Work In Progress

(First, a tiny bit of background information: the universe which we live in has some really strange properties. If you look up the formula for the force of gravity between two masses, you'll see that there's a constant there. (The value of that constant was discovered experimentally.) If the value of that constant were different, the universe would be very different. If it was much bigger, or much smaller, planets would never have formed. And the same is true of many other things. The formula for the force of attraction between electromagnetic charges looks the same but also has a constant. It happens to be much, much bigger than the gravitational constant, and it's responsible for the properties of all physical substances. Now, these constants aren't artifacts of the units we've chosen to measure things in. There's a fundamental relationship between the strength of gravity and the strength of magnetism, regardless of how you measure it, that changes everything. There are also the relationships of these forces to size, and other things; if these constant were different, chemical bonds would either be too strong or not strong enough for life to exist.)

I was thinking, recently, about the parallel universe idea that some materialists use to explain the universe. That is, that things are so strangely tuned to produce life as we know it because every possible configuration of physical properties (and outcomes) exists in some parallel universe. Only such outcomes in which sentient life came to be has anything living in it to ask why something so improbable came to be.

This does answer the question of "why is there life", but it's an explanation which explains too much. If you accept the multiple parallel universes hypothesis, you completely throw out any use of Occam's Razor.

(Occam's Razor is often quoted as "if you have two competing explanations for something, the simpler explanation is probably the right one". Apparently a better statement of Occam's Razor is actually, "never unnecessarily multiply entities".)

You'd think that anyone who's a fan of Occam's Razor would wonder about the theory that there are infinitely many entities. Why, then, do people who might otherwise like to invoke Occam's Razor go and accept something which is essentially its complete antithesis?

I think that the answer lies in personality. Some people simply can't stand oddities. The idea of something real which is arbitrary irritates them. It's the same phenomenon which is behind why people don't like human choice — when a human makes a choice, something odd has happened.

This is the same problem that Job had. Job's mistake was in thinking that the universe had a simple answer. In the book of Job, God answers Job out of the tempest and point out how strange the world is, and how little of it makes sense to human beings. Job is comforted because he realized that none of the world is simple.

So, apparently, some atheists try to avoid Job's realization by making the world simple.

The Modern religion is, aside from being a sort of decayed Christianity, based almost entirely on modern wealth. That is, it's based on the material comfort in which the middle (and upper) classes live. In ancient times only the wealthiest of people could be ignorant of evil. It took a prince, and really a young prince, to be ignorant of suffering. The middle and upper classes are almost like millions of Siddhārtha Gautamas who never left their palaces.

This also explains why some atheists (like Richard Dawkins) can be so committed to science (and hence to atheism). Believing (somewhat erroneously) that science leads to technology, it's science that holds the possibility of permanently sealing off the palace walls. It's almost as if we've entered the garden of eden through a breach in the wall, and are now trying to seal off the breach. There's something to the idea (which is why they can hold it so fervently); religion, like clothing, is a thing for outside of the garden of eden. Inside of the garden, people talked directly with God and there were no priests.

The flaw in this thinking, of course, is that removing temptation is not at all the same thing as moral improvement. (Removing temptation can help, since morality can be buttressed by habit, but morality is always a matter of free will, however strongly habit pushes.) Relatedly, you can never truly remove temptation, since we're all in competition with each other for earthly goods such as popularity. (The desire for popularity is mostly a mis-direction of the desire for our creator to look on us and see that we're good; we use each other as surrogates for God, though of course the appreciation of people by each other is quite legitimate too.)

The idea of determinism usually starts from one of two premises: the supremacy of nature or the supremacy of God. Both routes are fairly circuitous, and both involve a leap of faith. But what if we address the question directly?

First, I need to introduce a concept which I'll call "the unprovable". The unprovable is the things which may or may not be true, but cannot be proved even if they were true. The simplest example is this: what evidence would you accept that you don't exist? Not that I, the author don't exist, but that you, the reader, doesn't exist.

The answer, of course, is that there's no evidence which could be presented to you that would lead you to believe that you don't exist; your experience of any evidence is based on the premise that you exist to experience it. There's nothing that you can see, touch, taste, hear, or feel that can disprove your existence; at best they can totally disprove that your senses accurately correspond to reality. (Just to be rigorous, I'm using the standard definition of "reality": that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.) Thus, while you may or may not exist, to you your non-existence is unprovable.

I don't think that determinism is quite in the category of unprovable, but given how strong the evidence for free will is (how many things in the world seem more true than our ability to choose?), the evidence for determinism should be very strong. In particular, what evidence would actually prove determinism?

Clearly the ability to interfere with the brain and thus with free choice does not prove determinism. If it did, chairs would disprove gravity. The fact that something can be interfered with does not disprove its existence. No, the important feature of determinism is predictability. If something must happen, then you should be able to say in advance that it will happen. This was the position of the materialists of the 1800s and early 1900s. They thought (incorrectly) that the world was basically a big 3-dimensional pool game, and that if you could get precise enough measurements, you would be able to predict the future. They were superceded by the materialists of the mid 1900s who concluded that you can't possible take precise enough measurements (due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle), and so while the future is determined, you can never predict it.

Some of them presume a restricted form of prediction. That is, they assume that the brain is large enough that quantum indeterminacy can be disregarded and that with precise enough measurements one could predict the brain fully. Of course, we don't have the ability to get precise enough measurements without interfering with the brain yet, so the theory is untested. The test, to constitute strong evidence, would have to be something to the effect to taking the appropriate measurements of the brain without interfering with it, and then predicting, with strong accuracy, every movement that the person will make and every thought that they will think (in some restricted environment, of course) over some reasonable period of time, like an hour. No one's ever done an experiment even remotely like it. So let's be clear: those of us who believe in free will do so upon strong evidence constantly before us. Those of us who believe in free will have yet to produce any direct evidence of their claim. And for many determinists, they can't possibly ever produce direct evidence for it.

I was really burned by my experiences of grad school. I've been trying to let it go ever since I graduated, and I haven't really. On the plus side, it's taught me something: the most important skill for a dreamer to learn is to be able to forgive people and things for not being what you want them to be.

God help me, some day I'll forgive academia for being what it is rather than what I want it to be.