Thanks to my Readers

You’re not a very loquacious lot, but my sitemeter informs me you’re stopping by in increasing numbers. Like all other authors, I have an incurably inflated ego, and I appreciate it.

Sam Harris: Still Chasing the Moral Butterfly

Sam Harris is at it again, chasing the gaudy butterfly of the good-in-itself. Somehow, although Aristotle patiently explained why Sam’s “latest scientific ideas” about morality wouldn’t work two and a half millenia ago, and it’s been 150 years since Darwin put the last nail in the coffin of the notion of disembodied good and evil swimming around out there in the luminiferous ether, Sam is still pretending that the blank slate never died. Forget the fact that morality is the expression of evolved behavioral traits. Forget its connection with predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain. Forget that it is utterly dependent on subjective emotions in the minds of individuals for its very existence. Sam still believes that the butterfly is out there, and that, if he can only catch it, he can just hitch it up to his wagon full of dubious notions about the “scientific good,” and, with a flash of its wings, it will magically transport us to Sam’s Brave New World of “human flourishing.” In an article that turned up on Huffpo he writes,

Secular liberals, on the other hand, tend to imagine that no objective answers to moral questions exist. While John Stuart Mill might conform to our cultural ideal of goodness better than Osama bin Laden does, most secularists suspect that Mill’s ideas about right and wrong reach no closer to the Truth. Multiculturalism, moral relativism, political correctness, tolerance even of intolerance — these are the familiar consequences of separating facts and values on the left.

Guess what, Sam, John Stuart Mill was much too smart to believe in anything as contrived as “objective answers to moral questions.” He clearly and explicitly rejected the notion of “scientific good,” or what he referred to as “transcendental morality,” existing as an independent thing. His utilitarian ideas were fine as reasonable hypotheses about the principles according to which modern human societies might best be governed. His mistake was in believing that he could just tack on morality to make everything work better. If he had written a little later, after Darwin’s ideas had time to sink in, I doubt that he would have made that mistake.  He was much too brilliant a man not to put two and two together.  As for secular liberals “tending to imagine that no objective answers to moral questions exist,” it’s neither here nor there, because they act as if they do regardless. Show me one secular liberal of any intellectual significance who doesn’t think his notion of the “good” is superior to Rush Limbaugh’s, and maybe I’ll change my mind.

Sam continues,

It should concern us that these two orientations are not equally empowering. Increasingly, secular democracies are left supine before the unreasoning zeal of old-time religion. The juxtaposition of conservative dogmatism and liberal doubt accounts for the decade that has been lost in the United States to a ban on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research; it explains the years of political distraction we have suffered, and will continue to suffer, over issues like abortion and gay marriage; it lies at the bottom of current efforts to pass anti-blasphemy laws at the United Nations (which would make it illegal for the citizens of member states to criticize religion); it has hobbled the West in its generational war against radical Islam; and it may yet refashion the societies of Europe into a new Caliphate.

In other words, our “orientation” should not conform to the truth, but to what Sam thinks is “empowering” as a means to an end.  We must all become zealots of Sam’s new secular religion, not because anything as zany as disembodied “good” really exists, but because it’s necessary to pretend that it does to make sure that Europe doesn’t turn into a new Caliphate.  Continuing with this “utilitarian” theme, Sam writes,

Imagine that there are only two people living on earth: We can call them “Adam” and “Eve.” Clearly, we can ask how these two people might maximize their well-being. Are there wrong answers to this question? Of course. (Wrong answer #1: They could smash each other in the face with a large rock.) And while there are ways for their personal interests to be in conflict, it seems uncontroversial to say that a man and woman alone on this planet would be better off if they recognized their common interests — like getting food, building shelter and defending themselves against larger predators.

As I argue in my new book, even if there are a thousand different ways for these two people to thrive, there will be many ways for them not to thrive — and the differences between luxuriating on a peak of human happiness and languishing in a valley of internecine horror will translate into facts that can be scientifically understood. Why would the difference between right and wrong answers suddenly disappear once we add 6.7 billion more people to this experiment?

