Such is the immensity
and complexity of the cosmos; such is the
universal ubiquity of modal change, and such
is the homogeny between 'change' and 'cause,'
all of which is governed by the existential
imperative which peremptorily determines
that 'to exist' is analogous 'to cause.
For humans to seek to
single out attribute individual 'cause' to
any causal object is to differentiate and
isolate that object as being an individually
culpable entity which is somehow antithetically
separated from the overall, shared, mutual
or 'joint causal responsibility' or 'catenulate accountability' of all the causal objects in the cosmos
both historical and contemporary that exist
in accordance with scientific generalization
based on empirical observations or Laws of Nature or hypotheses confirmed by scientific experiments.
My own view I made plain
in the five propositions of Eliminative Determinism
though I believe that we genuinely
YEARN for the fiction of freedom of action
to be a fact for egotistical reasons connected
to the fact that we have spent XX-years at
the anvil of forging our own personality,
making sacrifices, behaving foolishly, getting
hurt, learning lessons, reading this, reading
that, feeling this, feeling that.
For some guy to come along
when we are nearing the end of the road and
say that we were never in control of the
wheel at any time during our long journey,
but we were actually under the control of
an automatic pilot called catenulate culmination and have been wagged at the end of a long
causal chain all these years without being
aware of it comes as a terrific blow to our
confidence. [well for most people anyway]
 |
My garden robin in the Spring
Was rapturous with glee,
And followed me with wistful wing
From pear to apple tree;
His melodies the summer long
He carolled with delight,
As if he could with jewelled song
Find favour in my sight.
|
 |
We may watch the robin
choose the ‘best’ strand of dead weed for
her nest, and can only assume that she does
make a choice, and apparently has the ‘freedom’ to do so, for even poetic symbols like a
robin live in the cold world of reality and
need to build nests I guess.
The lovely robin is the National Bird of
Britain we chose the European Robin Erithacus rubecula as our national bird in the 1960s. The bird
is lovely, has a beautiful singing voice,
and is very protective over its territory.
We have some who live near our home.
I would suggest that although the robin with
its rapid head-movement, cocking its head
from side to side [is this the origin of
the term 'cock robin?] to focus its bright eye on the available
twigs, it is not making a 'choice,' but only
appears to be.
For them to describe the robin's
discriminatory behaviour concerning which
twig to select for its nestbuilding as 'choice' is perfectly sensible. Such data will not
cause any inventoriable conflicts in a brain
which has been programmed since infancy to
accept 'choice' as a viable behavioural category. There
will be no communicational problems either, for
when he tells a friend that he saw a robin
choosing a particular twig from amongst those
available, for his friend's brain has also
been programmed to categorise the information
in a similar way.
Purely en passant, and because errant thoughts are often so
difficult to capture and recall if passed
by - I wonder if we were to accept the notion
of 'choice' as being true, how far down the
ladder of sentience one must clamber before
one reaches the level of non-sentience, or
non-choice?
For example, if we agreed that
a robin WAS capable of 'choice' - could the same be said of an earthworm
or a bumble-bee?
In affect this means
[if you accept my view] that the concept: 'choice' = 'appears to be making a choice.' Now as it is obviously important for humans
to internalise what they see in order that
the brain may mediate and store such data
concerning the environment, and in order
to communicate our experiences to others,
we require a form of words to describe the
robin's actions [or in Judian terms: 'the
existential modality of the robin during
the period of observation.]
Most people do not think this
way, not because they are unintelligent, on the contrary
many of them are much more intelligent in
certain ways, but because they have other
interests and concerns.
In a philosophical/ontological questioning
such as we are engaged in here however,
the robin's activity can be recorded by the
brain, inventorially stored and communicated
or presented in two different ways:
(1) That of a robin choosing a twig from
amongst many.
(2) That of a robin enacting an imprinted,
instinctively guided, reflexive process.
In that sense any description
of the robin's behaviour would be contextual.
What do I mean by this? I mean that if for
example I was reading a poem, perhaps
this one by Robert William Service:
[of Eskimo Nell fame]
I would need to deliberately
suppress or suspend my belief in order to
enjoy the personification which implies that
the robin 'was rapturous with glee,' or had a 'sad wing,' or if his singing was performed in order
to find favour in the eyes of his human observer.
