Ep. 90: Why is there something rather than nothing?

[tonyenglish7]

Humanguy,

are systems of logic which have been developed to model belief and revision of beliefs, and in those logical systems, both A and not A can be "true". In non-adjunctive paraconsistent logics, for example, just because p is true and ¬p is true, this doesn't entail that p ∧ ¬p is true.

Is that true?

[humanguy]

Humanguy,

are systems of logic which have been developed to model belief and revision of beliefs, and in those logical systems, both A and not A can be "true". In non-adjunctive paraconsistent logics, for example, just because p is true and ¬p is true, this doesn't entail that p ∧ ¬p is true.

Is that true?

Pay attention, Tony.

[Moonwood the Hare]

humanguy said

At this I have to call foul. You know precisely what I mean when I use the word "invention." Did you honestly think that all this time I've meant wily priests inventing gods to deceive members of their tribe? Monstrously simple minded indeed.

Surely you don't think I ever meant to say that the Roman gods, for example, were made up by a committee over the course of a couple of weeks with a specific goal in mind.

I'd say that a number of attributes of a society are not the results of inventions based on designs. These are cultural aspects that develop over a period of time. That's what I mean when I assert that deities, gods, in fact all supernatural beings that show up in human folklore, mythology and religion are human inventions.

There doesn't need to be a nefarious goal involved. People used to believe that the planet was flat; I don't think that idea was invented in order to deceive anyone, do you?

No I did think you meant something not far from that - because earlier on you did say something close to this.

However granted that these develop over a period of time; then they develop in exactly the way that perceptions about other things develop in a culture. So the question to me would be could God if he exists reveal himself though that kind of cultural development? And furthermore could he even reveal himself through the language of human beings?

But with the case claim that people used to believe the planet was flat you have chosen just about the worst example you could. There is little evidence to suggest that people in general thought the world was flat. The fact that the earth was spherical had been known since about 500 BCE and just about all educated people in the middle ages knew that (admitedly the world is flat in some of the Norse myths or rather there are several worlds all flat) People used to think the Old Testament writers thought the world was flat and you can use the imagery in there to construct an image of a flat world but there is no reason for thinking the Hebrews took that literally or even cared much about the issue. There are passages that have been used to argue that the Hebrews knew the earth wa spherical and given the date of these passages it is not impossible that they could have known by purely natural means but I think these passages are being misinterpreted. (I'll give you chapter and verse if you are interested) At any rate the story of Columbus defying the Church to prove that the world was round is a complete fabrication (some of the details were made up by the guy who wrote Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving) The difference between Columbus and his opponents, who were churchmen, was not about the shape of the earth but its size. They thought the earth was too big for any ship then built to have a chance of sailing all the way round it, and they were right but they did not know there was a whacking great continent in the west. And yes the purpose in making all this up does seem to have been nefarious - it seems to have been done to discredit the Catholic Church.

[humanguy]

humanguy said

At this I have to call foul. You know precisely what I mean when I use the word "invention." Did you honestly think that all this time I've meant wily priests inventing gods to deceive members of their tribe? Monstrously simple minded indeed.

Surely you don't think I ever meant to say that the Roman gods, for example, were made up by a committee over the course of a couple of weeks with a specific goal in mind.

I'd say that a number of attributes of a society are not the results of inventions based on designs. These are cultural aspects that develop over a period of time. That's what I mean when I assert that deities, gods, in fact all supernatural beings that show up in human folklore, mythology and religion are human inventions.

There doesn't need to be a nefarious goal involved. People used to believe that the planet was flat; I don't think that idea was invented in order to deceive anyone, do you?

No I did think you meant something not far from that - because earlier on you did say something close to this.

However granted that these develop over a period of time; then they develop in exactly the way that perceptions about other things develop in a culture. So the question to me would be could God if he exists reveal himself though that kind of cultural development? And furthermore could he even reveal himself through the language of human beings?

