In my continuing pursuit of humility as an antidote to modernity’s human supremacy illness, the atoms that constitute who I am take issue with lofty and self-aggrandizing concepts of idealism, dualism, and free will—replaced by the unflattering material world and its staggering wealth of emergent complexity. I have argued that opposite of lacking imagination and being reductionist, such a view far exceeds our imaginative capacity and is in fact rather expansive and open-ended next to facile short-cut cop-outs that sweep mind-boggling complexity under the rug by pretending that constructs like mind, consciousness, soul, God, or Santa Claus are real.
One stubborn sticking point is the beguiling illusion that “we” are separate from “our” corporeal bodies, owning and controlling them, somehow. This notion is prevalent, despite zero evidence that we are anything but corporeal, and heaps of evidence to the contrary. A less supremacist variant allows that all life, down to microbes, are endowed with this material override to exert control and autonomy over their environments, but still demand a line of separation between life and inanimate collections of matter. An amoeba suddenly changing course in reaction to its environment is, in this view, ontologically different than a hurricane changing course in reaction to its environment.
Granted, life is amazing and exhibits unambiguous behavioral differences compared to, say, rocks (hint: check the complexity of internal structure). A materialist, mechanistic basis does not in any way diminish life, although that’s often the regrettable reaction from someone who takes it on faith that transcendent mystery accounts for life’s splendor—rather than intuition-busting eons of emergent material fabulousness. Well, it turns out that life is incredible no matter what inconsequential thoughts we form about it. In any case, the point that I will develop in this post is that “decisions” are carried out at every level from electrons to ants, but are at no point fundamentally operating on a different basis.
Depending on how one defines “decisions,” either electrons and bats carry them out by the same rules, or neither can be said to be making “free” decisions. Whatever the case, electrons and bats are on similar footing when it comes to “decisions,” albeit at vastly different scales of complexity. Given enough information and background, the decisions by either are not surprising, even if not precisely predictable. Now, I do identify a difference between living decisions and inanimate decisions, importantly, but it’s a subtle one that I’ll wind my way toward.
Stimulus–Response
So, how do decisions differ (or not, fundamentally) between life forms and inanimate objects? Lots of non-living entities appear to make choices. How many times have you heard a non-living entity described as “having a mind of its own” in reaction to execution of inscrutable behaviors? Whether discussing individual electrons, amoebas, or newts, we might characterize the decision process as being centered on stimulus–response, to varying degrees of complexity.
As my suspicions are aroused by any claim of an ontological gap counterfactually separating life from a material world, I am drawn to explore the putative difference between “decisions” made by electrons, rocks, spores, seeds, storms, microbes, plants, ants, and humans. My premise is that they are arranged on a continuum of complexity, but nowhere break away to operate outside of the laws of physics, staged on a material plane, following the unscripted script the universe writes in real time.
Inanimate Decisions
In pondering inanimate decisions, some physical systems really do seem to be making informed decisions. You’ve probably seen or played with a Newton’s Cradle, even if not knowing it by that name. Gracing many an office desk, these steel balls arranged in contact along a horizontal line are each suspended by a pair of strings or wires in a V-configuration. Pull one ball back and release, to find that when it hits the queue with a clack a single ball emerges from the other side. Start with two balls and two pop out the far end. Even if the chain is only five balls long, drop three and three come out—the middle ball somehow knowing it has permission to continue on. How does the device know the number of balls you released? Yet it does every time. It’s a simple matter of simultaneous adherence to conservation of energy AND conservation of momentum. The balls have no other choice. I’m convinced, though, that a large part of its lasting popularity is the appearance of “magical” decision-making. Here, “magical” means without a brain, which we dumbly and self-centeredly assume is necessary for making decisions.
This relates, by the way, to my experience teaching physics classes and often bringing in classroom demonstrations. Students are consistently most engaged when the demonstration exhibits unexpected behavior. The closer it is to “magic,” the more fascinated students become. After all, we’re well habituated to “ordinary” physics all around us, to the point that it becomes mundane.
As another example, if you’ve ever held a corner cube prism, or retroreflector, it has this eerie habit of always showing your eyeball in the center, no matter the orientation (within limits). Because I shot lasers to these devices positioned on the moon, I generally had one at-hand in my office. What always seemed like magic to students was asking them to close one eye, then switch which eye is open. The corner cube prism “knows” immediately which eye you are using. It’s a simple passive bit of optical geometry, but it really feels like it’s tracking your actions.
Anyone who bikes on urban streets has no doubt run across collections of detritus (broken bits of tail light covers along with other trash and collision remnants) in places where car tires don’t tend to go—like the exact center of an intersection. But bikes, exercising their habit of avoiding cars, often end up going where cars do not, encountering these pockets of debris. How do all these bits know where to congregate? It’s the same as dust bunnies or pet toys all finding refuge under furniture. For that matter, it’s the same as water vapor in the room’s air finding your iced-drink glass and collecting on the outside. Wherever it’s “cold” (meaning reduced jostling), things will be jostled into such places and once there are not jostled out again. The general term is condensation. Related phenomena can account for concentrations of ores, fossil fuels, etc.
At its most basic level, one might ask how an electron decides where to go next. Well, it of course depends on the positions, velocities, and spin orientations of all the other particles (in the universe). Even though it executes a decisive path, it fundamentally has no other choice.
Now imagine, if you can (and no one really can), the same sort of mandates applied to complex systems all the way up to thoughts. Some folks seem to believe that thoughts and ideas are not material in nature, but holy cow: just try to have a thought without complete material dependence! Yes: even thoughts are made of atoms and their arrangements/interactions. We are nothing and can do nothing without them. Not a shred of evidence advocates otherwise: only affinities and untethered fabrications.
Border Cases
Before we get to living decisions, it’s worth a brief stop at seeds and spores. These can’t be called inanimate, per se, as they are stages of life (intricately structured material containing DNA and everything!) that might remain completely inert for tens of thousands of years in the case of seeds, and hundreds of millions of years for spores! Metabolism is completely stopped. No processes are transpiring inside. It’s just waiting—dormant. It may ultimately “decide” to spring into action, but that decision is not taking place in the interior: the organism is really just “off,” and operationally indistinguishable from “dead.”
When the outer surface senses appropriate conditions (moisture, nutrients), it may re-animate. But what is the nature of this decision if the structure is completely static and inert? What aspect of life is making this decision? What is the stimulus–response pair?
Imagine a mechanical (molecular) receptor shaped just so that when a correctly-shaped molecule (e.g., a nutrient) comes into contact, it fits perfectly, tripping the receptor molecule, which opens a channel through the protective shell to re-open the cell for business. The decision is purely mechanical, like a key unlocking a coiled spring waiting to be triggered. I would go further to say that every decision is fundamentally mechanical, but this one is a simplified version, removing the many layers of complications found in a fully-living, metabolizing entity. Through seeds and spores, we can see that life’s most important decisions can be carried out by mechanistic material interactions.
Life’s Difference
The key, I believe, to what makes an ant’s decisions different from a rock’s or an electron’s is: feedback: a closed-loop. An ant’s decisions bear on its ability to stay alive, facilitate reproduction, and remain an ant. An ant incapable of making life-sustaining decisions can’t be an ant. Conversely, a hurricane may decide to veer, but this decision is not part of a closed-loop that determines whether the hurricane can pass on its genetic code and propagate hurricanes into the future. The very setup of life, in an evolutionary, ecological context forces the kinds of “decisions” that enable the whole process to persist.
Life exists in a context of self-replication, evolution, relationships to other beings, and as such has developed a set of mandated behaviors we call decisions that are part and parcel of this capability. More exactly, organisms develop mechanisms to express observed behaviors that necessarily support continued existence. For life to work, it must develop the ability to react to the environment, and those reactions are shaped and refined for their selective benefit. If life failed to make “correct” decisions (complex responses to complex stimuli), it would perish and no longer be life. Life has no choice but to make the choices it appears to make.
Circular Reasoning?
One might object to the apparent circular reasoning exhibited above, which merits an aside. Circular reasoning, or tautologies, acquire a bad reputation in learned discourse. I hold that this disparagement is more a flaw in the conventions of learned discourse than anything intrinsically discreditable. Another term for circular reasoning is: self-consistent. And what could be so bad about that?
The truism that “it is what it is” stands as a decent representative of unassailable circular logic. The universe contains something rather than nothing because it does…and without pausing to ask our permission.
At its core, I believe the “circular objection” to be yet another expression of human supremacy. Just as our culture discounts the problem-solving acumen of early microbial life because they cheated and didn’t solve the toughest problems in the world with brains, we eschew circular reasoning because it highlights a sort of truth that is not of cerebral origin. We can’t take credit for it. Therefore it doesn’t count!
Never mind the fact that amoebas and their genius kin have solved problems that baffle our best brains to this day, to the point that we are utterly incapable of conjuring even the simplest of its tricks using our neurons (without simply parroting our smarter microbe teachers).
The same kind of protest arises in adjacent realms, such as the common reaction to determinism: “If I can’t drive the train, then what’s the point: I refuse to ride along.” Similarly, it comes up in discussions of free will: “I can make free choices [free of what: physics?] because I am a separate entity in control.” Discussions of mind or consciousness produce a related reaction: “Mind, consciousness—essentially soul, really—exist independent of (or at least alongside) the material plane” in a scary sort of dualism. And in this case: “Circular reasoning doesn’t count as proper thinking because it removes the motivating agent (human mind) from the argument.”
Gee. That sounds like the actual universe as it exists: going about its amazing business well before the recent addition of cerebral life. I’m more than okay with that.
Inanimate Tautologies
Circling back to where we were before our digression, I proposed that life must make the sorts of decisions that are necessary to maintain life—in a tidy tautology.
In order to better explore the essential nugget, here, I was compelled to go beyond Newton’s Cradle, congregating dust bunnies, veering hurricanes, and the like to seek more self-referential decisions among the inanimate. In other words, if an entity failed to make a certain decision, it would no longer exist as that entity. Here are a few initial stabs. Perhaps in the comments, folks can expand the list (and do better than I have).
A river “decides” to flow downhill (gravity and topography play key roles), but if—for whatever reason—it was prevented from doing so, then it would no longer be a river, would it? Maybe a lake. If a sudden logjam blocks a river from its normal course, it might decide to erode a bank, topple some trees, and form a new channel. That’s just a river deciding to remain a river!
A stalactite chooses to remain bonded to the cave ceiling—a decision we can more easily trace to mechanical conditions and material properties than we are able to do for decisions involving more complex processes. If, for whatever reason, it failed to adhere to that decision, it would no longer be a stalactite.
A long, thin spit of sand seems impossibly fragile, yet its presence alters the actions of currents and waves in such a way as to maintain and even extend itself. Its continuance depends on its agency in altering the decisions of sand, water, and wind to operate in its favor.
Likewise, snowflakes grow into snowflakes because they have the structures of snowflakes. That is, the presence of ice forms structured nucleation sites for other vapor to join the ice in orientations that self-referentially reinforce initial orientations to make elegant designs. Water molecules decide to attach in ways that preserve and innovate these unique structures. Yes, physics absolutely guides the decisions, as in all cases.
