Does God Exist?: Hendricks vs Myers

 

Does God exist? Perry Hendricks & I argue about it (freethoughtblogs.com)

I was interested to do a first parse of the above debate on God's existance with theist Perry Hendricks and evangelical atheist PZ Myers.  If time permits, I might do a more detailed commentary on this video but here are some initial comments.

Much of Perry Hendricks' argument was based on the Bayesian type reasoning which uses priors like the existence of cosmic design, organization, biological structures and human moral instincts as evidence for God. These arguments have a generic form which employs Bayes theorem to derive a high probability of God's existence. I considered an example of this class of argument here: Bayes and God. He also used the cosmological argument; Viz: Because the natural world is shot through with contingency and cannot be the seat of Aseity or the realm of explanatory completeness, Aseity must exist beyond the material world and must be the ultimate cause of the hard core of cosmic contingency. Hendricks is a bright guy and is a credit to the faith.

PZ Myers dismissed all that without further ado as just philosophy and therefore not worth further consideration. PZ made it quite clear he is looking for a God he can test like he can test a mechanical system such as a chemical reaction: i.e. Press button A and you get output B. He's looking for a God of quick tricks and the example he gave is this: Can God tell me what I've got in my pocket? If God can't rise to that simple test, then it is unlikely there is a God, although to be fair PZ admitted that no one can answer the question "Is there a God?" either way with absolute certainty. I'd agree there is no human certainty and I have some sympathy with atheists who feel that a world like ours can't be a result of a personal, loving and infinitely wise Creator; just think of Ken Ham, Alex Jones, Margorie Taylor-Green, Donald Trump & QAnon promoter Trey Smith and you've got some evidence for atheism.  But as for providing some tricks for PZ, you never know: After all God is a God of grace! What PZ didn't seem to twig is that underneath it his reasoning was Bayesian! How ironic! The further irony is that those Christians who say they know God exists because they have God in their hearts, are also using Bayes without knowing it!

The Self Referencing Problem

 

In 1993, in response to an article by Richard Dawkins in the New Statesman (Dec 1992) I wrote this essay:

Quantum Non-Linearity: HOW TO KNOW YOU KNOW YOU KNOW IT (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

This essay was all about the unstable self-reference implicit in Dawkins' article. However, that Dawkins was unaware of this conceptual instability was actually his "salvation"; the instability is only likely to occur if one spots and ponders the conundrum: People like Dawkins who implicitly assume there is such a thing as an unambiguous truth accessible via observation and rationality immunize themselves against the ravages caused by the unstable conceptual swings of contradictory self-reference (Self affirming self-reference is also immune). However, there are those out there who are not so fortunate and start to lose their grasp on the concept of Truth and consequently lose touch with reality itself as unstable self-reference kicks in. The societal confusion that this can cause gives opportunity for self-assured demagogues to exploit the situation by becoming an anchor point in a troubled sea of existential crises; in the face of this confusion demagogues from both the left and right oversimplify the struggle with a polarized "us vs. them others" model.  Today "them others" may be referred to by the right-wing as "The Woke". But in 1993 "woke" was not a vogue term and so I itemized the philosophies I was targeting, and they were...

THE NARROW CONFINES of extreme forms of reductionist materialism, dialectical materialism, existentialism, relativism and subjective idealism may be dogmatic about what can be....

(I'd also want to add any philosophy which portrays truth purely as a social construction and therefore relative to a particular society) These philosophies have an embedded unstable-self-reference which ultimately leads to self-contradiction and the thrashings of unstable conceptual feedback. The authoritarian far-right are exploiting the inherent social instabilities that these notions promote by becoming the great simplifiers of social reality as they lump everything they detest under the heading of "woke". In some quarters this counter-reaction has become so extreme that even someone like myself would be classified as "woke" simply because I don't side with the extremes of what I, in a tit-for-tat response, call "The Unwoke".  These extremists are joining the great historical simplifiers and demagogues of the past; their simplification of issues is one feature which makes them popular. But the Old Testaments provides warnings about the kind of popularism which seeks autocratic champions to provide an anchor during those societal breakdowns where every person is a law unto themselves (Judges 21:25):  This situation paves the way for the rule of charlatans who promise the earth but in return demand unconditional loyalty to their "highness". (See 1 Samuel 8:7-18). Adoring crowds are a magnet for the narcissistic. 

What triggered this current post of mine was the following post by IDist William Dembski on the website Evolution News. This post by Dembski also mentions the unstable self-referencing tendency of what he calls Scientific Materialism, but I would call exclusive secularism: 

How Scientific Materialism Begot Woke Ideology | Evolution News

Like Dembski I'm in the ironic position of siding with people like Richard Dawkins and Laurence Krauss, people who still firmly hold on to a belief in truth and rationality. So, 30 years after my essay I find Dembski mentioning something I wrote about in 1993. In fact, it was 20 years on from 1993 when Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga was also talking about the same subject. 

Relevant Links:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Evolution, Unstable Conceptual Feedback & Nihilism (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Plantinga Catches up on Unstable Self Reference. (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Meaningless Conflict (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

I'm Feeling Lucky

The above Google search, "Reeves Probability" + "I'm feeling lucky", used to work in favour of the paper I wrote on probability and then after a while it stopped working. But I seem to have "struck lucky" again and the "I'm feeling lucky" search now comes up with this:

T. V. Reeves, A theory of probability - PhilPapers

It's rather neat that "I'm feeling lucky" should come up with a paper on chance and probability!

With the advent of statistical and quantum mechanics, probability and chance are ubiquitous in physics. Also, in common speech we hear about events being "just chance", or "just luck" or "random"; events are often written off as insignificant and meaningless on the basis of these emotive labels.  

