is too small to contain much writing.  Some even saw it as vindicating the concept of free will:  the smaller the machine, the more room for a ghost.

Such tomfoolery he dismisses, as do I;  such allies, indeed, we do not need.  Our experience of Free Will  is like our experience of love or sunlight, in that it is immediate (and indeed, epistemologically better-founded, even than these);  we do not breathlessly await the latest decimal-point from Craig Venter’s lab, to see whether we are rational beings or rather robots.

[Update]  Venter himself, though, has come out on the side of the angels.  (This is good to hear;  he has always been one of my very favorite capitalists.) :

Even if there was an increased genetic tendency for something like that, that leaves out the notion that there’s free will.  I think what a lot of people are looking for in society  is to have genetics absolve them from individual responsibility.  I can’t help it, I’m obese.  My genes made me that way. … I can’t help it, I’m a pedophile.  I was born that way …

-- quoted in Haynes Johnson, The Best of Times (2001), p. 103

~     ~     ~

Miscellaneous quotes and epigrams:

What I think I mean by free will:  It is the ability for a conscious entity to do something irrational.

-- Russell Standish, Theory of Nothing (2006; 2^nd edn. 2011)

At first blush, this is rebarbative;  but on second thought, I believe I know what he’s getting at.  For, though a definition of free will in general is beyond me, I might venture this:  the proof of the pudding of free will  is our ability to do something contrary to the will of God.  (These two ideas may well converge upon the same thing.)

~    

Acting as though one did not have free will, corrupts the soul.

Thus Kingsley Amis, in his novel The Folks that Live on the Hill (1990), p. 53, depicts a young man attempting to wring some money from a relative via emotional blackmail:

“I’m afraid I’m getting a wee bit desperate.  I’m afraid I may find myself doing something very ill-advised and rather outré.  And rather awful.”

Clare could think of nothing she would have hated half as much as hearing even a hint of the very ill-advised, rather outré and rather awful thing Piers was afraid he might find himself doing.  She shied away from identifying to herself the area where it, the thing, might have lain, but it must be somehow connected with the secretiveness of his life  and the apparent absence from it of ...

(Mais vous devinez  déjà:  c’est un inverti.)

~    

*     *     *

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*     *     *

Given the popular misconception of Christian theology as desiring men to be the slaves of God (cf. also all those Muslim names in `Abd- ...), or as blindly following the ministrations of their priests or pastors,  it is remarkable how much emphasis the wise essayists of the Historical Church  place on freedom of the will.  God is not looking for obedient robots -- He could have had such, ten for a penny, if desired.  What He wants is something  far more precious:  Us; gifted by Him  with a will that is truly free -- free even to defy Him.

Thus, take this typical passage, from a Jesuit writer:

We do not understand free human acts … unless we understand them as freely aligning themselves  for or against the norm of what is good order.  This is why all human actions are worthy of praise or blame, because of the content freely put into them by the human decision…

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 90

Truly, this is a religion for grown-ups.

(Compare as well the comment by our spiritual advisor, Dr. Massey, at the end of this post:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/i-heretic.html)

 [update 3 III 12] "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." Thus, like Odysseus, who bade his sailors tie him to the mast, we must at times outwit  our own will-weakness: Meta-freewill in action.

-->

 

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(Je suis René Descartes, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

~

On occasion we have broken a lance with those who -- in philosophical autointoxication or bad faith -- maintain that we have no Free Will, and that Science shows so.   But no more are we partial to those who say, Yeh, sure, free will, for sure, it follows from Quantum Mechanics (somehow).   Fortunately a swipe at the latter has been ably delivered by the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, sparing me the need to reply, so that I may instead go off and feed the ducks.

An excerpt follows:

-->

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/38756-is-science-compatible-with-free-will-exploring-free-will-and-consciousness-in-the-light-of-quantum-physics-and-neuroscience/

Antoine Suarez and Peter Adams (eds.), Is Science Compatible with Free Will?: Exploring Free Will and Consciousness in the Light of Quantum Physics and Neuroscience, Springer, 2013, 326pp., $129.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781461452119.