At the grandest scale, our universe is quite plausibly one of a multitude, each “choosing” different parameters governing its physics (a la Landscape ideas). Only those landing on conditions conducive to making stars, planets, chemical diversity, and billions of years of stability are likely to be inhabited by the likes of us. It’s a (natural) selection effect wherein the initial choice determines whether some internal component may one day call the thing a Universe—not that such a moment amounts to a hill of beans as far as the universe is concerned.
Although not an inanimate case, an example from one of my favorite movies, Galaxy Quest, helps illustrate. The Commander was asked about a decision to save his crew instead of prioritizing his own survival. His answer: the Commander can’t be a Commander without a crew, so the decision is built-in as a self-referential, self-fulfilling, tautological certainty.
Back to Life
It’s possible that these examples seem trivial, circular, pointless, or lacking a “there” there. But I contend that an essential truth is contained in the self-consistency of each.
If life had not availed itself of mechanisms to assist in the securing of essential nutrients and resources to facilitate its self-replication, then it wouldn’t be life. The mechanisms may be too complex for us to grasp using puny meat-brains—being based on neurological mechanisms selected for different purposes. But the seed or spore provide a window into a stripped-down form of decision-making that more evidently comes down to a mechanical process—rather than some ethereal higher-plane assessment—since the interior is completely inactive and non-participatory.
Life makes decisions because decisions make life. Rivers flow because failing to do so would terminate their status as rivers. Every action in the universe, down to the motion of en electron can be cast as a decision, always based on simultaneous assessment of many factors/stimuli, and always obeying the laws of physics. Nothing has any freedom to do otherwise. Just because our brains are incapable of tracking the complexity of the mechanisms that lead to decisions at the level of life does not invalidate the basis. How grandiose to imagine that we have a say in the matter!
For me, this perspective only serves to enhance appreciation for life. It serves humility. It places me deep within the tangle of the material universe in all its diversity. It connects me intimately to every living and non-living entity—which is the way of things whether I’m ready to acknowledge it or not.
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I realized, with some degree of horror and self-loathing, that I should add a Category for posts like this on metaphysics, ontology, (are you going to make me say it?): philosophy. Blech. But I can't deny my turn in that direction, while somehow maintaining a dislike for the subject.
It called to mind a student evaluation I received years ago that caught me off guard. The class was a Freshman Seminar called Thinking Like a Physicist (most students were not physics majors, coming from all areas), where each session students would submit written questions they were genuinely curious about. I'd read them all and tackle the richest, most fascinating ones—usually ones I'd never thought about and wanted to explore. Anyway, I occasionally disparaged philosophy (preferring to let the universe tell us how it works). One student surprised me with this:
"Although he states that physicists generally have a low opinion of the field of philosophy, Professor Murphy can offer true intellectual opinion, based in science, that can almost become philosophical. A great thinker and questioner, he inspires the same questioning in his students and encourages every and any question within the realm of physics."
Guess this one would not be surprised by my recent turn…
I've always tried to be a simple person. A decade ago, I went looking for opinions I agreed with and I came across your blog. Since then I walk the line between the reality that you have revealed to me, and day to day life.
Out of all the posts of yours that I have read this one is probably my favorite and I'm going to check out that movie. Thank you for all you do here,
a Canadian in Maine,
Peter Gilbert
Check out Alex Rosenberg’s book “An Atheist’s Guide to Reality”. Covers this concept in detail.
@ tmurphy
I'm not sure if I fully understand your points but I do worry about the idea that we meatbrains are acting due to the laws of physics alone.
We do make choices. Choices that aren't optimal to our survival, reproduction or spread of DNA.
We hunt animals for fun. Not for food necessarily but just for the sheer rush of it. Expending lots of energy in the process.
Also I'm not sure that lets say " I beat my wife because of the predetermined laws of physics" is a valid excuse for poor behaviour.
We humans are something different. I wouldn't call that difference "exceptional" but it is different.
Since we discovered lithics and fire, we have removed ourselves from some of the "forces of nature" that other living things are bound by.
Are we alone, the only species to have ever hunted another to extinction? Usually, in the prey/predator relationship, things always balance out.
We can also choose to change our diet if we do eat all our primary prey.
A lion can't go vegetarian if it has eaten all the antelope.
Tofu is a choice not a necessity.
This trips many of the wires I hoped to deactivate, continuing to put humans magically outside of physics. Is hunting animals for fun (i.e., dopamine, endorphin, and similar biochemical reward) somehow escaping the physics of neurons and the like? Physics does not for one second disallow activities that are sub-optimal or even counter to survival. Evolution eventually takes care of any systematic imbalance in that regard.
If I murdered someone and said, true to form, that "my atoms made me do it," I should not be in the least surprised to hear the judge and jury say that their atoms demanded a death penalty for me. That's fair. A social species is bound to establish norms and punishments for transgressions. It's part of group survival strategy.
As for fire, etc., just as monkeys discovered they could use sticks to get termites (without violating physics), we found that we could exploit the physics of fire. It's par for the course for life to stumble on and exploit advantageous tricks of physics. Yes, fire, science, fossil fuels have given humans exceptional leverage (impossible to argue humans aren't exceptional, just as bees are; my beef is with attitudes of superiority), whose imbalance might indeed be ruled as "too far" by evolution in the long term, as only practices that fit within a community of life without destroying its foundation are tolerated.
The point is not that humans don't or can't make choices: just that those choices are contextual, constrained, and 100% generated by physics.
Thanks Tom.
Regarding materialism, I think that in some respects it’s one of those things that you can’t argue against (or is at least very difficult to argue against) because the definition of “matter” keeps getting updated as more info come in. Physicist would argue that they “letting the universe tell them” what matter is in a purely objective fashion, and that physics/materialistic science is the route that will get humans to the closest understanding of the universe that we humans can hope for. Perhaps this is true. But – and I could be completely wrong here – isn’t the answer by this point that we have absolutely no idea what matter actually is? Isn’t it the case that we have, at best, some understanding about the rules matter appears to follow under certain circumstances? (which, sadly, has helped humans to destroy the joint with remarkable efficiency…).
In a piece on John Wheeler, the science writer John Horgan said something that encapsulates my sense of bewilderment about it all: “When you peer down into the deepest recesses of matter or at the farthest edge of the universe, you see, finally, your own puzzled face looking back at you”.
Or as Wheeler himself put it, “At the heart of everything is a question, not an answer”.
As you say in a later comment, it's a hard leap to make. But one way of looking at it is to understand that all life today evolved from the earliest simple life forms, billions of years ago. Did they have free-will? If not, when and how did free-will evolve? For it to evolve, it must have a physical basis. What is it? These sorts of questions seem impossible to answer unless one jettisons the notion that any life form has free-will.
Humans have developed language and so have a monopoly on defining word and ideas. What humans think of as "life" may be an artificial distinction. It's just an interaction of atoms but we've made particular interactions special, when they are really just physics.
I don't know why we would expect (demand?) to know what matter *really* is, given our crude processing instrument (a.k.a., meat-brain). What would it even mean to know the answer? Know in what way? What is the "really" part? Why be greedy? What we *can* do is elucidate the cast of characters, and describe how they (without exception) interact. That's enough to open an enormous landscape of material relationships and emergent complexity—all the way to life and the adaptive/sensible sensation of self. No call to conjure fanciful notions to assuage our inadequacy.
Matter is as matter does, in another satisfying (to me) tautology.
Thanks Tom. All good points you make.
Still, I just can't seem to make that final leap of accepting that consciousness (or the sensation of experiencing at least) emerges from matter, unless matter is something more than just what physics reveals. I guess my simple/deluded/confused/stupid thinking remains stuck at the point that, while I may not able to EXPLAIN consciousness, I at least KNOW what it is because I have it. But matter… well, I feel like we have a firm grip on aspects of it (via physics), but we don't know what it is, i.e., what its intrinsic nature is. I guess all/many physicists would say that matter doesn't have an intrinsic nature (it's nothing more than the properties which can be measured by physics), or that it's something we are never going to be able to know/access, so why be greedy, as you say. But just because I am restricted from the possibility of ever knowing something, does this mean I should just accept that there is no possibility for it's existence, and that it might not be crucial to the universe? Does absolutely everything have to be physically measurable? I am not proposing a free-for-all in terms of "explaining" the universe and everything within it, but I prefer to state my position as "ignorant", rather than claiming any firm knowledge of anything. I still allow myself to ponder though…
The trouble I have with completely taking materialism to heart is that it asks me to accept that there is an explanation for something that I know (consciousness) in terms of something that we can explain (in terms of its physical properties) but which we don't actually know IS (matter). It all still seems deeply mysterious to me.
I agree that consciousness can be physical, but perhaps open to the idea that there may be more to the physical than what physics can reveal, i.e. that matter has an intrinsic nature, whatever that may be. Again, I may be completely deluded… and maybe at the heart of my confusion is that human supremacism again… I am a work in progress.
I agree, I don’t think we have free will. We have some capability to make choices but our internal programming will produce a statistical outcome based on all of the inputs. I wonder if our beliefs about free will and about supernatural agents resulted in improved ability to act in groups reinforcing those beliefs in succeeding generations and laying the foundation for modernity.
Back in the 1970s I bought and started reading The Whole Earth Catalog. There was an entry in it for the “MegaMachine”, basically the idea that organized humans are a form of a machine and a very powerful one at that.
"some capability to make choices" – that *is* free will / agency / volition. The term 'free will' has fallen out of fashion somewhat, though, so maybe people should stop using it.
The foundation of modernity has nothing to with belief in supernatural agents (and why would such a belief result in an improved ability to act in groups??).
Its foundations are more likely to be found in the 'Enlightenment' plus (later) fossil fuels, via massively increased leverage of scientific knowledge leading to Nature-destroying industrial processes and machines of all kinds.
Thanks for this thoughtful piece and your subsequent comments, which I find entirely consoling.
I only recently stumbled across your site as I returned to research a recurring puzzle in my life: why are the “Limits to Growth”, and the finite nature of the planet not taken seriously by any but a few? While I can understand the motives of politicians and religious leaders, I am baffled at how anyone trained in science can deny the problem. Your site “does the math,” which, let’s face it, is not all that hard, in a beautifully presented style. It should be included in all high school science courses to illustrate the use of measurements (data) and the power of math and physics to understand boundary conditions and finite resources. These should be concepts that become ingrained before adulthood and before other social forces can undo them.
I will be exploring and studying your essays to supplement what I have learned from my other heroes in this field: Herman Daly and recently, Charles Hall. Thanks for this body of work!
Thanks Tom, as always!
Your scientific approach, knowledge and reasoning are very accurate. Laconically: *it happens because it is possible*
Meager initial input data on structure, order and the properties and characteristics generated by them, which unfold, climbing the ladder of complexity and creating an almost ∞-conditioned Universe. Deterministic from its *beginning*.
I am not a physicist or a philosopher, but I perfectly understand the obscure (for some) message that you are trying to convey, it would be a worthy continuation of the Ishmael series.
