Atheism, Free Will, And Material Determinism Wayland Dong (Reply) (4-01)

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Atheism, Free Will,
And Material Determinism
Wayland Dong

Reference: Thou Dost Protest Too Much with Gary
Perspective: Quantum Mechanics Does Not Remove Causality Matt Johnson

From: "Wayland Dong"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Subject: Free will, determinism, and atheism
Date: Friday, April 13, 2001 3:47 AM

Cliff,

In response to a question about free will ("Thou dost protest too much" 1/9/01), you replied:

"Free will, within the limitations that physics and biology have placed us, is, I think, the only option to an atheist. Determinism, to me, is the crux of theism, even when it is cloaked in materialistic terms. Gora went much further in this thinking than I do."

I don't understand the positions of you or Gora on this matter; they seem contradictory to your basic premises. Perhaps it is a misunderstanding of terms. You present a dichotomy between a conditional "free will" and an undefined "determinism." Gora says that "materialism ... is theistic, since it requires man's surrender to natural laws or to historical forces.... In short, materialism is godless theism. Therefore, theism is ... is man's attitude of surrender to this world, whether it is understood spiritually or materialistically."

From what I understand of your beliefs, you have seen no evidence, even moderately convincing, for a supernatural force, a soul, an uncaused cause deep within our brain. In short, you don't believe in anything that could be termed "free will." Right?

In your view, as I understand it (and mine also, btw), there is no reason for us to believe in the existence of anything supernatural. We are therefore materialists, right? "Materialism" is kinda old fashioned, I think a better term is "naturalism," but what we mean is that we don't believe there's anything else but matter and energy, all natural stuff, all describable by physics. I view naturalism or materialism as the default position, with the alternatives being various forms of dualism, just as atheism is the default position, with the alternatives being various forms of theism. One could be an atheistic dualist, but not a theistic materialist.

Gora seems to be talking about something completely else when he says "materialism," more of an attitude than a metaphysics. Perhaps he explains in more detail somewhere else. But with the definitions that I understand, what he says makes no sense to me.

It's the same with "determinism." I suppose that Calvinistic predestination is determinism, but a more general definition, as I see it, is simple causality: all phenomena are causally determined by preceding events and preexisting laws and conditions. The word "determinism" has bad connotations; people tend to think of Enlightenment-era universe-as-a-giant-clock and all that extreme reductionism. Certainly the nature of physical law is more subtle and complex than anyone in the 18th or 19th century realized. Determinism as it was understood then (perfect understanding of initial conditions = perfect prediction of future states) is certainly not the case. But determinism defined as the basic concept of causality, defined above, survives. (Even the probablistic equations of quantum mechanics are deterministic in that are predictive.)

Again, this seems to me to be the default position. Certainly in the scientific method naturalism and causality are presumed as fundamental working hypotheses. Like you say, there is no reason to believe otherwise. The default position, therefore, must be that there is no free will.

This bothers a lot of people, even a lot of otherwise die-hard naturalists, who think this makes us mindless automotons. But that reaction is illogical. Perhaps you have read Pinker's How the Mind Works; his explanation is that the concept of a free-willed, uncaused, independent individual is an abstraction, an idealization, just an Euclidian geometry is an idealization of the real world. The idealizations are "close enough" and the causal, naturalistic mechanism is far beneath the surface. (The author of www.naturalism.org goes farther and claims that free will is not necessary, not even in abstraction, for morality and normal social behavior.)

I similarly believe that we are fully naturalistic beings, without immortal souls or free will or other uncaused effects, who appear (to ourselves and others) to be conscious, rational, emotional agents who interact with the environment and society according to rules as if we were free willed. The concepts of consciousness and active and emotive agents can be treated at face value, though they can in principle be understood from fundamental naturalistic principles.

There is nothing that I have read of your writings (and I've read most of what you've posted) that would lead me to believe that you would disagree with me in any of this. Yet you say that free will is the only option open to an atheist. I can only imagine that, like Gora, you refer more to attitude than metaphysics. What you're really saying, then, is that we need a proactive mindset or something, not that there is actually something called "free will" that is independent of natural causalistic phenomena (i.e., is supernatural). Is this what you mean by the "limitations [of] physics and biology"? I beg your pardon in advance if I misconstrued your position in any way, but your statement was confusing to me.

Your comments are welcome. Sorry for the length.

Your web site is absolutely killer! Keep up the good work!

Wayland

From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Wayland Dong"
Subject: Re: Free will, determinism, and atheism
Date: Friday, April 13, 2001 6:33 PM

To me, deterministic materialism would exist were it not for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle shaking things up a little. Theistic determinism, to me, is where God determines everything (which would not be true determinism, but determinism would exist within the universe). Since I have no reason to think that my life's script is already written out, I choose to continue to act as if we have choices.

This seems backwards from how I see it: the cells in my zygote may have divided according to a certain recipe, given the nutrition available and considering random radiation's interplay, but the result was an extremely complex nervous system that, I think, has free will in a limited sense -- limited, of course, by its nature, the availability of resources, and the constraints placed upon it by its environment. In other words, I don't think we are marionettes, either with God holding the strings or with Nature running the script. As mechanical as much of our thinking and behavior is, at times (as was initially shown by Pavlov), I don't think we are pre-programmed robots or computers.

While I think the notion of an all-powerful and all-knowing deity is an impossible concept (much like a square circle), I think it is conceptually possible for a very powerful deity to manufacture organisms so that they have free will in the sense that I see us as having free will. I also think it conceptually possible for a deity to have written a script (down to the last nose pick), but I cannot fathom any deity, however barbarous, having written this existence down in script form.

My conscious, aware "Self" is the result of the complex structures and processes in my brain and nervous system. Nature saw fit to give animals a conscious sense of self, probably because being able to move around and make decisions enhances survival. It is in this, most of all, that I see evidence in nature that organisms are not marionettes for the laws of physics, but have been designed by natural selection to have the ability to make choices within their environment and according to their resources and abilities.

I could be entirely wrong on this, and if I find myself to be in error, I will adjust my outlook accordingly. However, I will admit that this is as close as I come to taking a sides on a difficult question for aesthetic reasons -- because that's how I'd like things to be.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
people with no reason to believe

Added: April 19, 2001

From: Wayland Dong
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2001 11:23 PM
Subject: Re: Free will, determinism, and atheism

I remain amazed at how you manage to respond so quickly given the amount of traffic on your site. Thanks for your time.

I realize that to some extent I'm trying to pin you down even though you don't like to take sides. I think the point is worth clarifying, though, because it seems contradictory (it did to me, anyway) when left as is.

To me, deterministic materialism would exist were it not for the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle shaking things up a little.

Strict determinism, in the sense of being able to predict exactly (in principle), is undermined by the Uncertainty Principle. A less stringent definition of determinism, as I defined it, still holds. Perhaps "causality" is a better word to avoid confusion. The point is that physical laws remain causal and predictive. The Uncertainty Principle means that, say, you cannot predict exactly, even in principle, whether a system in state A will go to state B or state C, but you can say that there is a 27 percent chance of it going to B and a 73 percent chance of it going to C. You may not call this deterministic, depending on your definition, but it is still predictive and causal.

Further, indeterminancy or randomness does not prevent the people-as-marionettes problem. For one thing, quantum uncertainty is vanishingly small for anything as large as a neuron, or even the vacules within a neuron, and it seem unlikely that quantum effects are manifest in the action of the brain (despite what Roger Penrose thinks). Even if they are, it remains that the laws are still causal and predictive, and being able (in principle) to say that there is a 42.8 percent chance that Cliff will do A and a 57.2 percent chance he will do B is no improvement over being able to say that there is 100 percent chance he will do A (or B). It's just the difference between a book with a fixed outcome and an interactive book on CD-ROM that arrives at one of a number of outcomes through some more complicated algorithm that depends on user inputs. Both are programmed and both are counter to our concept of free will.

the cells in my zygote may have divided according to a certain recipe, given the nutrition available and considering random radiation's interplay, but the result was an extremely complex nervous system that, I think, has free will in a limited sense -- limited, of course, by its nature, the availability of resources, and the constraints placed upon it by its environment.

Of course, we appear to have free will, which means that our consciousness appears to have the ability to arbitrarily make a decision of the options available to us. The question is, is free will: (a) an illusion or an abstraction that is fundamentally still causally naturalistic, or (b) something supernatural that is truly uncaused?

I think (a) is the best answer, given that there is no evidence for (b). In fact, if you believe in a supernatural soul, then it's an easy step to assign free will to that soul. Further, if you allow that free will, an uncaused cause, exists, then you might as well call that the "soul" and be done with it.