Reviewed by Neil Levy, University of Oxford

Philosophers who work on free will are frequently irritated by articles by scientists, usually neuroscientists, proclaiming the death of free will. Sometimes these articles report good science, but the arguments against free will constructed on the basis of the results reported are question-begging, when not simply irrelevant. The majority of the chapters in this book exploring the relation between science and free will present us with a mirror-image of this kind of work. They aim to vindicate free will, not to kill it. As in the case of the debunkers, excellent science is deployed, by people closely engaged in it. But the results are every bit as frustrating, because the arguments for the existence and nature of free will are at their very best question-begging and inadequate.

This book brings together a number of papers presented at a workshop in Barcelona in 2010; the majority of the presenters are European and most are scientists. The original workshop was organized by Antoine Suarez, who is a member of the Center for Quantum Philosophy. In his preface to the book, Suarez tells us that the original workshop was designed to discuss the idea that science is compatible "with phenomena governed by nonmaterial principles, like, for instance, free will and consciousness". This preface, with its artless claims about the nature of consciousness and free will, and its frank aspiration to show that human beings are partially "spiritual" beings, is representative of much of the book, which combines scientific sophistication (or rather, sophistication within the scientific domain that the contributor knows well) with philosophical naivety.

The book is divided into three parts, on quantum physics, neuroscience and the reconciliation of free will and science respectively. The first section, on quantum mechanics, is the one most characterized by philosophical naivety. The five chapters that make up this section present the reader with (relatively) accessible discussions of major topics in quantum mechanics, such as entanglement, nonlocality, Bell inequalities and the free will theorem, with most of the chapters written by scientists closely involved in ongoing work to test the predictions of quantum mechanics. These chapters will be useful to philosophers, especially insofar as they present a strong case for a nondeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics (One chapter, by Gilles Brassard and Paul Raymond-Robichaud presents a dissenting, deterministic, view; the view is somewhat similar to the many-worlds interpretation, but rather than having each collapse of the wave function constitute a branching point of different worlds, they postulate the continued existence, within a single universe, of the superposition of both possible states. Due to our cognitive limitations, they suggest, we experience only one state of the superposition).

Since I am in no position to adjudicate the debates between the rival positions sketched, I will limit my comments to the claims made about free will and its compatibility, or lack thereof, with the science. It is here that sophistication gives way to naivety, not to mention sometimes bizarre speculation. In every contribution, 'free will' is understood to require indeterminism; acknowledgement that compatibilism even exists is limited to a single footnote. Much worse, 'free will' is for the most part implicitly identified with indeterminism, and quantum indeterminism at that.

Suarez acknowledges that some people have seen a threat to free will in indeterminism, and promises to show us that quantum events can be controlled by free will. But the proof seems to consist in the statement that it is compatible with physics that a mind outside space-time could influence such events; no hint of a mechanism is provided and no suggestion as to how this influence might constitute control. Since he maintains that the kind of control that such a mind can exercise is identical to the kind of control elementary particles themselves exercise, it is plain that this kind of control won't solve the kinds of problems indeterminism is often said to present for an account of free will. Indeed, contributors have free recourse to their naïve intuitions about free will in their physical theorizing. Gisin, for instance, in his excellent discussion of nonlocality, rejects the many-worlds interpretation partly on the basis of the claim that were it true, we would lack free will. It is only in Merali's contribution that anything approaching a genuine argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism is presented, with Merali claiming that Conway and Kochen's free will theorem entails that unless the experimenter's choices are undetermined, she must somehow be constrained in what measurements she can make of a particle's spin.

The papers in this section are valuable and even exciting. For both newcomers to these issues and for those with some degree of prior knowledge, they provide an excellent view of some difficult issues in contemporary physics. Moreover, creative philosophers may well find the ideas expressed here relevant for their theorizing about free will. But the philosophical speculations that accompany the science illustrate only the dangers of straying outside one's area of expertise.