But with the case claim that people used to believe the planet was flat you have chosen just about the worst example you could. There is little evidence to suggest that people in general thought the world was flat. The fact that the earth was spherical had been known since about 500 BCE and just about all educated people in the middle ages knew that (admitedly the world is flat in some of the Norse myths or rather there are several worlds all flat) People used to think the Old Testament writers thought the world was flat and you can use the imagery in there to construct an image of a flat world but there is no reason for thinking the Hebrews took that literally or even cared much about the issue. There are passages that have been used to argue that the Hebrews knew the earth wa spherical and given the date of these passages it is not impossible that they could have known by purely natural means but I think these passages are being misinterpreted. (I'll give you chapter and verse if you are interested) At any rate the story of Columbus defying the Church to prove that the world was round is a complete fabrication (some of the details were made up by the guy who wrote Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving) The difference between Columbus and his opponents, who were churchmen, was not about the shape of the earth but its size. They thought the earth was too big for any ship then built to have a chance of sailing all the way round it, and they were right but they did not know there was a whacking great continent in the west. And yes the purpose in making all this up does seem to have been nefarious - it seems to have been done to discredit the Catholic Church.

Once again you nitpick. My flat-earth example is insignificant, yet you spend more time arguing that than you do addressing the thrust of my original assertion, even going so far as to bring up Christopher Columbus for goodness' sake.

Anyway, could God if he exists reveal himself though that kind of cultural development? And furthermore could he even reveal himself through the language of human beings?

If he exists then he could do anything, couldn't he? The question then becomes why would he do it that way? Nope, I don't buy it.

[Moonwood the Hare]

humanguy - the flat earth example is not insignificant. It is a very good example of how an idea can become prevalent in a culture and then be conserved because it matches the general beliefs of that culture. In this case the 19th and early 20th Century idea of progress was so fixed in people's minds that they had no difficulty at all in believing that people 400 years earlier had believed the world was flat even though a quick glance at the historical evidence would have proved this implausible (and I'm not talking about obscure historical facts I'm talking about very widely read and translated literature - for example there were several translations of Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio available that clearly talk of a round earth) There is a cultural drag factor that means once something is established, like the idea that people used to believe the earth was flat that was even taught in school when I was younger, then people will go on believing it until it is challenged. Now this can apply to almost any belief. In the case of the flat earth myth it applies to the ideology of the enlightenment but it could as easily apply to beliefs about gods or God or anything else. But because it can apply to any ideas it can play a very limited role in telling us what is true.

The concept of the supernatural is a tricky one and one that is often left ill defined. If by supernatural you mean outside or other than nature where nature is seen as an interlocking system of cause and effect that is in principle investigable by science then most of the beings in folklore and mythology such as faeries and goblins dragons and unicorns and even the gods of Olympus or the Norse gods are not supernatural at all and are clearly a part of that system, unless that is you want to say that because these gods are depicted as agents who make choices they could not be investigated by science. But if you do say that then, unless you are a strict determinist who sees all human thoughts as determined by scientific laws, the human mind must also be placed outside nature and called supernatural. If you are a strict determinist and all your supposed knowledge is determined by physical processes it is difficult to see why you would regard any of it as true.

[tonyenglish7]

Moonwood,

If you are a strict determinist and all your supposed knowledge is determined by physical processes it is difficult to see why you would regard any of it as true.

I agree.... Atheist have to steal from the theistic world view to even argue there is no God. The ramifications of Naturalism are that it is impossible to know if it is true.

[mitchellmckain]

But if you do say that then, unless you are a strict determinist who sees all human thoughts as determined by scientific laws, the human mind must also be placed outside nature and called supernatural. If you are a strict determinist and all your supposed knowledge is determined by physical processes it is difficult to see why you would regard any of it as true.

But physical determinism is dead because science itself has demonstrated that system of physical causality is not a closed system and so the only way to rescue determinism is to reach outside the premises upon which science has constructed its system of causal laws. Thus what you say here isn't quite right. You can be a strict determinist who sees all things as determined by external conditions but in that case you must believe in things outside what is accepted by science as physical reality, but if you only believe in the things that science can investigate then you cannot believe in determinism.

What you said sounds like the words of a determinist (who does not question the presumption of determinism that everything has a cause and is completely determined by preceding events) to a scientific naturalist (who only sees a reason to believe in the things that can be studies by science), because it sets up this false dichotomy between physical determinism and non-physical determinism. Because of the discoveries of science this isn't even a viable alternative you are suggesting. The scientific naturalist who insists that only what science can study is real cannot be a determinist because that is the one alternative that has been ruled out by science itself. The remaining alternatives are non-science determinist, indeterministic scientific naturalist and someone like me who does not accept the premise of determinism nor the premise scientific naturalism.