If we don't have true free will, then, why are we perceived to have free will, by ourselves and by others? The answer must lie in the sheer complexity of our brain. The very complexity makes it impossible at this time to even imagine providing explanations of psychological issues with a map of electrical impulses and neurochemical concentrations. We can use explanations of a higher level of complexity, like the concepts of consciousness or free will, and even take them at face value for all practical purposes. As Paul Kurtz says:

"This is a nonreductive naturalism, for although nature is physical-chemical at root, we need to deal with natural processes on various levels of observation and complexity: electrons and molecules, cells and organisms, flowers and trees, psychological cognition and perception, social institutions, and culture. We cannot at this time reduce the concepts and explanations of psychology, economic politics, sociology, or anthropology to physics and chemistry, but need to leave room for naturalistic explanations on various levels of complexity."

Fundamentally, however, it is just physics. If you maintain that we have no reason to believe in the supernatural, you must by extension believe that there is no reason to believe in free will. However, there is no reason to become fatalistic (which is not a logical response anyway). We can take our apparent free will at face value. We know who we are, we know that we make decisions, etc., and the very basic fundamental mechanics of the whole consciousness thing need not impact us in practice.

Thanks again,
Wayland

From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Wayland Dong"
Subject: Re: Free will, determinism, and atheism
Date: Wednesday, April 18, 2001 10:47 PM

I remain amazed at how you manage to respond so quickly given the amount of traffic on your site.

Sometimes you get lucky. Yesterday, for example, I didn't download any e-mail at all because I spent the first part of the day typesetting and doing research for the now-late April issue of the print edition, and then spent another several hours updating my karaoke song list and organizing my collection to make it more manageable. Yours is probably the only letter of length I'll have time to work on today, and I have another lengthy, involved letter, requiring some in-depth research, that's been in progress since early yesterday. A third letter was a rather simple matter and was quite fun, and that one is slated to go directly into the print edition, as is the one from yesterday. I don't intend to even read any of the others today. I don't even know if I'll have time to finish yours today, and may finish it up tomorrow.

Thanks for your time.

This is part of the reason I do this: part of my personal philosophical study involves comparing notes with others, and part of my activism involves making these ponderings available for others to consider. Yours is a classic example of my tendency to want to test my current understanding, in the style of the Liberal Scientific Method, in the hope of reducing the problems with my personal outlook.

Strict determinism, in the sense of being able to predict exactly (in principle), is undermined by the Uncertainty Principle. A less stringent definition of determinism, as I defined it, still holds.

Yes. Anybody can see that some things cannot be changed by any amount of effort on our part. Gora's point was that many things will change if and only if we apply ourselves toward effecting those changes.

The big practical question is, Where do we draw the line? What was Bertrand Russell really saying when he noted that,

Man, in so far as he is not subject to natural forces, is free to work out his own destiny. The responsibility is his, and so is the opportunity."
-- "Is There a God?" (1952)

From our vantage point, it appears to us that we have choices. This could be a hallucination, just as conscious awareness itself appears to some (e.g., Pinker) to be a hallucination. And the main point Russell and Gora were making was to distinguish between "going with the flow" and buckling down and getting something done. Practical determinism (fatalism) can be just as destructive to an individual as solipsism, so we do well to at least pretend that we have choices (in the practical sense) even if we can make a solid case that philosophical determinism is valid. Like I said, this is as close as I come to believing something simply out of expedience.

The big philosophical question is difficult for me to express: We all know that once everything is said and done, events ended up taking a specific course. Thus, we can say that what will happen will happen and we just don't know what will happen. To me, determinism implies before-the-fact causality, not an after-the-fact historical account. I also ask, Are some occurrences a genuine toss-up, or are all occurrences inevitable?

My question is, After we've drawn that line, is it still proper to apply determinism in describing the human mind? or is it still possible to describe the human mind as being in a state of free will?

Victor Stenger points out that Heisenberg's principle played a role in the fact that, during the initial stages of the Big Bang, there was a precisely equal balance of matter and antimatter, but some fluctuation along the way produced more matter than antimatter -- and it is the matter that we can detect with our senses and our instruments. Antimatter, he says, can only be shown through our equations.