The middle section of the book, on neuroscience, exhibits far less naivety than the first, because most of the authors have the good sense to remain within their areas of expertise and not to speculate on free will. There is excellent and philosophically relevant material here -- particularly Fogassi and Rizzolatti's overview of some recent work on mirror neurons and the attribution of intentions -- but its relevance to free will is, at best, indirect and goes undiscussed by the authors. The main exception is Tononi's speculations concerning the implications of his important work on consciousness for free will, which are suggestive but underdeveloped. Tononi claims that an action is free if it is caused by maximally integrated information, and that entails that free actions are caused by conscious states. Though the entailment is argued for, only a few sketchy remarks support the main claim. Tononi appeals to the intuition that conscious agents are paradigms of freedom, and -- more persuasively, I think -- claims that the extent to which an action is caused by a conscious (and therefore informationally integrated) state is the extent to which it is sensitive to a broad range of factors. That would seem to entail, in turn, that an action caused by a conscious state issues from a mechanism that is sensitive to a broader range of reasons then one caused by a nonconscious state. But it would take further work to show that nonconscious states do not cause sufficiently reasons-responsive states: indeed, it is very likely that under some conditions they do.

Three papers, one in the section on neuroscience and two in the final section on the reconciliation of free will and science, are by people with a deep knowledge of the free will debate; obviously, they are not subject to the criticisms mentioned above. Robert Doyle presents the latest variant of his two-stage account of free will, which is closely akin to views sketched (though not endorsed) by Daniel Dennett and Alfred Mele. At the first stage, the alternatives between which we deliberate are indeterministically generated; at the second stage, we choose deterministically between them. This account succeeds in avoiding what Doyle calls predeterminism: its being the case that our actions are necessitated by facts (and laws) that date back prior to our existence. It does less well at satisfying the demand for alternative possibilities: on this account it is false that agents deliberate between metaphysically open alternatives. More importantly, I doubt that the account succeeds in avoiding the luck objection any better than rival event-causal libertarianisms. On this account, an agent who performs an act with a negative moral valence might have avoided performing an act with that valence only if an appropriate alternative (one without a negative valence and one with features sufficient deterministically to cause her to choose it) had featured among the alternatives generated by indeterministic processes. It will therefore be luck that explains the fact that she performed an act with that valence rather than one with a different valence. Elsewhere, I have claimed that defeating the luck objection requires showing that this contrastive fact is not due to luck. The other two papers by philosophers, Mele's critical discussion of Libet's experiments and Kane's overview of his influential event-causal libertarian view, achieve their aims admirably, though those acquainted with the work of these two important contributors to the free will debate will find little new in them.

Insofar as this book aims to show that free will is compatible with quantum physics -- this is a central claim of ten of the chapters of the book, and features heavily in both its introduction and the concluding overview -- it cannot be declared anything but a failure. The novel arguments are bad or nonexistent, best represented by Saurez's claim in the final overview chapter that quantum randomness just is "a particular case of free will". The papers that deeply engage with quantum physics do not demonstrate that quantum randomness is compatible with free will; they either assert their compatibility or simply identify the two. The much more careful chapters by philosophers are, of course, far better argued, but specialists will find little in them that they won't already be familiar with.

The book is most valuable for its overview of quantum physics, which is relatively clear and relatively accessible, and for its papers by people in the life sciences giving overviews of cutting edge work in their disciplines. The papers on quantum physics provide a glimpse into science which might help to constitute a genuine revolution in our understanding of the nature of reality. They also clearly illustrate the risks of building worldviews on the foundations of quantum physics. We may really need to countenance the possibility that our intuitions with regard to the nature of reality are systematically off base, but that does not license the speculation that consciousness is best explained by supposing that the mind is a receiver which picks up broadcasts from outside space-time (Staune), or Suarez's contention that free will and consciousness are either properties of elementary particles, or elementary particles are guided by a divine agency, either God or angels.

