Posted on 02/15/2003 4:18:25 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Scientists thought it was settled. The universe, they had decided, is about 20 billion years old, and Earth itself is 4.5 billion years old. Simple forms of life came into being more than three billion years ago, having formed spontaneously from nonliving matter. They grew more complex through slow evolutionary processes and the first hominid ancestors of humanity appeared more than four million years ago. Homo sapians itself—the present human species, people like you and me—has walked the earth for at least 50,000 years.
But apparently it isn't settled. There are Americans who believe that the earth is only about 6,000 years old; that human beings and all other species were brought into existence by a divine Creator as eternally separate variations of beings; and that there has been no evolutionary process.
They are creationists—they call themselves "scientific" creationists—and they are a growing power in the land, demanding that schools be forced to teach their views. State legislatures, mindful of the votes, are beginning to succumb to the pressure. In perhaps 15 states, bills have been introduced, putting forth the creationist point of view, and in others, strong movements are gaining momentum. In Arkansas, a law requiring that the teaching of creationism receive equal time was passed this spring and is scheduled to go into effect in September 1982, though the American Civil Liberties Union has filed suit on behalf of a group of clergymen, teachers, and parents to overturn it. And a California father named Kelly Segraves, the director of the Creation-Science Research Center, sued to have public-school science classes taught that there are other theories of creation besides evolution, and that one of them was the Biblical version. The suit came to trial in March, and the judge ruled that educators must distribute a policy statement to schools and textbook publishers explaining that the theory of evolution should not be seen as "the ultimate cause of origins." Even in New York, the Board of Education has delayed since January in making a final decision, expected this month [June 1981], on whether schools will be required to include the teaching of creationism in their curriculums.
The Rev. Jerry Fallwell, the head of the Moral Majority, who supports the creationist view from his television pulpit, claims that he has 17 million to 25 million viewers (though Arbitron places the figure at a much more modest 1.6 million). But there are 66 electronic ministries which have a total audience of about 20 million. And in parts of the country where the Fundamentalists predominate—the so called Bible Belt— creationists are in the majority.
They make up a fervid and dedicated group, convinced beyond argument of both their rightness and their righteousness. Faced with an apathetic and falsely secure majority, smaller groups have used intense pressure and forceful campaigning—as the creationists do—and have succeeded in disrupting and taking over whole societies.
Yet, though creationists seem to accept the literal truth of the Biblical story of creation, this does not mean that all religious people are creationists. There are millions of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews who think of the Bible as a source of spiritual truth and accept much of it as symbolically rather than literally true. They do not consider the Bible to be a textbook of science, even in intent, and have no problem teaching evolution in their secular institutions.
To those who are trained in science, creationism seems like a bad dream, a sudden reveling of a nightmare, a renewed march of an army of the night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.
The scientific evidence for the age of the earth and for the evolutionary development of life seems overwhelming to scientists. How can anyone question it? What are the arguments the creationists use? What is the "science" that makes their views "scientific"? Here are some of them:
• The argument from analogy.
A watch implies a watchmaker, say the creationists. If you were to find a beautifully intricate watch in the desert, from habitation, you would be sure that it had been fashioned by human hands and somehow left it there. It would pass the bounds of credibility that it had simply formed, spontaneously, from the sands of the desert.
By analogy, then, if you consider humanity, life, Earth, and the universe, all infinitely more intricate than a watch, you can believe far less easily that it "just happened." It, too, like the watch, must have been fashioned, but by more-than-human hands—in short by a divine Creator.
This argument seems unanswerable, and it has been used (even though not often explicitly expressed) ever since the dawn of consciousness. To have explained to prescientific human beings that the wind and the rain and the sun follow the laws of nature and do so blindly and without a guiding would have been utterly unconvincing to them. In fact, it might have well gotten you stoned to death as a blasphemer.
There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
In short, the complexity of the universe—and one's inability to explain it in full—is not in itself an argument for a Creator.
• The argument from general consent.