The point is that a small fluctuation way back when had profound consequences regarding the current state of our universe. I don't know if we can show that some of these processes were a random toss-up or were inevitable, or whether this is even a proper distinction. You raised another question that I had not previously considered when you appeared to suggest that only "a supernatural force, a soul, an uncaused cause deep within our brain" could bring about "free will." (This is what you appear to be saying in the initial paragraphs of your first letter.) I have not encountered any reasons for believing anything that anything herein described exists, so I cannot speak as to whether supernatural forces or entities could bring about genuine free will, even were we to show that the physical universe is deterministic.

According to generic monotheism, though, God has unlimited and unconditional free will, and could conceivably impart a limited form of this ability onto His creatures (even though that ability would, itself, be caused directly by God). As a Christian, I used this very line of reasoning several times: On one front, opposed the modern Evangelical and Charismatic concept of "surrender" on one front (similar to what Gora was fighting in India). On the other front, I questioned the Calvinistic concept of predestination. I suggested that (1) God had created us in His image, and (2) God has free will and creative power, so therefore (from 1 and 2) we have, in a limited sense, free will and creative power. If we don't, then either we were not created precisely in God's image, or God Himself is without free will and creative power.

(At least, this is how I saw things at the time, and were I to somehow convert to Christianity today, I have not, since then, learned or encountered anything that would alter my viewpoint on this: I have become an atheist, since then, but I still believe strongly in human free-will despite having struggled with that question for decades and from several different perspectives.)

However, some passages of Christian and Hebrew Scripture qualify even God's unconditional free will. Judges 1:19 says that "the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." Here it is admitted that the Bible god was unable to accomplish a goal. In Genesis 6:6, the Bible god is said to have "repented ... that he had made man on the earth" and allegedly sent the Noachian flood. The New Testament appears even more clear on this matter, because Hebrews 6:18 mentions that "it was impossible for God to lie." I haven't seen this passage used in any discussion of the "Euthyphro Problem" discussed in the Rebecca Donnarumma letter, probably because the "Euthyphro Problem" is somewhat discomforting from a Christian perspective, but were I a fundamentalist Christian, I'd probably take this passage into consideration. The "Euthyphro Problem" asks whether right and wrong is because that's what God says it is, or whether God Himself is subject to a sense of right and wrong that is higher than Himself. In the former sense, morality is not morality but obedience to God; in the latter, God is not Supreme in all senses, being subject to (or subjecting Himself to) a sense of right and wrong that is greater than Himself, he having the choice either to submit to it or to ignore it.

Although I can ponder these matters, I cannot speak to them, because I am not a theist, and don't have any reason to believe the basic claims of theism regarding gods and souls and the supernatural. My big problem, at this point, is whether the supernatural is the only alternative to the causal determinism you describe. And, as I mentioned earlier, if this is what looks to be the case, I will go along with it in the interest of following truth wherever it may lead. If that leads me to solipsism-like fatalism, perhaps I do have the ability to abandon my commitment to truth.

Perhaps you'd be willing to expound more deeply on how fatalism is not a logical response to the absence of free will, and how one can go about taking the appearance of free will at fact value and think of oneself as being self-consistent.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
people with no reason to believe

Added: April 26, 2001

From: Wayland Dong
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2001 1:10 AM
Subject: Re: Free will, determinism, and atheism

Sorry, I can't reply as fast as you!

As a side note, I just watched this HBO documentary on faith healing and miracles, and it was excellent. It prominently featured Pentecostal huckster Benny Hinn, followed up with those who claimed to have had miraculous healing, and went quite in depth on the placebo effect, the physiological responses that are perceived as religious or healing experiences, and an analysis of the "revival" meetings as mass hypnotic sessions. I don't know if you subscribe to HBO, but I'm sure they'll replay it at least a few more times.

In the religious wacko department, the LA Times has this story about how Muslim clerics have declared Pokemon a Zionist/Darwinist conspiracy to corrupt Muslim youth. The article does reference Falwell and the purple Teletubby.

This is part of the reason I do this: part of my personal philosophical study involves comparing notes with others . . .

And, it's fun! I love a good discussion.

Well, I'm not sure I see the difference. If you can explain, after the fact, the complete causal chain, then you could in principle predict it beforehand. Maybe only probabilistically, a la quantum indeterminism, but that still counts, to me.

You raised another question that I had not previously considered when you appeared to suggest that only "a supernatural force, a soul, an uncaused cause deep within our brain" could bring about "free will." ... My big problem, at this point, is whether the supernatural is the only alternative to the causal determinism you describe.... Perhaps you'd be willing to expound more deeply on how fatalism is not a logical response to the absence of free will, and how one can go about taking the appearance of free will at fact value and think of oneself as being self-consistent.

