How Was I to Know???

How was I to know,

that every single thing I’d ever

do or say or think or feel or dream

was already present, to the letter, spelled out,

right there in the Rootabaga Stories,

exactly as I (centuries thereafter)

did do it, said it, thought it, felt it, dreamt it?

How could a body have possibly known that?

And so, like a fool, I lived a life all over again,

exactly as predicted by the Potato Face Blind Man.

~

[Liked that?  Sure you did.
Reckoned you would.
You'll likely like this too:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/10/an-unexpected-guest.html ]

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.

*

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

Relief for beleaguered Nook lovers!

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

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.)

~    

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

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

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

*     *     *

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.

.

The Latest Dispatches from the Physics Pornfront

The ever level-headed Jim Holt has a good review of Lisa Randall’s new physics-popularization, Knocking on Heaven’s Door, in this morning’s New York Times Book Review.  The book itself sounds like rather a hodge-podge:  the familiar recounting of the Standard Model, plus Why I Like Being a Female Celebrity Physicist (the mindset this sort of thing can give rise to  is noticed here),  and -- every physicist’s privilege these days -- weighing in on the traditional Big Questions by sheer force of a Ph.D.   Apparently watching Large Hadrons collide  confers theological insights denied to the rest of us.

Let Holt tell it:

She is guilty of what might be called premature intellectual closure.  Can a scientist be religious?  Only at the price of inconsistency, she argues, because scientific determinism is not compatible with belief in a deity who can wilfully intervene in the world.  Sympathetic though I am to her conclusion, I would point out that scientific determinism is equally incompatible with free will and moral responsibility.

Skip, as contextually unimportant, the actual indeterminism which physics itself has done most to introduce into our scheme of the world.   The thing to notice is that, even given her assumptions, her conclusion remains untrue.  We don’t actually observe strict determinism (nor Higgs bosons, nor magnetic monopoles), but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it is the general rule:  much as it is the general rule that swans are white, and that CP symmetry is observed:  in both cases with some exceptions.  This state of affairs is in fact quite compatible with occasional exceptional events, such as intervention by God -- or by Babar for that matter.   Such events may be as rare as those elusive monopoles, but they are by no means logically ruled out.

The point is not profound;  it is just sort of funny that, out of all the reasons for not believing in God -- and they are many, and profound -- she should choose this silly thing:  perhaps by a sort of déformation professionelle.

Or as Steven Pinker put it (Blank Slate, p. 78): "... scientific findings  spin-doctored beyond recognition  to make a moral point  that could have been made more easily on other grounds."


[Further examples of popularizing overreach here.]

~

Actually -- two can play at this game.

For I too have a Ph.D. -- this one in linguistics -- and in my science [insert pages of technical gobbledygook here, while dwelling on the resonance of terms like “Generativity” and “Dee-ee-eep Structure”]…. all of which goes to show that, as shown by Principle P of the Binding Theory, the Nicene Creed is true.  Down to the last detail.

Chew on that.

~

[Update 4 Dec 2011]

The Nov-Dec issue of American Scientist has a careful review, by a physicist, of Randall’s new book, devoid of needless razzle-dazzle.   But the back cover of this same issue is taken up by a full-page color ad for a Nova program, “The Fabric of the Cosmos”, starring that other photogenic physicist, Brian Greene.  Now, Greene’s popularizations in book form are pretty good, plenty of substance  along with occasional nods at the science-fictional fantasies that the masses mistake for actual physics.  But the TV station -- PBS, yet -- chose to highlight just three questions:

Time Travel?

Alternate Universes?

Teleportation?

and added:

If the questions blow your mind, imagine the answers.

Well, no, the answers will disappoint:  No such animals, at least on any accessible macroscopic level.

Such tawdry appeals have nothing to do with principled popularization.  George Gamow was able to write physics books for children, amusingly illustrated by the author,  which falsified nothing.  PBS is pandering -- and indeed to a common denominator which it imagines is lower than, in fact, it likely is -- especially among the subscribers to the print edition of American Scientist !