Some creationists point at that belief in a Creator is general among all peoples and all cultures. Surly this unanimous craving hints at a greater truth. There would be no unanimous belief in a lie.
General belief, however, is not really surprising. Nearly every people on earth that considers the existence of the world assumes it to have been created by a god or gods. And each group invents full details for the story. No two creation tales are alike. The Greeks, the Norsemen, the Japanese, the Hindus, the American Indians, and so on and so on all have their own creation myths, and all of these are recognized by Americans of Judeo-Christian heritage as "just myths."
The ancient Hebrews also had a creation tale—two of them, in fact. There is a primitive Adam-and-Eve-in-Paradise story, with man created first, then animals, then women. There is also a poetic tale of God fashioning the universe in six days, with animals preceding man, and man and woman created together.
These Hebrew myths are not inherently more credible than any of the others, but they are our myths. General consent, of course, proves nothing: There can be a unanimous belief in something that isn't so. The universal opinion over thousands of years that the earth was flat never flattened its spherical shape by one inch.
• The argument of belittlement.
Creationists frequently stress the fact that evolution is "only a theory," giving the impression that a theory is an idle guess. A scientist, one gathers, arising one morning with nothing particular to do, decided that perhaps the moon is made of Roquefort cheese and instantly advances the Roquefort-cheese theory.
A theory (as the word is used by scientists) is a detailed description of some facet of the universe's workings that is based on long observation and, where possible, experiment. It is the result of careful reasoning from these observations and experiments that has survived the critical study of scientists generally.
For example, we have the description of the cellular nature of living organisms (the "cell theory"); of objects attracting each other according to fixed rule (the "theory of gravitation"); of energy behaving in discrete bits (the "quantum theory"); of light traveling through a vacuum at a fixed measurable velocity (the "theory of relativity"), and so on.
All are theories; all are firmly founded; all are accepted as valid descriptions of this or that aspect of the universe. They are neither guesses nor speculations. And no theory is better founded, more closely examined, more critically argued and more thoroughly accepted, than the theory of evolution. If it is "only" a theory, that is all it has to be.
Creationism, on the other hand, is not a theory. There is no evidence, in the scientific sense, that supports it. Creationism, or at least the particular variety accepted by many Americans, is an expression of early Middle Eastern legend. It is fairly described as "only a myth."
• The argument of imperfection.
Creationists, in recent years, have stressed the "scientific" background of their beliefs. They point out that there are scientists who base their creationists beliefs on a careful study of geology, paleontology, and biology and produce "textbooks" that embody those beliefs.
Virtually the whole scientific corpus of creationism, however, consists of the pointing out of imperfections in the evolutionary view. The creationists insists, for example, that evolutionists cannot true transition states between species in the fossil evidence; that age determinations through radioactive breakdown are uncertain; that alternative interpretations of this or that piece of evidence are possible and so on.
Because the evolutionary view is not perfect and is not agreed upon by all scientists, creationists argue that evolution is false and that scientists, in supporting evolution, are basing their views on blind faith and dogmatism.
To an extent, the creationists are right here: The details of evolution are not perfectly known. Scientists have been adjusting and modifying Charles Darwin's suggestions since he advanced his theory of the origin of species through natural selection back in 1859. After all, much has been learned about the fossil record and physiology, microbiology, biochemistry, ethology, and various other branches of life science in the last 125 years, and it was to be expected that we can improve on Darwin. In fact, we have improved on him. Nor is the process finished. it can never be, as long as human beings continue to question and to strive for better answers.
The details of evolutionary theory are in dispute precisely because scientists are not devotees of blind faith and dogmatism. They do not accept even as great thinker as Darwin without question, nor do they accept any idea, new or old, without thorough argument. Even after accepting an idea, they stand ready to overrule it, if appropriate new evidence arrives. If, however, we grant that a theory is imperfect and details remain in dispute, does that disprove the theory as a whole?
