Determinism

We can only understand our nature to the extent that we cannot rid ourselves of the need or cause for violence.

From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

So, will there ever be a time when it doesn’t have to be “set aside”? A time when the world of the very, very large and the world of the very, very small fit together seamlessly in an actual extant “theory of everything”. And then the part where the theory can be translated into an explanation for how the human mind fits into it given our day to day interactions? To be or not to be free?

In fact, it’s that very fuzziness sustaining all the uncertainties that allows us to voice all manner of conflicting assumptions generating all manner of conflicting conclusions. You might not be correct but no one is able to establish that you are wrong. Compelled or not.

On the other hand, as MA noted on another thread, “if humans are made out of molecules, and if molecules can’t speak, neither can humans” is nonsense. And yet it clearly seems to be the case that somehow we go from the fact of being constructed out of non-conscious atomic and sub-atomic particles to a very much conscious “I”.

Doesn’t the whole matter of determinism then revolve around how on earth to explain mind itself? Matter becomes mindful. How? Why? The very fact that matter can now ponder matter itself “ontologically” and “teleologically” seems, well, almost surreal to some.

Or, to others, attributable only to God. In particular, their God.

From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

Okay, but what of the “structure of molecules” when the brain configures into mind configures into “I”? What of these molecules when, as most intrigues me, one “I” comes into contact with another “I” and fierce conflicts erupt over which set of behaviors will be either rewarded or punished?

What of DNA and proteins and messenger molecules then? Where does nature’s code end and our own autonomous free will begin when, say, the conflict becomes entangled in politics such that attempts are made to encode human behaviors through the law? Behaviors actually able to be enforced.

Here’s how remarkably mechanical it gets on the biological level:

And it all unfolds such that, to the best of my knowledge, none of the biological “players” here have the slightest inkling as to why they do this instead of that? How then are the dots connected here between biological imperatives and any one particular “I” using these laws of nature to “instruct” the body – their own – to choose one thing over another?

Yep, here we go again. Making an attempt at an explanation by noting the manner in which material interactions on the quantum level are often indeterminant. Surreal even. At least in terms of pinning down definitively why and how relationships unfold as they do – as they must – “down there”. What of cause and effect when the “viewers” themselves somehow determine the outcome? We can only imagine that consciousness itself is explainable in regard to all of the pieces still missing when biologists and physicists either agree or disagree with respect to what is actually happening in a brain derived from DNA derived from matter containing who knows what combinations of these guys: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle

And that’s before we get to how all of this fits into a definitive understanding of dark matter and dark energy.

What of “I” there?

From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

Again, if you are a free will skeptic isn’t this “confounding thing” no less only what it could ever have been? Either from inside your head, inside the heads of others or wholly in sync with nature going back to the explanation for nature’s existence itself.

Thus, once we admit that we are all stuck here until “I” itself is understood definitively, these “intellectual assessments” can only be but one more component of what seems to be an inherently problematic examination itself. Unless, of course, I keep missing something here that makes my own ambiguity/ambivalence go away.

And what might that be?

Constraints would become but one more domino toppling over in a causal chain that includes all of the dominos in all of the material interaction that there ever were, are now or ever will be. Sure, one can speak of them in assessments such as this as though one might have “chosen” not to have spoken of them at all [or spoke of them differently], but nothing in the assessment itself is an actual outlier given what would seem to be a seamless intertwining of all matter in sync with the laws that compel them over time and across space.

Okay, suppose he had done that. So what? Given the assumptions of those who suppose that all interactions – from what Newton did then to what we are doing now – are at one with the only possible reality. What constrains everything that everyone of us think and feel and say and do are the laws of matter. If…if those laws are no less applicable to the human brain configured into mind configured into consciousness configured into “I”.

Yes, given the laws of physics, the apple on the string would behave differently from the apple not on a string and just falling to the ground. But how is this applicable or not in turn to Newton either tying the apple to a string or not tying it?

