'Blind-spot' suggests that we might resolve the philosophical problem of
freewill and determinism by approaching it as a scientific problem. Were that
to happen – were determinism shown to be false – modern man would enter a
terrain as foreign to his current way of looking at the world as the scientific
outlook was to the medieval mind in the era of Galileo, Hobbes, and Descartes.
A man who believes both that the Arctic is a continent and that a
submarine surfaced at the North Pole is a man with a problem: submarines cannot
move around under continents so one of these two beliefs must be false. This man’s problem is resolved by a
matter of fact: the fact that the submarine came up out of the ocean depths at
the North Pole establishes the fact that the Arctic is not a continent. The
problem for everyman, though, the problem of freewill and determinism, is not
so matter of fact because both beliefs (belief in freewill and belief in
determinism) are assumptions. Scientific experiments could provide evidence that
one or the other of these assumptions is true – or false.
Neuro-scientists may establish the fact of the matter with respect to
freewill; they’re already mapping the pathways between the human brain’s limbic
system and the pre-frontal cortex. 'Blind-spot' examines the basis of the
assumption of determinism and makes the case that we might experimentally test
whether human behaviour is in fact determined. This is a tall order, of course,
but anecdotal evidence gives us reason to believe that digital technology can
do for this type of research what the bubble chamber did for research into the
sub-atomic realm.
____________________________
On February 12th, 2004, the Radio National Breakfast Programme reported that fridges had been bursting into flame, seemingly without cause. Something must have been causing those fridges to catch fire. Flames no more come into being without cause than do chickens. There must be some explanation. Things don’t just happen without a cause – according to our scientific way of thinking. Everyone knows that – just as they know that they might have chosen to listen to RN on that day, had the idea to do so popped into their heads.
Ideas pop into my head all the time. I choose whether or not to listen to the radio, help someone cross the road, or read a book. And since things don’t just happen without a cause it must be the case that my idea to take a walk is part of a causal sequence which can, in principle, be traced back to before I was born. Which is nonsense, surely? It’s obvious, isn’t it, that the decision to listen to RN originated in my head? Some ideas, then, can’t be links in a continuous causal chain stretching back to the origins of the universe because that would mean I can’t ever have made a free choice about how to act or what to believe. If my decisions originate with me then I have freewill but if they don’t, if it’s otherwise, then how can I be held responsible for what I say and do? My decision to help an old man across the street, for instance, would fetch me no brownie points since I was going to decide to help him come what may; I had no choice but to decide to help.
It’s a cleft stick situation: I believe on the one hand that every event has a cause and yet believe on the other that I have freewill. Philosophers tend to doubt that any of us has freewill. They doubt it because they’re unable to reconcile the belief that every event has a cause – the belief known as ‘determinism’ – with the claim that some choices originate within an individual human being. You don’t have to be a philosopher to appreciate that there is indeed a contradiction, here. The man who believes, simultaneously, that every event is caused and that we have freewill is in the same logical circumstance as the student of maritime history who believes on the one hand that the Arctic is a continent and believes on the other that the nuclear-powered submarine USS Skate surfaced at the North Pole in 1959. Since submarines can’t move about under continents, one of the student’s beliefs must be false: in fact, it is false to believe that the Arctic is a continent.
Holding mutually exclusive beliefs is ultimately an untenable situation; as soon as we become aware of what we’re doing we acknowledge that something has to give. It’s easy to know which belief to abandon if the adjudication involves a matter of fact: the fact that a submarine could come up to the surface from the depths of the waters beneath the North Pole demonstrates that it’s false to believe that the Arctic is a continent. The case of believing that everything is caused and believing that we have freewill is not so matter of fact. Both beliefs are just that: beliefs, assumptions. Rupert Murdoch’s vast network of digital communication is unlikely to detect chickens being created out of thin air but it may already contain the raw data which the next Kepler or Heisenberg will use to demonstrate, for a fact, that there are some aspects of human behaviour that are not caused.