So with regards to the mind, the alternatives are as follows:
1. You can believe that everything in human thought is determined by scientific laws (not affected by quantum indeterminacy).
2. You can believe that everything in human thought consists of physical process which are not completely determined by scientific laws (because quantum physics does play a role).
3. You can believe that not everything in human thought consists of physical processes.
The last of these is a mind of the gaps approach that is not scientifically supportable, and I don't think the first of these agrees with my subjective experience of human life, thus I am squarely in camp number 2, believing that the mind is no less physical a thing than the body, but that its processes are not completely determined by physical laws. So I see no reason to place the human mind outside of nature to be called supernatural any more than the body is, and in fact consider that position of medieval dualism to be untenable in the face of scientific facts. However since I reject the premises of scientific naturalism and believe that there are interactions between the physical and something which is not physical within the limits allowed by quantum physics, I find the ideas of Christianity to be quite workable regardless.

[Moonwood the Hare]

Hi Tony
I would not go as far as to say

The ramifications of Naturalism are that it is impossible to know if it is true.

(although I have heard persuasive arguments to this effect by C.S. Lewis and Victor Repert) but there are some versions of naturalism that see everything being physically determined and it these views which make knowledge impossible. But it was an aside really

Mitch - I am honestly not sure quantum indeterminacy effects the issue at all. In order for it to do so the human brain would have to be sensitive to the actions of individual particles; do we know that it is? And if we do know that does indeterminacy in the quantum sense not result in randomness rather than agency. Agency in a non-dualist system would I think have to be a product of the total system. (I think Polkingorne says something like this)

Anyway my real point was the Greek and Norse gods and most gods in those polytheistic systems are in a very real sense parts of nature and not supernatural. Once people began to analyse the system that became clear. So for example Democritas sees atoms as the ultimate reality and the gods are made of atoms.

[mitchellmckain]

Mitch - I am honestly not sure quantum indeterminacy effects the issue at all. In order for it to do so the human brain would have to be sensitive to the actions of individual particles; do we know that it is?

This is the difference between alternatives 1 and 2 in my post above, and for me my experience as a human being is sufficient for me to reject number one, but as far as science alone is concern we can only ask which is more likely. That quantum indeterminacy affects large scale events is a fact because otherwise we would not even know about that indeterminacy. We know that it happens in quantum measurements but it would be absurd to suppose that this only happens in the science lab, and in fact chaotic dynamics gives us the means to describe the environment where this happens generally. It was a discovery of Illya Prigogine that the behavior of non-linear systems can depend on the pre-existing conditions to an infinite degree of precision which means that the behavior non-linear systems can involve quantum decoherence. This identifies the key feature in quantum measurements as the amplification that makes the results visible because this amplification is one of the properties of a non-linear system. The self-organization phenomena discussed by Erich Jantsch further requires a non-linear system in a far from equillibrium environment, all of which points to living systems being physical systems which involves quantum decoherence and this in fact agrees with the difficulty in predicting the behavior of living things, the diversity in the development of life and our own experiences of creativity and free will. All of this suggests that option 1 is HIGHLY unlikely even from the purely scientific perspetive.

And if we do know that, does indeterminacy in the quantum sense not result in randomness rather than agency.

There is no doubt about the fact that free will poses a difficult philosophical conundrum with some serious paradoxes. In the idea of free will we assert that we are the cause of our actions and yet that our actions are not determined by external events, yet we seem to be beings that came into existence as some point in time (whether by nature or by the act of creation by a deity) and thus if we only acknowledged time-ordered causality that seems to leave us with only two alternatives, either our actions are ultimately determined by things outside of ourselves from before we existed, or our actions are ultimately not determined by anything at all.