But "chance", "luck" and "random" cannot be used coherently unless you know what you mean by these terms. So, with this in mind in the 1980s off I went and after long investigation & thought I wrote a paper on probability and also a small book on randomness with the purpose of probing the meanings of these often glibly used terms.  The above link returns the probability paper. The link to my indy-book on randomness is here:

projectZv01b.pdf - Google Drive

Does this Interview Solve the Human Predicament? Part III

Spoiler Alert: "No"

The extravagance of the WTM claims is a concern in itself

(For Parts 1 & II see here and here)

Some people have called it a "cult" and I can hardly blame them: The World Transformation Movement, as I pointed out in the previous parts of this series, laud their movement with language borrowed from religion. Moreover, as I said in Part I "Griffith has received such enthusiastic accolades from his followers that it's almost as if he is some kind of religious guru ushering in another plan of salvation, decisively addressing the human predicament". Griffith claims to base his plan of salvation on science and would therefore deny he's talking religion. However, I can understand a certain wariness about this movement; one might expect a truly scientific community to be a little more cautious, tentative, restrained and self-critical (and so should Christianity in my opinion!). The whole thing has shades of scientology, but that could be unfair as Jeremy Griffiths, as a personality, gives me good vibes. Just how cultish or otherwise the WTM are would eventually become apparent in how they deal with dissent and criticism.

Anyway, continuing with my analysis of the interview that saves the world (sic)...

***

CRAIG CONWAY: ……that we have brutally competitive, survival-of-the-fittest instincts, which we are always having to try to restrain or civilise or try to control as best we can; I mean that’s what I was taught in school

JEREMY GRIFFITH: Yes, that’s what we were taught, but let’s think about this—and what I’m going to say now is very important, so I hope everyone’s listening closely. Surely this idea that we have savage competitive and aggressive, must-reproduceour-genes instincts cannot be the real reason for our species’ competitive and aggressive behaviour because, after all, words used to describe our human behaviour such as egocentric, arrogant, inspired, depressed, deluded, pessimistic, optimistic, artificial, hateful, cynical, mean, sadistic, immoral, brilliant, guilt-ridden, evil, psychotic, neurotic and alienated, all recognise the involvement of OUR species’ fully conscious thinking mind. They demonstrate that there is a psychological dimension to our behaviour; that we don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a conscious-mindbased, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION

MY COMMENT: As I said in Part II, I'm probably too old to have been taught in school that the “selfish gene's” need to reproduce is the origin of our savage, competitive and aggressive motives. In fact, the history of human emergence is irrelevant to the real hard-wired problem with human behaviour: Whatever the history of the human race is, whether it be the fundamentalist’s 6000 year old creation, or the North American IDist’s God of evolutionary patching, or bog-standard evolution or something else altogether, the challenges of human behaviour trace back to each person being a quasi-isolated perspective of first-person-consciousness. Viz: My personal private experience of consciousness is vivid and all but overwhelming, whereas the experiences of other people have to be inferred rather than directly felt. Therefore, when faced with a conflict of interest in our world of zero-sum games, a conflict which entails a choice of either choosing in favour of oneself or other selves, then unless I’m exceptionally selfless (which unfortunately isn’t true in my case) I’m likely to choose in favour of self. That's because I feel my feelings but not the feelings of others. OK, sometimes the moral imperative to put others first does win through, but unfortunately not always. I’m a sinner, so help me God!

In conclusion, then, the WTM’s claim that the problematic human condition traces back to a troubled psychological complex which seeks an excuse in the teaching that genetic opportunism drives humanity’s competitive behaviour is the wrong diagnosis: One may know nothing about genetic opportunism and yet one is still troubled by the choices one has to make in the face of the fundamental fault line between the consciousness of self and the consciousness of all those others. Whatever the history of the emergence of our strong sense of personal existence and individual identity, it is a fact that the consciousness of our individual identity is felt more vividly than the conscious identity of other humans; therein lies the rub. The challenge to human behavior is to weigh the inferred experiences of others as strongly as we weigh our direct experiences.  This challenge is far deeper than fixing a psychosis.

It is a trivial truism to say that there is a psychological dimension to our behavior; of course there is, by definition: Our behavior, especially in the social sphere where "love-thy-neighbour" choices are demanded, is largely a product of our neural make-up and the information that make-up stores. But yes, we are psychologically troubled because I know what is right and yet that strong sense of first-person-consciousness means that…. 

14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Romans 7:14-20)

That sums up my experience of the power of the self.

 ***

 

JEREMY: What’s more, we humans have cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts, the voice or expression of which we call our conscience—which is the complete opposite of competitive, selfish and aggressive instincts. As Charles Darwin said, ‘The moral sense… affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871, ch.4). Of course, to have acquired these cooperative, selfless and loving moral instincts our distant ape ancestors must have lived cooperatively, selflessly and lovingly, otherwise how else could we have acquired them? Our ape ancestors can’t have been brutal, clubwielding, competitive and aggressive savages as we have been taught, rather they must have lived in a Garden of Eden-like state of cooperative, selfless and loving innocent gentleness—which, as I’d like to explain to you later in this interview Craig, is a state that the bonobo species of ape is currently living in, and which anthropological findings now evidence we did once live in. For instance, anthropologists like C. Owen Lovejoy are  THE Interview That Solves The Human Condition And Saves The World! reporting that ‘our species-defining cooperative mutualism can now be seen to extend well beyond the deepest Pliocene [which is well beyond 5.3 million years ago]’ (‘Re-examining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus’, Science, 2009, Vol.326, No.5949)

So saying our competitive and aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and aggressive instincts in us is simply not true—as I’d like to come back to shortly, it’s just a convenient excuse we have used while we waited for the psychosis-acknowledging and-solving, real explanation of our present competitive and aggressive human condition!

MY COMMENT: Yes, I would completely agree we have moral instincts, but these are often at war with our temptation to put our very vivid first-person experience before the extrapolated/inferred experience of others. Our potential for selfish, aggressive and assertive behaviour and our contrasting potential for selfless loving and cooperative behaviour live side by side in us all. Humanity usually knows what is right and often does what is right, but certainly not always, in fact not often enough. We easily slip into selfish competitive ways, and regardless of how humanity emerged in ancient history the problem traces back to the balance of choice between serving our vivid first-person experiences and the extrapolated, inferred experiences of others.

The picture Jeremy is painting of both humanity and the primate animal kingdom looks to be wrong. Take for example the bonobos: If the references in Wiki are right then in spite of fact that bonobos are often cooperative and supportive, males still fight competitively for females.  Chimpanzee aggressiveness and competitiveness goes further still; they not only kill other animals for meat but also have been known to kill one another. So again, we find aggressive competitiveness and supporting loving instincts living side by side in both human and primate communities. This is no surprise: Humans and primates can be very supportive and loving toward fellow community members, but when it’s a choice between self and all those others in a world where zero-sum games abound that vivid first-person identity tempts a self-first choice.

So, who is saying that our competitive and aggressive behaviour comes from savage competitive and aggressive instincts inherited from the past? That sounds like a caricatured straw-man to me. Human behaviour, like primate behaviour is a mix of support and competition and both humans and primates are morally hard put to it when a zero-sum game forces a choice between self and others. Where Jeremy gets this primate Eden from I don’t know: Not from the Animal kingdom, or from Human behaviour: So, I assume he has extracted this picture from the Bible and is using it as a metaphor; but at this stage it is not clear how he is using it; will we have to get further into the interview, to clarify this point.  

***

CRAIG:  Wow, so that’s a pretty big statement Jeremy, I mean it’s a pretty important point you’re making here. You’re saying that our competitive and aggressive behaviour is not due to must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals, but is due to a consciousmind-based, psychologically troubled condition, yes?

JEREMY: Yes, our egocentric and arrogant and mean and vindictive and even sadistic behaviour has nothing to do with wanting to reproduce our genes. That was absurd. And it is actually really good news that our behaviour is due to a conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled condition because psychoses can be healed with understanding. If our competitive and aggressive behaviour was due to us having savage instincts then we would be stuck with that born-with, hard-wired, innate behaviour. It would mean we could only ever hope to restrain and control those supposedly brutal instincts. But since our species’ divisive behaviour is due to a psychosis, that divisive behaviour can be cured with healing understanding. So that is very good news. In fact, incredibly exciting news, because with understanding we can finally end our psychologically troubled human condition. It’s the understanding of ourselves that we needed to heal the pain in our brains and become sound and sane again

As I said, the ‘savage instincts’ explanation was just a convenient excuse while we searched for the psychosis-addressing-and-solving real explanation of our divisive behaviour, which is the explanation I would now like to present

MY COMMENT:  Jeremy continues to assert his case that the human predicament is being covered up by misleading theories about the selfish gene and that all we need is to do is to go into psychological rehab...... but the epistemic gap between our first-person experiences and the third person whose experiences can only be reached by empathetic inference & extrapolation is hard-wired in the physics of biology.  Given the fundamental nature of this gap it would be wrong to suggest that this is down to a “psychosis” that is remedied by rehabilitation. Yes, I agree, understanding ourselves is certainly the first step but that should entail understanding the fundamental fault line in human nature that drives our potential for selfish and competitive behaviour.

 ***

CRAIG: Okay, so what you’re saying here, Jeremy, is that we don’t need the convenient excuse anymore that we have some kind of savage animal instincts because we have the real explanation of our conscious-mind-based psychologically troubled human condition

MY COMMENT: That so-called convenient excuse is a straw-man. The real problem is far more fundamental than the WTM pundits make out. In other words, the WTM don’t have the full explanation for the human potentiality for competitiveness and selfishness.

***

JEREMY: Yes, and this key, all-important, psychosis-addressing-and-solving explanation is actually very obvious. If we think about it, if an animal was to become fully conscious, like we humans became, then that animal’s new self-managing, understanding-based conscious mind would surely have to challenge its pre-existing instinctive orientations to the world, wouldn’t it? A battle would have to break out between the emerging conscious mind that operates from a basis of understanding cause and effect and the non-understanding instincts that have always controlled and dictated how that animal behaves.

 CRAIG: Yes, that makes sense Jeremy, so what happened though when this animal became conscious and its whole life turned into a psychologically distressed mess?

MY COMMENT The epistemic distance between my personal experiences and the experiences of others is a fundamental and irreducible feature of nature that isn't due to a psychologically distressed mess; it is, in fact, the way physics determines how the biological human works. This epistemic separation, which in the zero-sum games of life tempts selfish and competitive behavior, behavior often condemned by our consciences, is the real challenge of the human condition. 

Consciousness lies on a continuum that is a function of (but not identical to) the level of cognition possessed by an organism. In fact a single human being becomes more conscious of the world around as (s)he learns and grows; that is, consciousness increases with perception and learning. In my view dogs, cats, and primates are also conscious, but their neural set-up, their perceptions and learning mean they are less conscious than humans about many things. I'll be tackling Jeremy's references to an animal becoming fully conscious in my next part, Part IV.

 ***

 So, if our conscious quasi-isolated first-person perspective is generated by the way biology uses the laws of physics then this probably means that cats, dogs, dolphins and primates have a first-person experience; that is, they are conscious beings, albeit with a level of cognition that in many areas (but certainly not all) is far exceeded by human beings.  That the extent of consciousness is a function of (but not identical to) cognitive level means that consciousness is on a sliding scale. So, when Jeremy talks about an animal becoming fully conscious that’s far too binary; there is clearly a consciousness spectrum that depends on the extent of one’s cognitive ability & perceptions. A high level of ability means one is more conscious of the world than at a lower level. For human beings much of that excess of conscious cognition resides in the world of community; human beings are gifted with strong social processing powers and have an awareness of those around them. Ironically, then, it is that very social consciousness which opens the door to sin, the word with the "I" in middle: My social cognition reveals to me how other people might be feeling and experiencing, even though I don’t experience those feelings directly myself. Emerging consciousness opens the door to potentially selfish behavior. This seems to be the very opposite of what Jeremy is maintaining!