Consider. I drive a car, and you drive a car. I do not know exactly how an engine works. Perhaps you do not either. And it may be that our hazy and approximate ideas of the workings of an automobile are in conflict. Must we then conclude from this disagreement that an automobile does not run, or that it does not exist? Or, if our senses force us to conclude that an automobile does exist and run, does that mean it is pulled by an invisible horses, since our engine theory is imperfect?
However much scientists argue their differing beliefs in details of evolutionary theory, or in the interpretation of the necessarily imperfect fossil record, they firmly accept the evolutionary process itself.
• The argument from distorted science.
Creationists have learned enough scientific terminology to use it in their attempts to disprove evolution. They do this in numerous ways, but the most common example, at least in the mail I receive is the repeated assertion that the second law of thermodynamics demonstrates the evolutionary process to be impossible.
In kindergarten terms, the second law of thermodynamics says that all spontaneous change is in the direction of increasing disorder—that is, in a "downhill" direction. There can be no spontaneous buildup of the complex from the simple, therefore, because that would be moving "uphill." According to the creationists argument, since, by the evolutionary process, complex forms of life evolve from simple forms, that process defies the second law, so creationism must be true.
Such an argument implies that this clearly visible fallacy is somehow invisible to scientists, who must therefore be flying in the face of the second law through sheer perversity. Scientists, however, do know about the second law and they are not blind. It's just that an argument based on kindergarten terms is suitable only for kindergartens.
To lift the argument a notch above the kindergarten level, the second law of thermodynamics applies to a "closed system"—that is, to a system that does not gain energy from without, or lose energy to the outside. The only truly closed system we know of is the universe as a whole.
Within a closed system, there are subsystems that can gain complexity spontaneously, provided there is a greater loss of complexity in another interlocking subsystem. The overall change then is a complexity loss in a line with the dictates of the second law.
Evolution can proceed and build up the complex from the simple, thus moving uphill, without violating the second law, as long as another interlocking part of the system — the sun, which delivers energy to the earth continually — moves downhill (as it does) at a much faster rate than evolution moves uphill. If the sun were to cease shining, evolution would stop and so, eventually, would life.
Unfortunately, the second law is a subtle concept which most people are not accustomed to dealing with, and it is not easy to see the fallacy in the creationists distortion.
There are many other "scientific" arguments used by creationists, some taking quite cleaver advantage of present areas of dispute in evolutionary theory, but every one of then is as disingenuous as the second-law argument.
The "scientific" arguments are organized into special creationist textbooks, which have all the surface appearance of the real thing, and which school systems are being heavily pressured to accept. They are written by people who have not made any mark as scientists, and, while they discuss geology, paleontology and biology with correct scientific terminology, they are devoted almost entirely to raising doubts over the legitimacy of the evidence and reasoning underlying evolutionary thinking on the assumption that this leaves creationism as the only possible alternative.
Evidence actually in favor of creationism is not presented, of course, because none exist other than the word of the Bible, which it is current creationist strategy not to use.
• The argument from irrelevance.
Some creationists putt all matters of scientific evidence to one side and consider all such things irrelevant. The Creator, they say, brought life and the earth and the entire universe into being 6,000 years ago or so, complete with all the evidence for eons-long evolutionary development. The fossil record, the decaying radio activity, the receding galaxies were all created as they are, and the evidence they present is an illusion.
Of course, this argument is itself irrelevant, for it can be neither proved nor disproved. it is not an argument, actually, but a statement. I can say that the entire universe was created two minutes age, complete with all its history books describing a nonexistent past in detail, and with every living person equipped with a full memory; you, for instance, in the process of reading this article in midstream with a memory of what you had read in the beginning—which you had not really read.
What kind of Creator would produce a universe containing so intricate an illusion? It would mean that the Creator formed a universe that contained human beings whom He had endowed with the faculty of curiosity and the ability to reason. He supplied those human beings with an enormous amount of subtle and cleverly consistent evidence designed to mislead them and cause them to be convinced that the universe was created 20 billion years ago and developed by evolutionary processes that include the creation and the development of life on Earth. Why?