Ok, here's my philosophy, as best I can formulate it at this stage of my (young) life. I'll start at the beginning.

First, we have to clarify the difference between naturalism and dualism. Naturalism, or materialism, as I see it, says that 1) the universe is entirely matter and energy (where these terms are used as a physicist would), and 2) events are causally determined according to the laws of physics. (These tenets are also the implicit assumptions of scientific inquiry.) Any other metaphysics would include some additional part of the universe that is not matter, or some part that is not causally determined, and would be a form of dualism.

(An aside on the causally deterministic aspect of physical law: as you point out, determinism in science is more related to explanatory than predictive power. The Uncertainty Principle randomizes results a bit, but you still have the theory that explains how you achieved a state given the previous state. Even if you had a random 50/50 choice at the beginning of time that determined whether the universe was predominantly matter or antimatter, you still have a causal explanatory chain: you had this state, which had an even-money chance of going either way, and it went one way, and that cause that, which caused this, and so on. After the fact you have a complete causal chain; before the fact you have a probabilistic prediction. Causally deterministic means that nothing happens that can't be explained by existing physical law and prior conditions. No miracles allowed.)

Next, consciousness. The naturalistic view is that consciousness is the result of the electrical and chemical activity in the brain, which is itself a result of the genetic and environmental conditions that caused our neurons to grow and connect the way they did. Now this does not mean that we can discuss psychology, much less sociology or history, in terms of electrical signals and chemical concentrations. As it said in the quote I gave last time, this is a non-reductive naturalism. Tom Clark (author of www.naturalism.org) discusses the matter eloquently and at length and distinguishes strong reductionism, which you could imagine writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln with a graph of chemical levels in the brain, from weak reductionism, where fundamentally it's all chemistry and physics, but higher level concepts such as emotive agent or sentient individual are valid and useful and in some sense REAL. To borrow a phrase from Richard Lewontin, the biologist, our conscious self is a nexus of weakly determining forces. If you take away a few neurons, dim the lights, or change the chemical balance in the brain, we are effected, but our "self" remains. None of these items IS consciousness or a sufficient condition of consciousness, only the whole is conscious, is us.

One of the aspects that this consciousness is the will, the ability to make decisions. Webster's Collegiate defines "free will" as "freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention," which seems a reasonable definition to me. It seems to me that the "prior causes" must include brain states and environmental factors. Naturalistically, consciousness is a result of a physical brain state, which is causally related to a previous brain state and the genetic and environmental influences, and so on down the causal chain. Free will must be something completely arbitrary, not traceable in a causal chain to any previous state. Ergo, naturalism implies no free will (so defined).

Fundamentally, we can say with some confidence that there is no such animal as free will. But fundamentally, there's no such thing as consciousness, either! Consciousness arises out of the structure of the brain, the pattern of electral impules and chemical concentrations, and environmental stimuli, without any "soul" involved. In some sense, then, consciousness is an illusion, because we appear to exist as something apart from the "objective" reality around us but in fact do not. On the other hand, consciousness is as real is it gets; it's the only thing we can be sure of! Cogito ergo sum.

Therefore, on a fundamental level, we can say that there is no free will, just as there is no soul. Anything else implies dualism. On the other hand, free will is no less real than consciousness, emotion, or any other such thing. I do not see any problem knowing that my love for my wife is the result of my neural structure, some brain chemicals, and my social environment. It does not make my love any less real; if anything, my disbelief in any underlying "real" reality -- god, objective Enlightenment-era reality, or whatever -- makes my love more real and more precious. It's the same with free will. It is in this sense an illusion or an abstraction, but it is entirely relevant and "real" to us.

Now fatalism. Fatalism can mean different things, none of which to me seem threatening at all. If fatalism is when people say, "It just wasn't meant to be," when things go badly, then it's just a coping mechanism. If fatalism is the belief that the future is fixed and humans are powerless to change events, but in an after-the-fact sense, the way some Chirstians read history and pinpoint events where God steered events so that what happened did happen, it's completely circular and ex post facto and has no effect on our behavior at all. It doesn't have to be theistic; as a gedanken experiment, imagine a being (like "Q" in Star Trek) who can create a completely causal map of history, down to the neurotransmitter level. Of what effect is this to us? Saying that the future is fixed in this sense is just another way of saying, "Whatever happened, happened." How does this make us "unthinking automatons," which is the usual claim?