A plague on them.

 

Notes towards an eventual essay on Causality (concluded)

"The law of causation  is the guiding rule of science;  but the categorical imperative -- the dictate of duty -- is the guiding rule of life."

-- Max Planck, The New Science.

“Che sera sera” is a truth of logic, not a version of determinism.

-- E. J. Lemmon, “Sentences, Statements, and Propositions” (1966)

Finally we turn to the matter of determinism.

For long, the center of mass of this question, lay within science.  Certain credentialled individuals, ignoring their own obvious Free Will, were pleased to assert the thesis that we are all robots, and that everything is completely pre-determined and predictable within this meaningless universe of billiard-balls.   This preposterous proposition ran counter to the evidence of our senses, as well as to the teachings of the Church.  But then, the heretics in question  were insensible to either.

Yet by now -- quite surprisingly -- the thesis of universal determinism has been refuted from within science itself -- und zwar, in two remarkable and unexpected and independent ways.

The better known of these  comes from quantum mechanics -- Heisenberg uncertainty; the collapse of the wave function; all that.  That pretty much comes across to most of us  as magic, and I wouldn’t blame people for not rushing uncritically to embrace something that they do not understand.   It’s probably true enough, I’m not calling it into question;  but one doesn’t enjoy it when something basically alien and only semi-comprehensible (as quantum theory notoriously is, even to its practitioners) is cited as sole proof concerning something fundamental to our lives.  (For similar reasons, it’s a dead-lousy linchpin for explaining the possibility of Free Will, as Penrose wished to do.)

The less well-known, but more easily verifiable, comes from within classical (pre-quantum) physics itself, once the math got hefty enough.   First, it was proved, over a century ago, that something so modest as the three-body problem (three masses orbiting one another in empty space) is analytically unsolvable.  Next, mathematical progress in nonlinear dynamics  sharpened our understanding of just how wildy  Nature can -- and typically will -- go off the radar.  (For details, look up “chaos theory”, plus some relevant remarks here.)

These new perspectives are very welcome, from a scientific and mathematical standpoint, though they just go to prove what no Christian ever doubted for an instant. 

*

In terms of the contemporary sociopolitical scene in America (I do not say: scientifico-philosophical, since that scarcely exists), none of the above is of the least consequence.   The denizens of McWalAmerica know nothing of math or science, and care less.   Yet a sort of dwarfish deformed offspring of (bleak, godless, but bold and parsimonious withal) classical Laplacian determinism, has slithered forth upon our shores, born of Dan White out of Oprah.  The goal of this degenerate tendency (the only defense for the proponents of which, is Diminished Capacity) is to absolve us of responsibility for our own actions -- and, conveniently, our own crimes -- thus reducing the moral stature of mankind to that of the insects -- or, if these be too admirable (get thee to the bee, thou sluggard, and the ant), perhaps the paramecia.

As often, G. K. Chesterton was early on the scene with trenchant comment.  Here he squibs the medical-excuse defense, in his 1912 parable, Manalive:

Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say one thing instead of another.  Forgery is a kind of writer’s cramp, forcing a man to write his uncle’s name instead of his own.  Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of sea-sickness.

To see that this parody by no means stretches beyond the facts, compare this actual case -- only the latest of innumerable such things -- documented in this morning’s L.A.Times:

August 5, 2011

An appointee of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa assigned to oversee dozens of neighborhood councils resigned after FBI agents raided his home looking for evidence that he or others downloaded child pornography.

Abrams, 63, submitted his resignation Wednesday and said he did not know whether he was a target of the investigation. Asked about the search warrant, Abrams said he had surgery earlier this year to address a tumor on his spine. That growth, he said, ultimately affected his brain and caused "behaviors that were completely out of character."

Asked if those behaviors included the downloading of child pornography, he responded: "That's a legal question. You'd have to talk to my attorney."