However, when we consider the assertion of responsibility, it does not require that we be the cause of what we do in a strictly time-ordered causality, but only that what we become is the cause of what we have done. Thus I remain committed to incompatabilist position and resolve the paradox by resorting to a causality that is not strictly time-ordered to say that our choices not only select our actions but our reasons for doing them and thus this choice is the cause, not only of what we do but of what we become, and thus what we become is responsible for what we do. I call this view "self-causality". This is consistent with a belief that reality is not contained with in the limits of physical space-time which is in turn limited to the Minkowsky cones of local causality. In other words, if it is true that we have a spiritual dimension that exists outside the structure of space and time, then it is hardly difficult at all to believe that our free will involves a kind of causality that is not a time-ordered one.

Agency in a non-dualist system would I think have to be a product of the total system. (I think Polkingorne says something like this)

But that just dodges the question really. As for this emergent phenomenon idea, the nonlocal nature of quantum decoherence means that this is not necessarily distinct from this at all. Quantum decoherence is both indeterministic (as far as local causality is concerned) and non-local and thus this is exactly the kind of hole in the logic of physical determinism that a belief in free will requires. The real problem with free will is not a scientific one at all but rather the philosophical paradox I talked about above.

Anyway my real point was the Greek and Norse gods and most gods in those polytheistic systems are in a very real sense parts of nature and not supernatural.

And I disagree, you are forcing a worldview that made no distinction between natural and supernatural into a format that does. Just because they don't make the distinction does not mean that everthing they believed has to be fit into one or the other. The distinction comes from information that we have that they do not and we have easy access to how they most likely would have responded to that information by simply talking to pagans that exist today.

So for example Democritas sees atoms as the ultimate reality and the gods are made of atoms.

Yes and Pythagoras decided that everything was made of numbers. You cannot identify the atomic theory of Democritus with modern physics any more or less that you can identify it with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead that saw reality as a composite of some kind of particles of process. So besides the fact that Democritus does not speak for these religions, this really doesn't equate to physical/natural gods any more than my assertion, that God is form of energy just as we are forms of energy, equates to my believing that God is physical being -- however much it may turn the usual arguments for the existence of God into so much scrap and foolishness. I believe in God but don't believe in those arguments.

[Moonwood the Hare]

Hi Mitch

You are getting into stuff that I am neither qualified nor well informed enough to comment on in sufficient detail. Quite often I simply don't know what you mean. I have no idea what it means to say God is a form of energy. So let me work backwards through your responses and do the best I can. I quite agree that the natural/supernatural distinction is a modern one and for that reason we cannot definitely identify the gods of ancient polytheism as either natural or supernatural. However if we do insist on taking that distinction with us then to me it makes more sense to identify them as natural rather then supernatural. It should be clear at any rate that the worldview of Hebraic religion is utterly different to that of Greek or Norse religion and to try to conflate them around the concept God/gods is plain misleading. As for trying to find out what people millennia ago would have thought about modern science by asking modern pagans I think that is frankly silly. It is like saying we could work out what the reformers would have thought about something by asking present day evangelicals.

I am not sure what you mean by non-time ordered causality but if you mean that the actions of an organism can be governed by their consequences then that is a fairly simple idea - it was proposed by B. F. Skinner to counter the heavy handed cause and effect determinism of the early behaviourists and Skinner was able to propose this while assuming the falsity of agency (ie that mind is never causally effective on matter). But I feel you mean something more subtle than this.

Mitch I just don't get this:

There is no doubt about the fact that free will poses a difficult philosophical conundrum with some serious paradoxes. In the idea of free will we assert that we are the cause of our actions and yet that our actions are not determined by external events, yet we seem to be beings that came into existence as some point in time (whether by nature or by the act of creation by a deity) and thus if we only acknowledged time-ordered causality that seems to leave us with only two alternatives, either our actions are ultimately determined by things outside of ourselves from before we existed, or our actions are ultimately not determined by anything at all.

If we are the cause - or one of the causes - of our actions then they are not (fully) determined by external events - that is not a paradox as far as I can see. The fact that we come into existence as an agent through some kind of process which involves interaction with the external world does not seem to me to make that agency less real, rather the external world is a condition which makes agency possible - there has to be an environment for me to chose in. But the philosophical issues here are huge as you say. I am not convinced that the three alternatives you offer are the only ones on the table.