Finally, (arrogantly) I think you should write a comprehensive work: Free will, evolution, the anthropic factor, mind, consciousness, etc.
with a thread of connection regarding suprematism.
and, one more thing.
It is worth adding that life does not make *right* choices (only), as in the context of individuals (and even populations).
So in the context of a species or coevolution.
This is a dynamic dance of a wide set of feedback loops in response to stimuli (stimuli) and a function of time (to some extent)
Crocodiles (species) are extremely stable in their habitat, but apparently helpless as individuals in different conditions. Tardigrades, on the contrary, are stable in a wide range of conditions.
What will the *decisions* of a crocodile mean in conditions of abrupt climate change or other phenomena of mass extinction. Will they contribute to life? Will there be a *right* (other) choice, except for extinction? Chance will decide (from among the possible conditions and individual characteristics of individual animals)
Is there something unknown in the evolutionary law that promotes complexity, that promotes (selects) self-development and reproduction, (cyclicality?). Let us humbly accept this gift of @#possible#@ in the religion of life 🙂
"A materialist, mechanistic basis does not in any way diminish life, although that’s often the regrettable reaction from someone who takes it on faith that transcendent mystery accounts for life’s splendor"
No need to invoke transcendent mystery. It's enough (for me) to just say "I don't know". However, you (and scientists generally) maintain that you *do* know. No one has access to that knowledge. Agnostic = not knowing.
To claim otherwise is to commit the cardinal sin of hubris.
The whole article is very 'left-brain', possibly due to your being steeped in academia (until recently).
The education system is a hierarchy, forcing people to learn the facts (and rules) of the Establishment's picture of 'how things are'. By imposing strict conformity and obedience throughout the process, it necessarily fosters a 'left-brain' outlook (you can't teach 'right-brain').
It fits people with a mental strait-jacket from which most never escape.
"[An electron] executes a decisive path, it fundamentally has no other choice. Now imagine […] the same sort of mandates applied to complex systems all the way up to thoughts."
That's some major-league extrapolation. Electrons are not the same as lifeforms. Thoughts are not "made of atoms"… These misperceptions might stem from a penchant for building models, instilled (or encouraged) during your scientific education. Models are reassuringly simple – unlike reality.
"Life exists in a context of self-replication, evolution, relationships to other beings, and as such has developed a set of mandated behaviors we call decisions that are part and parcel of this capability."
Ok, on evolutionary time scales, but not *in the present*. Yes, lifeforms that don't make "correct" decisions will not persist, and yet… they're still able to make them, aren't they?
How, in your developed-set-of-mandated-behaviours model (in real time, before evolution removes them)?
Rivers, stalactites etc don't make decisions. Again you deliberately conflate inanimate processes with life, and implicitly assert that explaining one explains the other.
"our brains are incapable"
Amen.
If I'm guilty of hubris, it's an unusual variant. Most hubris is: "I have the answers." I'm saying, none of us even have the mental capacity to possess the answers, so please can we stop making up $#!+ to paper over our ignorance? Because we are not even close to making a compelling case that a materialist foundation is not enough to result in the emergent complexity of life (and sense of consciousness), then why go off the rails with something unjustified just to avoid looking at the big unknown abyss/gulf?
Interesting to bring up left/right brain, because the McGilchrist book makes clear that left demands certainty and will make up stories/models about information to which it has not even been exposed (experiments in split-brain patients). I see the grasping for tidy explanation (mind, idealism, etc.) to be in this spirit, whereas I'm advocating an embrace of the mother of all uncertainty and ambiguity: we don't know how it all works, and never will. I'm simply trying to keep the rank speculation down, suggesting that we satisfy ourselves with the simplest (and well-studied) foundation. No one can say it's not enough to permit the emergent complexity we witness, but many people simply *really* don't like it. That's usually of no concern to how the universe works. Get our biases and security blankets out of the picture. To be clear, I don't find the materialist stance to be *comforting*. It's sort-of the opposite. But who am I to set the terms? There's that hubris again?
I recently came across a utub item discussing Witgenstein, that commented on his theory of 'language games.' This, apparently, refers to how words (phrases, sentences, etc) change their meaning depending on the context in which they are…well…uttered (what is a word that means being transduced from 'inside' a brain to outside of it without including stuff about the method of transduction? Written? Spoken? Sung? Yelled? Videotaped? WordEdited?). So, 'true,' to a person referring to observations of, say, how objects react to gravity in a vacuum, may (or may not) have the same…'meaning' is such a tricky word, don't you think…meaning as 'true,' uttered in the context of, say, politics.
Anyway, here you are, uttering words about other words, like the word 'decision,' when I'd bet that if you got 1,000,000,000 people together to define what 'decision' means, you'd get, maybe 13984710985601986 x 3798407123 different…well…reactions, anyway.
I mean, some people are going to say that 'decisions' are something that brains (minds, souls, little men (or women?) living inside our heads…talk about turtles-all-the-way-down) do, and that anything 'decided' by anything that is not a brain may look like a decision but, by definition, is merely the product of a nearly infinite chain of cause-and-effect that stretches back to the moment Eve decided to eat the apple…or to when the 'BigBang'…whatever the heck that is…decided to bang.
In any event, I have been appreciating your take on things since the days when you spent your time talking about stuff like how it would take the entire mass of the earth to build a solar panel big enough to power the umpteen billion people we are going to have living on the (now non-existent) earth in X number of years at (what used to be) our current growth rate.
But, there are (I suspect) more people on this earth living in mud huts, cooking with dried sheep dung, than there are listening to what you have to say (even though they are probably also chatting with their friends on cell phones while breathing in the pungent smoke of burning poo). And, for them, what does it mean to say that what you are saying is true?
I had no choice but to make the choice to post this comment.
In a side note:
"life must make the sorts of decisions that are necessary to maintain life…"
What is the difference between "must" and "does" ??
Tom, I am enjoying watching you dip your toes in Philosophy’s ocean! I don’t understand your negative attitude toward it — you are a natural philosopher! Methinks thou doth protest too much!
A few comments on your intriguing essay.
1) In your attempt to reduce life's processes to mechanistic interactions, don’t you risk glossing over the unique characteristics of living systems—like adaptability, self-replication, and evolution—that differentiate them from purely physical systems?
2) Your notion of ‘decisions’ seems, well, strained. Sure, electrons and bats may be governed by the same physical rules, but equating their behaviors ignores the emergent, context-dependent, and adaptive nature of decision-making in living beings. This distinction is crucial for understanding what it means to make a ‘decision.’ There is a difference between me ‘deciding’ to eat spaghetti instead of a hamburger and a purely physical process like the freezing of water. You can say that the water ‘decides’ to freeze, but isn’t that qualitatively different from my decision to eat spaghetti?
3) Your defense of tautologies as ‘self-consistent truths’ feels evasive. Sure, self-consistency is necessary — but it doesn't necessarily provide explanatory depth or insight into why certain processes occur.
4) You summarily dismiss the views of non-materialists without really engaging with their strongest arguments. For example, philosophical traditions like phenomenology or existentialism offer nuanced insights into consciousness and agency that materialism alone might not fully capture.
You certainly acknowledge the complexity of life, but it seems your version of materialism doesn’t fully engage with how qualitative differences—such as subjective experience or intentionality—emerge from physical interactions.
Useful comments, providing some traction for response:
1) Fully agree about the unique characteristics of life, which is why I emphasize the closed-loop feedback nature of Life's decisions. But "differentiate" from physical systems? Whoa. Why would I attempt to place life apart from physical systems? Wrong metaphysics.
2) My whole point in fact *was* that living beings have decisions shaped by emergent, context-dependent, adaptive pressures. Didn't ignore that at all! Won't be hard to find if you look back. See the explicit example of a hurricane vs. an ant.
3) Part of my "code" is that we are not the masters of it all, and some aspects of reality are not going to be generated out of logic in our brains, but just *are*. Explanatory depth and insight are not necessary conditions, but what hubristic humans impose before it "counts."
4) To me, these sound like dualism at best, and escapism at worst: artifacts of difficulty coping with incomprehensible complexity (which I share, to be clear, but don't demand a tidy short-cut that papers over the yawning gap).
As for the last point, fair enough: I have not fully engaged with "how." Part of that is I don't expect to have all the answers (no tidy paper-over: it's more than our brains can manage). But I would insert words like "illusion," "sense of," etc. before "subjective" and "intentionality." Those themselves are complex emergent sensations of a very tangled set of material interactions that I can't spell out.
Many thanks, Tom, for your response. I have a few final comments.
1) We’re talking past one another on the term 'differentiate.' To my mind, emergent properties in living systems — evolution, adaptability, self-replication—are not reducible to the rules governing inert matter, even if they arise from them. Just because I think this doesn’t mean I’m evoking metaphysical dualism. I’m simply acknowledging that complexity generates novel layers of causality. Wouldn’t you agree that feedback loops in life introduce qualitative shifts that are missing in non-living systems?
2) Okay. I agree that emergent, context-dependent processes shape decisions. But I think your hurricane vs. ant example is off. A hurricane’s behavior lacks agency and results from deterministic physical laws. The ant, however, combines sensory input, memory, and goals, and has a purpose, though it may be unconscious. Isn’t it reasonable to reserve 'decisions' for systems that process information toward adaptive ends?
3) So tautologies are foundational. Agreed. But they merely restate what’s already embedded in definitions, don’t they? Yeah, not all ‘truths’ are accessible to human reasoning power. But science has predictive power because it seeks relationships and causes and doesn’t stop at what ‘just is.’
4) I have a great deal of sympathy with your criticism of non-materialist traditions. But labeling them 'escapism' may sell them short. For example, phenomenology and existentialism, don’t necessarily reject materialism out of hand, but explore the lived experience of consciousness and intentionality. Don’t these perspectives, even as emergent properties, offer insights into the 'how' of subjective phenomena?
5) If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that subjectivity and intentionality are illusions or sensations arising from material interactions. But doesn’t that imply that they ‘work’ within their emergent contexts ? Even if they are rooted in the interactions of physical particles, isn’t their explanatory power as ‘real’ as the atoms that compose them? If we reject this, perhaps we risk missing the interplay of some of the layers in complex systems.
A "qualitative difference" is the "feeling of what happens."
Another way of distinguishing life from non-living materialism could be defined as systems that decrease entropy. A living being exists and interacts via mechanisms that decrease or maintain constant it’s entropy. This doesn’t do anything about the existential or philosophical point – but maybe it helps better define the boundaries between living and non-living, perhaps even at a theoretical level – there might be an “equation of life” rooted in thermodynamic principles.
Ice formation? When entropy decreases, it's always local: may not decrease in the whole system. Ice and life both decrease local entropy. That said, see my post on entropy from over a decade ago. A living body has far more thermodynamic entropy than a desiccated corpse (even tracking the same body). Entropy is a tricky one that is easy to mis-apply.
Thanks – your entropy post from 10 years ago was very clarifying.
A "qualitative difference" is the "feeling of what happens."