Does the Creator take pleasure in fooling us? Does it amuse Him to watch us go wrong? Is it part of a test to see if human beings will deny their senses and their reason in order to cling to myth? Can it be that the Creator is a cruel and malicious prankster, with a vicious and adolescent sense of humor?
• The argument from authority.
The Bible says that God created the world in six days, and the Bible is the inspired word of God. To the average creationist this is all that counts. All other arguments are merely a tedious way of countering the propaganda of all those wicked humanists, agnostics, an atheists who are not satisfied with the clear word of the Lord.
The creationist leaders do not actually use that argument because that would make their argument a religious one, and they would not be able to use it in fighting a secular school system. They have to borrow the clothing of science, no matter how badly it fits, and call themselves "scientific" creationists. They also speak only of the "Creator," and never mentioned that this Creator is the God of the Bible.
We cannot, however, take this sheep's clothing seriously. However much the creationist leaders might hammer away at in their "scientific" and "philosophical" points, they would be helpless and a laughing-stock if that were all they had.
It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for or even against evolution, march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.
Even if I am right and the evolutionists' case is very strong, have not creationists, whatever the emptiness of their case, a right to be heard? if their case is empty, isn't it perfectly safe to discuss it since the emptiness would then be apparent? Why, then are evolutionists so reluctant to have creationism taught in the public schools on an equal basis with evolutionary theory? can it be that the evolutionists are not as confident of their case as they pretend. Are they afraid to allow youngsters a clear choice?
First, the creationists are somewhat less than honest in their demand for equal time. It is not their views that are repressed: schools are by no means the only place in which the dispute between creationism and evolutionary theory is played out. There are churches, for instance, which are a much more serious influence on most Americans than the schools are. To be sure, many churches are quite liberal, have made their peace with science and find it easy to live with scientific advance — even with evolution. But many of the less modish and citified churches are bastions of creationism.
The influence of the church is naturally felt in the home, in the newspapers, and in all of surrounding society. It makes itself felt in the nation as a whole, even in religiously liberal areas, in thousands of subtle ways: in the nature of holiday observance, in expressions of patriotic fervor, even in total irrelevancies. In 1968, for example, a team of astronomers circling the moon were instructed to read the first few verses of Genesis as though NASA felt it had to placate the public lest they rage against the violation of the firmament. At the present time, even the current President of the United States has expressed his creationist sympathies.
It is only in school that American youngsters in general are ever likely to hear any reasoned exposition of the evolutionary viewpiont. They might find such a viewpoint in books, magazines, newspapers, or even, on occasion, on television. But church and family can easily censor printed matter or television. Only the school is beyond their control.
But only just barely beyond. Even though schools are now allowed to teach evolution, teachers are beginning to be apologetic about it, knowing full well their jobs are at the mercy of school boards upon which creationists are a stronger and stronger influence.
Then, too, in schools, students are not required to believe what they learn about evolution—merely to parrot it back on test. If they fail to do so, their punishment is nothing more than the loss of a few points on a test or two.
In the creationist churches, however, the congregation is required to believe. Impressionable youngsters, taught that they will go to hell if they listen to the evolutionary doctrine, are not likely to listen in comfort or to believe if they do. Therefore, creationists, who control the church and the society they live in and to face the public-school as the only place where evolution is even briefly mentioned in a possible favorable way, find they cannot stand even so minuscule a competition and demand "equal time."
Do you suppose their devotion to "fairness" is such that they will give equal time to evolution in their churches?
Second, the real danger is the manner in which creationists want threir "equal time." In the scientific world, there is free and open competition of ideas, and even a scientist whose suggestions are not accepted is nevertheless free to continue to argue his case. In this free and open competition of ideas, creationism has clearly lost. It has been losing, in fact, since the time of Copernicus four and a half centuries ago. But creationism, placing myth above reason, refused to accept the decision and are now calling on the government to force their views on the schools in lieu of the free expression of ideas. Teachers must be forced to present creationism as though it had equal intellectual respectability with evolutionary doctrine.
What a precedent this sets.