Now if fatalism means that we shouldn't try to change things, large, important things, like world peace or tackling large multinational corporations, because we are powerless to cause the effects we desire, then it's just negative thinking. And negative prophesies are self-fulfilling, as they say. I think this is what Gora was against, this kind of lackadaisical attitude. This is clearly not true, as a quick perusal of chaos theory or history teaches. Small events can have large consequences; I think the evidence for that is substantial. If you can accept that we have no soul but are still conscious, sentient beings, by the same token you should accept that we have no free will but are still emotive, willful beings, with both the freedom and the responsibility to effect what we see as desireable changes in the world. I just don't see a problem with fatalism; if my reasoning is flawed, please inform me.

I apologize if this is less than clear; it's a work in progress. But this reply has waited long enough! I await your comments, by which you help me refine my philosophy.

Hoping you are in good health, I remain

Sincerely,
Wayland

From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Wayland Dong"
Subject: Re: Free will, determinism, and atheism
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2001 4:23 AM

Wish I could get the transcript for the HBO article. Islam is Islam, and I stopped laughing a long time ago. Pokemon is Japanese for "There is no God in the universe." Right! Reminds me of Jerry Falwell and the others. This is the big problem with both monotheism and fundamentalism. Monotheism is extremely exclusivistic, always being The One True Faith. Though monotheistic religions are always headed by an all-powerful deity, an Oriental Despot, Only Bigger, and Invisible. These deities (for some reason) must always be jealously protected from the likes of Barbie, Simba the White Lion, Coca-Cola, Elvis Presley, Barney the Insipid Dinosaur, Ernie the Atheist Camel, Sylvester Stallone, a pair of Air Jordans, Bert and Ernie, Disney's Aladdin, and even the United States Marines.

Well, I'm not sure I see the difference. If you can explain, after the fact, the complete causal chain, then you could in principle predict it beforehand.

I see your point. I have pondered along these lines off and on since late childhood.

Religious fatalism tends to say that all events have been decided by a conscious, aware being, and nothing we do will change the outcome of those events because a "person" has determined que será será, actively thwarting any attempts at change.

What you are suggesting is that since nobody knows the eventual (inevitable) outcome, we are free to try to change the course of history in any way we choose -- and free to still think we are actually making changes. This goes along with my understanding of natural selection as a form of intelligent design, which is "intelligent" in all but one crucial aspect: it has no foresight, but designs only through hindsight, keeping anything that improves an organism's prospect for surviving long enough to bring its offspring to the point of self-sufficiency.

But if you could, in actuality, predict the chain of causality, could you not intervene and alter its otherwise inevitable outcome? And if you could partially predict outcome on a limited basis (and we humans can do just that), then what role does humankind's ability to make abstractions (and thus make rudimentary predictions) play in the causal chain itself? This ability to make predictions just might be the "random factor" we're looking for.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
Five years of service to
people with no reason to believe

Added: April 29, 2001

From: "Wayland Dong"
To: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2001 12:18 AM
Subject: Re: Free will, determinism, and atheism

Wish I could get the transcript for the HBO article.

I hope they make videos and transcripts available for purchase. I would purchase the video, for I found the whole thing fascinating. I can remember laughing at Benny Hinn and his hair when I'd see him on the good ol' Trinity Broadcast Network many years ago. (My brother and I used to watch it trying to catch their concerts of Christian rock bands, who we found hilariously awful.) But to see the crippled, the blind, the dying, in his audience, swaying with tears and smiles, some of them desperately trying to move their crippled limbs to prove that God had rewarded their faith, some of them coming back again and again to each each "crusade" with the same result but believing that they weren't healed because they didn't have enough faith...it was frustrating, it was thought-provoking, but most of all it was heartbreaking.

And to see the money that these pitiful people gave, many of them at or below the poverty line! To see Hinn say that the money was well cared for and well spent, while he sat in his shiny tailored suit with gilt fixtures and fine furniture behind him...it was infuriating!

This type of religious fatalism, as a tool for maintaining the status quo, is reprehensible, and makes no sense, even from the theistic perspective. How do you know, for example, that God isn't using you an as agent for change?

What you are suggesting is that since nobody knows the eventual (inevitable) outcome, we are free to try to change the course of history in any way we choose -- and still think we are actually making changes.

