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. )
How can logic admit the acceptance of illogical conclusions? To my admittedly inadequate mind, logic appears to be a closed and unfree system. The problem with logic is that it operates on tokens, which are only approximations of reality. Reality is complex, chaotic, indeterminant (turtles all the way down).
Very little of our minute to minute behavior is governed by logic (in the formal sense). So what are we doing, if it isn't logic? Answer that and you would be on your way towards artificial intelligence.
Now here's the fun part: After finding something that feels harmonious, logic come in to judge and edit the "solution". In particularly difficult situations, where every solution has strong negatives, logic has a clarifying power that can override "if it feels good, do it".
Me: 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.
You: Being blunt, does this mean that a person without language can be defined as not having any of these?
Of course not, my point was that “without language, it would be difficult to know.”
You: Or that a computer program that writes love poems with a Mad-lib algorithm does?
IMHO, all that shows is that that the designer of the program had free will. The program is only carrying out the instructions originally provided to it.
You: 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.
As you wish, js1138. I choose not to use your criteria because I believe the bar should be higher.
You: 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.
Strong determinism says that language determines thought and therefore they are the same. Weak determinism says that thought is only influenced by language.
In another view, strong determinism says that all things are predetermined, i.e. nobody can be “guilty” because it is in their genes to do whatever they did. Strong determinism is completely opposite of free will, since the future is already known.
Therefore, the big question IMHO is whether physical laws are evidence of strong determinism. Indeed, can you have both strong determinism and non-computability? The uncertainty principle would indicate that you can. Free will demands it.
So to have free will, there must be non-computable physical laws - which once again brings us back to Godel's incompleteness theorem and Roger Penrose and the debunking of artificial intelligence being able to compute the mind. Strong AI proponents are very much against the conclusions drawn by Penrose. I do not find that surprising, since he is saying they can never achieve their life goal.
IMHO, Penrose argues for free will, i.e. that an essentially non-algorithmic element is necessary so the future would not be computable from the present even though it might be determined by it.
You mention that it is an “observed fact” that the future is not predictable. What is your evidence?
One of the interesting points of Abraham’s model of slope time is that our mind sees time as an instant drop off from uncertainty (future) to certainty (past) whereas the evidence is that the drop off is not sudden but sloped, i.e. more like a wave in the ocean or a steam roller down a highway – the actual process of going from future to past occurs over time.
The point of all this conjecture is that we must not exclude that which we cannot instinctively observe. For instance, most people see the world in 3 dimensions – unaware of the motion and ramification of space/time. Likewise, from Abraham's model, there can be certainity of future and uncertainty of past within the slope.
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.
Absolutely! It is the materialist prejudice that creates the quandary, i.e. materialism tends to strong determinism and strong AI and is therefore the polar opposite free will and theology. Free will is self-evident as you say.
The work of Penrose, Walker et al clarifies the inability of physics and biophysics to explain consciousness!
That is very, very interesting and thought provoking! I have always looked at the implications of resonance on cosmology, biology, etc. - but had not considered it as a factor of the mind. Very interesting indeed. I'm off to contemplate the idea. Thank you!
There is no evidence that the future can be predicted, although people try all the time, and there are plenty of mathematical models indicating it is a hopeless goal, even without quantum uncertainty. Consider the classical three-body problem in astronomy.
One of the interesting points of Abraham’s model of slope time is that our mind sees time as an instant drop off from uncertainty (future) to certainty (past) whereas the evidence is that the drop off is not sudden but sloped, i.e. more like a wave in the ocean or a steam roller down a highway – the actual process of going from future to past occurs over time.
This sounds good to me and corresponds to my subjective sense of the future. My mind certainly doesn't see any instant drop off. In fact that is the point I have been trying to make. We do anticipate the future. The extent to which any entity anticipates the future is the extent to which it has free will.
I do not agree with the bleak prospects for artificial intelligence, although I am pessimistic about it being achieved within the next thirty years. Perhaps some of the double-secret skunkworks projects alluded to on these threads hold the key, but I don't know any details and can't judge.
I think I speculated on the gargantuan thread that the universe as a whole participates in free will -- just another way of saying that there really are new things under the sun, things made possible by the rules of existence, but not required. As entities within the universe, we also participate in free will. Our thoughts and behaviors are made possible by the rules but not required. From a purely theoretical point of view, this can happen because we are engineered to anticipate the future (an impossibly complex task). I don't expect to ever see this mystery completely solved.
LOLOL! Thank you for the chuckle!
On the part about the predicting of the future, I was looking for a statement of degrees. We all predict the sun will come up tomorrow, some predict the weather, some predict the presence of a Higgs boson and then test for it – etc.
I am curious about how one defines the elements of uncertainty and chance. Randomness is either elusive or illusive – I’m not sure.
My mind certainly doesn't see any instant drop off. In fact that is the point I have been trying to make. We do anticipate the future.
I agree! And I do understand your use of the mechanism to define free will, it’s just that I’m looking for something more but using the same phrase to describe it. It is not a problem as long as we understand each other.
Perhaps some of the double-secret skunkworks projects alluded to on these threads hold the key, but I don't know any details and can't judge.
The secret projects on strong AI may give a fair simulation of consciousness, but I do not believe it can ever achieve free will under my definition. Yours, yes.
I think I speculated on the gargantuan thread that the universe as a whole participates in free will -- just another way of saying that there really are new things under the sun, things made possible by the rules of existence, but not required. As entities within the universe, we also participate in free will. Our thoughts and behaviors are made possible by the rules but not required. From a purely theoretical point of view, this can happen because we are engineered to anticipate the future (an impossibly complex task). I don't expect to ever see this mystery completely solved.