And it’s not like the atoms involved in either context get together to decide this.

When you say things like the brain compelling things, it just makes me think of inanimate matter, what compelled such unconscious state of matter to react and diversify even further? What compels a tree to do what a tree does, all without a brain, it’s root system? It just seems more than such. Consciousness came before physical manifestation, the intent is the evolutionary string itself of which directs this all, a simultaneously overlapping change. That ‘something’ over nothing. Timeless awareness doesn’t always obey cause coming before effect. Sometimes the effect is the cause and if one may rest outside of that chain being causality, one is free from the standard of cause leading to effect rather than vice versa.

So if determinism is cause and effect, causality, and if one is timeless awareness not necessarily always bound to present, what is effect that may lead to cause? If an effect occurs before a cause, does there have to be a cause if choice simultaneously exists?

Is this not why people teach children to “turn the other cheek”? Or why they teach them at all? If it was all drawn out as being just pure causality, what’s the need for educating? To eliminate possible causes? No, to eliminate effects, and if one can SEE so far ahead as to what an effect MAY be, it proves not only timeless awareness but a will that IS free, outside of the chain. Like it has been stated already, the observer is not bound. An identity(ego) is merely a mechanism or receiver to function in a physical manifested existence that was consciously imagined or dreamt up, it is nothing more than that. It isn’t reverse.

Back to dreams. I don’t know about yours, but mine are simply breathtaking when it comes to creating these astonishing “worlds” that I find myself “in”. And rarely are mine “surreal”. Instead they revolve around actual contexts I am entirely familiar with. I find myself being with others from my past. I find myself seeing things, hearing things, touching things, reading things, experiencing things in great detail. They simply boggle my mind.

But it is my brain that is creating these worlds.

Why? and How? And how can I know beyond all doubt that my material brain is not able in turn to create the psychological illusion of my freely choosing to type these words. Sure, a part of me scoffs at this. But that’s not definitive proof that there is an autonomous me calling the shots.

The fact is that, as a species, we just don’t know what is actually going on here. Let alone being able to connect all of the dots between what we think we do know as individuals here and now and all that can be known about the entirety of existence itself.

Then the part where speculations of this sort…

…are grappled with by neuroscientists exploring empirically, experientially, experimentally how the brain functions when explored using the “scientific method”. What has, as of now, been pinned down beyond all doubt by these folks?

Now, I suspect there is nothing really conclusive yet. Such that they have in fact determined the extent to which “I” is or is not “free” in regard to thinking and feeling and saying and doing…what exactly? I would think that if definitive conclusions had been reached that would be Big News. And PBS and the Science Channel and the BBC among others would be airing documentaries about it. Not to mention all the print publications and internet sites.

But, if they have, I’m not familiar with them.

Okay, but what’s the need for anything to exist at all? Why the need that it be this way and not some other? The teleological parameters of existence? What is the meaning and the purpose “behind” “all there is”?

God, maybe? The thing that Buddhists or deists attribute to the “universe”?

Or, perhaps, one of the many TOE [religious or otherwise] that have been proposed right here at ILP. The James S. Saint/Fixed Jacob Syndrome?

Or, now, yours?

As some here know, I often come back to dreaming in regard to free will:

But when I Google “dreaming free will” it’s slim pickings. Moistly in regard to “lucid dreams”.

But I did find this at the “Catholic Answers Forums”:

Of course here it generally pertains to God and religion. The discussion aims at explaining God’s role in dreams given that He created us with free will. Or in pondering the question of committing sins in dreams that one would never do in “real life”.

For me though it’s a No God world. For me it’s all about how similar “I” am in my dreams as I am in “real life”. Why can’t the awake “I” be just another manifestation of the sleeping brain “I”?