^^^ Exactly ^^^
Do those espousing a purely materialist view believe that feelings are an illusion? Would they still *feel* that was true, if they were being tortured? The pain isn't real, merely an illusion, all in the mind?
What is real, then, if not experience? What is real, if not life?
He's in de Nile!
The actual denial is not of mortality but of *feeling*, of *consciousness*.
What are these hard-headed materialists so afraid of? Why do they deny what all life experiences – the reality of 'feeling'?
I can only guess it comes from a devotion to science, with its rules, its codification, its requirement for certainty…
Human-made rules (including language) only inhibit true perception.
Best to take it all with a pinch of salt.
Perhaps I should have written "…is the 'Feeling of What Happens'," referring to the book of that name by Antonio Damasio, wherein he points out that feelings are no less the effect of wholly material processes than…say…sneezing.
No, it made more sense the first time.
For me, the most powerful argument against free will is that we are all made of atoms (like all other materials in the universe), that interact. Where, and what, is the mystical substance that is free will? How does it interact with the atoms in our neurons to ensure that only the neurons which correspond to our freely willed decisions are fired? If someone can come up with some mechanism for that then I could be convinced that free will exists, but then I'd ask how does the free will reasoning begin, how does it develop before it mysteriously fire that first neuron that starts the chain of cause and effect, resulting in the decision?
At the moment, it is clear to me that free will doesn't exist but that doesn't make it any easier, at the moment, to come to terms with what seem like stupid, or inconsiderate, decisions that are made. I shouldn't get angry at those, but I do.
No mystical substance is needed in order to account for agency. The feelings that lifeforms experience are enough to lead them to make choices.
Feelings (emotion, whatever) arise through the incomprehensible complexity of life's physical structure (material atoms etc, as you say). How the material is arranged is the thing (that much is similar to what Tom says).
Yes, it feels like agency, but is simply physical cause and effect. The mystical stuff is what's needed to interrupt the physics, to have that uncaused effect.
[I often pass on approving comments of this length, but as a first-time contributor, here we go…]
Hi Tom/all – I’m new here: although I came across your conversation with Nate Hagans and a few other discussions of yours some time ago, I only recently had a read of “Energy and Human ambitions…” and have caught up with some of the previous posts and comments, as well as with your personal journey, which I find fascinating and impressive. I hesitate to write anything, rather doubting that I have anything useful or original to contribute, and finding that the other nigh on 8 billion of us are loquacious enough to go around, but for what it’s worth I’ll add my tuppence worth (being in the UK!)
As an agonosto-atheist, I have the pleasure of being able to cite scripture as it suits me, and the opening of John’s Gospel – “In the beginning was the Word…” springs to mind. If I am not misunderstanding you, these words encapsulate what is wrong, not just with monotheistic religion or idealistic philosophy but with the whole human enterprise…putting our language (and by extension ourselves) at the centre of the cosmos. Clearly it is difficult, at least from a materialist perspective, to reconcile those words with whatever quantum processes were taking place 13.8 billion years ago and with the universe’s subsequent evolution since, of which science seems to have given us a pretty good (that is, coherent and logically consistent) understanding.
I surmise that you would regard St John’s pronouncement as simply false (about as false a statement as could be made, I dare say), whereas I would see it as paradoxical – the paradox lying in precisely what my fingers are doing at the moment, and of course, what you and anyone else here are doing, ie. writing and reading and thinking words. Without words (and, I suspect, without the Word – whatever form the Word takes – shamanistic ritual, polytheistic myth, monotheistic dogma, scientific rationality, etc. ) it is impossible to assert anything – even to maintain (or deny) that I am a Boltzmann brain about to return to thermodynamic equilibrium.
I agree with you about the folly of the current human enterprise and the unviability of modern civilisation – the Human Reich, as you put it, (over a timescale of decades or perhaps a century or so with “luck”). I suspect that the planet’s true human carry capacity is in the low hundreds of millions (certainly under a billion), that in the toxic, environmentally degraded and resource depleted post-collapse world it will likely fall far lower, that our share of the mammalian biomass should not exceed that of comparable wild species by more than an order of magnitude. I also share your disdain for both techno-optimistic fantasies and idealistic and metaphysical obfuscations, though one sees that these can be a source of solace when confronted with a bleak prospect.
The problem I have with (your) determinism is that while it may be true in an objective sense, it does not correspond to how we (as far as I can tell) actually view the world and our actions. Forgive me if I’m mistaken, but when you write your blog, participate in podcasts and events, modify your lifestyle to reduce your ecological footprint etc., do you actually see yourself as acting out a predetermined course of events which Laplace’s demon surveying the universe a thousand, million or billion years ago could have foretold? Did you have the choice to do the opposite: to join team Musk? Denounce climate science as a hoax? Rip off your solar panels? Buy a Hummer or two? Join a fundamentalist sect and have 8 kids? Hunt big game etc etc? And what about your audience: do they/we have any (genuine) choices? If not, one wonders what you are hoping to achieve – presumably you want to influence people to act in some more benign fashion, or at least to prepare themselves for what may be to come; but what does “influence” mean in a materialist, determined universe?
Not that I wish to deter you from continuing your blog and other activities, as there is definitely a lot more sense here than elsewhere in the cyberworld!
Your beef is certainly understandable. Determinism is a tough pill to swallow, given that our experience absolutely feels otherwise, and I get that. To be clear, the way I think about it, no part of the universe (e.g., Laplace's demon) has any capability of foretelling the future. It is not written, not predetermined, far to complex to simulate entirely. The present writes the next attosecond, in real time. Unscripted. Matter has no choice to disobey the interactions that determine its next steps.
While every bit of matter in the universe executes "decisions" about what to do next (based on all these mandatory interactions), life has closed the feedback loop and developed biases for certain patterns of decisions. Does an amoeba have a choice not to follow a nutrient gradient leading to food? Well, I suppose if it is well stocked, senses a toxin also in that direction, is busy with some other cellular process, then yes: it can weigh multiple stimuli and arrive at a decision that is honed by feedback to serve its success in a complex world. But every bit of that is in principle traceable to the material interactions supported by the structures that evolved into being by exploiting tricks that work. Impossible to fully comprehend, granted, which is part of why we flee to facile short-cuts.
The other part is our strong sense of self, of autonomy, of control, of agency. Unless we can rule out these sensations being produced by a very complex corporeal being based on straight physics, developed over an incomprehensible billions of years, and in the context of a social species whose actions must weigh a complicated set of relationships and consequences, the least aggrandizing conclusion is that we simply are along for the ride. When I chose not to join Facebook, my atoms, structured as they have been in my particular brain, are doing what they must given the history of their stimulus/response structure-building.
The point, then, of writing for an audience (rather than folding my arms in a tantrum about not being in control) is that…that's what's happening in the universe. I am compelled to respond to the stimuli I receive in this way, and as such those stimuli are getting amplified and presented to others, who may also end up responding similarly and possibly amplifying the stimuli in a cascade that benefits the survival of our species—having become aware of an existential threat. It's part and parcel of a social species: one member becoming aware of a danger (smoke) is wired to alert others, else group survival is impaired and may make the difference between survival and extinction, over time. Evolution only keeps the species who are wired to do the things that lead to survival. I'm okay being granted this bit role, the script written for me as I go. Here, I read the lines as they are presented.
@tmurphy
"Evolution only keeps the ones who are wired to do the things that lead to survival."
Is that true?
But most of the choices we make in life aren't a matter of life and death. They don't increase or decrease our chances of survival.
And some choice aren't just about "pleasure responses".
We can care for someone with advanced dementia and it have a very negative effect on our own personal mental and physical health. And if you are doing this after your reproductive age, then it has no effect on passing on DNA.
And we can make a decision and then change our mind.
We adapt (or not) by changing our behaviour by changing our culture. By changing "the rules".
Those changes aren't predetermined by physics.
If all this decision making (culture changing) was detrimental to our survival, we would have evolved to stop doing it a long time ago.
On a basic level we are products of the laws of physics. We are all flesh and blood or stardust after all, but I think it's stretching the point too far that physics ultimately determines the choices we make. Physics creates ultimate limits perhaps but it doesn't drive culture.
I think it's our ability to adapt through conscious choices to change our culture to fit new realities that has been our greatest asseyfor survival.
I'm in the middle of reading
Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta.
It's an indigenous aboriginal way of experiencing/understanding the world we inhabit, that is quite different to our "western" science based approach to understanding.
Well worth a read if you haven't already.
Many layers operate at once, in a complex reality that does not easily fit into tidy mental models. Subtle advantages operate that are not evident on a few minutes (or even a lifetime) of reflection. It also operates on timescales outside of our individual horizons. If life isn't based on physics (matter, interactions, emergent complexity), then it transcends the material universe (mystical, magical plane), leaving me to wonder why it would even mess with material reality.
I liked Sand Talk's examples of Aboriginal culture deliberately tamping down narcissism (related to human supremacy).
Well put, Tom.
It is extremely difficult to accept that we're just a collection of atoms that are interacting. I get angry at decisions that some people make (even those I make myself sometimes). But no other decisions could have been made, even though it seems that they could have been. I can still be disappointed (to put it mildly) in the people making those decisions but they had no ability to do otherwise.
It's all weird but, in principle, totally explicable.
Thanks Tom for including my overlong comment and the thoughtful reply – nothing I can really disagree with. I guess my only other relevant suggestion is that the materialist – idealist and the humanocentrist – ecoharmonious axes of thought may be pretty much orthogonal, and perhaps, at least from a tactical point of view, some charity should be extended to the spiritualists (if their position on the second axis is not too repellent!)
Now you're talking my language! I sense a projection, however: not completely orthogonal. Idealism pairs well with anthropocentrism because it imbues us with special properties: if consciousness is the primary "substance" in the universe, and well, hey, we happen to have the most of it…we humbly accept superiority.
I have nothing against spiritualism per say. I believe ecologically-rooted spiritualism (e.g., animism) to be a positive adaptation helping us live in right relationship with the community of life.
'…do you actually see yourself as acting out a predetermined course of events…'
Robert Sapolsky discusses (among other things) the difference between "determined" and "predetermined."
For people interested in the debate about determinism and free will, the work of the experimental quantum physicist Nicolas Gisin is definitely worth a look. His highly contentious idea is that
"scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics can thus be interpreted in a deterministic or indeterministic
way. However, using quantum physics, some experiments prove that nature is able to continually produce new information, hence support indeterminism in physics."
I am in no way claiming he is right, but his thinking is interesting…
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.03697
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.01279
You may disagree with me but one of your best posts are deeply philosophical such as “Ultimate Success”, ”Human Exceptionalism” or “The Cult of Civilization” (I do think so maybe because I am a philosophy student). Some of those posts discuss subjects which would likely be met with bewilderment or denial at my faculty, because surprise, surprise almost all of the people present there are members of the cult of civilization. Your blog is one of the sources which provided me with questions that are hardly ever asked by philosophers, a domain of people who also “have a very hard time seeing how unusual and temporary this moment is, it having lasted all their lives and more” (Citing “The Intransigence of Now“). So do not be ashamed of writing about philosophy, you do a great job.