In other words, here’s how the logic works:

a.  Adam and Eve make a rational decision to maximize their well-being.

b.  Adam and Eve discover via experiment that smashing each other in the face with rocks diminishes their well-being.

c.  Adam and Eve decide that they should therefore alter the DNA associated with the complex emotions responsible for their moral behavior in order to avoid throwing rocks at each other.

Do you notice a disconnect between steps b and c?  So do I.  Hitler had some fine ideas about how to exploit human moral behavior to bring about the flourishing of the German people.  It resulted in the Holocaust and tens of millions of needless deaths.  Marx had another fine idea about how to exploit human moral behavior to bring about the flourishing of the workers.  That swell idea killed tens of millions more.  Now Sam wants us to swallow the idea that, if we just tinker with morality a little more carefully next time, we’ll finally get it right, and there will be a new dawn of human flourishing.  I have a better idea.  Next time we put our heads together to come up with better ways to live together, lets leave morality out of it.  If we really want to flourish, we’d best learn to thoroughly understand our moral behavior, and avoid trying to “adjust” it to suit the latest intellectual fashions.

John Stuart Mill and the “Blank Slate”

Categorization enables us to simplify the world sufficiently for us to think and reason about it.  However, like the rest of our mental equipment, it isn’t perfect, and can occasionally lead us astray, as when we try to categorize things that are, by their nature, highly individual or original.   Our most brilliant thinkers are an example thereof.  There are certainly similarities among them, but it can be very misleading to try to label them and fit them into philosophical pigeon holes.  To the extent that they are worth reading, they tend to be unique.  One cannot understand them or learn anything from them by virtue of the fact that someone includes them in this or that school of thought.  It is necessary to read their work. 

I ran across a particularly egregious example of the pitfalls of this form of categorization in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. The “blank slate” is the theory that prevailed among psychologists, anthropologists, and other experts in human behavior for much of the 20th century, according to which, for all practical purposes, human behavior and morality are learned, and there is no human nature other than what is acquired via experience and culture.  In its modern incarnation the theory was always an absurdity, and belonged more in the realm of ideological narratives such as “scientific” Marxism-Leninism than of science.  The “expert” defenders of blank slate orthodoxy in the 60′s and 70′s are better understood as the high priests of a secular religion than as proponents of a scientific hypothesis that turned out to be incorrect.  In general, Pinker has done a brilliant job of debunking them and explaining the reasons for their fanatical defense of an idea that had long been palpably ridiculous.  His book is well worth reading, although not without its flaws.  One of them is the manner in which he lumps some of mankind’s greatest thinkers together with the hidebound ideologues of the “blank slate.” 

Pinker shares a vice of the pedants who run philosophy departments in academia, in that he imagines direct chains of thought linking the ideas of highly original and individual thinkers who lived in times utterly different from each other informed by vastly different levels of scientific and general knowledge into neatly arranged systems.  Thus, as he tells it, the modern version of the blank slate was invented by John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers.  Then Locke begat John Stuart Mill, John Stuart Mill begat John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, and Watson begat latter day ideologues like Ashley Montagu and Richard Lewontin.  These are strange bedfellows indeed.  Let’s consider the case of Mill.  Pinker quotes him at length, citing his notion of intuitional philosophy.  According to Pinker,

By “intuitional philosophy” Mill was referring to Continental intellectuals who maintained (among other things) that the categories of reason were innate. Mill wanted to attack their theory of psychology at the root to combat what he thought were its conservative social implications. He refined a theory of learning called associationism (previously formulated by Locke) that tried to explain human intelligence without granting it any innate organization. According to this theory, the blank slate is inscribed with sensations, which Locke called “ideas” and modern psychologists call “features.” Ideas that repreatedly appear in succession (such as the redness, roundness, and sweetness of an apple) become associated, so that any one of them can call to mind the others. And similar objects in the world activate overlapping sets of ideas in the mind. For example, after many dogs present themselves to the senses, the features that they share (fur, barking, four legs, and so on) hang together to stand for the category “dog.”

