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Introduction

Image courtesy of "Ode to the Great Blue Heron", Scientific American Blog Network

Why Blue Heron?

Throughout history, from ancient Egypt to the first nations of North America, the heron has been seen as a symbol of independence, creativity, wisdom, resourcefulness, freedom, and even as a bringer of light and knowledge. This blog site aspires, however imperfectly, to these values. Moreover, herons are common along the river estuaries and shorelines of the Canadian Maritime Provinces where I grew up and live today, and I find them inspiring.

This website is dedicated to the theory and practice of free will. Of course human beings do not have absolute free will. To accomplish that, one would have to be omniscient  and omnipotent, and that is the definition of an absolute god. We possess free will only to a degree, and that degree varies with the individual and the circumstances. I am defining free will as the ability of conscious mind to be an original causal agent to varying  degrees. The question is:  can mind (as opposed to predetermined unconscious or subconscious brain activity) construct abstract models of reality and then influence real events so as to steer them in the direction of a realization of that model? To put it in simpler terms, can we make a plan, and then, through conscious choice, impose that plan on reality? Most people's casual response would be: of course we can! Sometimes we seem to have more success  than other times, but if we could never do that, we would simply be automatons, zombies, puppets of some other directive force! However, there are serious arguments dating way back into ancient Greek philosophy, and now bolstered by psychological and scientific theories, for "hard determinism". This blog will attempt to rebut those arguments.

Free will is fundamental to moral responsibility, artistic creativity, good empirical science, meaningful philosophy, and everything that mankind holds dear. Hard determinism clearly must be false, but how can we prove that? 

You will find on this blog articles and posts on this subject, as well as some posts on related subjects of interest about which I have been inspired to set down opinions. There also may be articles by other commentators published by invitation.

If you would like to comment on any of the posts, please send comments to my email address:  seaand2016@gmail.com ,  and I will treat them as "letters to the editor". If they seem to me to make a valuable contribution to the argument, or pose a question that needs answering, I may include them in an appropriate post, but only with your permission.

Moreover, if you read an  entry and find it interesting, please email me to simply say so. Don't feel that you have to make a comment.  It is nice to know that someone is reading this!

Below are some of the basic ideas developed in my articles and books.  They are briefly and boldly stated, and I hope they whet your appetite if you are interested in the free will controversy.

