Spoiler Alert: Pseudo Question!
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| 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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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