If the government can mobilize its policemen and its prisons to make certain that teachers give creationism equal time, they can next use force to make sure that teachers declare creationism the victor so that evolution will be evicted from the classroom altogether. We will have established ground work, in other words, for legally enforced ignorance and for totalitarian thought control. And what if the creationists win? They might, you know, for there are millions who, faced with a choice between science and their interpretation of the Bible, will choose the Bible and reject science, regardless of the evidence.
This is not entirely because of the traditional and unthinking reverence for the literal words of the Bible; there is also a pervasive uneasiness—even an actual fear—of science that will drive even those who care little for fundamentalism into the arms of the creationists. For one thing, science is uncertain. Theories are subject to revision; observations are open to a variety of interpretations, and scientists quarrel among themselves. This is disillusioning for those untrained in the scientific method, who thus turn to the rigid certainty of the Bible instead. There is something comfortable about a view that allows for no deviation and that spares you the painful necessity of having to think.
Second, science is complex and chilling. The mathematical language of science is understood by very few. The vistas it presents are scary—an enormous universe ruled by chance and impersonal rules, empty and uncaring, ungraspable and vertiginous. How comfortable to turn instead to a small world, only a few thousand years old, and under God's personal and immediate care; a world in which you are his particular concern and where He will not consign you to hell if you are careful to follow every word of the Bible as interpreted for you by your television preacher.
Third, science is dangerous. There is no question but that poison gas, genetic engineering, and nuclear weapons and power stations are terrifying. It may be that civilization is falling apart and the world we know is coming to an end. In that case, why not turn to religion and look forward to the Day of Judgment, in which you and your fellow believers will be lifted into eternal bliss and have the added joy of watching the scoffers and disbelievers writhe forever in torment.
So why might they not win?
There are numerous cases of societies in which the armies of the night have ridden triumphantly over minorities in order to establish a powerful orthodoxy which dictates official thought. Invariably, the triumphant ride is toward long-range disaster. Spain dominated Europe and the world in the 16th century, but in Spain orthodoxy came first, and all divergence of opinion was ruthlessly suppressed. The result was that Spain settled back into blankness and did not share in the scientific, technological and commercial ferment that bubbled up in other nations of Western Europe. Spain remained an intellectual backwater for centuries. In the late 17th century, France in the name of orthodoxy revoked the Edict of Nantes and drove out many thousands of Huguenots, who added their intellectual vigor to lands of refuge such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Prussia, while France was permanently weakened.
In more recent times, Germany hounded out the Jewish scientists of Europe. They arrived in the United States and contributed immeasurably to scientific advancement here, while Germany lost so heavily that there is no telling how long it will take it to regain its former scientific eminence. The Soviet Union, in its fascination with Lysenko, destroyed its geneticists, and set back its biological sciences for decades. China, during the Cultural Revolution, turned against Western science and is still laboring to overcome the devastation that resulted.
As we now, with all these examples before us, to ride backward into the past under the same tattered banner of orthodoxy? With creationism in the saddle, American science will wither. We will raise a generation of ignoramuses ill-equipped to run the industry of tomorrow, much less to generate the new advances of the days after tomorrow.
We will inevitably recede into the backwater of civilization, and those nations that retain opened scientific thought will take over the leadership of the world and the cutting edge of human advancement. I don't suppose that the creationists really plan the decline of the United States, but their loudly expressed patriotism is as simpleminded as their "science." If they succeed, they will, in their folly, achieve the opposite of what they say they wish.
( Isaac Asimov, "The 'Threat' of Creationism," New York Times Magazine, June 14, 1981; from Science and Creationism, Ashley Montagu, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 182-193. )
Well I suppose everyone's entitled to their opinion.
I don't think free will is exclusive to humans. What makes humans special is not free will, but the ability to "predict" the future, a faculty that is greatly enhanced by language.
I disagree, but certainly you are welcome to your views.
In my view, man alone is sentient, has free will and consciousness. The Bible, in Hebrew describes it this way:
And the LORD God formed man [of] the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath (neshamah) of life (chay); and man became a living (chay) soul (nephesh). – Genesis 2:7
Absolutely, as anyone with a dog or cat knows.