Awww. Thanks for the encouragement. I'm not surprised that my brand of philosophy is absent in (human supremacist) academic settings. Masticating the writings of the "great" philosophers has never appealed to me. Sometimes a fresh, unencumbered start is appropriate. Rather than join stale conversations, try starting a new one. The old conversants will likely have no interest in joining, to their loss. To me, it's a shame it shares the label of philosophy, as different as it is.
On meatbrains……….
What were we doing with our large brains before we started thinking about astrophysics, quantum theory or solving quadratic equations?????🤔🤔🤔.
All of which have piggybacked onto the existing wiring of the brain.
What were we doing with our brains for them to evolve into the super complex computing "machines" that they are now, if it wasn't the pursuit of scientific knowledge?????
And what evolutionary advantages did it give us for the positive feedback loops of increasing complexity?
As I mentioned above, I'm reading
Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta.
He makes a related point that palaeolithic existance can't have been too "short, hard and bruttish" if we managed to find enough food to feed/developed/grow these complex brains. And enough "downtime" to evolve complex abstract thoughts.
Our brains allowed us to be keen observers of the natural world, to build mental models that were good enough to have some predictive power and provide advantage. In a sense, the flexibility was a blunder because it allowed us to apply those skills outside an ecological context and initiate a sixth mass extinction. Oops.
I had a post (Life Expectations) also arguing against the "brutish and short" lie based simply on life expectancy data.
I would argue that the "flexibility" was not a blunder, but the very thing that gave us an evolutionary advantage.
The flexibility to change how we think about things. To create new neural pathways. To imagine things/concepts that don't exist and then make them real. (Atomic bombs).
The flexibility to see a process and adapt it to a whole new application (sauerkraut).
Our behaviour isn't just passed on via our genes. We also create behaviours in our own lifetimes and then change those behaviours for others.
We don't have to wait for multi generational, natural selection to effect and change our behaviour.
We can radically change our behaviour to react to shifts in circumstances almost at will.
We do so much of this behaviour changing, desicion making over our lives that we overlook how unique it is in nature.
We (and possibly a few other hominids) are the only living things now, (or perhaps since life began?), that have evolved these capabilities.
I'm NOT saying that makes us "exceptional", "special", "greater than". Just that it is a very powerful ability.
That's why I don't buy the, "it's just down to physics" argument.
Whether our capabilities to be a blunder or an advantageous feature is ultimately up to evolution, not our musings. Since you bring up atomic bombs, if events transpire so that we unleash the arsenal and create a mass extinction in an "instant," does our flexibility pencil out to be a blunder or an advantage? If we carry out the sixth mass extinction over a few centuries, is it any better?
Just because we *can* do unique things, and those things carry obvious advantages (together with net disadvantages) is not enough reason to pronounce them to be a net benefit. That decision is in the process of being made, but not by our thoughts.
"…brutish and short…" (don't forget "solitary," "poor," and "nasty") Wasn't Hobbes just promoting his particular brand of totalitarianism?
An uncontroversial statement: "People are responsible for their actions".
Are they? Minus agency, the answer is 'no', rendering the world completely incomprehensible (more than it is already). That some things (e.g. chemistry, maths etc.) *are* comprehensible proves agency is real.
If it were not, there could be no understanding – only zombies acting out roles, having the appearance of chemists, mathematicians, workmen etc.
So, either I am the only person in the world who has agency (extremely unlikely), or *everyone* has it.
As others have said (here and elsewhere), if no one is free to choose how to act then what is the point of encouraging them to behave better (be less materialistic, more considerate of the non-human world etc)?
The word 'ought' ought not to exist, by that logic.
Even if the 'mind' (of humans and other animals) has a purely material basis (likely), that does not negate the ability of those organisms to choose what they want to do at any given moment. Life's complexity bestows that ability. (Of course nature and nurture influence behaviour, but the point stands.)
To insist that mystical stuff would be necessary, is to not see the wood for the trees (the 'wood' being consciousness (facilitating agency), the 'trees' being atoms, molecules etc).
In the same way that a molecule of H2O is not wet but water is, individual atoms (in lifeforms) may behave entirely deterministically, but the emergent phenomenon does not. Just because we don't (and maybe never will) understand how this happens, evidently that does not stop it from happening.
In other words, our lack of understanding makes no difference to reality.
I am conscious, I have agency. Telling me otherwise is akin to telling someone "Humans evolved eating meat, therefore you can't possibly be vegetarian."
I would alter the first statement as: "we hold people as responsible for their actions," and I think that's okay: it's an important piece of how a social species works. It enters natural selection. Why invoke zombies? In my view, lots of processing is going on within the head, weighing incomplete inputs against future uncertainty, considering wants/needs, and reacting accordingly. Moreover, awareness of these processes (a form of metacognition) produces a sense of self and autonomy. Nothing wrong with that: another advantageous adaptation.
My point would be that our decisions are absolutely contingent on (emergent from) material structures, obeying physics, with no override or intervention. Our persons choose how they act because the sophisticated material arrangements and interactions (extremely nonlinear, interdependent) perform the choosing. The emergent, integrated module we would call consciousness is aware of (some of) these processes, and in fact may interact as part of the dance. But every time we use the words "I," "me," etc. we fool ourselves into believing this to be an entity outside our corporeal construction, somehow in charge.
Why does the original statement need altering? "People are responsible for their actions" – right?
The point about zombies is that they represent simulacra of actual, conscious humans (or animals, if you include zombie animals, no reason why not). Real people have comprehension, zombies do not.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
Our decisions are contingent on material structures (physics)? Sure. But then you tie yourself in knots with language, in order to maintain… something?
How can 'consciousness' be aware while 'we' are not? You seem to have trouble with "I" and "me", but not "we" or "our"?
"I" don't know whether you have a dog, but if you do then "he" exists (or "she" does) and will sometimes think (wordlessly, obviously), "I am hungry" etc…
I recognise that you exist. You are a person. Denying that is like some kind of weird, reverse solipsism.
No one is fooling anyone. You *are* in charge of your own actions. Same for everyone.
A lot of this is word play. Not everyone will be moved by the recognition that everything in the universe must obey the law of physics. That each and every event has some cause. It feels like we have agency and it feels like we are each "responsible" for our actions. So long as those things feel like they are real, most people, almost everyone, will simply believe that feeling and reject the laws of physics.
But I *don't* reject the laws of physics.
All I'm saying is that we don't know it all.
(Or maybe I should only speak for myself: I don't know it all.)
The rejection of the laws of physics is implicit in believing that life, particularly human life, is more than just the interaction of atoms and that there is some mysterious force that each human has which enables them to be "in charge" of the way our neurons are firing.
No-one knows it all but, from what we do know, there is no mysterious free will substance. Of course, there maybe such a force but the only evidence we have for it is that it feels like it exists.
It seems that the unquestioned and perhaps unacknowledged/denied premise under which zombies are used as a foil, and people are responsible for their actions comes down to belief in souls—even if not by that explicit name: something apart from the material being and its complex host of physics interactions. Only then is there an entity apart from the material/physics that can be held responsible for "their" atoms' behaviors, and only then does its removal/denial result in a zombie (i.e., the soul is needed to animate the bag of atoms). In this light, zombies are a silly idea because their theoretical existence requires the absence of something that doesn't exist in the first place (soul).
The language knots are the fault of inadequate language structures, crafted for and by a human supremacist culture predicated on the unquestioned existence of souls. It would be rather awkward indeed to always substitute I, me, you, we, us with constructions like: "the collection of atoms, interactions, connections, evolutionary history, genetic code, neural structures, experiences, wounds, scars, defects, etc. that make up this body or collection of bodies…" Thus the shortcuts, with an occasional acknowledgement via quotes that it is highly questionable to speak of an entity separate from—or in control over—said collection.
Tom Murphy indeed exists as a real set of atoms (according to the reckoning of those atoms), as does James, and any putative pets. No denying that! The denial is over some physics-separate entity (soul) somehow able to override or intervene in the interactions between atoms/matter. The atoms in any living body, together with their arrangement, itself contingent on the entire evolutionary chain and the shaping experiences they have undergone in life, AND all the interactions they have experienced are indeed responsible for the actions they take; but it's a very distributed responsibility, see? Not reduced down to a shortcut notion of a magical soul, but down to the entire billions-of-years weave that constitutes any living body.
It is very tedious to write (and read) text that deviates from English norms, and also the very strong and convincing/felt perception of self as a separate soul, but that's the way this response is constructed. Please forgive past and future lapses back to common conventions.
Hi – I'm sorry, but your arguments are all the same dribble and rehash of Dawkins' arguments. It's just gross stupidity. We can start with your avowed premise that the molecular behavior of life "nowhere breaks away to operate outside the laws of physics…" This is glaringly untrue as Schrodinger observed in his classic, What is Life?
The molecular organization within the living body, is globally organized. Like the interacting gears of a fantastic clock, all motion is perfectly synchronized in the dimensions of space and through time. It has absolutely no relation to snowflakes' unique crystal structures or the trash collected in the center-lane or side of a highway.
The body is an exquisite machine composed of billions of molecular gears in each of trillions of cells. The same precise organization endlessly reappears in each species. Machines are physical systems. But they are not constructed by random events. They are designed. Would you use your arguments to explain the construction of a car or computer?
Explain how the laws of physics that explain why systems go to greater entropy and equilibrium are obeyed in the operation of a cell. (The fact that cells use energy to produce this order is an observation, not an explanation any more the fact that construction of a house uses energy. It tells us nothing of what actually occurs to move bricks and boards and how they're placed.) In a cell, what provides the shielding of immense strands of nucleotides and amino acids? If you truly visualize the length of these strands, why don't they tangle in mess? Why do they move within the cell with the certainty of being contained in the rigid corridors of a fantastic machine? This is not bottoms-up organization. This is top-down global organization of an invisible hyper-dimensional structure.
If you have an interest in challenging your beliefs, look at my book, Chasing Memory, or my website https://www.carlgunther.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Memory-Exploring-Dimension-Conscious/dp/B0CVFYS291
Truly, this is a debate that is never settled (and likely can't be) by human brains: just not up to it; not evolved to that function. Most of the "why" questions can be answered by the tautologically-adjacent: "because that's what works." Maybe that answer is intellectually unsatisfying, but evolution doesn't care about that sort of purity. Evolved biology carries the appearance of design, because time, trial, reward for working, and culling failures drives to amazing, elaborate ends. The only authority is the actual universe as it works, and not what any meat-brains say about it (looking at you, Schrodinger; but myself included). My strategy is to be more of a listener to the symphony (e.g., physics, as observed) than trying to compose/fabricate notions on my own: above my station.
Perhaps you could explain how any one of your examples defies physical laws? If any do, then there would be room for free will.
@tmurphy
Following on from the meatbrains thread above………01/23/2025 13.36pm
"Our brains allowed us to be keen observers of the natural world, to build mental models that were good enough to have some predictive power and provide advantage."
Yes, but plenty of animals do this.
Why have our brains gone on to become the computing powerhouses that they are?