From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular uncertainty ensures this isn’t so
George Ellis at the aeon website

Higher level processes in the brain “reach down” to the lower level process. The macro-brain and the micro-brain somehow in tandem. But we still don’t have a full grasp of how these interactions unfold insofar as “I” become more or less the commander-in-chief. And as often as not when descriptions of this is brought down to earth they revolve around what unfolds only in the either/or world.

To wit:

But how do we go about determining beyond all possible doubt if our mental interpretations are merely, as of yet, not fully understood manifestations of physics wholly in sync with the material laws of matter?

Yet this basically crunch time for all who take an interest in grappling with their own choices. But: Given the mind-boggling nature of interaction between the billions and billions of bits of matter all the way down to the “ions and signaling molecules and synapses”, who but the neuroscientists themselves have access to anything that could lead only to the least uninformed leap of faith here.

And then the fact that, depending of the context in which the terrible accident above occurs, there may be those who do not feel “sympathy, fear or guilt” at all. For whatever personal reasons they may actually take satisfaction from it. And feel positive emotional and psychological states. Or see the whole thing as just “entertainment”.

The part where, free will or not, there’s no way to pin down how one ought to react to it.

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Unless of course someone – everyone – loses it only because nature, in unfolding only as it must, compels this to be the one and the only reality. But how exactly would philosophers or theologians come to know this if they can’t be entirely certain that what they came to know was as a result of being able to freely choose to know something else.

It still comes down to what the “hard guys” tell us based on the conclusions they come to utilizing all of the tools available to them through the “scientific method”.

But!

You know the rest.

Yet here even Kant falls back on the “transcending font”: his own “deduced” Creator. And, for most in the “Christian tradition”, this Creator is said to be omniscient. He knows all but somehow He does not know what we will freely choose. Because, if He did kn ow, how then would we truly be free to choose it?

And we are still back to assuming that the things we think up in regard to God and religion and ethics are examples of what we actually have no way in which to confirm beyond the assumptions themselves. Somehow, viscerally, intuitively, we just know these things.

And that’s before we get to the part where the behaviors we link “freedom and goodness” to are determined and then demonstrated to be ours and not theirs.

There you go. A leap of faith to free will. Just the thought that next week’s election here in America was “fated” going back to whatever brought into existence matter and the laws that govern it is simply beyond our grasp. Perhaps literally. It’s just that some are able – compelled or not – to shrug it off and to nestle comfortably in their own set of assumptions about “I”. Not to mention all of us who go about the business of living our lives from day to day not giving a single thought to these complex “philosophical” conundrums.

Iambiguous,

It’s kinda complicated… but I’ll give you the cliff notes version.

The moment a being can say they’re free, free will exists. In a cosmos with no free will it’s IMPOSSIBLE to conceive or say it!!!

Is free will freedom? Not necessarily.

What we really seek is freedom. Free will is a given.

Let me add to this.

Free will is the ability to always say, “I like this or I don’t like this”

Freedom is doing anything you want without consequence.

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Bolder is one thing, pinning down that there is absolutely no doubt that you are reading this only because you were never really free to choose not to read it, another matter all together.

In fact, how do we untangle ourselves from the conundrum itself? You’re a neuroscientist or someone able to do research on the brains of dead people. You’re poking around and performing all of these experiments. But what constitutes the part – that eureka! moment – when it finally becomes clear that it is only because you freely chose to do what you could have freely chosen not to do.

It’s like the human consciousness equivalent of figuring out why the universe is something and why it is this something. Or whether existence has always been around or actually started given a particular set of conditions.

Then, for some, cue God. Or some manifestation of the universe which they believe is “out there” able at least to provide an explanation. Meanwhile God or No God we continue to be stuck in antinomies…going around and around in circles trying to sort out – scientifically, philosophically, spiritually – what exactly it means to be dependent on our “biological inheritance”.

Wholly dependent? Compatibly dependent? Or “free at last!”?

The either/or world rendition of “conflicting goods”. Both sides can make reasonable arguments that the other side can deflect but never entirely make go away.