***

In his very moving series "The Power of Art" historian Sir Simon Schama comments on the life and work of the Italian artist Caravaggio, a man who lived on the edge of the precipice of his strong passions and emotions. He led a life of profligacy and lost control more than once. According to Schama, however, Caravaggio was aware of his flaws, at least toward the end of his life. In Caravaggio's late-life painting of David holding the severed head of Goliath Schama tells us that it displays the self-knowledge of a self-aware sinner; the head of Goliath was a self-portrait. The figure of David, instead of wallowing in the pride of victory looks at the head with a pensive compassion and sadness. 

Schama picks up the story:

The power of his [Caravaggio's] art is the power of truth, not least the truth about ourselves. For if we are ever to have a chance of redemption it must begin with an act of recognition that in all of us the Goliath competes with the David. 

Until we grasp the truths at the root of our schismatic motives, truths about the epistemic distance between ourselves and our fellow human, salvation will continue to allude us. 

On Panda's Thumb: Do we have free will? Part II

Spoiler Alert: Pseudo Question!

The free will-determinism dichotomy is an illusion

This is the second part of a two-part series where I discuss a post by Matt Young on the evolution website "Panda's Thumb" entitled Do we have free will? No.  See here for Part I.  In his post Matt mentions that in 2001 he wrote a book with the title of No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an Impersonal Universe. This is what he says of his book:

MATT YOUNG: In that book, I argued that humans were biological creatures and therefore governed by the laws of physics. Those laws are deterministic (we will get back to that in a minute), so everything we do, think, or decide is determined by those laws. We may think we have free will; we certainly have to act as if we have free will; but in fact we have no such thing.

MY COMMENT: I wouldn't take issue with Matt's statement that humans are biological creatures and therefore governed by the laws of physics.  After all, as a Christian I support the view that our highly contingent physical regime has been reified from the platonic realm in an act of Divine creation and therefore displays miraculous wonders every second of the day; it can have no property of Aseity and therefore its mere daily existence is a sign and wonder. Where Matt falls over in the above quote is that he's barged straight into subject as if we have a clear idea of what freewill and determinism are about; but we don't: See my series where I took to task a Christain who was also sure that the dichotomy was absolutely uncontestably clear and meaningful; that it certainly is not! My understanding is that even a computer running a deterministic program can be said to have "free will" in that it makes choices/decisions according to its physical make up; but it loses that freewill if outside influences coercively steer it away from its natural decision tree. I don't necessarily dispute that the laws of physics govern human behavior, although we must caution that it is clear from the state of physics that in spite a substantial understanding of the "algorithms" which constrain the patterns of the cosmos we cannot claim to have a comprehensive understanding of those laws. But as I show in my series I've linked to, the conclusion that we either have "free will" or "no free will" is an unintelligible dichotomy. 

MATT YOUNG: Now before you get your knickers in a twist, none of the foregoing implies, for example, that we should not punish criminals. The pain they may inflict is real, and we may have to separate them from society until (or unless) they reform. I suggest, however, that their lack of free will suggests that we should be rehabilitating rather than punishing criminals. But that discussion is a little off-task here.

MY COMMENT: Interesting to note that Matt in his comment about the pain criminals inflict is very probably implicitly making an empathetic extrapolation whereby he perceives the first-person perspective of other human beings; that is, he is implicitly recognizing the existence of private consciousness. 

Yes, I think I agree with Matt's rehab line but the awful public punishment spectacles of times past were a primitive attempt to interfere with human psychology via a kind of social aversion therapy; that is, fear of the consequences of transgressing the societal status quo help keep law and order. It's a crude kind of rehab on the social level. It may well be that the sometimes-irresistible instinct to punish & wreak vengeance (something we all feel at times) is a proximate motivation which finds its utility in more primitive contexts.   In fact, in times of war it swings back into action, with a vengeance.

MATT YOUNG: When I wrote NSO, I assumed that quantum mechanics was itself purely deterministic and that someday we would discover an underlying, deterministic theory. It simply seemed unreasonable that, for example, an atomic nucleus would decide all on its own to emit an alpha particle, rather than being caused to do so by some external agency. It still seems unreasonable to me, but it may not be right

.MY COMMENT: Interesting to note that Matt was inclined to rebel against the idea that QM presented randomness. I suspect two motives for this: 

a) Prior to the coming of the new mechanical sciences there was much more scope for attributing inexplicable events to the fiat of spirits and gods.  In contrast under the new paradigm stuff happened because it conformed to known (or perhaps as yet unknown) mathematical patterns. But the notion that events, some events at least, are part of larger random patterns seems to leave the door ajar for the introduction of superstitions about spirits and gods manipulating the world via fiat. After all, the apparently acausal nature of randomness is counter intuitive and spirits and gods may be resorted to as a way of restoring conventional ideas about cause and effect; human beings find it hard to except patterns at face value. 

b) Determinism, if it can be expressed in terms of succinct mathematical algorithms which can be humanly grasped, gives us the feeling that it wraps things up in a neat package and looks to be a big step toward a closed ended system that crowds out divine fiat - or so it seems.

So, it is my guess that Matt is sublimating here an ulterior need for an intellectual hegemony which lives in the hope of tying up all those loose ends with a comprehensive system of intellectually tractable deterministic laws or algorithms which describe all that happens in the universe; This is the search for explanatory completeness.  It is futile quest destined to end with a hard core of unexplained brute contingency - and I'm talking about "explanation" here in a sense that is more satisfying than mere mathematically tractable descriptions. 

But, and here is the big "but", randomness is just another pattern albeit with the mathematical property that it requires either very large algorithms to specify it or very long algorithmic generation times. In the final analysis randomness presents us with the same mysteries that underlie those humanly tractable deterministic patterns: Viz: From whence come these ultimately contingent patterns of behavior? What sustains their reification moment by moment and place by place? Their mystery isn't to be found just in their instantiation in mathematical generators at the beginning of time but also in that they continue to work everywhere and everywhen when in fact there is no logical necessity (i.e. no Aseity) that they should continue to do so. 

 

MATT YOUNG:  Does quantum mechanics then come to our rescue and somehow grant free will? No. First, so many molecules are involved in, say, neurotransmission that their action may be considered completely classical and therefore completely deterministic. Even so, the occasional quantum fluctuation would not so much grant free will as it would make our decisions somewhat random, a condition that I think proponents of free will would not particularly care for

.MY COMMENT: It is possible that the human mind, like many other systems in the cosmic physical regime, is a non-linear feedback system, making it chaotic and therefore influenced by the butterfly effect of random quantum events. This actually may be a useful feature as the mind seeks creative solutions to problems: The randomness is exploited to provide useful novelty, but this doesn't necessarily mean human decisions are random; our decisions are likely constrained by overall teleological considerations that regulate this novelty, selecting or rejecting those randomly generated contingencies according to the goals and aims of the human complex adaptive system. 

However, it's true that I can't be dogmatic about the foregoing paragraph, but it does mean that Matt's conclusions above are in no way obliging. 

MATT YOUNG:  Quantum randomness may have been critically important to the evolution of the early universe. If we ran the “experiment” again, we might, for all I know, end up with a very different universe, one that does not even include us. That said, quantum randomness has very little effect on our daily lives, unless you count, for example, cancers induced by radioactive decay or cosmic radiation. Thus, as Sapolsky would argue, everything we think, say, and do is wholly and unequivocally determined by our detailed histories (except, as I have noted, for the occasional quantum fluctuation)

MY COMMENT: Matt's first two sentences here may well be true, but I feel he is likely to be wrong that quantum randomness (if it exists) has very little effect on our lives given that non-linear feedback systems are ubiquitous in our world. But this question, in my opinion, has very little impact on the free will-determinism question: The latter question as I have shown is really bound up with our definitions.

MATT YOUNG : I conclude, then, that we have no free will in any sense. I do not understand why some people consider that threatening; it simply is the way it is. We feel as if we have free will, we act as if we have free will, and we are treated as if we have free will. Free will is thus a useful fiction, but in reality it is only a fiction.

MY COMMENT: Determinism, as I've implied, is a perspective effect that is a function of the level of epistemic tractability of the patterns in nature. Determinism is an epistemic spectrum which runs from those simple (that is, short) algorithms of elementary physics which we find relatively easy to handle, to the much more complex patterns of apparent randomness, patterns which do not yield to simple algorithmic expressions. Ergo, determinism is a subjective category which depends on one's information, i.e. it depends on one's perspective. Matt's triumphant conclusion that "we have no free will in any sense" is as incoherent as those who hang onto to freewill categories. 

The two sides in this polarized debate between so-called "freewill" and "determinism" advocates find one another's stance threatening because they undermine each other's dearly held philosophy.  But for me their respective positions are void of intelligibility. 

On Panda's Thumb: Do we have free will? Part I

Spoiler Alert: Pseudo Question! 

The freewill-determinism dichotomy is an illusion.

In a post on the Panda's Thumb website entitled Do we have free will? No, poster Matt Young considers the time-honored question of free will vs predestination/determinism. As a rough rule theists tend to fall into the free will camp and those of a more secular leaning gravitate towards predestination/determinism or "no free will".  So, it is less than a surprise that Matt Young opts for the latter.  As I've proposed in my series on Free Will and Determinism, I believe both sides of this debate have polarized around a pseudo question. See here: 

Quantum Non-Linearity: The Incoherent Notions of Free Will and Determinism. Part III (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

I'll deal with the detail of Matt's post in Part II,  but I want to make some preliminary comments about the polarization we see in North America between theists and secularists over questions which don't actually justify polarisation. The freewill vs determinism question is just one of these needless contentions. 

The North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community are in strong contention with American science establishment. The latter is largely populated with thinkers who in the main are likely to style themselves as secularists; that is, they believe the cosmos as it is understood through science is all we can really know. They see the NAID community as trying to import religious notions into science by the backdoor under the guise of "the science of intelligent design".  Just how these respective communities answer certain questions can be used as faith tests or shibboleths betraying which of these two polarized groups one identifies with. Below I list three examples of shibboleth questions and their shortcomings as community identifiers: 

1. Do you believe in evolution? My understanding of evolution, as I've clarified in this blog many times, is that whether or not evolution as conventionally understood has taken place, either way a huge burden of up-front information is required to drive the emergence of life. The reason for this is the following relationship which holds for any process that can be algorithmically simulated (See here & here for more):

Information generated <= upfront information + Log (computation steps)

Unless we are dealing with a processor capable of expanding parallelism the second term on the right-hand side means that unless we supply sufficient upfront information an immense amount of time is entailed by the Log term in the above relation - times which make the age & size of our observable universe look a very small and cozy affair indeed. That conventional evolution doesn't address this origins question over the frontloaded information means that as far as evolution is concerned the science establishment vs. the NAID community  polarisation is actually a non-contention: Viz: The science establishment have a mathematically inevitable origins question, evolution or no-evolution, and therefore this leaves them open to an appeal to the Aseity of Deity. On the other hand, the NAID community still have a case even if evolution has occurred and therefore, they are not necessarily obliged to set themselves against the academic community on the basis of an anti-evolution platform. 

2. Do you believe in junk DNA? NAIDs are very likely to take an anti-junk DNA position as they are so sure that an intelligent creator designer would never leave extraneous non-functional code in the DNA. On the other hand, secularists, who are inclined to believe in a meaningless & purposeless cosmos substantially ruled by the random walk of evolution have less problem with the idea that useless junk DNA has accumulated in the genome over millions of years. And yet why should a super-intelligent creator of inscrutable purposes be constrained not leave code of, say, historical interest in his DNA scripts as might a human software engineer? And can the secular establishment be so sure that enigmatic tracts of DNA honed by evolution don't have a deeper meaning?  As far as I can see the NAIDs and the academic establishment have divided on an issue that has no necessary connection with their respective world views.  

3. Do you believe entropy bars evolution? Many in the NAID community wrongly believe that the second law of thermodynamics is an evolution stopper grounded in fundamental physics. But at least one young earther appears to realize that this is an unsound argument. 

***

In contending over the above issues, the science establishment and the NAIDs are fighting on another on the wrong battle fields They should be arguing over what to my mind are much more pertinent issues such as the question of Aseity; given that science is a fundamentally descriptive discipline where the search for logical necessity is always destined to end at a stultifying barrier of hard-core contingency, it will never supply Aseity.  In his post Matt Young tells us about a book he wrote in 2001 on science and religion called No Sense of Obligation: Science and Religion in an impersonal Universe.  I'll hand it to him: He's on the right track about the challenge of an apparently impersonal Universe: It's true that unless we are going to go for the cosified universe of Christain young earthers and flat earthers the ostensive appearance of the universe can present an enigma to theists such as myself: Is the universe the sort of place an all-powerful loving deity would actually create? This question is linked to the problem of suffering and evil. 

Below I add a fourth battlefield that the science secularists & the NAIDs tend to fight over, and this is what I regard as a pseudo questions: Viz: the question of freewill and determinism.  As I've said I'll deal with Matt Young's post in detail in Part II, but below I make some general comments. 

***

4. Do you believe in free will or determinism? If the physical regime was fully deterministic and we had full knowledge of that determinism this would be the nearest science could come to providing a complete understanding; that is, providing a comprehensive description for all that passes in the cosmos.  I can see why those who lean toward secularism favor this option; it is the best science can offer in the way of explanatory completeness, a closed ended rational system.  But as we well know, this completeness is a pseudo completeness: Ultimately the deterministic algorithms which simulate the physical regime have an explanatory edge, that is, a hard-core barrier of irreducible, incompressible information. The question of the origin of this information is either regarded as a mystery, an absurdity or a meaningless question. 

But in any case, what's so special about deterministic algorithms? In the final analysis they merely describe in compressed form the highly organized patterns of determinism. Moreover, it can be questioned as to why "deterministic patterns" are so fundamentally different from the random patterns of statistics which are simply patterns that demand either very large algorithms and/or long execution times to be described. Furthermore, once those random patterns get set into the resin block of history, they to take on, from a human perspective, the property of being potentially completely knowable and in that sense determined......likewise, any human action which claims to be freewill: Once the so-called freewill is actioned it cannot be changed and becomes as fixed into history and determined as any event fixed by deterministic algorithms. 

Determinism is a spectrum concept that is a function of the epistemic ability of humans to know; in short, it's a subjective judgement. Randomness looks indeterministic not because it has some intrinsic property of indeterminism but because prior to it being set into the resin block of history (and apart from its statistical aspects) its details are humanly unknowable, beyond human epistemic handling. Randomness's indeterminism is a human perspective effect. Ergo, determinism is also a human perspective effect. 

Does this Interview Solve the Human Predicament? Part II

Spoiler Alert: "No"

Biologist Jeremy Griffith comes over as a nice reasonable guy, so all the more reason why I'm wondering how he got caught up in this extravaganza of hyper-hype and sales promotion.

I think Jeremy has got too many people around him telling him how great he is!

Below I quote bits of "THE most important interview of all time" (!) and as usual interleave my comments.  See here for Part I of  this series. 

***

CRAIG CONWAY: So Jeremy, thank you for talking with us. Tell us, how does your work bring about ‘the psychological rehabilitation of the human race’ and end all the suffering and strife, and, as Professor Prosen said, ‘save the world’

JEREMY GRIFFITH: Thank you very much for having me on your program Craig. Finding understanding of our psychologically troubled human condition has actually been what the efforts of every human who has ever lived has been dedicated to achieving and has contributed to finding. As Professor Prosen said, finding understanding of the human condition has been ‘the holy grail’ of the whole human journey of conscious thought and enquiry. We humans have absolutely lived in hope, faith and trust that one day, somewhere, some place, all the efforts of everyone—but of scientists in particular—would finally produce the completely redeeming, uplifting and healing understanding of us humans. I know it must seem outrageous to claim that this goal of goals has finally been achieved, but it has. In fact, the human condition is such a difficult subject for us humans to confront and deal with that I couldn’t be talking about it so openly and freely if it hadn’t been solved.

MY COMMENT: I think you will find that these people see themselves as having no pretentions of invoking an other-worldly solution to the human predicament: That is, they are likely to claim that their diagnosis of the human condition and their proposed (or should that be "asserted" rather than "proposed"?) solution to it are purely secular and scientific.  And yet they express themselves with the superlative language of religious aspiration, epiphany and certainty. In the above quote we hear that humanity has lived in hope, faith and trust that out there somewhere, somehow there is a solution that remedies their difficult lot, a final answer which classifies as a kind of salvation. In fact, Jeremy Griffith, clearly borrowing his language from the Western Christian tradition, describes his revelation as “the completely redeeming, up lifting and healing understanding of us humans”. It is the “holy grail” which according to Craig “...ends all the suffering and strife and as Professor Prosen said 'saves the world'”. Gasp! This isn’t a tentative statement fielded as a proposal for comment as one might expect from scientists, but this “goal of goals” has finally been achieved according to Griffith. He has been enlightened by the ultimate epiphany!

Griffiths and his followers are in fact admitting something that many theists have said for a long while: Namely, that human beings aren’t like the beasts of the fields who have little more than an idle curiosity about some of the superficial aspects their world; as far as we know animals, unlike humans, do not question the fundamentals of their lot. For them life is an unquestionably given state of affairs, like it or lump it. In contrast, many humans have that deeply probing curiosity about the numinous and resist an unquestioning acceptance of the status quo. They don’t readily accept the cosmic state of affairs as a brute given; for them a cosmos which is just there and where further questions are regarded as futile because it is all meaningless and purposeless is an absurdity.  (But see here)

Though it may be deeply buried there is among humans an existential yearning for meaning and purpose that is not easy to get over.  Humans not only have an unquenchable curiosity about deeper matters but also proactively seek betterment of the secular status quo, and more; they have a soteriological hope in their hearts. The surprise is that Jeremy and his followers, who I suspect purport only to seek solutions in the secular realm, have effectively admitted the existence of these deep existential yearnings and motivations: Viz: a soteriological faith & hope which perhaps hints at that residual hankering after the Divine.

 ***

CRAIG: Okay then Jeremy, solve the human condition for us, we’re all ears!

MY COMMENT: We’re all ears? You can say that again!

*** 

JEREMY: Firstly, I’m a biologist, and that’s important because I think everyone will agree that what we need is a non-abstract, non-mystical, completely rational and thus understandable, scientific, biological explanation of us humans. So how are we to explain and understand the human condition, understand why we humans are the way we are, so brutally competitive, selfish and aggressive that human life has become all but unbearable. In fact, how are we to make so much sense of our divisive behaviour that the underlying cause of it is so completely explained and understood that, as Professor Prosen said, the whole of the human race is psychologically rehabilitated and everyone’s life is transformed?

CRAIG: Yes, that’s what we want; the human condition finally explained, fixed up and healed forever!

MY COMMENT: As I’ve already said Jeremy, in spite of his quasi-religious expressionology, is not claiming to offer any more than a scientifically accessible explanation of the human predicament. This is clear in his first statement above where he says that being a biologist he seeks a non-mystical, scientific biological explanation of the human predicament.  Fair enough, but this to my mind clashes with the sensational fanfare we are getting from his World Transformation Movement.  Where’s the studied scientific detachment? Where’s the “Let’s try this hypothesis and see where it takes us”? Can they be so confident when their solution hasn't been tried & tested yet?

Humanity has a very poor track record when it comes to implementing what they believe to be comprehensive solutions to the human predicament. Let’s recall those many failed ideologies & their intoxicated ideologues who have promoted them: From the French revolutionaries to Marx’s followers, from Hitler to Donald Trump**, from the Inquisition to Islamic state, we've heard from their respective ideologues who have made loud and emphatic claims about proffering comprehensive solutions to humanity’s problems but look where their deluded followers have taken the human race. Such unquenchable and convinced confidence starts the alarm bells ringing. The studied detachment and caution of scientific and rational attitudes are being thrown to the winds here.

Jeremy continues to lay on the religious archetypes with a trowel as he goes on to describe in strong terms what I, as a Christian, would call sin (That word with the “I” in the middle) and its effects: He tells us that We are so brutally competitive, selfish and aggressive that human life has become all but unbearable. Yes, I think I can just about agree with that!

Jeremy’s last sentence in my quote above alludes to his solution to humanity's rampantly divisive behaviour. Using the language of psychology, he hints that the solution is also scientific by saying that the whole human race needs psychologically rehabilitating.  He continues with his melodramatic tone by assuring us that this rehabilitation will mean everyone’s life is transformed!  Gasp! But will a bit of psychological tinkering & rehab be the holy grail solution which heals us and fixes us up forever? In fact are there enough psychoanalysts in the world with the level of skill to fix us up? I think we need more details here!

Let’s face it, Jeremy's demeanor is that of a modern-day Scientific Apostle of Salvation and this appeals to those recrudescent religious archetypes we find in our hearts. In fact, he seems to have succeeded in planting the faith in quite a few people; enough to form the World Transformation Movement, a strongly self-publishing movement which leaves me with the impression that it is a sales organization rather than a scientific think-tank. Well, if the WTM is chiefly about advertisement then the self-praising sales talk is understandable; but that doesn’t amount to a recommendation. *

 ***

JEREMY:  Exactly Craig. So, to start at the beginning, I know everyone listening is living with the belief—well it’s what we were all taught at school and are told in every documentary—that humans’ competitive, selfish and aggressive behavior is due to us having savage, must-reproduce-our-genes instincts like other animals have. Certainly, while left-wing thinkers do claim we have some selfless, cooperative instincts, they also say we have this selfish, competitive ‘animal’ side, which Karl Marx limited to such basic needs as sex, food, shelter and clothing. I mean, our conversations are saturated with this belief, with comments like: ‘We are programmed by our genes to try to dominate others and be a winner in the battle of life’; and ‘Our preoccupation with sexual conquest is due to our primal instinct to sow our seeds’; and ‘Men behave abominably because their bodies are flooded with must reproduce-their-genes-promoting testosterone’; and ‘We want a big house because we are innately territorial’; and ‘Fighting and war is just our deeply-rooted combative animal nature expressing itself’.

CRAIG: Yes, that’s exactly what I’ve understood is the reason for our competitive and aggressive nature—that we have brutally competitive, survival-of-the-fittest instincts, which we are always having to try to restrain or civilise or try to control as best we can; I mean that’s what I was taught in school

MY COMMENT: Speak for yourselves chaps! My schooling was long enough ago for me to not be taught any significant evolutionary theory at school. And when I got into higher education (A levels and beyond) I specialized in maths, physics, chemistry and computing. So, I didn’t start grappling with evolutionary texts until quite late in life. For example, I read the book Sociobiology: The Whisperings Within (David Barash) and The Blind Watchmaker (Richard Dawkins) when I was in my thirties, In these books I heard about the selfish gene and how even altruism was a manifestation of this selfishness. On top of that I had also pondered those survival of the fittest notions as promoted by Social Darwinists such as we find among the fascists and Nazis. I assume that it is this sort of thing which Jeremy is referring to in his first sentence. But by the time I was seriously considering these topics not only was I already a Christian but predating that, I believed I had located the core problem with human nature. Let me explain…

I can remember a time at first-school when I would walk around the playground by myself convinced that those other young human beings were robots without feelings – it took time for it to sink in that that wasn’t true. It took me time to sample human behaviour sufficiently for me to realize that their  behaviour was entirely consistent with they too being conscious beings and that they were not just some kind of façade like an unfeeling computer simulation: This was the awful discovery that they had pains, pleasures and fears like myself. Obviously, this didn’t mean that I then started experiencing other people’s conscious feelings; their first-person perspective remained hidden: Rather via an extrapolation of my own feelings I inferred (but did not feel) other people’s first-person perspective. It’s what I called in later life an empathic extrapolation or empathic construction.

Therein lay the rub: That I had at last acquired the ability to empathize certainly didn’t mean I would necessarily act on it in a morally acceptable way: I didn't suddenly become free of the temptation of putting myself at the centre of my universe; after all I didn’t feel others feelings, I only inferred them and consequently it was too easy to ignore those other first-person perspectives all around me and get on with my own life in a very self-centred and selfish way; frankly, that is how my inner nature is skewed even today. I had the choice of affecting other people’s pains and pleasures for either good or bad, but there was no automatic switch which suddenly turned me from a naturally self-centered person to an unselfish one; choice, especially the potential for bad self-centered choices, loomed large: If I kept my self well insulated from the social world around me, I wouldn’t even hear about those feeling other beings. In short, I had discovered “sin”; the word with “I” in the middle. So, when Christianity came along and told me I was a sinner I said, “Of course I’m a sinner!”. This personal discovery needed no evolutionary theory about that competitive struggle in the survival of the fittest or teaching about the selfish gene. My first-person perspective meant that I was always tempted to choose self-first and neglect others; As Saint Paul said in Romans 7:14-20:

14 We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

That sums up my experience of the power of the self. 

The information in our genes is the recipe, which when baked in the right environment of the womb, generates what ultimately turns out to be a humanoid structure with that private first-person perspective of consciousness. (I have made some guesses as to what physical conditions might be required to give rise to first-person consciousness; see here). It is this first-person perspective which entails the potential for those bad self-centered choices we identify as sin. It is irrelevant just how the population of conscious beings has come about via the genetic code and some kind of evolution. Moreover, it is irrelevant whether or not those physical processes which entail sentient choosing beings are deterministic; choice is always entailed (See my posts on free-will and determinism). We cannot escape choice and choice opens the possibility of choosing self at the expense of other selves. The genes & evolution are just mathematical generators; they don’t rid or excuse the final human product of the responsibility of choice and the potential to sin - that is, to make selfish choices. 

What may be confusing Jeremy and his followers is that the objects of scientific study are conventionally described purely in the language of the third person; that is, as if there is no such thing as the first-person experiencer and observer of those objects described by science. This linguistic trick has confused many, so much so in fact that some people have even taken onboard the absurd idea that there is no such thing as consciousness; these people have read the third person language of science far too literally. The irony is that the touchstone of reality for the objects of science is that they deliver observation, conscious observation, enabling those hypothesized objects to be tested for reality. The reality of those highly regular laws is underwritten if they reify a rational ordered conscious experience. The reality of a cosmos which doesn’t deliver this world of organised experience is under question. Exactly how those laws create our first-person experience we are still discovering, but it seems that the potential for temptation and sin is built into the cosmic physical regime because that regime generates the first-person experience, regardless of whether or not we’ve been taught about competitive survival instincts being written into our genes. Summarizing then, my conclusion is that Jeremy and his followers, in spite of their confident and over-hyped sales talk, have got their diagnosis of the human predicament fundamentally wrong. 

Well, be all that as it may, what about the WTM's proposed treatment of the human condition? That will be my consideration in the next parts of this series: Does humanity, as the WTM suggest, simply need to have some psychological rehab and then its problems will all be fixed up forever? The straight answer to that, as we will see is “No!”. Moreover, compounding the problems of the human tendency toward the self, as I hope to show, are some very significant epistemic issues concerning the physical & social constraints on the way we interrogate and form opinions about the world we are in: This makes harmonizing our opinions far from straight forward This is why in my estimation we need the accountable open government of democratic forums. Psychological rehab isn’t going to make those challenges go away, because again, psychology isn’t able to change the status quo of the physical regime.  

Footnotes: 

* It can be fairly objected that the Christian sub-culture of which I am part is all too often given to the hype and bigotry of certainty. True. In my case however my faith is less than certain: I take epistemic responsibility for having pieced together my own sense-making explanatory structure around meaning and purpose - being a clay vessel myself (2 Cor 4:7-9) whose epistemic technique and morality are flawed I acknowledge the strong possibility of error and that my faith is subject to futility. It's an interesting paradox that Christianity, which is so clear on human imperfection, should consequently have a self-referencing conflict, an almost self-undermining effect. Christianity has clauses that lead faith to doubt itself and indulge in self-examination (2 Cor 13:5). But if there is a Biblical God why worry? He is the giver of faith no matter how small and therefore we should not think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think (Romans 12:3). But faith as small as a mustard seed means nothing is impossible.  (Mat 17:20)

** Hitler lived for the evil Nazi ideology, Donald Trump's ideology is ..... Donald Trump.