About Me and My Concern for Free Will

My name is Dr. Andrew T. Seaman, though you may call me Andy, as does everyone else who knows me. I retired as Professor Emeritus from Saint Mary's University in Halifax Nova Scotia some time ago, which has given me time to pursue a question which has "haunted" me ever since I encountered it in my undergraduate days as a double major in English and Philosophy at Mount Allison University. Since then I completed a Masters Degree at Dalhousie University and a Ph.D. at University College, Dublin, Ireland, and taught for over 40 years. While at SMU I filled several quite different roles as well as professor of English: President of the Faculty Union, Director of the Division of Engineering, Acting Vice President Academic and Research, among others.

I had cudgeled my brains over the problem of "Free Will" for many years when one day I picked up M.M.Waldrop's book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos from a table of remaindered books in a bookstore. Thumbing through it I got hooked immediately, paid $5 for it, and my life was changed. It began for me a fascinating journey through the books of James Glieck, Stuart Kauffman, Richard Dawkins, James Lovelock, Lee Smolin and many others. That journey has culminated in the conviction that there is a sound alternative to the philosophical logic and old science of "hard determinism" in what Lee Smolin calls "the relational revolution" (Time Reborn xxix). I believe it is firmly based in the new science of chaos and complexity, which describes an emergent and evolutionary universe diametrically opposed to "the mind forged manacles" (William Blake, "London") of hard determinist theory. While still actively teaching, I published a couple of articles on the importance of Chaos and Complexity Science for the Arts, and after I retired I wrote and self-published a book aimed at defending free will and developing a humanist philosophy of  life.  I called it The Grand March of the Intellect after a phrase from one of the letters of the Romantic poet John Keats --  perhaps too grand a title, but I still like it. However, the argument for free will that it presented was based largely on chaos and complexity, and did not confront directly the block universe theory which purports to arise  from the relativity theories of Albert Einstein. 

Later it became clear to me that if I were to properly defend free will, the most serious challenge comes from this branch of science. The philosophical arguments are not so hard to deal with, as they are based purely in a logic the limits of which are not difficult to see, and as Hawking and Mlodinow boldly state in The Grand Design, philosophy has not kept up with science. But a scientific theory of hard determinism based on Einstein's theories of relativity was rather daunting, and besides that, psychologists such as Daniel Wegner have asserted that conscious will is an illusion, basing their opinions on psychological experiments that seem to indicate that motor action precedes apparent conscious choice. And so I began work on The Abstraction Secret: Why Hard Determinism and the Block Universe are Wrong, and Free Will is Right. This book was published on Blurb for a few years, but has now been rewritten as The Block Universe Delusion, in view of further insights.  You will find abstracts of both it and The Grand March of the Intellect on a separate page titled My Books.

I think of myself as a modern humanist, and you will find a discussion of this in The Grand March (271-274). We possess a level of consciousness which implies a level of responsibility for our actions. We are imperfect to be sure, but that is not our fault and we are not therefore sinful. We achieve higher levels of "free will" through conscious understanding and education. Such achievement is the fundamental and only possible purpose of human life (other than to simply live it to the full), and should be the ultimate goal of social organization.   I hope this blog will contribute to that purpose in some small way, if only by stimulating controversy.