Then you must not be free to say that.

Look, Kid, iambiguous didn’t say that. Stephen Cave did when he created a title for his article.

And, unlike you and James S. Saint, who actually take pride in having freely chosen to post the didactic [pedantic] objectivist dogmas that you and he pedaled/pedal here, I flat out admit that I have no capacity to demonstrate my own autonomy.

Now, how about a youtube video?

The quote has your name on it.

And yet you do nothing else.

Look, Kid, there’s no way in hell that I’d expect someone of your ilk to grasp the points that someone of my ilk is making here.

Just suffice it to say that if you’re lucky you really don’t have any choice but to post what you do. And, if I’m lucky, I am compelled by the laws of nature to read your crap.

Iambiguous,

It’s quite simple. If freedom doesn’t exist in any way shape or form; it’s logically impossible to hypothetically suppose it.

This means that freedom necessarily exists in some way, shape or form. That form may not be appreciated right now (Not what we want it to be) by us in the way we want it to be, but it does exist.

You cannot refute that.

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Uh-oh?

Right, like this settles it. Consider: if, out of the blue, I type, “the green hornet on Maple street stole the only copy of the document definitively establishing the Christian God as in fact the Devil”, was that only as a result of whatever set into motion the laws of matter going back to…where and when exactly?

Then it ever and always comes down to how far this can be taken. Up to and including everything we think, feel, say and do? After all, look at all of those who are afflicted with brain tumors that don’t become murderers and pedophiles. And what becomes particularly unnerving for most is the idea that they are themselves murderers and pedophiles…but it’s all beyond their control. Unless of course you think it is all in your control and you murder someone or rape a child and someone comes along and tells you that you aren’t really responsible because there is no way you could have not murdered someone or raped a child.

Clearly, this gets all tangled up in what we think we know and what we’d like to to believe is so given a particular set of circumstances.

Again, this rendition of it!

We hold that, “the universe is deterministic and free will is a non-starter”, and then ask if we should be a bit more mindful of luck, as though anything that we are mindful of here is not also embedded inherently, necessarily in a wholly determined universe!!

Look, I’ll admit I’m just not thinking this through correctly, but if “I” is derived from a mind that is derived from a brain that is no less matter wholly in sync with the immutable laws of matter, being mindful about anything is only what we were ever able to be mindful of.

Right?

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
Stephen Cave in The Atlantic

Of course the difficulty here revolves around conducting an experiment embedded in a demonstration in which all of these steps are explained in the manner in which, say, we explain the functions of a human heart:

[b]"* Pumping oxygenated blood to the other body parts.

• Pumping hormones and other vital substances to different parts of the body.
• Receiving deoxygenated blood and carrying metabolic waste products from the body and pumping it to the lungs for oxygenation.
• Maintaining blood pressure. the human heart functions"[/b]

How do we do the same with the human brain such that in the end we are able to demonstrate that the demonstration itself is or is not only as it every could have been. With the heart it’s like explaining the functions of an automobile engine. With the brain it’s like explaining the capacity of the brain to explain itself.

Or, rather, to the extent that [compelled or otherwise] my own explanation here is actually reasonable. And what can then be the comfort embedded in the conclusion that if it is not I cannot really be held responsible for getting it wrong. Not if I was never able not to get it wrong.

This is clearly as good a description as any of where we are stuck. And, of course, we would seem to have no definitive capacity to disentangle ourselves from the conflicting sets of assumptions in order to know in, say, a comprehensive epistemological sense which assessment is the right one.

I merely muddy the waters all the more by introducing my own set of assumptions: that even given some measure of autonomy “I” in the is/ought world is embedded in and derived from all manner of variables that are are beyond our understanding and control. “I” is largely an existential contraption rooted subjectively in dasein. And that in turn it seems reasonable to construe “I” here as “fractured and fragmented” such that any particular individual’s value judgments are, at least in some sense, “illusory” even given free will.