The editors of the book stress the importance of interdisciplinary work for progress on central problems in philosophy like the nature of consciousness and the existence of free will. I applaud the sentiment, but in many ways the book stands as an object lesson in the pitfalls of interdisciplinary work. Brilliance in one field does not guarantee, or even (on the evidence presented here) make it likely that someone's speculations outside the area of their expertise will be worth taking seriously. Good interdisciplinary work requires deep engagement with the fields into which one ventures, as well as the epistemic humility to recognize that one needs to learn from specialists in that field. Mele's discussion of Libet, the result of many years of reflection on the relevant science as well as very extensive reading in it and discussions with those who engage in it, is exemplary of such good interdisciplinary work. Too much of the rest of this volume illustrates the dangers of a failure to engage, with the requisite humility, with the areas into which one blunders.

.

Consilience

The unity of science consists  alone  in its method, not in its material.

-- Karl Pearson

The unity of science is a pipe-dream.

-- Ian Hacking

The learnèd world  for long has yearned,  that all knowledge might be uniformly regimented beneath the broad skirts of science -- typically led by whatever was in fashion at the time.  For a while, it was Newton.  Thus,

Hume prided himself on doing for psychology  what Newton had done for physics.  He offers a (vacuous) theory of the association of ideas  as the counterpart to the theory of gravitation.

-- Anthony Kenny, The Oxford Illustrated History of Western Philosophy (1994).

In the 1920s, Otto Neurath headed up the influential Unified Science movement, which set the intellectual tone for a whole generation.

Subsequently, various technical developments have proved alluring to architects of airborne palaces -- computers in particular. As, “Hey, maybe the mind is just a Turing machine !  Tape goes to the left, goes to the right, scribble, erase,  and, bingo!,  you get Hamlet and the Credo.”  This eructation was dignified with the title of “machine-state functionalism”.

In our day, in the English-speaking world, the lodestone is Darwin.

In a lengthy work  unfortunately titled Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), Daniel Dennett effectively claims skeleton-key status for Darwinism, comparing it to “universal acid:  it eats through just about every traditional concept”, including in cosmology and psychology.  A clear-headed corrective to his claims, from the ever-trenchant H. Allen Orr, may be read here: http://bostonreview.net/BR21.3/Orr.html.

~     ~     ~

And then Edward O. Wilson weighs in, with his much-talked-about book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998).   Wilson is the man to beat, when it comes to ants;  has he likewise managed to outline a Theory of Everything?   The dust jacket is certain that he has:  “nothing less than a daring challenge to the prevailing world-view ... a grand, coherent conception,  encompassing the sciences, the arts, ethics and religion” burbles Gerald Holton on the back cover, and Jared Diamond proclaims the eminent ant-man “one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers”.

Well, a man is not on his oath, in jacket copy.   Let us see whether the accomplishment matches the hype.

Wilson borrows the word from an 1840 work by William Whewell, which states:

The consilience of inductions takes place when an induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an induction, obtained from another different class.  This consilience is a test of the truth of the theory in which it occurs.

Wilson comments: “Consilience is the key to unification.  I prefer this word over “coherence” because its rarity has preserved its precision.”  (p.8)

That is a common and valid reason for philosophical neologism (since the word consilience had become obsolete, Wilson effectively re-introduced it).  The word is not, however, used with much precision in this book -- at least, it does not truly preserve whatever meaning Whewell may have had in mind (his own wording is none too precise.)

Consilience -- It is a lovely word, rhyming with brilliance and resilience.  Wilson trots it out from time to time, rather like those “station identification” messages required by the FCC;  but over the whole course of the book, it seems to do no actual work.   As he himself suggests, it is roughly a synonym of coherence -- which would seem to be setting the bar pretty low.    

As Wiki  puts it:  “Wilson's concept is a much broader notion of consilience than that of Whewell, who was merely pointing out that generalizations invented to account for one set of phenomena often account for others as well.”  But broader is a nice way of saying diluted, weakened. --  In terms of ambition, however, Wilson’s consilience is a stronger program, in that it aims to rope in the humanities as well; but it can hope to do this only at the expense of diluting the proposed commonality.