If on the other hand
I was observing the small creature with the
light horny waterproof structure forming
the external covering with a red patch on
the breast we call a robin dispassionately,
scientifically, then I would view the behaviour
quite differently.
I would conclude that
he was actually a befeathered little automaton,
acting out imprinted instructions. which
had been laid down over millennia by a process
of genealogical catenulation [sorry about
the word - but I think its cute] scripted
in deoxyribonucleic acid economically packaged
for deterministic delivery in the form of
a fortune cookie double helix.
The Deterministic DNA contains the genetic
instructions specifying the biological development
of all cellular forms of life, including
which size, smell and colour of twigs have
proved to be the most suitable survival-wise
for his particular subspecies of subphylum
vertebrata over the last million years. [or
whatever.]
This then
is the contextual distinction or dichotomy
I am highlighting when I refer to the practical,
commonsensical apprehension of 'events' and our description of them employing the
traditional usage, and the alternative deterministic
scientific Laplacian account as a series
of concatenational effects, rather like a
line of dominoes falling from a spatio-temporal
point (A) when the first domino falls - to
the spatio-temporal point (B) when the last
domino falls.
For Eliminative Determinism
there is no abstract 'cause' and 'effect' involved - just the causal dominoes and the eventive dominoes.
There is no 'event' either - the notion: 'event' really can be mapped to: 'more than one domino.'
It makes no SCIENTIFIC
sense to speak scientifically, pragmatically
or materialistically of
'freedoms' - though it does make non-scientific, romantic
or 'everyday life' sense to speak in such
terms - because - and here we encounter the
raison d'être for such abstractions as 'freedom' [indeed or ANY abstraction] -
the word 'freedom' is a useful fiction.
The word 'freedom' is useful in order to
avoid the intimidatingly long paraphrasis
required to provide the actual 'scientific'
version, which is the 'realistic' version
of the robin's 'choice. t is necessary
to provide us humans with some semblance
of meaningfulness in our lives. We
need a level of empathy towards ourselves
and other humans/creatures/landscapes/music/art/
literature/poetry etc., from the point of
view of what I will call for convenience
- our transcendental inner life.
A. Every cosmic entity
is a causal object.
B. Every event is caused by a causal
object.
C. Therefore every human
is causal object.
D. Events couldn't have happened otherwise.
E. Objects couldn't have
existed differently
F. Abstractions Cause and Effect do not exist
I do not believe in a
'self' on the discrete or the unitary model. I
believe that a selfish human holism exists,
and as far as the "seat of selfishness" is concerned [notice the "scare quotes" - I believe that it is an existential modality of
the meat inside our skulls. It seems to me,
and here I am going to employ the computer
as a metaphor, that the working brain is
organised in a fashion where there is some
sort of 'control centre' which co-ordinates the incoming and outgoing
date and
structures the behaviour patterns which it
feels are most beneficial to the human organism.
There seems no philosophical or physiological
reason why this should be not so - for like
every other creature on the planet the brain
coordinates/controls the limbs, facial expressions,
balance, and all the rest of it, so why should
it not control and co-ordinate its own functioning?
Maybe the idea of ‘most beneficial’ suggests that there exists some kind of
benefit-meter in the cortex that weighs its choices and
picks one that is the best for survival,
redolent of an 'intelligent organisation of resources?' I do think that the brain records
and stores data in such a way that it 'learns'
lessons. Child psychologists would certainly
be able to provide scientific evidence for
this as regards to the developing child,
but one has only got to look at say a feral
child to see that in the absence of humans
its brain records and stores data in such
a way that it 'learns' lessons which enable
repeat modes of self protection, food-gathering
expertise and survivalist stratagems within
the lupine jungle world in which it exists.
I imagine that normally we learn
to experience what is best for us by a process
of parental guidance, pleasant or unpleasant
experience, and hardwired instinct?
In this way then
we accumulate and gather information that
provides us with 'viable
working data' or 'experiential evidence,'
which provides an existential framework within
which the deterministically produced holism
can work out our concatenationally determined
destiny. In that sense, yes, I do believe
that there exists some kind of best-policy-meter somewhere in the brain that weighs its choices
and picks one that is the best for survival
and that this 'best-policy-meter' is
written determino-genetically and coded in
deoxyribonucleic acid.