What were we doing with them to create such complex circuitry and what was the evolutionary advantages?
In thinking that "flexibility is key to the answer to that question.
Absolutely true that we are not utterly alone in that other animals share plenty of our traits and developments. Why such capable brains for us? That's just the path evolution tried for us—and not out of nowhere, but elaborating a trend. Those brains were excellent for reading subtle animal tracks, noticing subtle cycles, and elaborating subtle social cues for better group selection. I think it's fair to say those developments accidentally (evolution's way) crossed a sort of cognitive threshold, for better or for worse.
@tmurphy
"I think it's fair to say those developments accidentally (evolution's way) crossed a sort of cognitive threshold, for better or for worse."
Yes, but what cognitive threshold?????
@tmurphy
Following on from you comment 2025/01/23
18.46pm,
You say….
"I liked Sand Talk's examples of Aboriginal culture deliberately tamping down narcissism (related to human supremacy)."
But are those aborigines deliberately tamping down narcissistic tendancies or are they just acting through the "laws of physics". That all sounds like they have agency and are making choices to me🤷??
If we are all being governed by the rules of physics then nuclear annihilation or the 6 mass extinction are going to happen if physics says so.
Why worry? It's already been decided.
My opinions and actions are not my own. I have no responsibility for my actions. It's just physics ?
Not sure how such a defence would have stood up at the Nürenburg trials
That last comment suggests that some aspects of our physical world, the stuff that runs counter to our feelings, still needs more explanation. Robert Sapolsky cites many examples where societies have finally understood some aspects of biology (e.g. epileptic fits) for what they actually are rather than what they feel like, and have altered our societal behaviour accordingly.
For Sapolsky and for me, it's a very difficult step to take. I'm sure that any trial and "punishment" would be radically altered if society, as a whole, understood that our decisions are beyond our control. The decisions are still made and those decisions still have consequences for society but I'm sure we'd treat the cause as best we could rather than punishing people for what they can't avoid. I find this an incredibly tough concept to deal with but that doesn't mean its wrong.
I have a slightly different take. Go ahead and punish murderers even if their atoms made them do it. Don't let philosophy get in the way of instinct. The instinct is there for a reason (also physics doing its thing). Group selection is a powerful evolutionary force, and punishment of transgressions is an important part of shaping social behavior that leads to stability and group advantage.
Yes, I agree, but punishing someone for something they have no control over doesn't seem right. As I say, difficult to make that leap, and Sapolsky has that difficulty also. He did think that Norway has gone some of the way with their justice system having way better outcomes than systems which assume transgressors had a controllable choice and so just mete out punishment. And it seems that Norway's society has also moved somewhat in the direction of trying to understand that transgressors need help to adjust to being a better member of that society. I only take this from Sapolsky's book so don't know the details myself but trying to alter the neuron arrangement to make it less likely for someone to decide on criminal behaviour in the future seems like the way forward.
"trial and "punishment" would be radically altered if society, as a whole, understood that our decisions are beyond our control"
So you're saying that no crime should incur any penalty? Wow, that's something even the most liberal do-gooder would baulk at.
Poverty is a cause of crime, and extreme inequality is baked into civilization (especially modernity). But why would we even attempt to do anything about it ("treat the cause as best we could")? To do so would be to assume agency – which, according to you, we lack: "our decisions are beyond our control".
As I tried to point out upthread, how can society (or any being) understand anything *unless* they have agency? It's a prerequisite for comprehension. Computers can't understand anything , as they are inanimate machines.
Animals, as living things, can understand things.
"trying to alter the neuron arrangement to make it less likely for someone to decide on criminal behaviour"
But you already said they *don't* decide. So how do we decide to help them, if we lack agency??
Your argument is like a Swiss cheese.
James,
"So you're saying that no crime should incur any penalty?"
No. I'm saying that if we understood that no-one can avoid doing what they do (that apparent choice is not actual choice) I'm sure the justice system would find mechanisms other than just plain punishment to get better outcomes for society. We're a long way from that collective understanding and even Robert Sapolsky, who understand the physical mechanism of choice making, baulks at recommending no "punishment" for any actions society considers crime.
You say understanding anything requires agency. But you don't define either agency or understanding. And so claiming that computers can't understand anything is based only on a feeling. A feeling that is the result of a sequence of neurons firing, and that sequence, in response to some external stimulus (like this on-line discussion), is built-in, with our neuron arrangement being the end result of billions of years of what went before.
The word "decide" is a shorthand way of referring to the outcome of our neurons firing in the sequence that is built-in to the brain's current configuration. Much research has shown how certain events can alter the neuron sequence, even down to what we had for breakfast. Of course some "criminals" might have their neurons altered by the conditioning a particular "punishment" might apply. This also applies to the people making the "decision" on what the penalty for particular actions are. Learning can alter the neuron pathways and result in law changes which attempt to alter those pathways in others who have "chosen" to act anti-socially, in the hope they might not so act in future. It doesn't always work, of course, but should we not try?
Mike,
I agree that the justice system is too harsh, especially on non-violent offenders. The word "justice" is itself problematic though, when seen through a determinisic lens (justice the quality of being just). If nothing is anyone's fault, why bother with 'justice'? How can blame be apportioned, compensation awarded etc?
Hardcore determinists resort to mangling semantics when trying to reconcile their position with our (and other animals') ability to choose.
"no-one can avoid doing what they do", "apparent choice is not actual choice"…
This straw-clutching is down to the left hemisphere's power to deny reality in order to fit in with its theory about realty. That's its defining feature, as Iain McGilchrist rightly points out.
"you don't define either agency or understanding". I thought it unnecessary, as they are not obscure terms and have generally accepted meanings… Here are the Chambers dictionary definitions, anyway:
'agency' the operation or action of an agent
'agent' a person or thing that acts or exerts power ; any natural force acting on matter
'understanding' the act of comprehending ; the power to understand ; intellect
'understand' to be able to follow the working, logic, or meaning, etc, of
"claiming that computers can't understand anything is based only on a feeling"
Our neuronal arrangement is indeed from billions of years of evolution – that's what has given us the capacity to understand. Computers don't have that – they don't have "feeling". If someone pointed at gun at you, you'd understand that your life was in danger. If someone went up to a computer and weilded a sledgehammer in front of its camera, nothing would register but an image encoded in 0s and 1s. Life is the difference.
The word "decide" is not a shorthand way of referring to the outcome of our neurons firing in the sequence that is built-in to the brain's current configuration. That's not what people mean when they use the word. That verbose definition results from the (left-brain) desire to form a simplified model, rather than apprehend wider reality.
James,
You're starting with the assumption that blame needs to be assigned to someone. But if no-one is to blame for their actions, then there is no blame. There are just actions.
I agree that the word "justice" is problematic but I use it because society uses it, having taken on board your assumption that blame needs to be meted out.
By claiming that non-living machines can't understand anything, you assign some special abilities to humans that is somehow beyond physics. If understanding is just some configuration of neurons, then why can't a non-living machine have something similar?
Which word would you use to describe the end result of a neuron firing sequence, if not "decide?" Again, it seems you want humans to have some non-physical way of making decisions, that is not just the firing of neurons in a cause and effect sequence.
This is extremely difficult to accept, as I've said before, and even more difficult to alter one's own opinions based on the physics. I'm not sure I'll ever get there but I can see the argument for not having free will. If we don't have free will, then we should be altering societies mechanisms for dealing with ant-social behaviour. I don't expect that to happen before modernity ends.
Mike,
My assumption (that *sometimes* blame can be attributed) seems less bold than yours (that no one is to blame for their actions).
Blame is apportioned/attributed, punishment is meted out. It is possible to assign blame yet not bother with punishment (e.g. for minor shoplifting by a desperate mother etc). That's what the courts are supposed to decide (although the entire system is irredeemably corrupt).
Saying 'computers can't understand anything' is not a claim but a statement of fact, and an uncontroversial one, I would have thought. If you consider the faculty of 'understanding' to be a special ability, then ok, humans have that, but I never said it was beyond physics, did I?
Why can't non-living machines have it? Why can't abacuses understand?
"If we don't have free will, then we should be altering societies mechanisms…"
This is inconsistent, because if we don't have the ability to choose, then you can't say we "should" do anything.
It's all out of our hands, if our actions are not accountable to us.
You're trying to leap over enormous layered complexity with a single, facile requirement that it all crystallize in your head. What happens if you dig deeper? Can you come up with sketches of ideas how life might adapt to (and as an embedded part of) a world of only physics? Maybe not, and that's okay. Would you allow the possibility that the universe and life work in ways individual humans can't easily understand, if at all? Or, are the only acceptable versions ones that easily "compute" for human brains? Naturally, the same question may be asked of me, and I ask it of myself all the time.
Recognize the asymmetry in the proposal. Even without demanding of myself that I understand the whole picture, I suggest that humans, life, and the universe operating on physics alone is a completely viable possibility: we have no proof otherwise. To reject such an idea is a heavy lift, requiring enough mastery to say it can't happen—but also introducing non-material "substances" that are a matter of pure speculation. Meanwhile, physics keeps working.
Since this stumbling block shows up over and over (like hitting a cognitive wall), I assume it must have to do with needing to relax a core and unrecognized metaphysical assertion involving who we are. Without doing so, the hangups persist. Animals do things. Those things interact with and modify the environment. Turn on feedback and selection and those actions tend to aid success (on the whole: don't demand some perfect purity, because evolution sure doesn't). Aborigines can develop practices that work for them. Physics does not preclude this happening. Stimulus; response; result; feedback; tune.
Nothing is predetermined. The universe doesn't know what it will do next, except take the next tiny step following the laws of physics. Lots of amazing and unexpected things result: unpredictable. How we react to the threat of nuclear annihilation or 6ME is unknown, but my belief that we're all reacting to stimuli as physics demands does not mute my urge to react: it's built in. A fox smelling smoke in the den will not fail to react on the basis that the outcome is not of his making. Every fiber of his body (i.e., physics) says to alert others and get out. A species failing to act out of philosophical protest will not fare well in evolution's eyes.
As for Nüremburg, go ahead and try the defense. Physics will have the others react predictably. Because we are a social species, we have developed traits and norms for dealing with deleterious actions of others. We don't punish because we hold souls accountable and deny the mandates of physics: we punish because without doing so group selection fails and evolution gives the thumbs-down. The philosophical argument is a speculative afterthought/gloss, not the driver. Social norms among animals FAR predate any debate about physics vs. souls.
"You're trying to leap over enormous layered complexity with a single, facile requirement that it all crystallize in your head"
But aren't you doing the same with physics?
Just because we can't explain/understand consciousness, doesn't mean that it isn't a thing.
This debate will have no effect on either of our chances of survival or effect humanities direction of travel.
But….we still have it, non the less. Not all societal choices (cultural choices) effect a societies chances of survival/extinction. They are neutral in the great game of evolution. (If I choose coffee over tea this morning, I don't think it will effect anything. It would be human hubris to think that it would.)
If societal/group/individual decisions always did effect or survival chances, then we would have evolved the most effective set of social rules for survival by now. It's the fact that we come up with so many different ways of doing things, that sets us apart from other life forms. (Not in a super being kind of way, I hasten to add!!!) Our choice don't always effect our survival chances. That's why we have so many different ways of doing things (cultures) in the world.
Sure there are huge layers of cause and effect going on out there. Far too complex for our meatbrains to figure out.
But then to try and simplify the whole process by "the laws of physics" is just human hubris all over again.
When physics can't explain something, it calls it "dark matter" for example. It's not a complete "science"/explanation and never will be. But we seem to have an inate need to understand the world we inhabit.
Your arguments suggests that your thoughts/opinions/ideas aren't actually your own anyway. (As well as mine)
If you reply to this comment, please can you do it in a new thread. If you reply using the reply box below, I'm going to have to read the reply vertically again😬
I'll keep it short: this discussion is becoming repetitive; the same disconnects keep appearing , so I'll duck out.
"Animals do things. Those things interact with and modify the environment. Turn on feedback and selection and those actions tend to aid success"
There's no doubt that evolutionary feedback moulds life's behaviour, but as I asked earlier, how do animals decide *in real time*, before evolution says 'yes' or 'no'?
"A fox smelling smoke in the den will not fail to react on the basis that the outcome is not of his making."
He will react because the outcome *can be altered by him*. That is, he has agency, and understands he may survive by exercising it.
Invoking souls or making human-centric criticism is unnecessary. All life is animate, all is physics-based.
It's possible that unknown physics may give rise to life's ability to choose its path, i.e. 'agency'.
Is that so outlandish? Electricity was unkown physics for quite a long time.
Whatever the physics, the Earthly fact is that we (and other animals) do have agency. Denying that is like denying the nose on one's face.
Real-time decisions are made by embodied structures shaped and tuned to make good real-time decisions. Those organisms who have an aggregate knack for making "good" decisions are judged in the long term by evolution to be worthy of persisting. Lots of inheritance, too, so that no organism starts from scratch in formulating decisions (via physics).
Of course the fox reacts and does not refuse due to some debate over agency: also alerts others (and performs many other social acts) even if direct personal survival is not at stake: part of being honed by feedback as a social species.
It's also possible (completely plausible or even very probable) that known physics gives rise to all our sensations: less outlandish. I like that better than assuming new physics just because brains are not smart enough to connect the thousands of dots in a jumble.
No disagreement that we have agency: look back over all the writings and exchanges. Life can be an agent of change, and in feedback that reflects on health, survival, etc. Organisms have precisely the ability—through marvelously sophisticated physics-based arrangements of atoms—to sense, react, maneuver, interact, and all the rest. No denying that! The denial is whether attributing to a novel, unknown, mystical, beyond-physics "external" agent or soul (even for amoebas), or assuming the fault is in our ignorance: that physics is capable of patching this all together but we don't happen to possess the mental mastery to get it. The latter seems FAR FAR more likely to me. No hubris needed.
Hi Tom. When you say “Nothing is predetermined. The universe doesn't know what it will do next, except take the next tiny step following the laws of physics”, does this mean that you take time as real and fundamental and think that the future is something that genuinely hasn’t happened or exist yet? I only ask because there are physicists that seem to say time isn’t fundamental, but emergent. And then there is the block universe interpretation that suggests past, present and future are all locked in doesn’t it, or maybe I am misinterpreting it? Do you believe in the “now” as something real and not just, for example, an “artefact” of our brain? I tie myself in knots over this stuff. I would just be curious to know your thoughts. Is this something that is beyond the human pay-grade?
I'm a simple guy, and happy to accept time as an axis through which we move. I quite like the result from relativity that we always travel the speed of light (the four-vector velocity, often denoted u, always has magnitude = c). In our own frame, it's always a pure time-axis speed (can't stop moving fast through time). But if zipping through someone else's frame, you travel more slowly through the time axis, "spending" some of your speed through space (the phenomenon described as time dilation).
So anyway, in my non-authoritative view (no one is an authority; only the actual universe), it seems sufficient to describe time as a dimension we inexorably move forward in, as does every particle in the universe. I'm not a fan of "future has already happened" brain warps. Uncalled for clickbait. I certainly do not hold that our brains generate time as an anthropocentric perception. Stars would have had a hard time forming by the laws of physics we know them to follow if you rip time out from under them. It's not about us.
I could, of course, be wrong. Above human pay-grade for sure to try speaking with any authority. I'm happy enough to say that all matter we observe appears to acknowledge one-way flow of time, creating the not-yet-existent future one tiny step at a time.
I love this topic however I avoid it due to the anger that tends to erupt from the majority of people. I've even had a person try to strangle me over the topic. It's also been really fun watching Neil Degrass Tyson come to similar conclusions as Tom's. I've taught high school science for 25 years which has really taught me a lot about the capacity of the human mind. As was mentioned in the post I love using discrepant events when teaching science. It is a surprising and paradoxical outcome that is not what an observer would normally expect. I taught physics for 5 years and they have the best demos by far compared to all the other subjects I've taught including Biology for 25 years, microbiology, chemistry, earth science, environmental science, oceanography, forensics, anatomy, and an ecology class. I tend to live through the mental model of once you "know" you have closed all doors, and the unknown is unlimited possibilities. I teach students that we construct reality through building mental models in our heads and we experience life through these mental models. A model is a representation of reality. By definition It's not reality because it's a reduction of reality. Just like theories they are tools we use to navigate life or solve problems. Students realize they were able to find my room because of a mental model however it's just a model and the model can't ever incorporate the complexity of the school. Learning is when you've constructed a new model which is change in perception. And this is where I've realized that our brains tend to act like a parasite pulling us into its denialism and abstractions. People actually think they are experiencing reality and can't see that they are constructing it. It seems that most people are just interacting at an interface like a computer screen and can't see all the complexity behind the screen. Once humans got caught up in a positive feedback loop some 10,000 years ago it seems that humans adopted a growth mind set as a mental model. I've recognized that life maintains homeostasis at all levels of life from the cell to tissues to organs, individuals, populations, communities, ecosystems, and the biosphere. They are all interconnected. If the ecosystem or the biosphere isn't in homeostasis we aren't in homeostasis. All this excess energy that creates all this order or low entropy has allowed us to step out of the river of entropy causing us to feel we have free will. I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure paleolithic people didn't have the idea of free will or a growth mind set. Our perception changed because the conditions changed. I would argue If we actually had free will, we wouldn't be sawing the branch we are sitting on. Finally, I've noticed that Tom works with lasers. I've been working in a physical chemistry lab doing research using a laser for spectroscopy and man is that humbling.
@Chad Cooper
"Once humans got caught up in a positive feedback loop some 10,000 years ago it"
I think we've been able to do all this mental gymnastics for a lot longer than 10,000 years.
I don't think it's a growth mindset. It's simply what happens when a species has managed to circumvent all potential predators, so that it, effectively, has none. Combined with the exceptional ability to access resources was bound to result in a continuously growing population and resource extraction. There are limits to growth, however, so modernity will hit a wall eventually.
I think this is more evidence for, and a consequence of, not having free will.
"I'm pretty sure paleolithic people didn't have the idea of free will or a growth mind set"
They probably didn't have any need for philosophical debates so, no, they wouldn't have had such an idea. They had agency though: deciding what to eat, what to paint on the cave wall etc etc. They would have seen it as natural that they were in charge of their actions (like all life).
The growth mindset, aka greed, is a cultural phenomenon (and unfortunately, a very 'successful' one – but it won't be, in the long term).
"If we actually had free will, we wouldn't be sawing the branch we are sitting on."
The sawing is happening through ignorance. Civilization is the root cause and means by which it is being done. Does that mean we only had agency before civilization began? Maybe metaphorically – but actually, no.
On humanity and evolution.
I think "mother nature" is always playing the long game and the jury is out on whether humanity and our big meatbrains are an evolutionary dead end or not.
But then that brings into play ideas of failure and success which are human constructs that aren't of evolution's concern.
Ultimately all life forms have two paths to go down.
Extinction or evolving into something else.
Nothing stands still.
(Are there any life forms that haven't evolved over the last 100,000,000 years?)
For we humans, one of those same two paths, will be our destiny.
I guess, by "life form" you mean species. No life-form evolves, but its offspring might contain mutations which improve its chances of survival and reproduction. As the only mutations which continue over the long term must be beneficial, I guess extinction of the original species must eventually happen unless geographically separated. I don't think there is a hard and fast definition of a species. I'm reminded of the image invoked by Richard Dawkins of a human child holding the hand of her mother, holding the hand of her mother, and so ad infinitum. Eventually, at the end of the line, is the single celled organism that started this all.
I wonder where free will entered the picture.
Picking back up on the "punishment" thread (e.g., 2025-01-25 at 14:16 ), here is a possible pathway to appreciate the "atoms made me do it" perspective.
What if someone was drugged without their knowledge and performed heinous acts while under the influence. Are they 100% accountable, 10%, 1%?, 0%? They just did what their (drug-influenced) atoms told them to do.
In that case, we might blame the poisoner. But what if no one is knowingly at fault: like lead in the water system of Rome. Can we blame any psychotic acts of violence that resulted on the individuals (victims of lead poisoning)? No person is to blame. Lead atoms inserted into the neurophysics and altered results.
What it always comes back to is whether a separate entity controls the physics (as a primary agent or soul), or whether we *are* the physics, and modifications to the physics can change who we are and how we behave. Mess with the material interactions and the behavior is completely at the mercy of what the atoms do or don't do.
Of course, some cases are difficult (or impossible) to decide fairly (hence the 'wisdom of Soloman'). In cases where the perpetrator is caught red-handed though – punishment ensues.
If some lead-addled ancient Roman committed a psychotic act of violence, they would have been punished, maybe executed, as the authorities at that time would not have known about lead poisoning. Too bad, but it is not possible to know everything – hence the simplified models constructed by the left brain (maybe including determinism?)
Even if we are the physics, that's no excuse for evil. "There is no I, your honour, merely a collection of atoms" would not stand up in a court of law.
It doesn't matter whether a soul is believed to exist or not – in realty, *agents* have the power to act in the physical world and are deemed responsible for those acts.
Despite a sense of repetition, we might be slightly converging. Any attempt to isolate/assign blame is execution of a flawed, narrow, left-brain model of (some notional form of) justice. Of course it is absurd to assume that such arguments of "my atoms made me do it" would not be instant gotcha-winners in courts (which serve to stamp a left-brained demand on a more complex reality), and such suggestions have never come from me. Among other reasons, it's like imagining that the first move in a chess game captures the whole game. As I point out probably every time this is raised, the counter-move could be: "Then the collection of atoms now uttering words that some call 'your honor' will execute the actions that result in your permanent incarceration." So that "won't hold up in court" argument, which has appeared countless times in Do the Math comments, feels rather empty and beside the point. A single additional "move" by the same self-consistent rules nullifies the first.