What makes humans special is ... the ability to "predict" the future
I'd put it differently - we're just a lot smarter. Even without language we'd be top of the heap.
a faculty that is greatly enhanced by language
Not so sure about that. I think language is more of an output. I'm sure most if not all of our thinking is unconscious.
However at a species level, and maybe this is what you meant, our much greater capacity for culture, in which language plays a central role, puts us far beyond our fellows.
Now you've got me going, bb... }};-` even though you're joking with me, I'll give you my explicative of what was deleted. But you know it was just one of my typos, of curse, I mean of course, eh? And jennyp was astute to find it and report the error. That was the last straw and time to ax those poorly written and 'proofed' posts. I'm going to hold on to that a little longer, until I can read through it without needing to edit -- I hope.
Now, since you were just playing along, I didn't need to write that... but I did.
My method of thinking about difficult problems like this is to assume that since the problem is still treated as unsolved, I have as good a shot at it as anybody. I read other people's ideas and then look for ways in which their ideas would make a difference in the way the world works. So far, in my humble opinion, no one has defined free will in a way that can be tested -- except to state obvious tautologies.
I have a very simple "turing test" for free will. First a candidate must demonstrate the ability to learn from experience -- that is, it must demonstrate an ability to recognise recurring situations and respond to anticipated consequenses. Second, the candidate must demonstrate a non-deterministic method of coping with dilemmas -- situations where there are multiple competing consequenses. Insects, reptiles and fish pretty much fail this test, and many mammals pass it.
It ain't a complete or pretty idea, but it has a rough correspondence to brain size and complexity, and it has the potential to be quantifiable and testable.
I'm glad to learn that you are the reason your post went away. My impression is AdminMod does not wander around willy-nilly, looking for posts to censor. I imagine it must be something like 99% of the time, posts are pulled because somebody complained.
If the complainant was you, I have no problem with that. I'm looking forward to your next post.
I tend to agree, but I don't want to assign percentages. There are lots of verbally challenged folks out there who make it through life OK.
Perhaps I should say that people have the ability to imagine doing things, physical as well as verbal, and to sequence these imagined behaviors, rehersing them and anticipating their consequences. I have seen cats and dogs do this, but they have a very limited ability to see beyond the immediate situation.
As you may have noticed, I seldom argue from authority and seldom post quotations.
No doubt you are comfortable asserting a position without authentication, but I am not – unless it is a matter of personal testimony. Also, the process has been useful to me, causing me to do a lot of research before formulating an opinion. I’m learning by leaps and bounds here.
I have a very simple "turing test" for free will. First a candidate must demonstrate the ability to learn from experience -- that is, it must demonstrate an ability to recognise recurring situations and respond to anticipated consequenses. Second, the candidate must demonstrate a non-deterministic method of coping with dilemmas -- situations where there are multiple competing consequenses. Insects, reptiles and fish pretty much fail this test, and many mammals pass it. It ain't a complete or pretty idea, but it has a rough correspondence to brain size and complexity, and it has the potential to be quantifiable and testable.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing your view on how it should be defined!
Since you mentioned Turing (and I’m a research hound) – I found this little tidbit on his attitude about free will:
Alan Turing Scrapbook - The Inspiration
The whole essay is given in my book. It suggested that the traditional picture of determinism in physical theory, and the apparent conflict with the sense of free will, had been overturned by the new quantum physics. He thought that quantum physics was directly involved in the brain, an idea suggested by Arthur S. Eddington in The Nature of the Physical World. …
Quantum mechanics was then really 'new physics', only formulated in 1926. But it is still in many ways a mystery. The question of whether it has something to do with the nature of Mind has come to the foreground of serious enquiry again.
Roger Penrose's most recent ideas are linked with the research of Stuart Hameroff on the possibility that the physiology of microtubules in the brain depends crucially on quantum-mechanical effects….