1. You can believe that everything in human thought is determined by scientific laws (not affected by quantum indeterminacy).
2. You can believe that everything in human thought consists of physical process which are not completely determined by scientific laws (because quantum physics does play a role).
3. You can believe that not everything in human thought consists of physical processes.

Like you I don't find the first plausible. I find the third implausible if it is held to imply some kind of non-material mind substance which has to find a way of interacting with matter/energy. But it also seems clear that something in my mind, a proposition for example, is not physical. So it depends on what you mean by human thought consisting of physical processes. If there is a way for quantum processes to generate agency I am certainly open to that as a possibility but I am just not able to judge any account of that that is given.
(Frank Tippler had a go at this explaining agency through quantum indeterminacy but as he used Everett's many worlds theory he still ended up with every choice leading to a new branch in the multiverse which just looked deterministic on a huger scale to me. It has occured to me that your concept of God as energy could have affinities with Tippler's deity although his definitely is physical. I know Penrose had a bash at this idea of quantum events giving rise to agency as well but I can't claim to understand his answer either - and he says there are gaps in our knowledge which make a full understand impossible at present)

[mitchellmckain]

So let me work backwards through your responses and do the best I can. I quite agree that the natural/supernatural distinction is a modern one and for that reason we cannot definitely identify the gods of ancient polytheism as either natural or supernatural. However if we do insist on taking that distinction with us then to me it makes more sense to identify them as natural rather then supernatural.

You mean that it serves the purpose of those today who want to dismiss those beliefs as ridiculous. So of course modern day pagans would most certainly disagree with you on this and say no that it makes more sense to identify them as supernatural/spiritual.

It should be clear at any rate that the worldview of Hebraic religion is utterly different to that of Greek or Norse religion and to try to conflate them around the concept God/gods is plain misleading. As for trying to find out what people millennia ago would have thought about modern science by asking modern pagans I think that is frankly silly.

Why? They are believers like those millenia ago, who simply have the information that those other lacked. What is ridiculous is letting someone like you who does not in any way shape or form believe what they believe, say what they would have thought.

It is like saying we could work out what the reformers would have thought about something by asking present day evangelicals.

No it is more like asking Christians today what Jesus would have thought about nuclear power. Yes you are likely to get a diversity of opinions and that is where the fallacy of your example is. Instead of asking everyone today who shares the beliefs of those reformers you are choosing just one sector of them.

I am not sure what you mean by non-time ordered causality but if you mean that the actions of an organism can be governed by their consequences then that is a fairly simple idea - it was proposed by B. F. Skinner to counter the heavy handed cause and effect determinism of the early behaviourists and Skinner was able to propose this while assuming the falsity of agency (ie that mind is never causally effective on matter). But I feel you mean something more subtle than this.

Well Aristotle describes four different kinds of causality: efficient cause, material cause, formal cause and final cause. With some adjustments from information from modern science we could explain the first three in scientific terms as follows: initial or preceeding conditions, the molecules/atoms/particles/energy of which it is composed, and the system of actions and force of which it is a part. But the last one, the teleological cause is not one that fits into modern science because it sounds like a reversal of the temporal order of causality which is not a type of causality recognized in modern physics. And yet the idea of teleological cause appeals to thinking human beings because they do things with a purpose towards an end, and so perhaps this strictly time-ordered idea of causality in science is not the only kind of causality there is.

Mitch I just don't get this:

There is no doubt about the fact that free will poses a difficult philosophical conundrum with some serious paradoxes. In the idea of free will we assert that we are the cause of our actions and yet that our actions are not determined by external events, yet we seem to be beings that came into existence as some point in time (whether by nature or by the act of creation by a deity) and thus if we only acknowledged time-ordered causality that seems to leave us with only two alternatives, either our actions are ultimately determined by things outside of ourselves from before we existed, or our actions are ultimately not determined by anything at all.

If we are the cause - or one of the causes - of our actions then they are not (fully) determined by external events - that is not a paradox as far as I can see. The fact that we come into existence as an agent through some kind of process which involves interaction with the external world does not seem to me to make that agency less real, rather the external world is a condition which makes agency possible - there has to be an environment for me to chose in.