  • Lee Smolin, in Time Reborn (2013), uses an acronym he picked up from a professor when he was an undergraduate: RWOT for "real world out there". I like it because it underlines a distinction between the RWOT and something "in here". I give you another acronym for what is "in here": ACIM, for "abstract concept in mind".
  • Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, In The Grand Design (2010), speak of "model dependent realism". Our brains, they remind us, "interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be many ways in which one could model the same physical situation."
  • Metaphors and models have something in common. Both are useful because some, or even many of their characteristics parallel reality in a way which produces or enhances human understanding. If, using a metaphorical expression, I say that "Buddy is a pig", I mean only that he is messy. All other characteristics of pigs may be irrelevant, and I do not mean my metaphor to be taken literally. I do not really think that Buddy hides a curly tail under his trousers! When Hawking and Mlodinow say that "we tend to attribute to [models] the quality of reality or absolute truth", they are thinking primarily of scientists, and are saying that scientists tend to take models literally. However, models and metaphors are ACIMS, and must always be differentiated from the RWOT if we are to understand the universe and our relation to it.
  • I give you a new law: ACIMs are never the direct equivalents of the RWOT. They are always simplifications or reductions of the RWOT when they relate to something real at all, and their relationship to the RWOT is therefore always somewhat metaphorical at best. Good scientific models based on empirical evidence may be highly detailed and largely parallel to reality. That is how civilization progresses, and how we come to be flying about in airplanes and chatting on cell phones. But other models may be largely imaginary, and based more on psychological needs and wishful thinking, like the model of the perfect monarch (or the perfect Prime Minister).
  • Lee Smolin brings to our attention (Time Reborn, 17)  that over two millennia ago Ptolemy produced a model of a geocentric universe (one with Earth at its center) which accounted for the apparent retrograde motion of the planets in the night sky. The planets were mounted on revolving disks which in turn were mounted on revolving crystal spheres which surrounded Earth (crystal to account for why we could see through them to the next outer sphere). As you can see, the model was clearly wrong, but in fact, it did explain the apparent motion of the planets so accurately that it could predict the location of any planet at any time in the future. Because of its predictive capabilities (a key proof of the "truth" of a scientific theory, by the way), it was accepted as absolute truth for many centuries. Of course it did also reinforce the religious conviction that we are God's pet creation, and thus sprung as much from psychological needs and wishful thinking as from empirical observation. It worked because one aspect of the model (the view of the planets from Earth) paralleled reality.
  • I give you a new term: Ptolemaic Metaphor -- a model capable of predicting real events even though its assumptions about causal structure are false.
  • Time is an ACIM arising from the intelligent observation of motion and change in the RWOT. Clocks do not measure time because there is no real time to measure; they merely codify relative motion.
  • Space is an ACIM arising from the intelligent observation of separation in the RWOT, expressed as relative distance --  in cosmic terms, as light years.
  • All Einstein has to work with in the RWOT is motion and change on the one hand, separation and distance on the other. Therefore "spacetime" is a misnomer, and the spacetime continuum must be a Ptolemaic metaphor. You can't make a new reality out of two abstract ideas. What you make is a new abstract idea.
  • Mathematics is a modeling system which exists entirely as ACIMs. It is able to model the universe so intricately that we have come to assume that it is the essence of reality. Its assumptions are not false in the sense that Ptolemy's spheres were false, but they are purely symbolic. It assumes that numbers are real, but in reality there are only things that can be so grouped. It assumes that a point is of no dimension (you don't have to add or subtract anything for the width of the point when measuring from one point to another), but in reality where there are no measurable qualities, there is nothing. It assumes that positives and negatives are real, but in reality there are only forces of attraction and repulsion.
  • Logic is akin to a computer program which provides us with a method for dealing with information. But like a computer program, it has nothing to say about the data used as the starting points. Philosophers call these starting points "a priori" assumptions. There is only one way to ascertain the probable accuracy of an a priori assumption (never the absolute truth of it -- that Ptolemy proved is never assured, despite predictive powers),  which is the scientific method. Obviously, the correspondence of an a priori assumption to reality cannot be checked by logic, as that is a circular process and leads back to the fallibility of a priori assumptions.
  • The function of philosophy, therefore, should be to teach us how to think effectively with the best possible empirical data. When it attempts to discover truth by logic alone, at best it may produce Ptolemaic metaphors.
  • The function of science is to apply the scientific method to the testing of scientific theory. When it attempts to discover truth by mathematics alone, at best it may produce Ptolemaic metaphors.
  • Nevertheless, Ptolemaic metaphors may be very useful because of their predictive capabilities, even if they are not "true". We must always guard against taking them literally.
  • Philosophical hard determinism is based on logic which proceeds from false a priori assumptions because it does not properly understand the non-linear dynamics of causation. Chaos and complexity science has taught us that complex emergent systems are more than the sum of their parts. Conscious mind is a complex emergent system. It is no longer necessary for us to appeal to soul, or an experiential essence within the physical universe (panpsychism) to account for mind.
  • Block universe "scientific" hard determinism, which arises from Einstein's relativity theories, is dead wrong (it claims that Buddy really hides a curly tail under his trousers), and arises from taking literally Einstein's Ptolemaic metaphor of the spacetime continuum. Einstein himself understood the principle of model dependent realism, and wrote to the mathematician Felix Klein in 1917:

               "The day may come when this way of conceiving [referring to his theory of gravity]   will  have to give way to another which differs from it fundamentally, for reasons that  today we cannot even imagine."

  I wonder if Ptolemy ever said that to a friend!

  There may come a time when what we now think we know about the universe will seem as primitive and mistaken as we now consider Ptolemy's geocentric system to be.  To draw the conclusion from Einstein's model that block universe hard determinism is a simple fact of physics is not only deluded, but arrogant. We need a little more humility about what we think we know, and a lot more understanding of the principle of model dependent realism.

 Let us take flight, then, and bring light to these proposals from every possible perspective.                         

                     Image courtesy of Ardea Herodias --  Corel Discovery Center