I’m
convinced that I freely choose how to act, that it’s my decision whether or not to help the old man cross the road. And
the philosophers are telling me that I had no choice, that everything I do is
the effect of some chain of events stretching back for time out of mind. Not
all of the philosophers, admittedly. There are
some who doubt that every event has a cause. And we’re with them, most of us
moderns; we would allow that, while other types of events have a cause, our
decisions and choices are ‘self-caused’. To say that an event is ‘self-caused’
is to propose that it miraculously escapes from the chain of cause and effect
to which every other event is shackled. The dilemma of accounting for
self-caused decisions is referred to as the
problem of determinism.
Determinism denies me my autonomy, strips me of any responsibility for my actions; I can take no pride in my good (nor feel remorse for my bad) behaviour. Some philosophers deny that there is a problem. They say that human freedom is compatible with determinism, that it’s simply a matter of being realistic about what it means to be free. We’re free, they maintain, just so long as we are not coerced. These ‘compatibilist’ philosophers have not so much resolved the problem of determinism as dissolved it – by diluting what it means to be free. Most of us would regard this definition of ‘freedom’ as too limited, not appreciably different from ‘free-range.’
Those who recognise that belief in genuine freedom is indeed incompatible with belief in determinism have to choose between the two beliefs. Incompatibilist determinists regard human freedom to be a delusion (akin to the delusion that the sun goes round the earth). The advantage of the determinist position is that it’s consistent with our scientific approach to the world out there. Since everything that happens in the normal everyday world is the effect of some prior cause, we’re able to understand how things came to be as they are by examining the links in the causal chain. The disadvantage of adopting the scientific outlook, as already noted, is that I cannot, therefore, be held responsible for the actions I decide to take. Incompatibilist non-determinists – libertarians – on the other hand, regard determinism to be a delusion.
Most of us cannot shake the (libertarian) feeling that my decision to commit a charitable act starts with me. Feeling this is not enough, of course, because we also feel that the sun moves while the earth stands still. We now know that it’s the other way around with respect to the sun and earth and may one day know that we’re deluded in feeling that we originate decisions. We may not be deluded, though; perhaps some of my decisions do start with me; and if they do then it follows that not all normal everyday events are caused, that some things – mental events admittedly – come into existence without cause and cease to exist without cause. Those of us who adhere to the libertarian belief that human behaviour is not fully determined are implicitly rejecting the orthodox scientific outlook and need to come up with an alternative, a perspective which goes beyond what William James called the ‘iron-block universe’ imposed by the tyranny of determinism to an acausal account of human experience.
The determinist says that freewill is a false belief; those who believe in freewill reckon instead that determinism is a false belief. As a matter of fact, it may be that both beliefs are false. Perhaps freewill, like consciousness, comes in degrees, is a function of the relationship between the brain’s limbic system and the pre-frontal cortex? We’ll leave that to the neuro-biologist to investigate and turn our attention to establishing the fact of the matter concerning determinism with respect to human behaviour: are our actions fully determined or not? Like the neuro-scientist, we’re sidestepping the philosophical argument as to whether or not the metaphysical assumption of determinism holds water and proposing, instead, that the matter be decided by a scientific experiment. In order to drive home the point of the proposed experiment, we need to appreciate how the causal principle became the cornerstone of the edifice that is modern consciousness – the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume called causality “the cement of the universe” – and why it remains so.
In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, medieval man was faced with irreconcilable beliefs of the pre-scientific world of natural philosophy. Galileo, Hobbes, and Descartes zeroed in on Aristotle’s notion of nature’s ‘four causes’ as the metaphysical culprit holding man back from a clear understanding of how things are in the world out there and in teasing out the problem they laid the foundation for the scientific worldview. In the twentieth century, Heisenberg (with his uncertainty principle) and Jung (with synchronicity) continued to walk in the shoes of their Teutonic forebear, Leibniz, in seeking to retain something of the old Aristotelian conception of causality. Coming to terms with what drove them to doubt determinism will clarify the purpose of the experiment to discover whether or not there’s a serious blind-spot clouding modern consciousness.