For sheer emptiness, it touches bottom on page 117:

But surely, skeptics will say, that is impossible.  Scientific fact and art can never be translated  one into the other.  Such a response is indeed the conventional wisdom.  But I believe it is wrong.  The crucial link exists:  The common property of science and art  is the transmission of information.

Omigosh,  we didn’t we think of that before ?!?  All-kina stuffs uses information!! -- Or rather, “the information”, in the unidiomatic jargon being peddled by James Gleick’s recent (and similarly overambitious) book. -- In point of fact, there is more commonality between a sermon and a sex pheromone, since both, in addition to transmitting information, exhort. --

Or again:  We may regard elephants and chimps as simply alternate aspects of a single superorganism, since both may be seen as machines for processing peanuts into poop.
Or again, p. 219.  He quotes with approval: “Edward Rothstein, a critic trained in both mathematics and music, compares their creative processes”:

We begin with objects that look dissimilar.  We compare, find patterns, analogies with what we already know.  We distance ourselves and create abstractions…

I’d be prepared to concede (and the suggestion is intriguing) that, at a high and abstract level, there are similarities between the appreciation of … well, certain types of music (not “Who Let the Dogs Out”) and mathematics.  But surely the creative processes are quite different.   The description above (which does rather sound like a mathematician’s work)  is itself already such an abstraction, that it rings less like an analysis, than like a really terrific pick-up line  for naive and impressionable co-eds.

(There is a wonderful app, by the bye, for mathifying, or at least patternizing, our musical appreciation:

An animated graphic showing interval type

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1QM6YZC45g&src_vid=asDXpfFMKNA&feature=iv&annotation_id=annotation_587547

Disney did something similar at the beginning of “Fantasia”, but this display is more precise and structured, and ultimately just as evocative as the artistic impressionism.)

However, there is another way of reading Whewell’s definition, which, whether or not Whewell himself meant it this way, leads to a more interesting notion, which we may call strong consilience.   This thesis, I shall argue, is exciting, though false; whereas the watered-down weak consilience is little more than consistency, and thus is uninteresting even if true.

[Note:   I have only just this minute stumbled upon the fact that H. Allen Orr has already written a (typically incisive) review of Consilience as well. That man is hard to top, whenever he opens his mouth about something.  So out of respect for the reader’s time, I must in all candor now urge you to cease reading this one, and go read Orr instead:

http://bostonreview.net/BR23.5/Orr.html

If, after you have savored and assimilated what Orr has to say (and which, fwiw, I heartily endorse), you still have appetite left for some leftovers, you may return to the present on-going essay.

Orr himself, incidentally, writing with Jerry Coyne, downplays consilience even within biology, in that the essential species concept is itself not tightly unified:

Because we rejected ecological differentiation as part of the Biological Species Concept in sexually reproducing groups, we obviously endorse the use of different species concepts in different groups.  We do not consider this pluralism to be a weakness of the BSC.  Because the causes of discreteness may well differ among taxa, so may the concepts appropriate to addressing the species problem.

Jerry Coyne and H. Allen Orr, Speciation  (2004), p. 52 ]

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(I am William Whewell, and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

(To resume...)  ]

So, let us see if we can force an interpretation on Whewell’s words which will lead to something interesting.

An “induction”, whatever exactly that may be, is not a fact, but an orderly pattern of facts.   So let us by fiat define  strong consilience thus: 

actual isomorphism (or at least homomorphism) between established aspects of different disciplines. 

The model for what we have in mind  is the collection of surprising and delightful structural coincidences within and between mathematics and various parts of (originally) mostly physics, known under the slogan of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.  (You can consult Wigner’s original essay of that title here.)  And since Wigner wrote, the essence of the history of mathematics over this past half-century or more, has been an efflorescing of consilience in just this neo-Whewellian sense:  subfield after subfield  turn out to be deeply interlinked.  It is a breathtaking tale (and has, incidentally -- see below -- nothing whatever to do with the thesis of Reductionism).