In a separate interview with CBS2, Abrams said a "split personality" caused him to go by the name Boywonderusa — the account that the FBI contends was used to download pornographic images of children.

Villaraigosa said Thursday he was appalled by the news and said Abrams told him he was "sorry for everything that has happened." The mayor also said Abrams' explanation wasn't something he had heard before as "a reason for this type of thing."

*

Oh -- I almost forgot.  The miscellaneous quotations that were to form the nucleus of an eventual essay.  Well, here they are anyway, mostly for vocabulary purposes (determinism/necessity/necessitarianism).

C.S. Peirce, "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined": "Its first advocate appears to have been Democritus."

"a strict necessitarianism" "The usual and most logical form of necessitarianism is called the mechanical philosophy."

Robert Lindsay & Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (1936), p. 189, contrasts “dynamical” (rigidly deterministic) vs. “statistical” theories:

Thermodynamics and radioactivity  refused to be completely understood in terms of the familiar dynamical concepts. … Ordinary dynamics, or its bolder offspring, the general mechanistic theory, not only becomes inapplicable or useless [in these domains], but leads definitely to results  contradictory to observation.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 174:

Heisenberg’s [Uncertainty] Principle  offers no logical basis  for either determinism  or indeterminism.  On the contrary, its philosophical implication  is that neither thesis is experimentally testable.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 175:

For a determinist, the withdrawing of the Red Sea for the Passover, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the genesis of life,  all are mythological miracles  until he can find a causal explanationfor them.  For an indeterminist, they are just possible results of the play of chance. … Indeterminism of the hard type  has no recourse against Broglie’s verdict that, with it, physics runs “the danger of remaining stuck in purely statistical interpretations, and thus becoming  completely sterile.”

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 183:

If one narrows down science … to a dynamical matrix, then one must swear by determinism. … And the same is true for … full-fledged indeterminism, which claims that everything consists of jumping electrons.

Mario Bunge, preface (1979) to third edition of Causality and Modern Science (1959; 1963):

Instead of becoming indeterminists, we have enlarged determinism  to include noncausal categories.

(Sounds like moving the goalposts, but it could well be justified in detail.)

Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord (1982), p. 442:

Born’s observation in 1926 that the absolute square of a Schroedinger wave function is to be interpreted as a probability density … goes to the heart of the problem of determinism. .. He wrote: “I myself am inclined to renounce determinism in the atomic world, but that is a philosophical question  for which physical arguments alone do not set standards.”

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 276f, distinguishes five varieties of determinism: metaphysical determinism, epistemological determinism, etc.

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 279: "Macroevolution may be random, regardless of the complete microdetermination of each mutation." 

This rather reverses an earlier view, according to which overall evolution proceded broadly by the laws of natural selection, the microscopiic source of selected variety being mysterious (prior to Mendel) or random.

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 280: "necessitated by antecedent conditions"

"the Laplacian archdeterminist, Claude Bernard"

~

Matt Ridley, Genome (1999), p.  307:

The equation of determinism with fatalism  is a fallacy.  … Determinism looks backwards to the causes… not forward to the consequences.

In politically-correct circles, biological determinism (hereditarianism) was a no-no, while cultural determinism (environmentalism) was okay.   Ridley quotes a novel perspective on this:

Rich Harris lays bare just how much more alarming social determinism is thqn genetic.  It is brainwashing.  Far from leaving room for free will, it rather diminishes it.  A child who expresses her own (partly genetic) personality  in defiance of her parents’ or her siblings’ pressures, is at least obeying endogenous causality, not someone else’s.

A thought-provoking passage, especially as we shall ponder further upon the matter of Free Will.

Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate (2002), notices a loose polemical use:

The radical scientists’ case against Wilson and Dawkins  can be summed up in two words:  “determinism” and “reductionism”.  Their writings are peppered with these words,  used  not in any technical sense  but as vague terms of abuse.