Medieval philosophers debated whether or not God pre-determines everything that happens; modern philosophers want to know whether the laws of physics determine whatever happens. In which respect, we might be tempted to conclude that not much has changed. When God was running the show whatever happened – even unspeakable tortures suffered by recalcitrant free-thinkers – was in accord with the divine purpose. Scientific determinism provides no such comfort: there is no purpose. Purpose was made redundant by the employment of the new, improved method for mining knowledge. Scientific knowledge is the outcome of enquiry into how a given phenomenon occurred. Asking why it occurred doesn’t come into it. Moreover, asking why is to cook the books somewhat in that it assumes purpose. Scientific enquiry took the place of natural philosophy because it enables us to see how the world came to be as it is, how we came to be as we are; using this tool, we have accumulated knowledge by solving problems piecemeal. The pre-scientific approach to knowledge sought to solve the most intractable over-arching mysteries before the more straightforward ones. The approach being suggested here is that when it comes to our underlying metaphysical beliefs we must suspend the how question in favour of discovering what; e.g., what is the fact of the matter concerning the causal principle?
Galileo’s (thought-) experiments provided piecemeal solutions to problems of traditional (Aristotelian) physics and went a long way to undermining the Aristotelian edifice. Galileo’s analysis of freefall motion is a famous example: a rock dropped from a great height accelerates toward the ground; according to the precepts of Aristotelian physics, there’s a place for everything in the world and everything tends to move toward its place; the closer it gets to its natural place the faster it moves. For the medieval mind, then, an object in freefall accelerates toward the earth because of an inherent tendency to get to where it belongs. Using mathematics and citing experimental evidence, Galileo showed that freefall motion is mechanical, not teleological. And when Galileo trained his telescope upon the sky, what he saw changed everything. The great man had crossed the line and it was inevitable, he realised, that when the dust settled everyone would see things from a fundamentally different point of view. They did; we do: the Aristotelian conception of a discontinuous universe, of a sub-lunar terrestrial world made of one type of stuff and a celestial realm beyond the moon made of another, is false. Before Galileo there was natural philosophy; after him came science.
Galileo
undermined the medieval concept of causality, demonstrated that we do not need
‘purpose’ to explain the world of motion. Descartes went much further in
explicitly setting out to start again from the ground up working with a
mechanistic concept of causality. Medieval (Aristotelian) causality was a
cumbersome four-pronged affair where formal, material, efficient and final causes each had a part to play when something
happened. Medieval man thought of the world out there as something of a
biological phenomenon where (active-masculine) form imbued (passive-feminine) matter
with substance. Different substances had different potential attributes. The
chicken form, for example, had the potential attributes of laying eggs,
crossing the road, etc. Amorphous (formless) matter lacked attributes per se but acquired them when a given
form gave it substance. According to the
medieval natural philosopher when the ‘fowl form’ resides in primal matter it
organises matter into the substance of a chicken; this is the formal cause of the chicken. The
corporeal body of the chicken is the material
cause whilst the efficient cause
is the union of the male seed with the female egg. The purpose of this union
(that there be egg-laying, road-crossing substances) is the final cause. In this conceptual world
the efficient cause operates on
behalf of the formal cause to bring
about the final cause; it’s a means
to an end, and makes actual what
would otherwise remain merely potential.
All manner of things in the medieval world out there are explicable in terms of
formal, material, efficient and final causes. But Aristotelian causality failed
to satisfactorily explain the world out there.
This teleological conception of causality is
quite foreign to our modern way of thinking. We would admit only one of these
four so-called causes: the efficient
cause; and only the mechanics of how
the chicken came to be born, making no assumption about it being a means to an
end. From our modern perspective, whatever happens in the world out there is
contingent: A is contingent upon B is contingent upon C, and so on. For us, the
chicken was born because of a chain of events leading to the fertilisation of
an egg, division of cells, and so on in a series of chemical reactions.
Following on from the work of Galileo and
influenced by Thomas Hobbes’ insistence that events can only be intelligibly
accounted for in terms of mechanical causes, Rene Descartes conceived of the
world out there as a vast mechanism and endeavoured to detail its mathematical
structure. He hypothesised that the material world is a mathematical machine
extended in space; events which occur in this world are mechanically caused.