In 1932, it was reading von Neumann's new book on the Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics that first brought Alan Turing to the edge of new work in mathematics. Then in 1933 he read about mathematical logic in the work of Bertrand Russell. Bringing mathematical logic to bear on the problem of mind and matter turned out to be Alan Turing's crucial innovation. In 1935 he was elected to a Fellowship of the college, and in the same year had his greatest inspiration: the idea of the Turing Machine ....
IMHO, one of the very best launching points on the web is Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind, which has this great essay on theories of quantum consciousness. It sums up the Penrose/Hameroff view and offers these motivations for theories of quantum consciousness:
2. The unity of consciousness. It is claimed that consciousness has a unity, or wholeness to it, that cannot be explained by reducing consciousness to a scattered group of neurons. Rather, many think that quantum mechanical coherence (a phenomenon whereby many different objects can share a single wave function, and in some respects behave as a single particle) gives an explanation for this. Of course, it could be objected that this line of reasoning rests on a blatant content/vehicle confusion. From the fact that some of our introspections have a content with certain properties (we perceive our consciousness to be non-scattered, for example), it is concluded that the vehicle of this content must also have these properties (being non-scattered, for example). Of course this line of reasoning fails horribly. The bank's computer represents my checking account as a more or less unified entity, but the electromagnetic objects that constitute the vehicle of that representation are scattered widely, and could be scattered over a large geographic area -- perhaps even distributed with parts of record from other accounts --, depending on how their computer hardware is set up. One can write the word 'red' in blue ink. In general, there need be no match between the properties that characterize a content, and the properties of the vehicle that carry that content. Given this, there seems to be little motivation to try to explain the unity of consciousness via quantum mechanical coherence.
3. The mysteriousness of consciousness. Consciousness appears to be an extremely mysterious phenomenon. It is not clear how a collection of molecules whose chemical composition is not unlike that of a cheese omelet could be aware of anything, to feel pain, or see red, or dream about the future. Quantum mechanics also seems to be very mysterious -- particles going traversing two paths at the same time, for example. So perhaps they are the same mystery. Nobody phrases it that way, of course, but this seems to be a line of intuition that motivates many people. It is often argued that mere neurons could not be conscious or aware, and this seems to be because one can imagine all the working of of a neuron, or even a large group of neurons, without seeing how consciousness could be implicated. But because the mechanisms underlying quantum mechanical phenomena are less viaualizable, or comprehensible, or whatever, it seems not to be as clear that something as mysterious as consciousness couldn't work its way into the machine somehow. Clearly, this intuition survives only as long as the mechanisms of quantum mechanics are mysterious to the person making the argument.
In my view, free will encompasses the ability to hope, comprehend, plan, dream, love, hate, coordinate, control, organize, direct, communicate, sacrifice – to be sentient, self-aware. Without language, IMHO it would be difficult to know if a lower life form is capable of these things.
I'm pinging betty boop and Phaedrus because they might find this discussion interesting.
On another thread some time ago I related an anecdote about a Corgi dog we had. I don't know if you read it. She liked to torment our older, dumber dog. The Corgi and I sometimes played a game where I'd get between them and keep her away to "protect" the other. One time we were playing that in the kitchen. The kitchen connected to the dining room which connected to the living room which connected to the den which came back to the kitchen through another door. As we were playing, she suddenly stopped then turned and ran out through the door to the dining room. I could hear where she was running and realized right away that she was going to attack through the other door. Sure enough she did.
I found that quite an astonishing level of planning; I'd guess at the level of a five year old child or older. She did many other remarkably intelligent things. I wonder how certain people would account for them.
The debate about free will has a fundamental flaw, and that is that things are as they are regardless of which side "wins".
The central point of determinism is that things move because they are moved; everything has a prior cause.
Contrast this with a key observation of intelligent beings -- that they move or behave in anticipation of events. Combine this with the observed fact that the future is not predictable, and you have an operational definition of free will. The specific mechanism doesn't matter. The intelligent being could be embodied in a computer program, provided it is sufficiently complex.