Yes: heinous acts can often be attributed in sufficient measure to an individual so-as to warrant punitive response to that individual, as social brains are structured to act out. Group selection and all. It's still a shallow interpretation out of the left-brain's desire for certainty and tidiness, but hey: the left brain is part of evolution's products, too, and has clear adaptive benefit. The main thing is: such punitive instincts are part of why we are here, and like anything else share blame with the entirety of the world, all the way down to physics. It works.
I agree that courts, as enforcers and extensions of wider society, are left-brain institutions (if that's what you're saying). What I was trying to get at with the (slightly facetious) 'No I' comment is that there *is* an "I" (maybe that's right-brain knowledge, rather than left-brain fact).
I can't fault your comment on logical grounds. It's intelligible and self-consistent…
The thiing about science is that is says, overtly, that it doesn't 'do' values, ethics etc. But what if some of those things really are a part of physical reality? Truth, beauty, goodness? Are they only illusions, due to evolution?
That's the heart of the matter.
I'd call them emergent qualities that are necessary for a successful social species: elaborations using basic vanilla physics that are beyond our pay-grade to track. Values can emerge, be useful, and still at base be "made" of atoms (and their rich interactions)! It doesn't seem left-brain when the point is to accept ambiguity and the utter inadequacy of facile mental models to capture. It's just a call not to make up make-believe constructs that are not necessary only to gloss over the gap in our left-brain level of understanding.
In the article, you describe a snowflake as exquisite. Why? What possible evolutionary benefit would be conferred on people by their seeing snowflakes as beautiful? If anything they signify bad weather, so evolution would be expected to select for an avoidance of them – i.e. they should be 'ugly'.
Similarly, why does, e.g., a picture of Saturn look beautiful? No one's ever going there are they? There are countless other examples.
To focus on one of the other things, 'truth' is clearly not an emergent quality. Some things are either true or they are not. The human brain, for all its sophistication, did not evolve to seek truth (alas), yet it seems to be important.
It exists irrespective of whether or not we recognise it.
I guess it all comes down to those damn words again and their meanings.
"The Laws of Physics" is a kind of short hand for something we don't really understand. (and never will)
Our understanding of the cosmos is constantly "evolving" but is always subjective.
We are limited in our understanding by our senses. We can only "see"/experience the universe through them.
(It is impossible to explain colour to someone who is colourblind. Or, a creature at the bottom of the ocean has no concept of the Milky Way.)
So we can't possibly say what "The Laws of Physics" actually are but that we all live by them.
It's kinda meaningless.
(Though the breaking down of the cosmos into smaller and smaller bits has lead to some pretty clever/frightening spin-offs)
I don't buy the duality argument either.
That's it's either physics (that unknown entity) or spirituality/soul (that other unknown entity)
I think we make choices/decision that are utterly random but I don't then also believe in a god/soul.
The writings in Sand Talk offer suggestions of other ways of thinking.
I would venture that we've got the basics down *well* *enough* for the statement that I'll end with, here. Gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces are very well described now at exceedingly high precision. We know the primary actors (particles) and how they behave with respect to the fundamental interactions. We don't understand extreme environments (black hole "singularity," Big Bang, or ultra-high-energy-density environments as produced at the edge of particle acceleration experiments) to our satisfaction, but the 16 million degree center of the sun is tame by comparison and we have that down.
Even if some underlying nuance is wrong, as was the case for Newtonian gravity giving way to General Relativity, such subtleties do not enter in life on Earth.
Then the key point is: what we believe we understand about physics (a considerable amount) appears to be completely sufficient to account for life and its interactions. My strong suspicion is that the gap in understanding is one of immense complexity, not some ontological missing ingredient. No overrides necessary: straight physics can do the job. So why make up unfounded stuff just because the complexity makes a full account too difficult for us? Seems lazy.
Thanks for the article, Tom. I very much agree that what makes an organism alive or not is the existence of a closed feedback loop. The way children learn their mother tongue lacks any kind of algorithmic method, yet they learn it without any problem to communicate accurately in their environment. The way I see it is this: The way in which we interact with our surroundings and the responses (feedback) we receive from the environment end up configuring the connective weights and intensities of our neural network and giving it a greater or lesser statistical propensity (which fluctuates according to internal and external parameters) to a certain response to any type of stimulus received. By repeatedly training against a certain range of stimuli we can very finely “calibrate” our response (for example, driving a utility car on public roads), and once a certain tolerance threshold has been reached (represented by making a lower number of discrete errors than is considered the limit) an external certifier gives us a qualification (a driving license, for example). Some of our responses (usually in the form of a peak) seem innate, as if they were firmware pre-installed in our DNA, such as reacting suddenly when we see a cockroach or a mouse moving quickly at our feet.
I believe that the Universe is not at all deterministic and that the decisions we make are always made with an intentional background based on achieving a certain purpose, regardless of whether or not it is “realistic” (that is, achievable or even physically conceivable). Each member of society has their own neural network and works towards different purposes more or less circumscribed to an environment in terms of scope. There are those whose decisions affect us all and whose decisions are therefore very important, and there are those with more modest purposes. It is generally the former who have the most "grandiloquent" purposes which are generally linked to collateral effects that lead to the suffering of many for the benefit of a few (including the "grandiloquent" individual in question, of course!)
Just to be clear, determinism is in no way predictable, and in no way precludes individuals altering the conditions. A landslide alters conditions, which we can attribute to (blame on?) a single slope. But many other factors went into creating the landslide, just as many factors from past and present influence an individual's actions—all the way back to early evolution and before. Determinism is about whether the laws of physics alone are "in control," or whether individuals have some secret bypass, override, intervention to subvert physics interactions (against any evidence).
Thanks for the reply 🙂 First of all am not such cultured in physics/mathematics as you are at all, by a far margin – I studied engineering but can't even say I work in the field – , I am simply just another meat-brain trying to grasp as much as possible the unphatomable complexity that surrounds us all by trying to compress everything down to its essence so to have a very coarse compass to navigate across the Universe. This said:
I think there is a sort of relationship between the puzzling phenomena observed in quantum physics (such as the unpredictability for when a specific elementary particles will decay and how it will) and the mind-boggling, absolutely ridiculous complexity in macroscopic terms that takes place in the Universe (such as social phenomena) to the point the answer to that question may be trivial. The subtleties that account for great differences between the state at any determined macroscopic metric between two parallel universes begot at a certain moment due to apparently unexplainable reasons equal to say that time is a constant throw of a dice, although each iteration should be more similar to the next given the energy is being more and more disperse into the space (entrophy rising). This is, the subtleties taking place between two instants after the Big Bang (something we infer that happened given our observations, but actually who knows…) would beget two much different parallel universes than between two instants now. In any case, independently of that, both should end in the same way when time tends to infinite, with complete and absolute energy dissipation across all points of space. So the paths to that are not determinist, but the end state should be, at least macroscopically, due to the brute force of statistics.
About trying to know the reasons behind why physics behave the way they do, I think there is no answer to that, and it shouldn't actually matter to us in the sense we are entirely a by-product of it. As we say in Spanish: "Es así porque sí", and over that basis we ellaborate.
On further reflections………..
Going back to my question on "why the big meatbrains"
I think we evolved our complex brains to analyse all the data that our senses are/where collecting/feeding in and then, through life experience, "ancestoral memory" and some weird thing called conscious thought, coming up with actions/responses. Lots and lots of possible actions/responses.
That "computing" process became conscious (somehow 🤷 but it did) and created feedback loops that increased the level of consciousness allowing the brain to imagine new material things and abstract concepts. Some being of use for survival and some as "byproducts" but with no material advantages.
We love patterns. We seek them out for some reason? Because they are predictable?
Cave Art by Bruno David has some interesting thoughts on why we stated to make art.
It seems trivial, but sticking a bit of flint on a stick with a bit of cordage and pine resin is a huge congnitive leap.
Our modern ways of thinking piggybacking onto that complex interconnected wiring in the brain.
(My kids learnt their times tables by walking round the kitchen table)
Those acute senses no longer being required for survival. (My sense of smell is terrible)
To filter/funnel those actions/responces we have developed modes of thinking to narrow down the options.
Morals being one of those filters.
Gods being another. (Believing in a "higher being" may have a survival benefit. When things get really tough, faith may be the thing that kept/keeps people going.)
Interesting points – on both sides of the divide – even if we do end up going round in circles a bit. For what it's worth, I might suggest that this discussion (like most others) is heavily conditioned, both in terms of medium and message, by its situation on the upward (perhaps just barely still upward) slope of the carbon pulse. As an instance, to cite Norway (one of the most favourably endowed parts of the world in terms of its energy to population ratios) as an example of enlightened penal policy is of doubtful relevance to Darfur, Honduras or Afghanistan, or to the world as a whole once we're properly past the peak and onto the downward slope (?precipice). When one is buoyed up on a lake of fossil fuel, it is very difficult to envisage the landscape (both physical and cognitive) once the "waters" have receded, but one might have reasons to believe that it would look quite different.
As to the agency/determinism point, at least as it pertains to our ecological predicament, I would venture that there is an (unhappy) parallel between human and stellar evolution. While the individual atoms, subatomic particles, photons etc within the star may have undetermined trajectories and fates (and could, if one wanted, even be ascribed freedom or agency), the star's evolution is pretty much determined by its initial conditions (its mass and the proximity of any other massive bodies): low mass stars like our own or lower being guaranteed billions of years of "quiet" life, while those an order or so greater mass being set on the course of rapid burn-out and possible supernova explosion. Now it may well be that complex life can only evolve on planets whose conditions are conducive to the sequestering of carbon/hydrocarbon, but if one can imagine humans evolving
in a world where fossil carbon was not available/readily accessible, our evolution might have followed the low-mass star trajectory (ie. as we were forced to live within the constraints of the day to day solar flux and recurring biomass.) As it is, humanity seems well down the supernova path, with the inevitable consequence (the question being whether some sort of white dwarf survives at the other end).
As for us as individuals, I'm not sure that we have any more freedom (as a collective) than the nuclei in the star have, ie. as to whether they will just "boringly" evolve from protons to helium nuclei and stop there, or instead are cooked into heavier elements. (As an aside, I'm not taking a position against supernovae: they do light up the cosmos in a way that other celestial bodies don't, perhaps in a similar way to that in which our consciousness in its current burst has illuminated swathes of a psychic realm which were not accessible to our pre-modern forbears; I would merely suggest that both are severely time-limited.)
James.
Our recent exchanges demonstrate the difficulties associated with the concept of no free will. Since almost everybody has a belief in free will, our societies and cultures have been built to incorporate that belief. This makes it difficult/impossible to consider societies and cultures without that free will.
We have learned many things we didn't know and this has altered our neuron pathways enough to change many ways we operate as individuals, cultures and societies. If the acceptance of no free will becomes widespread, it could change the way we view anti-social behaviour, should it occur in that environment.
I have no expectation that that situation will be reached so we'll see what happens with those individuals who do seem to have accepted that there is no free will.
Mike,
I don't think that societies and cultures were built to incorporate a belief in agency (or free will, as you say).
Those things were probably taken for granted while societies were being built.
Disbelief in it seems to be a relatively recent thing.
Anyway, I know I won't change your mind but thanks for the exchanges.