laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (09/05/83)
I think that in the free will vs determinism debate we have several questions all lumped together. I am going to try to unpack some of them. 1: What is consciousness? 2: Given that consciousness exists, is it a function of the physical structure of the mind? 3: Does the existance of consciousness imply the existance of free will? 4: Does the non-existance of concsiousness imply the non-existsnce of free will? Inherant in all these discussions, and thus fundamental to them is the notion of causality. Most predictive theories (both scientific and philosophical) have an implicit belief that there is a cause to every action. NOTE THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THERE IS A GOD TO CAUSE THE UNIVERSE. NOBODY GETS TO MISQUOTE ME THAT WAY. On the other hand, it does not rule out the existance of God, either, i am just not interested in God in this whole argument, okay. What I am saying is that it that you can look at an event and then say that something (or somethings) caused it. Thus you can further knowledge by discovering the causes of things. Paul Torek's broken window is an effect and we can see that the cause of it it Paul deciding to hurl some object at it. The problem arises when we decide to see what 'caused' Paul to hurl the object at the window at the first place. We might ask him. he might reply, "Because I wanted to". Now if you were a psychiatrist, or a policement come to cart Paul off for damaging property, you might not find this a satisfactory answer, because you might want to know WHY Paul decided to do this. Suppose he answered "to demonstrate a point for the readers of net.philosophy". he might have to answer other questions, but at some pointt the questions would stop. Paul broke the window because he wanted to, and now we have some better understanding of why he would want to do this. Note -- all these people believe that Paul has free will, because "i wanted to" has some meaning for them. They may not believe that he is entirely free, however, but there is some measure of freedom which he is believed to have. Most people believe that he could have not broken the window had he chosen not to. There is another class of person that believes that Paul had no choice. When the window, the object, and Paul came together it was necessary for the window to be broken -- it was the only possible course of events, because everything is determined. These same people would contend that i have no choice but to write this article and you have no choice but to read it now, and those of you who are about to hit <BREAK> have no choice in that either. In general these people also believe that if you could adequately model what is going on in soemeone's head then you could also predict with 100% accuracy what is going to happen. There are no secrets, just delicate chemical balances which can be predicted and thus a model of exactly what is going to happen could be made. In general, these people think that they could change what was going to happen by changing the chemistry of the brain -- except that since they are also determined by their own brain chemistries and the nature of the world "what was going to happen" never was going to happen at all. This does not mean that there cannot be improvement. Now, how does the Quantum Mechanics fit into this? it says that at one level causality is meaningless. things do not happen because they are caused by other things, things just happen. Now, the question is, does this make any difference? Science did not stop having predictive value just because of Quantum Mechanics! Well, at this point, one has to stop until one figures out what consciousness is. If consciousness is a macro-level phenomenon, then Quantum mechanics should not have any effect. if, however, it is not then we are going to have to abandon pure determinism -- because at a certain level people 'are conscious of things' for no reason. No matter what happens in the long run, however, the strict determinists have a real problem already. Current studies of the brain show that brain Chemistry is very important. And chemistry is measured in probabilities. And noone can build a perfectly deterministic model of how chemical reactions take place -- one can only talk about the 'average reaction' and 'chemical equilibrium' which is not quite good enough for the strict determinists. if you want to predict the behavior of something, saying that 'there is a 20% that this nerve will fire' +/- X% is not really good enough. If I feed you LSD I may be able to predict that you will hallucinate, but I cannot really predict exactly what your hallucinations are. laura creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura