One major hangup in subscribing to a physics-based universe of material monism is that it appears to remove human agency as typically conceived in our culture. If atoms and their interactions are making everything happen, abiding by rules they (or we) cannot violate, is there any room left for human intervention or free will? As obvious as it is to us that we can weigh decisions and do things when/as we want, this disconnect alone is often enough to cause categorical rejection of materialism—retreating instead to the more comforting and self-promoting metaphysics of dualism. This is quite understandable: the notion that physics, not “soul” is the master of all “our” actions is an exceedingly challenging prospect for meat-brains to square—especially when modern language is constructed around first-person ownership of “ourselves” as subjects. Even if able to make intellectual sense of the matter, it’s still a tough pill for anyone to swallow. It sure doesn’t feel right, for what very little that’s actually worth.

Determinism also rubs people wrong in the context of history: suggesting that only one path was available to the present, precluding any potential counterfactual fantasies that are all-too-easy and entertaining to imagine (by leaving out almost the entire, actual universe in meat-brain models). It also might imply to some (erroneously) that humans played no role in shaping events, if there’s only one way said events could have played out.

Many react to determinism with a “then what’s the point, if everything is pre-determined” sort of response (another fallacious framing). Determinism seems to lay out railroad tracks to the future, leaving nothing for us to do. Why even get out of bed, then?

I’ll try to address these issues here. Perhaps I’ve said it all scattered across other posts and comments, but here it is all in one place, with a few new twists and perspectives. Bear in mind that I am presenting (advocating) the case against dualism and for materialist monism. Please forgive the fact that I do not couch every statement with “In the materialist monist view…,” the repeated absence of which may come across as laying claim to ultimate truth, which of course I cannot do.

The Physics Prescription

We should start with a clear picture of how the physics game is played vis-à-vis determinism. Given two particular particles in some relative position and velocity, the (equal and opposite) forces exerted on each other are fully prescribed. The rules are rigid, in this sense, allowing no known exception.

Naively, then, one might expect that perfect knowledge of an initial condition (among an arbitrarily-large set of particles) would allow the turning of a mathematical crank to dictate the future—like clockwork. This is not even close to being true, for a number of reasons:

1. Such computational power exceeds what could be built in the universe. Only the universe itself can “run” the calculation, as it’s racing to do this and every moment without fault.
2. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle—which itself stems from the interaction of necessary “touching” in any “measurement” (interaction)—precludes simultaneously knowing both position and velocity (momentum) to arbitrary precision, so that the actualized initial conditions cannot even in principle be ascertained.
3. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions means even twenty digits of initial precision (theoretically impossible to simultaneously hold for both position and velocity) quickly spirals into complete lack of knowledge. The air molecules in a room undergo something like 10³⁶ collisions per second, the bounce angles of each collision being super-sensitive to position and velocity (and orientation and even rotational/vibrational states of the molecules), so that after about a dozen sequential collisions you’d not even be able to predict which particles collide, let alone exactly how.
4. Quantum superposition states allow interactions to follow multiple possible branchings, each having their own probability. We might be able to exactly specify the probabilities, but cannot predict which branch will actually be taken.

Nonetheless, all these factors play by their own rules and are not open to interference from some agent (e.g., soul) “external” to the physical process: no interventions or overrides. Please don’t tell me that you know how. What it means is that the actual future path is not predictable, even under the “determinism” of physics. Determinism does not mean rigid, mechanical, predictable clockwork in complex systems. That said, no opportunity to choose the actual, unpredictable path obtains. The universe does what it does, and we get to be participant–spectators.

Unpredictable

The fact that strict obeyance of physics—with zero opportunity to insert any override or intervention—is not predictable means that one of the key reactions against determinism amounts to a misunderstanding. Since the future is unknown, the “train tracks” one imagines as “already” laid down do not exist yet. The “tracks,” such as they are, are laid down in real time attosecond by attosecond. Who knows what twists they have in store? Even the universe doesn’t know. The only way to find out is to step forward in time, which is another action we have no choice but to take—whether living or not. The future is open-ended: not written yet. Determinism does not mean pre-determined.

I have found the Game of Life to be highly instructive in this regard. The rule set and space are far simpler than the physics stage upon which we interact, yet the process immediately veers into unpredictable territory even starting from a rather simple initial setup. It’s perfectly deterministic—far more so than the actual universe, in fact, due to exact/perfect knowledge and computability—but the only way to “predict” what it will do is to actually run it. The physics/materialist view of the universe is identical in this regard. Except in the case of the universe, the only “computer” powerful enough to run it is the universe itself.

Agency

How might we square determinism with our obvious and undeniable agency to proactively do things and affect change in the world? It seems impossible, and I won’t pretend it’s easy (many hit a brick wall when “trying”). As pointed out many times in this series, the universe doesn’t always pick the path that’s easiest for us to conceptualize, and there’s no guarantee that our meat brains are even capable of the feat. Why on Earth would we let our own cognitive limitations (and the way things feel) dictate what we are willing to entertain as the way of the world?

The article of faith for the materialist, if you will, is that neither humans nor any other assembly of matter (living or not) have any sort of override to intervene in the way the electrons and their friends interact. They only answer to one boss: physics. To insert capability outside this realm of material interaction (while believing matter to be real) is to be a dualist.

What is agency? Thinking in words (I know: terrible idea), agency is something possessed by an agent—able to affect something in the real world: an agent of change. But that’s really everything. Every particle in the universe is interactive and thus has a role in changing the experiences of all the other particles to some degree. A rock is an agent because it can tumble down a hill and cause damage. Or even sitting still it can form the perfect shelter for a pica and through such partnership change the course of the hillside. A hurricane is an agent of great change. A speed bump has agency to make you slow down. Stairs and walls and doors shepherd your movements—as does all the mass within Earth via gravity. Microbes are agents, as are humans—and they interact with each other! Everything is an agent, because everything is inseparably interactive.

But what about agency in the sense we usually mean: expressing some intentionality; executing a plan? Don’t these behaviors indicate that determinism does not apply, if we can plot our own course?

Turtle Stack

Maybe this will help. We want to do something—maybe something big like have a child, buy a house, or eat another potato chip. So we do it (or don’t). Agency. Free Will. Seems obvious, right? Isn’t it insane to challenge something so superficially evident? At the small scale, a microbe might want to eat, reproduce, eliminate waste, or evade danger, so they do. Pretty amazing (I agree).

But what controls the “want,” or the urge? If you do try to influence a desire at that level, you have to want to control the urge. Where does that want come from? You can see that it’s turtles all the way down, right?

Tough Choices

Let’s try an “easy” example. Walking alone at night, you happen upon a masked and armed aggressor holding the bloody wallet of a victim dying at his feet. He holds a knife to your throat demanding all your cash. You have $32, and decide that amount of money is not worth challenging someone who appears to be quite prepared to kill you. You want to live, but a seemingly infinite menu of other decisions are open to you: run, fight, joke, pretend you’re deaf and keep walking, faint, act insane, clip your fingernails, break into song. How much actual choice do you have? It might not be as much as we imagine. The action that is ultimately taken is likely to be calculated (correctly, you hope) to maximize your overall lot in life.

This is because animals lacking self-preservation reactions don’t remain an animal species for very long. Evolution hones us into beings who—on average—make adaptively beneficial decisions. It won’t work 100% of the time: something in the process might go haywire in a particular individual—it happens. But generally it works. Of course, among humans at least, there will (predictably) be contrarians out to prove a point (satisfying some other social compulsion they are powerless to resist). I’m not aware of anyone cutting off both arms to prove they have free will, but even if they did it would be easy enough to identify social forces or past trauma at play making such action seem like the optimal option under the circumstances. Such a demonstration would represent quite a loss for little or no gain. No demonstration can prove free will exists and drive materialist monism to the grave; thus I do not recommend going to futile extremes.

Or ask yourself how many times you’ve had ample opportunity (freedom) to execute a quick action that would immediately cause great damage to—or terminate—your life, yet you refrain…every time. Maybe it’s a quick lurch off a dangerous height or a sudden veer into oncoming traffic or a swerve off a bridge. Such opportunities easily number in the many thousands (how many cars have you passed in your life going the opposite direction a mere car width apart?). Granted, a believer in free will has no great difficulty accounting for these behaviors, but the recognition of overwhelming restraint touches on something fundamental: “our minds” are not really, truthfully, honestly in control of fundamental urges or inhibitions. Even imagined exceptions are not provably so, because life is complicated.

Microbial Choice

It helps me to think on the microbial scale, which is still too hopelessly complex to have any chance of connecting all the dots from first principles to behavior, but has far fewer layers and moving parts than we do. The microbe design that runs from food and flies toward danger is suppressed by Darwinian forces. In their comparable contexts/analogs, they don’t throw themselves off cliffs or twitch into oncoming traffic either.

Let’s take a bunch of genetically-diverse amoebas and place a slowly-diffusing novel toxin to the north of them. Maybe none of them pay any heed to the unfamiliar signal (or lack detection capability) and most die. The lucky ones who randomly escaped to the south are no less vulnerable to the threat, should it arise again in the future. If they are attracted to the toxin for whatever reason (maybe it smells delicious), then they die and don’t pass on genes. If, by random fluke, some fraction are repelled (in the way that some humans dislike cilantro), then the next generation will inherit this aversion while those who are not repelled more likely perish. A million years later, an amoeba detects this toxin and strongly wants to get away—so it does. Is it free will? What created the want? Who knows, at the molecular level? But some internal protein or sensor or whatever was configured to produce a favorable reaction. Initially it was essentially random, but proved to be useful and now has every appearance of smarts or learning.

By its very survival, Life builds up thousands of such adaptive reactions. For every reasonably likely scenario, there’s an app (gene/protein) for that. The wants come from experience (selection), and mostly not those of the individual in question, but experiences all along their ancestral line. The materialist view is that humans, while substantially more complex than microbes, are not ontologically different: applying a sophisticated set of chemical and neural processes in response to (cooperation with) the larger material environment to figure out the best course of action—often in hopelessly complex social situations to which there is no “right” answer.

One window I utilize is described in the rivulets post, where a (more obviously) purely mechanical system appears to develop decisions that have adaptive benefit in an “ecological” context and would seem to be “smart.” The complexity of living systems is far greater, but the same principles operate: “good” decision tendencies are rewarded with survival, and bad ones are pruned away. This persistent bias in the context of self-replication capability and billions of generations is all it takes to shape critters stupendously arranged to make amazingly-astute decisions in contexts they (their lineages) have had to confront over the long haul. Of course evolution would work that way: how could it fail to?

Design Evolution

While on the subject of more-obviously mechanical systems, let’s detour into adaptive evolution in modernity’s “artificial” (non-ecological) space, wherein our constructions appear to execute agency or make choices. This exercise is not perfect, but let’s try on a few examples as potentially-helpful analogs on more familiar turf (being the ecological ignoramuses that we are).

A life vest “knows” which way is up after a plunge into turbulent water, even if the wearer of the vest is completely disoriented. The vest will execute the correct “decision” to bring its charge to the surface (perhaps having a vested interest?). A life vest made of lead consistently makes the “wrong” decision (though still not “confused”), and doesn’t compete very well in the market.

A skyscraper made of marshmallows isn’t a thing, because it can’t be. Skyscrapers “choose” to be made of materials that skyscrapers can be made of. The design engineer is heavily constrained by physics, and can’t select materials or dimensions freely or arbitrarily. The kid’s sketch on the refrigerator isn’t going to cut it. Surviving skyscrapers made good “decisions” about their properties, contributing to many universal similarities among the set.

Boats of arbitrary design don’t exist. Boats that sink aren’t boats. Boats that tip too easily don’t get replicated. If a team of (monkey) engineers made random modest tweaks to a successful boat design and then continued to replicate/modify only those that stood the test of time when exposed to real and varied conditions, their seemingly random tweaks can serve to improve the “decision” of how a boat reacts to realistic conditions (waves, wind, tide rips, collisions, etc.). The boats may well develop subtle features of the hull shape that are not entirely understood by the designers, but appear to confer benefit. The Wright brothers, after all, did not possess a full comprehension of the theory of flight, but experimented and let the universe guide them as to what worked, aerodynamically.

While these examples are in the domain of technology, similar principles apply to living beings in the grip of replication, mutation, and selection. Bees don’t need to understand flight, either, in cognitive terms. But something in the bee’s body surely does understand: there are other ways of knowing. A ciliate does not need to understand Stokes drag to have mastered techniques for speedy propulsion in the viscous regime. Likewise, we (nor any other animal) needs to understand the mechanisms underlying our decision process, but that doesn’t mean that mechanisms are not the foundation.

Mysterious Drive

Note that when faced with a difficult decision (or even a fairly inconsequential one), you yourself don’t know what you’re going to decide. You’re a spectator, not in command. Yes, you have expensive front row seats (thanks, prefrontal cortex!), and can follow the progress of ins and outs, whithertos and whyfors, pros and cons, impulses, rationalizations, etc. But that’s a brain/body doing its thing: batting around options and trying to arrive at what the overall organism hopes to be a least-damaging result (then, one hopes, learning from the experience). Decisions are made by neural firings, action potentials, electrons jerked this way and that (in partnership with the entire material setting)—according to a layout shaped by a billion-year-plus heritage of experience as well as our own personal experiences and those of folks we have come to learn from (directly or not). Many research efforts confirm that choices are made sometimes many seconds before we become consciously aware of the outcome, after which we lie to ourselves that we consciously selected the chosen path. Spectators. Physics is the engine, and we don’t have a single override lever to stop the electrons from doing what they must in an arrangement shaped by the near and distant past.

When someone is driven, or compelled, or forced to do something, or can’t help themselves, what’s going on there? Compulsions or addictions or narcotic influences expose situations in which “we” (alleged dualistic minds) do not appear to be driving. Scads of movies and TV shows place a “normal” person in extenuating circumstances, which spirals into extreme actions (often illegal or morally dubious) but all to point out that the situation commands responses that you’d never think to be “in character,” yet in such a way that the viewer might realize they would plausibly have done the same. None of this proves anything, but interpretations become pretty straightforward in a world where living beings are engaged in interactive/reactive performance roles rather than conducting the symphony.

Just because it feels like we’re in control doesn’t mean very much: of course it would come off that way when witnessing the consequences of our actions. Yes: we (our corporeal selves) participate in a dynamic world in which consequences emerge connected to actions of our bodies—those actions being influenced by processes within our bodies that are themselves inseparably connected to processes in the wider world. But the same ugly sentence can be applied through microbes to hurricanes to atoms without once tripping over an ontological gap. Selective feedback of evolution can elaborate the dynamic coupling to extraordinary degrees.

Can we React?

When faced with any situation, we have no choice but to react. Even if the decision is to do nothing, that is itself a reaction that produces its own set of consequences. So, yes, we must always react. It can’t be stopped. But an electron also reacts (dutifully) to every stimulus to which it is subjected. A rock reacts to cold by conducting heat outward, to rain by absorbing water into cracks, to a disturbance by tumbling downhill. Reactions of sophisticated beings will be correspondingly sophisticated and oftentimes baffling, but effectively the result of cascading reactions from quarks and electrons on up—too difficult for meat-brains to track.

It’s as pointless to execute the “what’s the point if determinism holds” plan as it is not to, in some sense. Whichever way it goes, the combination of stimuli you received, life history, cultural norms, unique genetic makeup, species-level social programming, and experiences/consequences all down the line of evolutionary heritage shape “your” reaction. Some people react to the prospect of determinism by folding arms in philosophical protest, but they were always going to be that way: they can’t help it. The universe trucks along regardless.

Is the Future Set?

People in modernity (dualists, mostly) don’t like determinism because the idea that things went the only way they could have gone according to physics suggests that people are powerless to affect change. While it still might gall in a historical sense, we can all at least agree that what’s done is done: we have one past that went the way it did. Even so, it would seem that if we had no control over the past, we have no power to change the future, and that’s what I believe really chafes. But this seems to be an absurd conclusion, because guess what: just as people—and rocks and rivers and earthquakes—were agents (played roles) in shaping the past, people absolutely have the ability to change the future—as does an inbound asteroid, a hurricane, a good berry season, a mild winter, a chance encounter, or a particularly well-placed electron. The impossible trick is to somehow manage to have zero influence on the future! That’s yet another thing you simply do not have the freedom to choose!

How we react to circumstances does matter. If we react to the prospect of a sixth mass extinction with a shrug, well, then, we get what evolution doles out. If we come to recognize that modernity poses an enormous threat to what we hold most dear, then maybe we’ll be compelled to do something about it and melt away from modernity. Even in the view that we are hopelessly-complex stimulus–response “machines,” the stimulus matters. Attention to the stimulus matters. Who cares if “you” are not the grand conductor of your body’s actions, and it’s physics instead? Is it a point of pride (for a dualist)? Why not be content to play a part that assesses peril and responds accordingly, in keeping with our inherited sense for survival? You don’t have to buy the illusion of free will to react and change the world. In fact, just try stopping yourself from reaction! Because even that is a reaction, beyond “your” actual control.

A Challenge

For those allergic to any whiff of determinism in governing our lives, I ask a number of questions: How can you know enough to rule it out? How familiar are you with the mountains of empirical evidence (physics) lacking known exception? Or have you decided that experimental physics results are irrelevant and not worth your acquaintance? If so, on what grounds? Is the material universe irrelevant in the context of humans (dualist or idealist stance)? Do your positions amount to more than assertions or opinions (what evidential support)? Are you able to prove that humans and other beings do not strictly follow physics (huge news!…against countless examples where we very clearly do)? Is the sheer challenge of connecting the dots from first principles to complex experience sufficient basis for rejecting even the possibility that this is actually how the world works, and if so, on what sort of authority?

I would suggest that the very fact that none of us are smart enough to connect all the dots is the best reason to adopt a humble attitude and allow (as if possessing authority on the matter) that the lives we live are playing out on a stage of material interaction using standard physics. “It’s too hard to grasp” is no basis for declaring it impossible or even unlikely. Nobody possesses sufficient credentials to make such a claim, although that never stops some people. Given the huge empirical foundation at hand, and nothing more than wishful speculation on the other side, it seems that material monism is the safest default, because we certainly can’t credibly proclaim interacting matter to be incapable of producing the world we experience.

Given our severe limitations in this arena, the least arrogant approach is to graciously take what the universe gives us, and not demand (or fabricate) end-to-end understanding that in all likelihood exceeds our capacity—since we were evolved for other sorts of competencies. As pointed out at the start of the series, materialism need not deprive the universe of its splendor, and in fact aligns quite well with animism in a number of ways. We could do much worse: like a culture of dualism. And that’s been exactly the problem. Maybe it’s time to try something different.

Are You a Dualist?

The first post in this series started with a brief quiz to assess standing as materialist, dualist, or idealist. Some comments in the series have tried to label me as a dualist without apparently even understanding what it means (other than being unsavory). The key: mind the ontological gap!

Having gone through ten posts, it should now be clearer that if you believe matter/physics is real, but find yourself:

1. objecting to lack of an ontological gap somewhere between electrons, geology, weather, machines, spores, microbes, fungi, plants, and animals (e.g., humans);
2. believing consciousness (mind) to be something matter/interactions are incapable of producing (and in fact lacking physical properties);
3. denigrating “mere” matter as being inferior to humans;
4. creating a sharp (ontological) dividing line between animate and inanimate beings;
5. subscribing to first-person subject/object and inner/outer demarcations;
6. rejecting the idea of no free will (determinism);
7. casting materialism as reductionist;
8. or believing the universe to be an expression of ineffable consciousness (e.g., self awareness as its driving force)…

…then you’re probably sitting on at least some residual dualist metaphysical core, like the majority of people in our culture (thus not the least surprising or damning). Depending on your comfort level with this diagnosis, you might either have it checked out or at least own the label.

Marathon Complete

Whew. We made it to the end of this long series. At over 30,000 words, it’s almost book-length. My apologies for droning on so long, and probably being repetitive to a fault. A smarter individual might have distilled the content to something much smaller, but then maybe it would be harder to follow. Anyway, my atoms made me do it the way I did it, so there!

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