There have also been some remarkable recent examples of consilience between math and physics:  cases in which mathematicians, burrowing from (as it were) the east coast, and physicists, burrowing from (so to speak) the west, suddenly met in the middle.  Celebrated cases include:  fibre bundles (math) and gauge theories (physics); zeros of the Riemann zeta-function (math) and atomic energy levels  (physics).  These results are, I suspect, among the most important of the past century (as much as to say:  of the past two millennia), and the best thing would be for us all to quit our day-jobs and join mountaintop monasteries set up specially to study these matters.  (While not omitting matins;  first things first.)

Mathematics itself might be defined as the science of matching patterns;  so there is a certain appropriateness that it serves as a link between such superficially disparate phenomena as the pattern of spots on a leopard and the subject of reaction-diffusion equations (pioneered by none other than Alan Turing), or floret patterns and Fibonacci series.  An absorbing book on this subject is Life’s other secret (bad title, good book), by Ian Stewart, 1998.

“Strong Program” publications, that go way beyond such vacuous ecumenism, include the Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Vienna Circle).

[A more careful consideration of this kind of consilience  is available here.]

 

~     ~     ~

There are times when Wilson does seem to be talking about something like strong consilience  (p. 125):

The natural sciences have constructed a webwork of causal explanation  that runs all the way from quantum physics  to the brain sciences and evolutionary biology.

Yet at other times  (p. 229), consilient seems no more than a ten-dollar synonym for consistent:

The biological origin of the arts is a working hypothesis, dependent on the reality of the epigenetic rules … It is meant to be testable, vulnerable, and consilient with the rest of biology.

Which is to say:  When attempting to demonstrate that various foul-smelling chemicals lead directly to the Goldberg Variations  and  Paradise Lost, you’re not allowed to actually falsify the basic biological facts.

~      ~      ~

Wilson never explicitly defines the characteristics of consilience once and for all -- which is fine;  it’s more a term to guide the thoughts along.   I use “minimalism” in a similar way, in these essays:  connotation accretes to the term in the course of investigation.  And a connotation that accretes to Wilson’s term  is that of hierarchy:  which has indeed characterized biology ever since Linnaeus, and in ever richer ways since, but which seems a very odd fit for, say, mathematics or art.  P. 182:

The crucial difference between the two domains is consilience:  the medical sciences have it and the social sciences do not.  Medical scientists build upon a coherent foundation of molecular and cell biology.  They pursue elements of health and illness  all the way down to the level of biophysical chemistry. … Social scientists  by and large  spurn the idea of the hierarchical ordering of knowledge…

Sidenote:

Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate,p. 26) quotes from anthropologist Leslie White  the sort of statement that apparently drove the worthy Wilson u-batz:

The culture process [is] sui generis;  culture is explainable in terms of culture.

Not, note, even in terms of psychology;  let alone physics.

Anyhow:

If being hierarchical is a requirement for being consilient, then indeed the term in this sense is more substantive than it seemed when the author proclaimed that simply using “information” would suffice.  And accordingly it becomes more falsifiable (philosophically, this is a good thing), but also (though I won’t argue the point further) in the case of many quite respectable spheres of activity, false (not so good).

~      ~      ~

Wilson’s penultimate chapter is titled “Ethics and Religion”.   Its motto (p. 238) is:

Moral reasoning, I believe, is  at every level  intrinsically consilient with the natural sciences.

Now -- those of you who have followed this blog (in particular my intemperate trashing of morally reductionist neuroscientists), no doubt expect, that at this point I shall undergo the Incredible Hulk transformation and start blasting-out one of my patented rants  against atheists (for Wilson manfully avows himself, not really an atheist, but an a-theist, a non-theist), Nominalists (Wilson is, in general, not that), and Donald Trump (so far as I know, Wilson has never even met the man).  Well, not a bit of it.