The associationism of Locke and Mill has been recognizable in psychology ever since. It became the core of most models of learning, especially in the approach called behaviorism, which dominated psychology from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Voila!  With this trivialization of the ideas of a brilliant thinker, Pinker mashes him into a soup with the likes of Montagu and Lewontin.  There’s just one problem.  Mill is poles apart from the 60s blank slaters intellectually.  Where his mind was open, their minds were nailed down tightly in ideological boxes.  Where he was original, they were dogmatists.  Where they demonized anyone who disagreed with them, he always admitted the possibility that he could be wrong.  Where they were fanatical defenders of the blank slate in its most extreme forms, he freely admitted the possibility of innate predispositions. 

How do we know Mill was a brilliant thinker?  For one thing, unlike 999 out of 1000 of the “experts” in morality, he, in the words of E. O. Wilson, “laid his cards on the table” when he was discussing it.  Unlike so many others who pontificate wisely about morality, he did not consider it beneath his dignity to explain to the rest of us on exactly what basis he presumed to base his claims for the legitimacy of his conclusions regarding why we should do some things but not others.  He knew the difference between the subjective nature of morality as it actually exists and morality as a “good-in-itself,” for which he admitted he saw no rational basis.  As he put it in Utilitarianism:

The ultimate sanction, therefore, of all morality (external motives apart) being a subjective feeling in our own minds, I see nothing embarrassing to those whose standard is utility, in the question, what is the sanction of that particular standard? We may answer, the same as of all other moral standards – the conscientious feelings of mankind.

Note that by invoking the “conscientious feelings of mankind,” Mill has already distanced himself from the blank slate purists.  In the following sentences, he explicitly embraces a theory of human nature of which these moral feelings are a part:

…the feelings exist, a fact in human nature, the reality of which, and the great power with which they are capable of acting on those in whom they have been duly cultivated, are proved by experience. No reason has ever been shown why they may not be cultivated to as great intensity in connection with the utilitarian, as with any other rule of morals.

In other words, Mill’s error was not in rejecting human nature per se, but in assuming that it was more malleable than subsequent research has revealed it to be in reality.  Unlike our current “experts” in human behavior, including Pinker, who, having finally rejected the blank slate, remain mesmerized by the chimera of the “good-in-itself,” Mill suffered from no such delusions.  In his words,

There is, I am aware, a disposition to believe that a person who sees in moral obligation a transcendental fact, an objective reality belonging to the province of “Things in themselves”, is likely to be more obedient to it than one who believes it to be entirely subjective, having its seat in human consciousness only.

Mill, rejecting transcendental morality himself, notes the obvious fallacy in its claim to superior moral authority:

Does the belief that moral obligation has its seat outside the mind make the feeling of it too strong to be got rid of? The fact is so far otherwise, that all moralists admit and lament the ease wwith which, in the generality of minds, conscience can be silenced or stifled.

As we have already seen in the above, far from embracing the blank slate, Mill states his explicit belief in the existence of human nature.  How, then, do Pinker and the rest come up with the idea that he was the great progenitor and godfather of the blank slate.  Perhaps from statements like the following:

On the other hand, if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason the less natural.

Note that what Mill is referring to here is not human nature, but “moral feelings,” by which he means emotions, themselves grounded in human nature, in association with an explicit code of moral behavior.  Let us allow him to elaborate on this for himself:

…the moral faculty, if not a part of our nature, is a natural outgrowth from it.

But there is this basis of powerful natural sentiment; and this it is which, when once the general happiness is recognized as the ethical standard, will constitute the strength of the utilitarian morality. This firm foundation is that of the social feelings of mankind; the desire to be in unity with our fellow creatures, which is already a powerful principle in human nature.

The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that, except in some unusual circumstances or by an effort of voluntary abstraction, he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.