Mindful of Galileo’s fate and appreciative of the implications for human
behaviour if the world is nothing but a mechanism, Descartes imagined another
world, the unextended non-physical world of thinking substance. Changes occur
in the material world (res extensa) via mechanical causes. But the immaterial
world of thinking substance (res cogitans) is not subject to mechanical
causality. Descartes’ metaphysical dualism, then, holds that the world out
there is mechanistic whilst our thoughts are not. Human beings are not mere
mechanisms but partake of res cogitans and have, thereby, freewill – unlike
chickens, which are machines.
Determinism is the doctrine that everything
which happens (above the level of the atom) is mechanically caused. As a rough
generalisation, English-speaking philosophers have tended to be empiricists who
regard human behaviour as determined, the effect of mechanical causes, whereas
Continental philosophers have been rationalists who, when it comes to
explaining human behaviour, want to navigate by the old teleological
Aristotelian stars. Empiricists believe that our minds start out as empty
vessels and acquire knowledge via experience, via the senses. Rationalists hold
that one can know what there is to know by sitting in an armchair and applying
deductive (or mathematical) logic. Seventeenth-century rationalists were
somewhat over-impressed by the ‘revelations’ of mechanical physics; Galileo had
appeared to demonstrate that simply by uncovering the mathematics of its
clockwork we can know how the world out there ticks. There, set apart from the
empirical world of the five senses, was an equally objective but abstract
(Platonic) realm that could be apprehended by reason. Rationalists believe that
a world grasped via the senses would be nothing but a fog of meaningless
perceptions.
Untethered rationalism, though, soon builds
metaphysical castles in the air. Immanuel Kant sought to bring rationalism down
to earth and to skirt what he believed were the worrying implications for human
freedom of empiricist mechanical philosophy. Unconvinced by compatibilist
claims that freedom could live side-by-side with determinism, Kant proposed
that the empirical (phenomenal) world out there experienced by the senses is
subject to the laws of nature whilst (noumenal) understanding is governed by
the laws of reason. What we see, smell, hear, touch and taste could not be
experienced without first being arranged and ordered by the innate concepts of
our understanding. Thus, for example, we would not be able to experience actual
instances of causes and effects in the world out there, would not make the
necessary connection between the thorn and the flat bicycle tyre, were we not
born with the concept of cause and
effect already formed.
Phenomena, in Kant’s philosophy, are those
things which occur in the world out there. Phenomena are governed by the laws
of physics and mechanical causality. We infer from our experience of these
phenomena, however, that there is a world beyond our experience, a world of
noumena. Noumena are teleological. The faculty of reason is a noumenon which
enables us to operate freely, ungoverned by mechanical causality. According to
Kant, we’d have no reason to believe anything unless the understanding
is free; if those who claim that we’re not free, that all of our decisions are
determined, are correct then they must have arrived at this conclusion without
good reason, mechanically. Only insofar as we are free to choose are we able to
reason to a logical conclusion. Freedom
is the fundamental principle of the noumenal world, says Kant, so determinism
is false.
Kant wrote his major works in the late 18th
century. By then Newton’s clockwork universe was taken for granted and James
Cook had landed on the east coast of Australia. Cook’s Endeavour returned from the South Seas with knowledge of the fact
that not all swans are white. Prior to this, it had been thought that all swans
were white because no-one had ever seen a swan of any other colour. Sailors saw
black swans Down-under. This illustrated a flaw in the operation of the causal
principle to which David Hume had already drawn attention: just because
something happens today, Hume points out, that’s no reason to believe that it
will necessarily happen tomorrow. Just because night has followed day for as
long as anyone can remember there’s no rational basis for believing it will do
so tomorrow; there’s no necessity for one event to occur because another event
has occurred; there’s no rational basis, moreover, for believing in cause and
effect; the phenomenon of cause and effect is nothing but the thus far observed
‘constant conjunction’ of two types of events; it’s mere habit. We believe that
a bike tyre will deflate if penetrated by a thorn, says Hume, because it’s our
experience that this is invariably what happens. There is no necessary connection, says Hume, between
cause and effect. There are subtle debates concerning Hume’s “cement of the
universe” but when all is said and done the determinist has made a clean break
from Aristotle and adopted an exclusively mechanical concept of causality
whereas the libertarian who believes in freewill harks back to Aristotle’s
teleological concept of causality.