(Compare the snarling use of “liberal” by the populist Right in the U.S.)

Theologia Mathematica: I

THEOLOGIA MATHEMATICA

 [Synopsis:

            Beginning with a parsimonious outset of only two Postulates,

            (1) Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht … [Kronecker]

            (2) …visibilium omnium et invisibilium [the Credo]

we conclude to the Realist position in mathematics, associated with Cantor and Gödel. We note the nice fit with theism.]

I

The great Laplace, having presented his Mécanique Céleste, and having been asked by the Emperor, "Mais où est Dieu dans tout cela ?", notoriously replied:

"Sire, je n'ai pas eu besoin de cette hypothèse."

The cheese-eating atheist, feeling pleased with himself

(I am reminded of the austere style of his countryman Lagrange, who boasted that his Mécanique analytique contained no pictures to help make things plain; and later their compatriot Dieudonné, who in the preface to his celebrated Foundations of Modern Analysis, warns his audience that the tome will contain no such sweetmeats as pictures or diagrams, as that would only encourage the reader.)

            Perhaps people read too much into that oft-quoted remark (or in a sense, too little).  It is often taken, I suspect, as a dismissive, not to say smart-alecky reply:  a snook cocked at theists.  But really the context is both richer and more narrow.  The famous remark is more austerely analytical, I believe, and comparable to Newton’s celebrated “hypotheses non fingo”.

            Newton discovered the basic clockwork of the planetary scheme, but it was not at the time apparent, whether that system were ultimately stable under the various perturbations that mass is heir to.   And if it turned out in fact not to be so, then how to explain its evident stability over all geological time (itself of a vastness only recently appreciated – long enough to let *us* evolve, for instance)?  Before inertia was discovered (or, again rather, in a way more like posited, but still: based upon a more systematic survey of the phenomena), a  traditional perspective had angels impelling the planets in their paths by constantly puffing on them from behind (a pleasant thought); now it seemed as though these same angels might have to be called out of retirement, not to impel the planets, but to herd them from time to time, lest they wander off like lost sheep.  It was Laplace’s great achievement to prove stability by sheer mathematical means – as noble a use of the imaginative faculty  as ever graced the Sistine Chapel, and by no means a snub to the Watchmaker.  Laplace, in demonstrating that planets (‘wanderers’ in Greek) were (like the a-toms) misnamed,  proved we may dispense with the hypothesis of shepherding angels –  for this.

            But there is more beneath the firmament than the placid planets.  Beyond the deductive system of classical mechanics, there is the inductive panoply of actual life.  This too Laplace addressed, in his Essai philosophique sur les probabilités.  And again, he made no use of the supernatural.  But perhaps he took too much comfort from the pleasing and positive example of the stability of the solar system.  There was an overconfidence, a sunny bumptiousness, taken to task at length by Keynes in his Treatise on Probability (a work too little known, and which I commend to your attention).  Keynes descries a witless wizard behind the mathematical manipulations that pretend to deduce so much, and who ultimately throws us back -- surreptitiously -- on human intuition to make sense of events.  (Pay no attention to the man behind the screen.)

            Since Keynes’ time, the problems of induction and prediction  have only grown worse – or rather, they remain the same as ever, but our awareness of their depth and paradox has grown.  We have now become familiar with examples of dynamical chaos, even within the heart of the classical theory; and learned that such systems are, theoretically, rather the rule than the exception.  Even that simplest paradigm of all, the fabled billiard table, affords examples.  There are tables so shaped that, given a desired degree of knowledge of the trajectory by some future time, one may attain it by sufficiently precise initial conditions, whose precision is in some sense reasonably related to that of the required precision of prediction;  and there are tables so shaped that one may not.  (That is, the relation of the intransigent epsilon to the hapless delta, is in one case that of a banker, with perhaps rather stiff interest rates, and in the other, that of a highway robber.) This directly refutes the Laplacian determinist vision, which once extended to the universe as a whole, and which now fails right in the pool hall.