Yes, and further, not only do you still think you're making changes, your actions, based on your thinking that you have free will, are necessary to cause those changes. Even if they're inevitable. This is why fatalism doesn't make sense -- if you don't know the future, how does whether or not it's predetermined make the slightest bit of difference?

But if you could, in actuality, predict the chain of causality, could you not intervene and alter its otherwise inevitable outcome?

In principle. But consider again that there are a large number of weakly determining conditions on our brain that result in a given decision. Because these forces are weakly determining, changing one a number of them might produce no change or a very large change. This non-linear, weakly determining stuff is contrary to the textbook science experiment where you hold everything constant and change one factor to gauge its effect. That just won't work; brains are too complicated.

Further, consider that at least some of this causal web of weakly determining forces is probably somewhat chaotic (in the sense of chaos theory, i.e., extremely sensitive to initial conditions). That would exponentially complicate your prediction calculations.

The end result is not only would you need so much information to predict an outcome that you would have to be god-like, but partial information would do you no good. So while I do say it's predictable in principle, that principle is so far removed from reality as to be completely inconsequential.

And if you could partially predict outcome on a limited basis (and we humans can do just that), then what role does humankind's ability to make abstractions (and thus make rudimentary predictions) play in the causal chain itself? This ability to make predictions just might be the "random factor" we're looking for.

As I've explained, I don't think you can make a partial prediction at a fundamental physical level. You have to go to a higher level, an agent level, which is where all our experience lies. This brings up the very interesting question: why is agent level behavior, what we do and how we expect people to act, as predictable as it is? The consciousness that emerges out of the murk of brain chemistry is very stable (imagine how even severely afflicted people can retain their sense of self) and somewhat deterministic (in that it is fairly easy to predict, not with perfect accuracy but close, how someone will react to a given setting, with limited knowledge of that person).

I think the stable, predictable aspects of our agent-level behavior are what confers the survival advantage of consciousness -- assuming consciousness does confer a survival advantage, which seems likely. The mechanism by which that appears is mysterious. If anyone ever succeeds in creating an artificial intelligence, that will hopefully give us more insight. Does consciousness arise spontaneously once the complexity reaches a certain level? It's all very interesting.

I'm not sure what you mean by the "random factor" though. Care to elaborate?

All the best,
Wayland

From: "Positive Atheism Magazine" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Wayland Dong"
Subject: Re: Free will, determinism, and atheism
Date: Sunday, April 29, 2001 12:53 AM

I can remember laughing at Benny Hinn and his hair when I'd see him on the good ol' Trinity Broadcast Network many years ago.

I never saw Trinity Broadcasting, but always thought Jim Bakker looked like a fish. And how could Peter Popoff not know how his name could be taken -- a double double entendre!

I'll admit that it makes much more sense to me from a theistic perspective than it does from a materialistic perspective. Just what prevents us from considering ourselves unfeeling automatons? the fact that it's all a neurological hallucination anyway?

if you don't know the future, how does whether or not it's predetermined make the slightest bit of difference?

I cannot answer, but it sure seems like it would. And if I can show that it's predetermined, based upon the laws of physics, then I can see how this could profoundly affect how I feel about myself. I don't see how the emotional impact of thinking this way can differ much from that of being a solipsist; though I can easily refute solipsism, I cannot so easily put away the notion of determinism.

Also, many theists have accused us, as materialists, of saying that the human is merely an unthinking automaton. How this differs from how it would be had we been created by a deity escapes me, though. But the emotional impact of their argument is very forceful, even though the logic behind their concluding that we see humans as unthinking automatons is a straw man of the false dichotomy and reductio ad absurdum variety.

This goes without saying. To say otherwise is a straw man. The more sophisticated variety of Calvinists (Westminster West, et al) teach this, and even the myth of the Turkish cabbie who drives like a maniac and says, "Unless Allah wills that we crash, we will not crash" is, to me, a straw-man myth against that variety of Islam.

But if you could, in actuality, predict the chain of causality, could you not intervene and alter its otherwise inevitable outcome?

So while I do say it's predictable in principle, that principle is so far removed from reality as to be completely inconsequential.

I'm not thinking this complexly. I'm saying that if I know that a certain course of action will change things, but through my inaction, things will remain the same, doesn't this ability of a conscious, aware agent to foresee possibilities throw a wrench into the very idea of determinism?

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine
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people with no reason to believe

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