Because that is the agency of a computer program. You can even label the variables in the program with names like "choice", "reason", "purpose", "will", "feeling" or whatever but none of that changes the fact that the computer does nothing more than what it was programmed to do. And that is even if it has learning algorthms and re-writes its own code. Ultimately the responsiblity for what it does lies 100% with those who wrote it and the computer program has no free will at all. It is just a big mathematical equation or machine that does what it was made to do and nothing else. Like dominoes, no matter how complex the setup may be, in the end its just gravity.

Yes choices require a context, just as the process of life requires an environment. It is in the response that life makes to its environment that agency is found, BUT there is a difference between the environment and the living organism precisely because what the living organism does is not just a product of environmental events. So the context of a choice does not mean that the choice is determined, for a response to the environment is not the same thing as an environmental effect.

Look if you are a compatabilist then I am afraid that there is just an unbrigable gap between us here that no amount of talking is going to make any difference to.

But the philosophical issues here are huge as you say. I am not convinced that the three alternatives you offer are the only ones on the table.

Well it wasn't really meant to present all the alternatives and yet it is in the form of
1. A and not B
2. A and B
3. not A
A = everything in human thought consists of physical process
B = the physcial process in human thought are affected by quantum indeterminacy

And thus it is a little hard see any logical alternative to these three, since logic would say that one of these must be the case, unless you are arguing that A and B are not restricted to either true or false, in which case you would only say that these 3 alternative do not need to be exclusive, not that they don't cover all the possibilities.

1. You can believe that everything in human thought is determined by scientific laws (not affected by quantum indeterminacy).
2. You can believe that everything in human thought consists of physical process which are not completely determined by scientific laws (because quantum physics does play a role).
3. You can believe that not everything in human thought consists of physical processes.

Like you I don't find the first plausible.

I believe that I argued that I don't find this option probable on scientific grounds, but that the reasons of subjective experience were enough to convince me that it is wrong.

I find the third implausible if it is held to imply some kind of non-material mind substance which has to find a way of interacting with matter/energy.

I believe that I argued that this option was not scientifically supportable.

But it also seems clear that something in my mind, a proposition for example, is not physical.

Well it depends on what you mean. A proposition is an information structure and Information can be transmitted from one media to another. But any particular instance of that information most certainly is physical. You point to a specific instance of proposition and I can describe the physical processes that can destroy it, including any that may happen to be in your mind.

If there is a way for quantum processes to generate agency I am certainly open to that as a possibility but I am just not able to judge any account of that that is given.

No I certainly do not believe in any such thing. The process that generates agency is the process of life, but that is a non-linear process and that is most definitely affected by quantum indeterminacy. Do I believe that this quantum indeterminacy is essential for there to be any agency in the process of life? Yes I do. You can set up a non-linear process in a computer and it is perfectly deterministic because you supply the intial conditions to perfect accuracy and thus the result is always completely determined by those initial conditions. No I do not think agency is possible in such conditions.

(Frank Tippler had a go at this explaining agency through quantum indeterminacy but as he used Everett's many worlds theory he still ended up with every choice leading to a new branch in the multiverse which just looked deterministic on a huger scale to me. It has occured to me that your concept of God as energy could have affinities with Tippler's deity although his definitely is physical. I know Penrose had a bash at this idea of quantum events giving rise to agency as well but I can't claim to understand his answer either - and he says there are gaps in our knowledge which make a full understand impossible at present)

Not only I would I have a problem with Tippler's physical deity but also his belief in a multiverse. I see no commonalities. Yes there are gaps in our knowledge for understanding this but not I think as much as most people think. I think the pieces are there for assembling the big picture, but there is no doubt that we do not have all the details yet. Two scientific advances are the key to making this more concrete and confirming that picture: a working theory of abiogenesis and real artificial intellegence. In many ways, I think that we are not that far from either of these. In other ways, I think we are farther from them than most people realize, because I think there are some required paradigm shifts.

[Dave B]

If there is a way for quantum processes to generate agency I am certainly open to that as a possibility but I am just not able to judge any account of that that is given.