First of all, because I myself do not pretend to really understand moral reasoning.  Logic, yes, given the premises;  but ahh, the premises !  But more important, because Edward O. Wilson is a remarkably genial and congenial companion;  and one who, given his deeply Christian upbringing, truly understands what it’s all about, even if he has reached different conclusions from those of his Protestant evangelical tutors (as have I).  Furthermore, it would seem that both the present and the previous Pope would agree with that statement.

He clarifies:

The split is not, as popularly supposed, between religious believers and secularists.  It is between transcendentalists [dbj:  cf. Realists], those who think that moral guidelines exist outside the human mind,  and empiricists [dbj: cf. Nominalists], who think them contrivances of the mind.  The choice between religious or nonreligious conviction  and the choice between ethically transcendentalist or empiricst conviction  are cross-cutting decisions made in metaphysical thought.

Absolutely true.  There is, of course, a question about how non-theistic and indeed non-deistic transcendental moral schemes are grounded, but that does not invalidate the logical point made here.

As Charles C. Gillispie puts it in his generous review:

Put baldly, this sounds like arid monistic materialism. Wilson does not put it baldly. He brings to his subject a disarming mixture of personal modesty and intellectual rigor. His reading is wide and his learning extensive. He writes as well of arts and letters as he does of science. It is difficult to think of a finer evocation of Milton's genius than Wilson’s passage on Satan’s invasion of the garden of Eden.

(Um, well, actually, not so much:  C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost.  Still, Wilson’s own tribute is very creditable indeed, for a myrmecologist.)

He adds:

There is no question in his mind but that conveying the essence of truth and beauty pertains to the arts.

You (as Sarah Palin would put it) betcha !  But -- contrary to the effusions of certain journalistic science-pornographers, “conveying the essence of beauty” is not, in fact, the brief of science.

~      ~      ~

The latter part of the book contains rather general sociopolitical discussions:  which, at his own assessment that the social sciences are lamentably unconsilient, means that we stray fairly far from genuinely scientific or Whewellian concerns. 

Despite the fact that his overarching project is ambitious (or made to sound so), Wilson himself is a becomingly modest man.  He even cops to a probably spurious potential charge, granting a “whiff of brimstone in the consilient world view, and a seeming touch of Faust to those committed to its humanistic core.”  Specifically, he points to the spectre of human genetic engineering:  “How much should people be allowed to mutate themselves and their desendants?”  The spectre is quite real, the charge being spurious only if laid at the door of a Whewellian philosophy of science.   What eventually -- or not-so-eventually -- comes to pass, will depend, neither on philosophy nor on theoretical science, but on what is fashionable and funded in places like Singapore and Hong Kong.  It is quite possible that, within the lifetime of some of you, you will witness a Wellsian world of Eloi and Morlocks.   Institutionally, not much stands in the way of this but the Historical Church.

~     ~      ~     ~     ~

This may be a tad off-topic but... The Atlantic Monthly has just published a very nice article on Professor Wilson's current activities.  Of particular interest to myself was reference to an article that Wilson recently co-authored with Martin Nowak, a splendid mathematical biologist whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of making at a conference he organized at the Princeton IAS, described in "Follia Linguistica" (in: Princeton Follies;  to appear).

~      ~      ~

Russell Standish, a mathematician, cites the work of his chatmate, one Bruno:

His conclusion is, instead of psychology being reducible to, or indeed emerging from the laws of physics, the fundamental laws of physics are in fact a conseuence of the properties of machine psychology.  This is indeed a revolutionary reversal of the traditional ontology of these subjects.

Russell Standish, Theory of Nothing (2006; 2^nd edn. 2011), p. 129

Such a view is certainly consilient, though it stands Wilsonian consilience on its head, along with common sense.  And Standish embraces it thus (solecistically):  “I agree with this fundamental tenant.”  By that he means tenet;  but “machine psychology” is no typo -- sic, as it stands -- albeit it would make about as much sense to derive the laws of physics rather from marine psychology :  We are all but the dreams of porpoises …

[Update 16 III 2012] A striven-for consilience of art criticism and neuroscience:
http://chronicle.com/article/Eric-Kandels-Visions/131095/