We want to shift the debate from the
metaphysics of causality to an analysis of determinism as a scientific
hypothesis. In the 1920’s Karl Popper proposed that scientific hypotheses must
be falsifiable in principle. The falsification principle requires of us that in
proposing a theory of how things are we suggest what sort of evidence – were it
produced – would undermine the theory. Newton’s theory, for example, was
falsifiable in principle when proposed and subsequently shown to be false, or
at least not universally true. The falsification test is a useful criterion for
scientific knowledge because – when applied – it will expose as metaphysical
flim-flam what might otherwise masquerade as a scientific hypothesis.
Determinism is falsifiable. Reviewing the evidence of quantum experiments, Werner Heisenberg concluded that it had been falsified when, in 1927, he formulated the uncertainty principle. At the sub-atomic level, where we’re dealing with infinitesimally small quantities, there’s a high degree of uncertainty; mechanical causality, here, fails to account for the phenomena. In the light of this, philosophers generally acknowledge that the notion of universal determinism is false. At the everyday level, though, where the quantities are large, it’s the uncertainty which is infinitesimal and the mechanical cause can account for phenomena. Garden variety determinism, then, determinism above the sub-atomic level, has not been falsified. But that does not mean it cannot be falsified; there’s not a firewall, here. We’re no more entitled to draw a line between an undetermined sub-atomic realm and a determined everyday world than Aristotle was to arbitrarily separate the sub-lunar world from the celestial realm.
Heisenberg wondered whether Aristotelian causality
might not be a better tool for scientific enquiry than the blunt instrument of
mechanical causality. In re-floating Aristotle’s concepts of form and matter
Heisenberg revitalised the teleological conception of causality which Leibniz,
Kant and the various post-Kantians had refused to let go of. They held fast to
the final cause because human behaviour seemed to demand it. And while Darwin’s
mid-19th century hypothesis of the mechanism of natural selection
explains much about how apparently teleological phenomena are actually
mechanical, the final cause remains at the heart of the freewill-determinism
debate. For example, we spoke, earlier, of ‘compatibilist’ philosophers who
seek to dissolve the problem of determinism by employing a narrow definition of
human freedom. Well, there’s another group which wants to claim compatibility
between freewill and determinism by expanding the meaning of determinism; this
group argues that all events are caused but that human motives, reasons and
intentions are special types of cause and it’s this special character which
guarantees that man has a free choice. This is actually an argument that while
most causes of human behaviour are mechanical
there are some that are final causes.
Resort to the final cause, to teleology, is an acknowledgement that we originate
some decisions, that determinism is false.
Philosophers can argue the toss but only
scientific experiment will be able to establish that determinism is false, if
it is. Phenomena associated with depth-psychology suggest a fruitful line of
enquiry, here. Depth-psychology, per se, is unfalsifiable, little more than an
institutionalised confidence trick. Some of its findings, though, bear scrutiny
in the wider context. For example, Freud was so perplexed by things which
happened in the consulting room that he considered it possible that we read
each other’s thoughts. It was Jung, of course, who had the more open mind about
so-called ‘psychic phenomena.’ Many would say that Jung was a charlatan, or a
mystic, unscientific at best. And insofar as the famous Swiss psychiatrist
abandoned the assumption of mechanical causality, he was indeed ‘unscientific’.
In the narrow sense. As he continually reminds his reader, Jung was “steeped in
philosophy” – Kantian philosophy. Kant’s noumenon re-appeared in Jungian psychology
as the archetype. Devoid of the
trappings of depth-psychology, the archetype may be the modern version of
Aristotelian potentia that would
satisfy Heisenberg. Whatever else might be said about the archetype as an
explanatory principle, it is an acausal
explanatory principle, grounded in the final cause, teleology. Jung coined the
term ‘synchronicity’ for a phenomenon which he believed betrayed the operation
of archetypes in human behaviour.
Synchronicity refers to ‘meaningful
coincidence’, a coincidence experienced by the individual as having a numinous
quality. Jung regarded such coincidences as evidence of the existence of the
archetype as a noumenon. As a scientific hypothesis, that’s a long bow to draw.
A more sober explanation for the numinous (spooky) feeling which we sometimes
experience when a coincidence occurs is that the odds are decidedly against
such a thing happening. It feels spooky because extraordinary coincidences
appear to contradict our ingrained belief about how events come about. Feeling spooky, though, is not enough;
it needs be spooky if there’s
anything significant, here.
The first step in understanding whether or
not some coincidences actually contradict the cornerstone assumption of our
modern outlook – mechanical causality – will be to quantify the phenomenon.
Apart from measuring the frequency of coincidences, we’d need to give some
weight to types of coincidences. We’re all aware, for example, of the
surprising coincidence of birthdays. When the probability of a specific birthday
coincidence is calculated it may be that it was quite likely – or it may have
been extraordinarily unlikely. It would be extraordinary, for example, to find
yourself in a room where everyone was the same height and had the same
birthday; you’d want to know how the situation came about, whether it was
contrived. The experience of such a coincidence would be as much an affront to
our belief about the way the world is as experiencing a chicken coming into
existence without cause.
The orthodox sceptical response to the
phenomenon of extraordinary coincidence takes its cue from Hume’s Cleanthes
who, in a different but related context, says that if he can explain how each
person came to be in a room then it’s unreasonable of anyone to expect him to
explain how the collection of people came to be there. It’s not, however, the
collection, per se, which needs be explained but its special character;
extraordinary coincidence needs be explained – or at least acknowledged. It is
reasonable to challenge the improbability of a given coincidence; it’s
reasonable to question whether or not a reported extraordinary coincidence
occurred. It’s surely unreasonable, though, to adopt a knee-jerk response as a
matter of course, to invariably deny either the improbability or the fact of a
reported coincidence. A variation on this sceptical theme is the claim that
since we’re pattern-seeking individuals we will find patterns in any random set
of data so there’s no point in testing whether or not the phenomenon of
coincidence points to something fundamental about reality which we’ve
overlooked. This is an argument whose corollary is the claim that determinism
is unfalsifiable.
The scientific approach requires that where
there’s smoke we consider the possibility of fire. It’s wasteful of scarce
resources to design experiments for testing crackpot scientific theories but
‘crackpot’ must not be confused with ‘unorthodox’; given that there is prima
facie evidence from quantum physics that determinism is false and since the
fact of ubiquitous coincidence would constitute evidence against the theory
that human behaviour is exclusively determined, it would be good science to
conduct an experiment which helps quantify what’s going on in the world out
there with respect to coincidence.
The quantum data supporting the uncertainty
principle is to hand but we have only anecdotal evidence, no collated data to
speak of, concerning human behaviour. Yet that, too, is available for capture:
millions of people communicate thousands of times via the various applications
of twenty-first century technology. Ironically, we may have to await the advent
of the quantum computer to crunch the numbers that such an investigation of
human behaviour will require. And there’ll be ethical issues, too, of course,
but it’s possible (some would say likely) that even garden variety determinism
will be falsified by analysis of the choices and decisions that are nowadays
stamped as electronic fingerprints on almost every digital device.
Communications technology will provide an ever-increasing range of possible
test sites – the call-centre having the most to offer, here – wherein
experiments could be conducted. On a good day, and with the stars forming the
right angle, a series of experiments might do for science what Galileo did for
natural philosophy.
Select Bibliography
Michael Bradley, 1989. Lecture delivered at
Adelaide University
A C Crombie, 1995. The History of Science. From Augustine to Galileo, Dover Publications, Inc
Werner Heisenberg, 1999. Physics and Philosophy, Prometheus Books
David Hume, 1927. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Charles Scribner’s Sons
David Hume, 1948. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hafner Publishing Company
Ted Honderich, 1993. How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem, Oxford University Press
C G Jung, 1981. Collected Works, Volumes 7 & 8, Routledge & Kegan Paul
Bernard Williams, 1986. Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, Penguin