The powerful sentiment, and apparently clear perception, which that word (Justice) recalls with a rapidity and certainty resumbling an instinct, have seemed to the majority of thinkers to point to an inherent quality in things; to show that the Just must have an existence in Nature as something absolute – generally distinct from every variety of the Expedient, and, in idea, opposed to it, though (as is commonly acknowledged) never, in the long run, disjoined from it in fact. In the case of this, as of our other moral sentiments, there is no necessary connection between the question of its origin, and that of its binding force. That a feeling is bestowed on us by Nature, does not necessarily legitimate all its promptings. The feeling of justice might be a peculiar instinct, and might yet require, like our other instincts, to be controlled and enlightened by a higher reason.

In other words, far from rejecting innate behavior associated with morality, Mill embraced it.  He neither doubted nor rejected the notions of human nature and innate predisposition.  It was his misfortune to live just a bit too soon for the full import of Darwin’s great theory to sink in.  As a result, he could not imagine the true nature of the moral instincts whose existence he explicitly recognized, nor appreciate the fact that it would be a great deal more difficult than he expected to get them to attach themselves seemlessly to his Utilitarian prescriptions.  I firmly believe that, had he been born 20 years later, the truth would have dawned on him.

As for Pinker’s notion that Mill’s ideas were somehow primarily intended to “combat conservative social implications” of the thought of continental intellectuals is similarly far from the truth, and a further bowdlerization of his ideas.  He was certainly engaged politically, but with the rather substantial difference from the high priests of the blank slate that his mind was always open to new ideas and new arguments, and he didn’t automatically assume someone was evil and guilty of some terrible political crime simply by virtue of the fact that the person in question disagreed with him.

The best antidote to Pinker’s wooden portrayal of Mill is to read him.  As a writer he is clear and easy to understand, the very opposite of the likes of Kant and Hegel.  His work is of lasting value today.  If he’d known what we now know about morality, he probably would have realized that attempting to link his utilitarian prescriptions to a new moral code wouldn’t work, and would likely be dangerous.  On the other hand, the ideas set forth in works like On Liberty and Utilitarianism, divorced of their moralistic trappings, are worth serious consideration as possible means of promoting the happiness and welfare of human beings as individuals in the societies of the future.  I vote in favor of giving them a try.

On the Nature of Morality

The behavioral traits we associate with morality are elicited by mental processes that have evolved over tens of millions of years. Human morality is not fundamentally different from morality in other animals, and depends for its existence on similar mental processes.  Its apparent uniqueness in our species is only due to our superior cognitive abilities rather than to any fundamental difference in the nature of these mental processes themselves.  Our morality is the manifestation of the complex emotions associated with these mental processes in an animal with high intelligence. That intelligence has enabled us to theorize about and interpret our moral emotions in countless ways, but the innate features of our brains that give rise to those emotions remain similar to those in other animals with highly developed brains. The aspects of our nature associated with morality are not infinitely malleable, cannot be changed or adjusted at will, and they predispose us to behave socially and to interpret the social behavior of others in certain ways and not in others.

None of the traits associated with morality evolved in societies anything like modern states, or in environments anything like those in which the vast majority of human beings live today. Morality does not serve any purpose because purpose implies a builder or designer. Morality exists solely because, at times in the distant past, the physical characteristics of the brain that give rise to it had a selective advantage. They made it more likely that the genetic material carried by individuals would survive and reproduce. Any notion of “moral progress” not associated with the selective advantage of genetic material carried by individuals is an oxymoron. Progress towards what? That which has no purpose can have no goal towards which progress can be measured.

There is no such thing as objective good or objective evil, existing independently of subjective mental processes in the minds of individuals. Outside of the context of individual minds, these categories are meaningless, nor would they continue to exist if the minds that give rise to them ceased to exist. Attempts to exploit morality to achieve social goals in the modern world are not only extremely dangerous, but necessarily embrace the myth that good and evil do have an independent, objective existence in themselves.

If what I have written above is true, it will not become false by virtue of the fact that it does not agree with some religion or ideology. It does not imply the inevitability of an amoral, dog eat dog world, or of social chaos, or of exploitation, or of poverty, or of any other form of human misery. If anything, it implies the contrary, because we are more likely to achieve any goals we set for ourselves if we base our actions on fact than if we base them on fiction.

