Keith wrote:
> The truth of the matter is that we are automatons, or very largely
> so. Each of us is programmed according to factors quite outside our
> individual control. In my opinion, freewill must exist -- or else we
> couldn't possibly consider its possible existence -- but how or why
> or to what extent it operates must remain inexplicable for now, and
> perhaps forever. It is a problem of the same complexity as the real
> nature of the quantum world, or the unknown 95% mass of the universe
> or whether evolution is a random game or is intrinsic to the
> creation of the universe (if it was created).
In Neal Stephenson's _Baroque Cycle_, the fictional incarnation of
Gottfried Leibniz asserts [1] that the two great questions confronting
natural philosophy are the question of free will and the nature of the
continuum.
The entity that has (or doesn't have) free will is the person, the
conscious, self-aware being that each of us believes himself to be and
which each of us infers each of the rest of us to be. But the
"natural philosophy" that will address the question is cognitive
neuroscience. As yet we have no idea -- or at best several tentative,
contradictory and poorly substantiated ideas -- of how the self-aware
persona emerges from the substrate that neuroscience scrutinizes. So
3+ centuries on from Leibniz, our only reasonable strategy is to
behave *as if* free will existed.
>From a purely theoretical standpoint, the behavior of entirely
deterministic systems of sufficient complexity (in the narrow sense)
can be entirely unpredictable. The brain is of just such a complexity
so the answer may be that in a purely mathematical sense, free will as
we traditionally conceive it is impossible but that in practice we will
never be able to distinguish any way in which people with more or less
normal brains deviate from free will.
Law (and society in general) already depend on this. People with
irresistible compulsions and other "deviant" cognitive states are
regarded as in some way defective. Others are deemed to be
responsible for their actions as if they were intentional. Free will
is a necessary, if unverified, assumption.
> Unless scientific research is snuffed out completely in the coming
> years then it will inevitably be the case that the growing political
> demand of the future will be that the well-being and satisfactions
> already experienced by the small power-groups be translated
> downwards to us all.
>
> In a vague way as yet, this is called 'Decentralization'.
Or it's called a "distributed" system. Evolution is a distributed
system. It doesn't have a hierarchy or a goal. It's not
teleological. Evolutionary "decisions" -- whether or not a mutation
is viable, or a population with a certain expressed trait survives or
a trait is effective in finding food or (for higher organisms) a mate
-- are made locally on the basis of the local situation and the single
individual. Those "decisions" are not directed hierarchically and
there is no "final cause". Evolution is the net effect of a myriad of
local decisions.
Much of human society has operated that way to a degree. Within a
group, whether an isolated extended family or within a great empire,
cultural "decisions" are made about mating, eating, hygiene, violence
and who may direct it at whom, crime, slavery, insanity, religion and
the forceable imposition (or not) of it, etc. As long as those many
cultures -- for the purposes of discussion, say the same "many" as the
number of languages -- as long as those cultures were internally
cohesive and externally partitioned and distinct, society was a sort
of distributed system the elements of which were cultures thater than
individual organisms.
Taking that as a given, it's interesting to reflect on how globalized
commerce and finance, global projection of military power and the
global arborization of the English language, western media and western
consumerism may be corrupting a healthy distributed system and
converting it to an unhealthy monoculture.
The notion, held by both Muslims and Christians, that their religion
is the one and only, universal truth for all mankind, handed down buy
the one and only God takes on new significance when "all mankind" is
just next door or a couple of mouse-clicks away.
As for the nature of the continuum, that's what the the hoo-rah over
the Higgs particle is all about, isn't it? Is the continuum empty
space or is it dense with potential virtual particles that
continuously pop into existence and vanish? Or something else?
So we haven't made a whole lot of progress on Leibniz's problems, have
we?
- Mike
[1] I have no idea whether or not the real Leibniz made such an
assertion. But it's credible.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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