[A note, since this essay is going out to a diverse audience:  The time is past, when an author need pull his punch, for fear some member of his audience may not have met this or that notion.  You are online, or you wouldn’t be reading this.  So if “dynamical chaos” is an unfamiliar term, simply Google it up in Wikipedia.  Wikipedia knows all that can be known to Man.  – Though incidentally this does *not* mean that we should actually *pray* to Wikipedia.  Just so you know.]

            So we are back to a paradox.  System after system is either itself chaotic, or is in contact with, and thus influenced by, chaotic systems:  The parson is a placid man, but he lives within the weather.  Why then does the center apparently hold?  Why does it not all eventually – spin out, or bubble down to a sort of porridge?  Does it, like the imagined planets, need a nudge from time to time, to get it back on track?  -- Well, whether it needs them or not, it gets them, but: from us.  For the nonce, let us leave God and the seraphim aside.  [Note: In what follows, we assume the three-level system of natural description which C.S. Lewis expounded in Miracles. Roughly: subnatural = quantum; natural = classical (including relativistic etc.);  supranatural = involving free will.]  For supra-natural intervention, we need look no farther than our own fingers – righting the wineglass that had started to topple, or pulling the baby back from the edge of the stage. (The paradigm case of supra-natural intervention is supernatural intervention, by ghosts or by God; but as a logical problem, this differs little from the intervention of human will, and thus may be dispensed with where parsimony suggests.)

            Most of what goes on the the universe is (let us call it) naturalistic – whether ruled by the (classical, relativistic) laws of the natural, or the (quantum, aleatory) laws of the subnatural, or some complexus of both. But most of what *we* experience, day to day – that is, experience in consciousness, as opposed to this or that enzyme oozing about – is generously admixed with the supra-natural.  I mean this in its familiar, almost ho-hum sense (except that, by dint of our ongoing ho-humming, we have become dulled to the fact that it is, strictly, miraculous.  Our simplest Saturday afternoon crackles with miracles like a fourth-of-July sky.)

            Now, this in itself need not point to God (let alone prove Him), any more than this or that billiard-ball impact proves classical mechanics, or some passing photon yields Maxwell’s equations.  Indeed, in so far merely as itself, it does not so much as indicate that this supra-natural capacity in ourselves is even rational or good:  picture (though only for a dreadful moment) a universe peopled exclusively by madmen and sociopaths, the free-willed equivalents of scorpions.  That is to say, an outside observer of our universe might detect its departures from plain (non-quantum, non-noetic) determinism, whether from sub-natural or supra-natural inputs; but lacking internal access to the lived experience, he could not tell whether these departures made sense.  Indeed, our hunch now is that the subnatural inputs do not “make sense” – that is, no moral sense, no sense beyond themselves.  It will all (within its own world) dutifully trot along in the path laid out by the Schroedinger equation, while its inputs to our world look to us like clowns piling out of an infinite Volkswagon: but it will not, pace philosophers from Protagoras to Penrose, supply or even heighten our humanity, our morality, our free will.  Indeed, from our present vantage, the subnatural is somehow even more alien to the noösphere, than is the shadow play of Newton, or the passion play of Darwin.  He who would seek the key to our humanity there, seeks the stars in a mudpuddle.

            Whereas we, in our priviliged observatory of our own shared experience (though of nothing else), can report:  Yep, it makes sense.  It’s often in practice too f***ed-up for words, but we’re not just ensouled scorpions, we’re … possibly fallen, anyhow substantially tattered angels.

Addendum:

 A distant kin to the imagery of the ushering angels, impelling the planets and keeping them on course, cropped up again in 1925, with de Broglie’s idea of “pilot waves”, guiding the electrons in their rounds while orbiting the proton; revived again in another context by David Bohm, in his hidden-variable theory of quantum mechanics.

[continued...]