Stephen Hawking’s Issues with God

According to Reuters, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has deigned to inform the rest of us that it’s OK to be an infidel because, according to the most up-to-date physics models of the universe, God isn’t necessary:

In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

Hawking’s latest won’t be released until tomorrow, and I hesitate to commence panning him until I’ve read it, but this story smacks of a well-managed publicity stunt. In the first place, it’s a virtual carbon copy of the great urban myth about the exchange between the great French mathematician, Laplace, and Napoleon (hattip Wiki):

Laplace went in state to Napoleon to accept a copy of his work, and the following account of the interview is well authenticated, and so characteristic of all the parties concerned that I quote it in full. Someone had told Napoleon that the book contained no mention of the name of God; Napoleon, who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, received it with the remark, ‘M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.’ Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy, drew himself up and answered bluntly, ‘Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.’ (“I had no need of that hypothesis.”) Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, who exclaimed, ‘Ah! c’est une belle hypothèse; ça explique beaucoup de choses.’ (“Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.”)

Well, it’s not really that well authenticated, but it still captures the substance of Laplace’s thought on the subject accurately enough.  In the second place, if that’s really all Hawking’s got, he was beaten to the punch by the brilliant Frenchman Jean Meslier in his Testament by more than 250 years:

Is it not more natural and more intelligible to deduce all which exists, from the bosom of matter, whose existence is demonstrated by all our senses, whose effects we feel at every moment, which we see act, move, communicate, motion, and constantly bring living things into existence, than to attribute the formation of things to an unknown force, to a spiritual being, who cannot draw from his ground that which he has not himself, and who, by the spiritual essence claimed for him, is incapable of making anything, and putting anything in motion.

Indeed, all of the best arguments of the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, appear in Meslier’s work, along with much else besides.  As an infidel myself, I fail to see what, if anything, Hawking is contributing to the discussion, assuming he’s being quoted accurately.  After all, how do physical laws prove anything?  Laws can have no disembodied existence of their own, floating around in nothingness.  If they don’t apply to any real thing, then they cease to exist themselves.  If they do apply to something real, it still begs the question, why do the real thing(s) exist to begin with?  We’re still left to wonder, “How did all this stuff get here?”

The Evolution of Intelligence in the Universe

According to Paul Davies, author of “The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence,”

I think it very likely -in fact inevitable-that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe.

I think that, if there were any other kind of intelligence, it would (assuming it were smart enough) recognize its own irrelevance and terminate its existence. The biological entities that programmed it to begin with might have equipped it with analogs of the biological will to survive and other DNA-programmed emotions, but it would recognize their absurdity in its own context. Intelligence exists because if has promoted the survival of biological life. Once it no longer does that, its continued existence is pointless. “We” are not our intelligence, and “we” are not our consciousness. These things are merely ancillary tools constructed by our DNA because, at some point, they have promoted its survival. What is it about us that has been alive for the last 3 billion years in an unbroken chain of existence, passing from life form to life form, and what is it about us that is potentially immortal? Our intelligence? No. Our consciousness? No. It is our DNA. That is the real, immortal “We.” Once “We” have ceased to exist, the continued fate of the universe and any “intelligence” it might contain will have become a matter of complete indifference.

