Monday, April 10, 2006
Scott Adams says:How many of you believe in evolution because you accept the scientific consensus, yet also believe you have free will despite the scientific consensus against it? If so, explain your reasons.We begin our nonsense with two quotes:
According to the theory of cognitive dissonance, those who believe in both evolution and free will experience dissonance and will therefore offer arguments that appear humorously nonsensical to observers. Let’s see if that is true.
1.1 1 The world is determined by the facts and by it being all the facts. - Wittgenstein (my translation)
The unexamined life is not worth living. - Socrates
If the world is determined by the facts, so is everything within it. Including you and me. This is the view taken by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Much of the Tractatus seems to be an embodiment of the positivist notion that if we only gather all the facts, we will know the truth. This is a road that believers in science still tread, ever groping about for the next bit of information to further shrink the world of mystery and expand the world of knowledge. It is a route, however, that Wittgenstein obliquely rejected in wrapping up his ostensibly all-encompassing philosophical system.
Wittgenstein's biggest philosophical breakthrough in the Tractatus was the final line: That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence. It is a startling conclusion, indicating, in essence, that while the preceeding pages have laid out an internally coherent structure for understanding thought and meaning, any questions you might have probably don't have answers.
Free will is one of those questions lacking answers. Whether it exists or not is in the mind of the beholder. It is plausible enough to assert that in a cause and effect universe, everything has its reason. It is plausible even to add that this reason may not, ought not, be ours, but that of the workings of the universe. It is plausible, further, to argue that the randomness of the quantum universe, while murkying the waters of the world of cause and effect don't indicate that we're taking the decisions, just that there is something beyond the Newtonian that impels our taking of them. And yet, something doesn't feel quite right. There's a why in there somewhere that knocks things about. Here's the why:
Why are we talking about this?
It could, of course, be part of some master plan. We could be fragments of God's consciousness, exploring ourselves individually so He can contemplate Himself by assembling the manifold impressions. Though we're dubious about this working since the world just may be more than everything that is the case, or all the facts. As He would know. It seems less likely that chance would impel us to wonder if we're a product of chance. And then, there's a second problem, which is that this debate makes the cause-effect thing bewilderingly complex if not impossible. Time for Socrates.
Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living." He could have added that it is lived differently. Free will or not, those who are circumspect about their existences seem to make different, even if predetermined, choices than those who don't. It is possible that our destinies are fixed, but it's usually not the straight-A, college-bound debate team captains who are tragically killed in car-surfing accidents, to take an example, er, at random. When we examine our lives, the type of choices we make change. And here's the kicker: It works the same way with everything!
Quantum physics teaches us that the act of observation affects the thing being measured when you reach a small enough scale. In my case, this is when the paper slips as I attempt to line up the ruler. But even scientists with electron microscopes can't look at a quark without screwing everything up in the quark's afternoon plans, and possibly the quark's entire neighborhood, in the process. We know about some subatomic particles in space because of traces they leave on our instruments, but this cosmic doo-doo, too, comes from somewhere, and our act of measuring thus has its effect.
Is there free will? It's a difficult question. Especially because our attempts to answer it change, over time, everything. Observation alters. Even a predetermined "choice" to observe impacts. If you believe in a clockwork universe, it may be possible to see one thing leading to another to the point where the Rube Goldbergian space-time contraption produces organic beings that think they're thinking when really they're not and whose subtle alterations of whole galaxies by the process are of no more consequence than cows dispensing dung where we might step without looking - a great and cosmic sh-- happens. But Occam's spinning in his grave as I write.
Is there evolution? Sure. Is there free will? Likewise. But neither exist in fact in the way they manifest to us. Our senses are better suited to avoiding (imperfectly) the cow dung than tapping into the rolling probabilities of the quantum world where our free will either exists or is engulfed in a subtle, unfathomable determinism whose randomness makes it all the more splendid and undetectable within the realm of our daily experience.
The whole thing is so perplexing that some people choose to believe that some primordial intelligence - call it God - slammed this whole thing together as an expression of His will and that just perhaps, He willed the unfolding of the world in a way that looks like evolution because that was His design, even as they think themselves to have free will because in infusing them with His spirit they picked up their own dash of that power to exist and to create. And when these things were done, He looked and saw that it was good. If utterly baffling.
posted by gbarto at 1:00 PM