Of course this survivalist 'best-policy-meter' - better known as 'commonsense' can be damaged and 'overidden' due to the effects of chemicals like alcohol,
narcotics, tobacco, sugar, chocolate, etc.,
and also by errant brain-states such as an
appetite for speed, sex, danger, theft, over-emotionalism
and all the rest of it.
Omar Khayaam pushed the policy
of self-indulgence - the hedonistic approach
that 'most beneficial’ should be replaced with; ‘most pleasurable.’- hence the flasks of wine [I cannot believe
there was only one :-) ] and the women [I
cannot believe there was only one. ;-) ]
If one adds the complexities due to chance
-- i. e. the probabilistic nature of the
process at the lowest level of analysis –
it is impossible to imagine any degree of
predictability.
Jud:
If you are referring to 'behavioral predictability'
in relation to determinism and the inevitability
of 'events' then I do not believe it is part
of the deterministic belief or project. There
was one famous Frenchman Laplace, who said
stuff most apposite to your paper in the
Introduction to his Essai philosophique sur
les probabilités (1814) His importance
with regard to determinism came up in a lecture
given by my favourite tutor Dr. Vernon Pratt
[a brilliant mind] He is a fellow determinist/eliminative
materialist.
Look at this from a Laplacian website:
' So not only did Laplace make important
discoveries, but he also thought it crucial
to communicate them to a wide audience so
that even those not versed in technical mathematics
could share his pleasure and enthusiasm for
science. This desire gave rise to verbal
paraphrases of his two great treatises as
Exposition du Système du Monde and the Essai
Philosophique sur les Probabilités. Consider
what he had to say in the latter work:
All events, even those that on account of
their insignificance do not seem to follow
the great laws of nature, are a result of
it just as necessarily as the revolutions
of the sun. In ignorance of the ties which
unite such events to the entire system of
the universe, they have been made to depend
upon final causes or upon hazard, according
as they occur and are repeated with regularity,
or appear without regard to order; but these
imaginary causes have gradually receded with
the widening bounds of knowledge and disappear
entirely before sound philosophy, which sees
in them only the expression of our ignorance
of the true causes. Present events are connected
with preceding ones by a tie based upon the
evident principle that a thing cannot occur
without a cause that produces it... The theory
of chance consists in reducing all the events
of the same kind to a certain number of cases
equally possible, that is to say, to such
as we may be equally undecided about in regard
to their existence, and in determining the
number of cases favourable to the event whose
probability is sought. The ratio of this
number to that of all the cases possible
is the measure of this probability, which
is thus simply a fraction whose numerator
is the number of favourable cases and whose
denominator is the number of all cases possible...
The theory of probabilities is at bottom
only common sense reduced to calculus; it
makes us appreciate with exactitude that
which exact minds feel by a sort of instinct
without being able oftentimes to give a reason
for it. It leaves no arbitrariness in the
choice of opinions and sides to be taken;
and by its use can always be determined the
most advantageous choice. Thereby it supplements
most happily the ignorance and weakness of
the human mind.' [1]
The man was brilliant!
This concept of causation underlies Laplace's
striking formulation of universal determinism,
Treating the history of the universe as a
single process, he maintained that, from
a complete specification of the state of
the universe at a given instant (initial
positions and velocities of all bodies),
a superhuman intelligence knowing the laws
of nature could infer all past and all future
states of the universe. Laplace assumed that
mass, position, velocity (the terms of Newtonian
physics) would suffice for the required specification.
Since it is doubtful, however, not only whether
the terms of Newtonian physics or any possible
future physics would suffice, but also whether
even a superhuman mind could specify, in
any terms, a state of the whole universe,
Laplace's formulation has been rejected by
many determinists. It is now more promising
to define universal determinism as the doctrine
that every event in principle falls within
some deterministic system. [2]
I argue that to pick
out and isolate 'that which is described as participating
in an 'event' i. e., a billiard ball is to unfairly attribute
'causality' to a single causal object, which in fact is merely the end-proxy of
all the events which have led up to its existing
on the table before the cue hits it and it
becomes a moving causal object rather than
a stationary one. The same can be said for
the other ball to which it is directed, and
the billiard-player, the table, the building,
the town and ultimately the Big bang itself.