“Designer Babies” and Transhumanism

Internet chatter over “designer babies” has died down considerably since early 2009, when a chain of fertility clinics headquartered in Los Angeles offered to allow prospective parents to select for cosmetic traits such as hair, eye, and skin color. However, the subject bears on the genetic future of mankind, and is of enduring importance whether the media gatekeepers are paying attention to it or not. The clinics in question quickly withdrew the offered services in response to the inevitable “storm of protest” by those who consider themselves the guardians of public morality.  Regardless, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), the technology involved, has been around since the early 1990′s, and continues to advance. It involves checking the genetic material in a cell taken from an embryo very early in its development, when it only consists of about six cells. Initially developed to screen for diseases such as Down’s Syndrome, or reduce the probability of developing diseases such as diabetes or cancer, in principle it can be used to select for arbitrary inherited traits.  Recent research has focused on diseases and psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia that do not appear traceable to simple genetic variations, and are more likely genetically heterogeneous; dependent on what is likely a complex combination of genetic factors.  As our knowledge increases along these lines, we will inevitably learn to better understand and eventually control the similarly complex genetic factors affecting cognitive ability, or intelligence.  One must hope that day comes sooner rather than later, and that when it comes, prospective parents will have the right to use it without state interference.

If we are to survive, we must become more intelligent, and the sooner the better.  The matter is urgent, and there is no alternative.  If we do survive, we will become more intelligent.  The only question is how.  Will it be by controlled genetic engineering, or by the “survival of the fittest” in the future holocausts we bring on ourselves because we are too stupid to avoid them?  Consider the events of the 20th century.  A great wave of popular idealism that had been growing ever stronger since the days of the American and French Revolutions among a large proportion of the most intelligent and highly educated elements of societies around the world metasticized into the incredibly destructive pseudo-religion, Communism.  The better part of a century and 100 million deaths later, we seem to have weathered that particular ideological storm, at least for the time being.  There is no compelling reason to believe that it was inevitable that we would, or that it was impossible that, under somewhat different but plausible conditions, Communist systems could have dominated the entire world, or that the resultant clash of ideologies might have culminated in a general nuclear exchange.  Orwell’s 1984 might very well have become a reality.  International boundaries might very well have been reduced to the role of marking where one North Korea ended, and another begun.  There is no guarantee that the outcome of the next storm will not be different. 

Communism was no historical anomaly.  It was a phenomenon dependent for its existence and its power on some of the best and brightest minds of its day.  As such, it provides us with an objective metric of our intelligence.  We are not nearly as smart as we think we are.  Messianic Islamism has already begun occupying the ideological vacuum left by its demise, and the true believers of new and, perhaps, yet unheard of systems will surely swarm forth eventually to promote new “scientific” paths to the “salvation of humanity.”  Meanwhile, the technologies of mass destruction continue to develop at an alarming pace.  Unless we become intelligent enough to control them it is only a question of time until they are used.  If we take control of our own genetic future there is a slim chance that we will be able to avoid the worst.  If not, it will at least improve our chances of surviving it.

When it comes to making the necessary decisions, it would be best to leave the state out of it.  State eugenic programs have not been remarkably successful in the past, and they are unlikely to be more successful in the future, because states cannot be depended on to act in the interests of the individuals who are their citizens.  Individuals are remarkably acute judges of their own best interests.  Give individuals the power to use the technology or not, as they see fit.  Their genetic survival will be the metric of whether they made the right choices.  As noted in Psychology Today, they have always made those individual choices in the past by selectivity in the choice of a mate.  Technologies such as PGD will not change that.  It will merely give them the opportunity to make the choice more accurately.

Many articles have been written about the need to explore the “ethical” implications of the choices we must make about these technologies.  In fact, virtually anyone who describes themselves as a “bio-ethicist,” or, for that matter, an “ethics expert” of any other stripe is, objectively, a charlatan.  Their “ethical debates” are merely so much emotional posturing, in which the various sides carry on fantastical arguments about whose deeply felt emotions are the most “legitimate.”  Ethical debates that do not start with the recognition of the evolutionary origin of these emotions, of the reasons and conditions under which they evolved, and their nature as subjective constructs deriving from predispositions that are hard-wired in the brain, are no more rational than the raving of madmen. 

Values can never be legitimate in themselves.  They are, by their nature, subjective.  They exist, like virtually everything else of significance about us, because the wiring in the brain that gives rise to them promoted our survival.  If, then, one finds it necessary for some reason to pursue a “value,” none can rationally take precedence over survival.  That is the only “value” that can be accepted as seriously at issue here.  We can ignore the rest of the blather about “ethics,” because the “ethicists” quite literally do not know what they’re talking about.