There are a number of potential sources of sufficient complexity -- chaos, complexity, quantum indeterminancy. All of these are attempts to describe and quantify a key feature of our reality -- that the future is unpredictable in ways that really matter to our personal well being and survival.
But brains are engineered to make the best of this, for the species if not always for the individual. Brains attempt to predict the future, and in doing so, their behavior is determined by causes that cannot be determined -- a neat little paradox, but one that can be studied, described and quantified. In short, a phenomenon available to science, rather than a mystical, neverending subject of bull session.
Being blunt, does this mean that a person without language can be defined as not having any of these? Or that a computer program that writes love poems with a Mad-lib algorithm does?
I think we judge the sentience of a being by the complexity of its behavior, and I see nearly all of these things in cats and dogs.
Again, I'm going to assert that the key test of free will is how an individual copes with the future.
The physics profession will always bow to the evidence. They acknowledge and revere that things are as they are and they do the hard work of experimental verification. The profession has integrity.
Free Will is so self-evident to me that there is no argument as to actuality. Did you see me take a sip of my coffee? I willed it. End of discussion. But that Free Will is always, at the human level, constrained by the laws of physics and by our physicality. I can live with that.
Because we cannot satifactorily explain what something is or how it came to be does not detract from the fact that it is. I refer specifically to consciousness and Free Will. I respect the evidence.
I suggest that it is our immersion in Materialistic cause-and-effect cultural thinking for well over a century that explains why we don't understand. It is a mindset, a prejudice, that is a work. Our incapacity to understand state vector collapse says nothing about reality, which speaks for itself. Certain brave souls, Penrose and Walker among them, are working on it.
This is far too vague, js. How is it key? The future is amorphous, ambiguous, undefined and immensely complex in its possibilities. What test does it give us?
In philosophy, free will pretty much has to be taken as an axiom. It can't really be proven, but it's got to be assumed to exist. Without free will, we wouldn't be free to reject illogical conclusions. Would we be rejecting them only because we were predetermined to do so? If so, the whole enterprise of reason would be a futility, and without free will we would be so programmed that we wouldn't be able to know the difference. To cut through this unresolvable thicket, so that we can continue thinking with confidence that we are more than mere calculators reaching pre-determined results, it's essential to posit free will as an axiom. Thus, free will is a "genuine" axiom, embraced out of absolute necessity, and not for an isolated arbitrary purpose (such as "axiomatically" accepting the existence of the Olympian gods in order to practice the Hellenic religion).
This is far too vague, js. How is it key? The future is amorphous, ambiguous, undefined and immensely complex in its possibilities. What test does it give us?
I plead guilty to much of this, but only in degree, not in principle.
If you think for a moment about classical physics, the key concept was cause and effect, and cause always preceded effect. Living things turn this on its head. The behavior of living things is determined by the anticipated consequences. Reflexes and tropisms are generally analyzed as belonging to the classical view of cause and effect, but when you get to brains -- particularly brains with a significant sized temporal lobe -- you get more complex kinds of anticipation. This is the realm of psychology, admittedly a fuzzy science.
When you say "the future is amorphous, ambiguous, undefined and immensely complex" you are saying it is unpredictable in detail. But it is not entirely unpredictable. Every living thing must anticipate future events and consequences or die. Plants must anticapate seasonal changes, animals must find food and water. Animal species with simple, reflexive, brains place very little value on the individual life. As you work your way up the scale of brain size, there is more importance attached to the survival of the individual, and more means to enable this survival.
If you think about your personal life and what it means to have free will, I believe you will say you have the ability to make choices. But what does this mean? For me it means analyzing the current situation in terms of things that are possible to do and the anticipated consequences. There are lots of interesting things about this analysis, starting with the fact that there is no "list" of possible things to do. The list would have to be infinite and include things that have never been done before by myself or anyone else. Consider Star Trek's Captain Kirk's solution to the unsolvable training exercise -- cheat.
Secondly, the list of anticipated consequences is also infinite and unknowable. When you feel yourself engaging in free will you are feeling yourself solving an unsolvable problem, predicting the future.
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