Having said that, I UNDERSTAND why the human
is directed towards and is interested in
the performance of the billiard balls which
he 'thinks' he is controlling - because even
if he was aware that the event he had 'created'
on the table was all worked out even before
he took the cue out of the rack and whether
or not the B-ball drops in the pocket is
predetermined. (Though NOT humanly predictable)
We all seem to completely
forget or ignore the fact that events must
be seen holistically. In the case of billiard
balls, one cannot ignore the state of the
ball being struck - . but for me it is not
a case of ignoring the fact that the ball
has been struck. What happens on the billiard
table is very important from the anthropocentric
view of the billiard player, where the event
of the striking balls is actually of more
import to him than to some far-off giant
star being sucked into a black hole and crushed
to the size of a billiard ball.
It is the mental singling-out
[in natural languge terms 'victimisation of the cue-ball as the fall-guy
who takes the causal rap'] of the cue-ball as being the cause of the
stationary ball being moved.
In fact the cue-ball is the 'innocent victim of concatenational circumstance. '
Therefore, whilst it is perfectly satisfactory
and understandable to blame, or to attribute
causal responsibility, to the poor old cue-ball
from a pragmatic or humanly commonsensical
point of view, but not from the point of
view of the scientist.
The dualism - 'moving' or when referring to a moving ball -
'its motion' does not exist - it is 'the moving causal ball' which eventuates as a 'causal object' in it impingement upon another ball
As Laplace says - only a superhuman intelligence
knowing the laws of nature could work out
ahead of time what will happen in the world
- and neither of those fictions exist. We
can plan, conjecture and make intelligent
guesses, but if it were possible - it would
already have happened - and competitive sport
would be not be worth watching if the outcome
were to be known in advance..
It is not part of the eliminativist
agenda to either proscribe the use of 'fiction'
in language or to physically eliminate those
who employ such terms - it is merely a desire
that when people use such fictions that they
realise that the fictions [like freedom or
freedom of will etc.] do not really exist.
Anyone adopting Eliminative Determinism would certainly be effected by its implications
for Free Will, for it is a more radical form
of Determinism, in that even human beings
are referred to as causal objects and its
assault on abstraction is merciless. For
Free-willers who value their independence
and like to think they make choices in their
lives this would probably be difficult to
live with. Because eliminative determinism
is in a certain sense an offshoot of eliminative materialism it also provides one with a ready-made explicatory
ontology from those that approach you from
the position of The Philosophy of Mind. So to finish up I am sorry that I cannot
say more - I guess I will fall back upon
the position that Knowledge is Power and I certainly believe that eliminative
determinism is intellectually empowering
- but what is to be done with that power
once it is attained is another question that
only the individual can answer.
Eliminative Determinism has no bone to pick with the traditional
doctrines of determinism, apart that is from
removing the transcendentalist and reificational
medievalisms of 'event' and 'cause', etc. the rest is left more or less intact.
Knowing this doesn't mean that eliminative
determinists are any the less subject to
the vagaries of the inevitable consequences
of antecedent behavioural causal objects
than ordinary folk - it just means that most
eliminative determinists understand perfectly
why things are panning-out in their lives
the way they are, and that though they are
helpless to do anything other than conduct
themselves in the best way they can for themselves
and their loved ones they are philosophically
equipped and more than usually empowered
to understand it all and see it through.
Jud Evans 12 May 2006
References:
(1) International Encyclopedia of Statistics, vol. 1 (New York: Free Press, 1978), pp.
493-499; Dictionary of Scientific Biography,
vol. 15 (New York: Scribner's, 1978), pp.
273-403. The above quote is from Pierre Simon,
Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay
on Probabilities (New York: Dover, 1951),
pp. 3-4, 6-7 and 196.
[2] Donagen, Alan. The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Electronic Text Center PO Box 400148
Charlottesville VA 22904-4148434.924.3230
| fax:434.924.1431 http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv2-02