I wish to survive, and I wish for my species and life in general to survive.  I don’t flatter myself that those wishes have any objective legitimacy, but, subjectively, I am very attached to them.  Assuming there are others out there who also wish to survive, I have a suggestion about how to fulfill that wish.  Let us become more intelligent as quickly as possible.

Quantum Mechanics and Free Will

Quantum theory is one of the most important and least understood advances in physics over the last 150 years.  Beginning with Max Planck’s supposition in a paper published in 1900 that energy could only be emitted in quantized form, it eventually led to the realization that, particularly at the atomic and sub-atomic level, it was more accurate to represent objects and their interactions, mathematically at least, in terms of wave functions and probability distributions than in terms of the deterministic prescriptions of classical physics.  There has been a great deal of speculation regarding the implication of these discoveries touching the matter of free will (see, for example, here, here, and here, and Google will turn up many more examples).  As often happens in such philosophical speculations (and as some of the authors of the linked articles themselves point out), the various hypotheses occasionally go considerably further than is warranted by what we actually know. 

One can’t really say anything positive about free will unless one understands what it is, and to understand what it is, one must understand consciousness.  Unfortunately, we don’t.  We can be more confident in speaking about what free will is not.  For example, let us assume for the sake of argument that insects are not self-aware or conscious, and they only react to their environment via instinct.  They may seem to make decisions such as whether to fight or flee, admit another insect into the hive or nest or not, etc., but free will is not involved.  Machines could be programmed to react in exactly the same ways.  Proponents of free will believe that, somehow, the human mind can consicously override such programming, and deliberately make choices that are not pre-ordained by physical law or instinct.  These choices, in turn, can alter the outcome of events.  Again, without resorting to supernatural arguments, we cannot state positively that free will exists because we lack sufficient understanding of what goes on in the human mind to do so.  We literally don’t understand what we’re talking about.  We can, however, discuss whether it is even possible for it to exist to begin with.

In that limited sense, the implications of quantum physics are profound.  If everything in the universe obeyed the laws of classical physics, there would be no room for free will.  Given a certain initial state of the universe, everything in the future would be pre-ordained by physical law, or so, at least, it has seemed to many great thinkers in the past.  In principle, we could create mathematical models that would predict the future with absolute certainty, although, at least at the current state of the art, the complexity of the universe is so great as to put such models completely out of the question.  We would just be along for the ride, and free will would be just an illusion.  In a quantum universe, at least we have some wiggle room. 

True, we still don’t know at a fundamental level what all this stuff in the universe around us really is, or why it exists to begin with.  However, we can demonstrate with repeatable experiments that it conforms to mathematical models in which probability plays a significant role.  Now if, once again, we are given a certain initial state of the universe, the claim that the future outcome of events is pre-ordained by the laws of physics is not as plausible in such a probabilistic universe.  The mathematical models may be misleading us about the true nature of things, but, in principle, an infinity of possible outcomes becomes possible.  In such a universe, it is at least possible for free will to exist, although it is hardly certain, and the manner in which it exists, if it does, must remain a mystery to us until we learn a great deal more about the nature of our own minds. 

That is the implication of quantum physics regarding free will.  From a classical universe whose eventual fate was written in stone depending on its state at some point in the past, we have proceeded to one in which many outcomes are possible, and free will is, therefore, not completely excluded.  It seems a rather limited implication on the face of it.  However, it’s comforting that a universe in which what we think or do actually matters is, at least, not out of the question.

On Rewarding Publicity Stunts

In response to a deliberate and premeditated act of violence by a “peace flotilla” resulting in nine deaths and many injuries, Obama has called the Israeli blockade of Gaza “unsustainable,” and has pledged $400 million to reward Hamas and its Turkish pals for their provocation. In other words, at a time when Turkey and Iran are both threatening to use force to break the blockade, our President is signalling, “Go ahead!” This does not seem like a wise strategy to me, unless, of course, the Obama Administration perceives Israel as the enemy. Given the President’s ideological affinity for the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, and Bill Ayers, that would be anything but surprising. In any case, the Administration’s actions signal our weakness to Israel’s enemies at a time when she faces unprecedented threats of attack. It is hardly out of the question that Iran and Turkey will conclude that any U.S. response to their use of force will be limited to diplomatic protests, and decide that the moment to strike has arrived.