No I certainly do not believe in any such thing. The process that generates agency is the process of life, but that is a non-linear process and that is most definitely affected by quantum indeterminacy. Do I believe that this quantum indeterminacy is essential for there to be any agency in the process of life? Yes I do. You can set up a non-linear process in a computer and it is perfectly deterministic because you supply the intial conditions to perfect accuracy and thus the result is always completely determined by those initial conditions. No I do not think agency is possible in such conditions.

What is required for agency other than quantum indeterminacy?

[mitchellmckain]

If there is a way for quantum processes to generate agency I am certainly open to that as a possibility but I am just not able to judge any account of that that is given.

No I certainly do not believe in any such thing. The process that generates agency is the process of life, but that is a non-linear process and that is most definitely affected by quantum indeterminacy. Do I believe that this quantum indeterminacy is essential for there to be any agency in the process of life? Yes I do. You can set up a non-linear process in a computer and it is perfectly deterministic because you supply the intial conditions to perfect accuracy and thus the result is always completely determined by those initial conditions. No I do not think agency is possible in such conditions.

What is required for agency other than quantum indeterminacy?

Well I don't really like the word agency alone since that seems like an adaptable word to me. You could talk of the agency of a computer program, but in the context it was clear that we were specifically talking about an agency of free will and responsibility.

With that clarification, I answered your question already. It is the process of life that generates agency and that is a process that involves quantum indeterminacy. It means that sometimes when living things make choices there is a quantum decoherence involved in the process so that the choice is not completely determined by pre-existing conditions. From within the presumption that all causality is time-ordered, one would conclude that this lack of complete determination represents the lack of causes and that the results are random. But frankly, this is exactly what you would expect if free will actually exists, because a strict limitation to time ordered causality makes it impossible to make any logical sense of the idea of free will at all.

Are you asking, what is this process of life? That is something I have tried to explain numerous times on this forum and few understand what I am talking about. Life is a non-linear process of self-organization whereby dynamic strutures (organisms) in a far from equillibrium environment grow and maintain themselves not only by drawing resources from their environment but also by responding to environmental changes in creative/unpredictable ways so that by trial and error these organisms can learn/develop towards more successful ways of doing this. One can get the basic properties of non-linearity in cyclical processes because of feedback, and when these cyclical process interact with each other, the more complex system that results can have the features I have just described. One can see free will agency in this process by how it responds to the evironment, grows/develops and thus organizes itself. But it should be clear that this free will agency is not just an either/or qualitative difference but is something that is highly quantitative. The organism that balances a greater sensitivity to the environment with an greater independence from the environment (so that the sensitivity can be called awareness and the the independence can be called adaptability), is the organism that will have a greater degree of free will agency.

So on some level, I suppose asking what else is required, equates to asking what is required for the process of life besides quantum indeterminacy. Well a far from equillibrium environment was mentioned, and you have to have a sufficient diversity in the medium for interactions to have the complexity in which the mathematics is non-linear. And, for this process of life to learn and develop you need a changing environment that provides some challenges to the survival of the organism.

I see the human mind as simply another example of this same basic process in a different medium than biological life. Whereas biological life consists of chemical processes and the transport of materials (chemicals), mental life consists of information processes and the transmission of neurological information.

[Dave B]

Mitch,

So if you set up a nondeterministic, non-linear, adaptive, learning computer program that grows and maintains itself, could it have free will? Or is biological life necessary for free will?

[mitchellmckain]

So if you set up a nondeterministic, non-linear, adaptive, learning computer program that grows and maintains itself, could it have free will? Or is biological life necessary for free will?

No life does not have to be biological in any way at all. What makes something life is the process not the medium in which the process occurs. But it is not a matter of designing a program to meet specifications and that is in fact the antithesis of life. Life is a self-organizing process. But you can create the right conditions for that self organization to occur. In my last response to Moonwood, the two scientific advances I mention includes one about real artificial intellegence and that would be an example of this process of life in an electronic computer-like environment. That is not possible with current technology, but might be possible with an application of the ideas concerning quantum computing. But programming would only help create the necessary conditions and would not represent life itself. The living part would be self-organized and that would only grow in an interaction with the environment and would likely take just as long as it does to raise a child, if not longer. Though our first attempts at this is not likely to produce intellegence comarable to humans, and may reach the limit of its potential in a shorter period of time.