Thank you so much for sharing your view on this. Actually, your thinking is but a heart beat away from the view of a universal consciousness, Buddhism, etc.
The upshot, I would suggest, is that we consider ourselves rational beings. That's because we forget that Great Library in the Sky, wherein is catalogued all those things a guy does to win and keep a woman. I introduce this hypothetical guy, this rational being, to that library, occupying a full city block, comparable to Powell's Book Store in Portland, OR, and wait patiently on the curb, smoking my cigarette, while he has a quick look. Meanwhile he is all the while wondering "How can a library be 10 stories tall?". When he comes out wide-eyed I say "Now, tell me about the Universe, Mr. Rational."
Living things turn this on its head.
Yes, they do.
But [the future] is not entirely unpredictable ... 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.
I'm suggesting that more than rational analysis goes into the process. Many "life decisions" (if you will) are based upon anything but perfect information. I have discovered, though, that there is a still, small voice within that sometimes says to me "It would probably be better if you did not do this." When I was younger, sometimes I would and sometimes I wouldn't. If I ignored this small voice (a "gut feeling" really), I would often or always regret having taken the warned against action. I don't understand it, to say the least, but I'm clear that it has nothing to do with rationality.
... [T]he 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.
It's possible that you may instead be creating the future.
Of course you are, but you don't have anything approaching perfect knowledge of what you are creating. It is the attempt to know that constitutes free will.
As per other posts, some of them mine, I agree that rationality is at best, and editing function rather than a generative function of the mind. I like the resonance metaphore. I wish I knew how to express it better, but it seems to me that the unconscious processes that roil around while we consider a difficult problem are seeking a stable point of resonance. Sometimes talking about a problem, if only to ourselves, allows something to gel. Other times, sleeping on a problem helps. Only occasionally are deep problems solved by writing down all the possibilities and subjecting them to a logical analysis. (Oddly enough, that's the process that Darwin used in deciding to get married. People are full of contradictions.)
Several posters have admitted believing that much of our mental activity is unconscious. Doesn't that pose problems with a traditional view of free will? If you are not aware of a significant mental process, how can it be free? Any takers?
Sure. But my focus is (and will be for some time, I fear) that consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon in its own right, independent of anything material. That aside, "unconsciousness" is a mental or verbal construct and very imprecise. There are multitudiouns degrees and modes of awareness. We dream. Those dreams often color our daily consciouness. Sometimes we remember those dreams and sometimes they convey messages to us. At that point, has the unconsciousness become consciousness? I suggest that it has. There is no clear demarcation.
I would not know how to address whether or not this process is "free". It seems quite chaotic to me and yet it does have influence. There is such a thing as legitimate numinous experience. And sometimes we "just know", and to a certainty, with no idea as to the origin of that knowledge.
So far as I'm concerned, you're both pretty much "nailing it". "Resonance", I feel, is very much on target but the Materialists won't like it.
Since js1138 brought up resonance and thought, I've been off reading things right and left. There is a surprising amount of information on the subject, but it has been challenging to weed out the metaphysical.
js1138, I know you don't like references, but I have found a number of articles where are rather interesting and supportive of your views.
A Harmonic Resonance theory is presented as an alternative to the conventional paradigm of neurocomputation known as the Neuron Doctrine, whereby the neuron is conceived as a kind of feature detector whose response is determined by its synaptic input through a spatial receptive field, and visual processing is described as a feed-forward progression through hierarchical layers of visual representation. This concept is shown to be inadequate to account for the holistic global aspects of perception identified by Gestalt theory, including such properties as emergence, reification, and invariance in recognition. Harmonic resonance is shown to exhibit these same properties not as specialized circuits to account for those properties individually, but as natural properties of the resonance itself. I propose therefore that harmonic resonance is the long-sought and elusive computational mechanism behind Gestalt theory.
And from the Buddhist corner: Consciousness Resonance
The evidence that human consciousness and intention can affect physical systems in a subtle way is persuasive, though still not convincing to everyone who looks into the matter. For many scientists it is good enough to warrant thoughts about "how it works" and efforts to connect the research findings to standard scientific models, especially in physics. Some of the connections are formal, and others metaphoric, but all seek to improve our ability to explain and predict.
I'm not very nice.
Based upon your authoriy, I presume. In any event, not according to Walker, a physicist of some accomplishment.
No, any decent book on solid state physics will do. If you do a search on the web using the string 'coherence lifetime temperature', you'll get a bunch of references. You'll probably need a course in q.m. and maybe thermodynamics to make sense of it, but I can't help that.
In any event, not according to Walker, a physicist of some accomplishment.
It's a pop physics book. It wasn't, as far as I can tell, reviewed much in the serious scientific press. But I did find one review by a real physicist.
http://www.poco.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mjd1014/ehw.pdf
Excerpt:
Walker attempts to tie together quantum theory and neuroscience by arguing that quantum tunnelling has a vital role in synaptic transmission. This depends upon very specific and technical assumptions about the mechanism involved, for which he refers to Walker (1977). In that paper, he claims that his theory 'predicts specific results for future experimental work. Its utility will be measured by the validity of these predictions.' It is disturbing, therefore, that his book gives no more recent references to work in this area, despite the fact that synaptic structure and function are among the most studied topics in neuroscience. A magnificent survey of the entire field which has just appeared (Cowan, S¨udhof, and Stevens 2001), certainly leaves no space for his hypotheses.
Quintessential fringe science, in other words. Some very fine minds have gone off on similar tangents. London thought DNA replication could be explained by superconductivity. Linus Pauling (perhaps the greatest chemist of the 20th century) spent years promoting ideas on Vitamin C that were nonsense.
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