Morality: A Christian puts 2 and 2 Together

I haven’t read the book,  ”Roots of Despair: Evolution and the Death of Morality,” by Bill Weaks, but the the blurb about it on the Amazon website is interesting in its own right.  It reads,

Is morality real? Is there a universal morality that exists beyond opinion and circumstance? If evolution is correct, then the answer to these questions is an obvious and unequivocal “NO.” If Darwin was right, then what we call morality is simply the physical result of billions of random accidents, and that is that.

When the author, who happens to be a Christian, speaks of morality here, he is referring to transcendental morality, meaning morality that is legitimate in itself. As an atheist I completely agree with him on this particular point. He’s really just stating the obvious. If morality is the expression of evolved behavioral traits in a particular type of animal, namely us, then it is illogical to speak of morality as a thing in itself, an object having some kind of universal validity in its own right. The remarkable thing is that, in spite of rapidly increasing acceptance among secular scientists and philosophers of the evolutionary basis of morality and its association with innate predispositions, many of which we share with other animals, none of them, at least to my knowledge, has explicitly accepted this seemingly obvious and fundamental truth.  It is, apparently, a truth that has, so far, been too unpalatable for them to swallow.

Why do all these academic, scientific, and philosophical worthies have such difficulty putting two and two together when a Christian many of them would dismiss as a simpleton can see the obvious without the least difficulty?  As a hypothesis, I suggest that it’s because it conflicts with the ideological preconceptions of many of them.  Like all human beings, they experience moral distinctions of good and evil as real, because that’s the way they’re wired, so it’s no more difficult psychologically for them to maintain the illusion that they actually are real than anyone else.  Many of them suscribe to ideological “holy causes” that they are used to associating with “the good.”  If “the good” is the artifact of behavioral traits that evolved at times that are completely different than the present, then the basis for associating ideological goals with “the good” disappears.  The problem becomes even more accute for “ethics experts” who have spent their lives reading dull tomes of philosophy.  The rug is pulled out from under them, and their “expertise” becomes irrelevant.  Throw in for good measure the fact that many of these people come from a milieu that until very recently considered any suggestion that innate predispositions had anything to do with human behavior a sign of political unsoundness, and the reasons they keep clutching at some imaginary Platonic form of “the good” become clear.

How long will it take them before, like Mr. Weaks and other Christians who have no ideological motive for being spooked by the truth, they, too, finally put two and two together?  There are grounds for optimism.  After all, the fact that morality is an expression of evolved predispositions has been obvious to anyone with an open mind since at least the days of Darwin, but because of the ideological baggage referred to above, many of them have rejected the obvious until very recently.  They defended their ideological myths with the tenacity of true believers until they were finally buried by the mountains of evidence emanating from the fields of neuroscience and other scientific disciplines.  The fact that morality has no objective validity in its own right is just as obvious as the fact that it is the expression of evolved behavioral traits.  For that matter, the former fact follows from the latter, and one hopes they will finally stumble on that truth as well in the not-too-distant future.

Of course, Mr. Weaks takes a very pessimistic view of things.  As the Amazon blurb referred to above puts it,

This simple truth is at the root of the decay and despair that surrounds us. Grasping this fact allows those of us who believe in a supernatural source of morality to better love and minister to those lost in the moral wasteland that Darwinism inevitably leaves behind.

Unfortunately, the truth regarding the existence of a God does not depend on whether Mr. Weaks experiences despair about it or not.  I tend to take a more optimistic view of things, and, based on the evidence of all recorded human history, conclude that moral behavior in human beings will not suddenly disappear regardless of whether Christianity or any other religion or philosophy happens to be true or not.  We’re wired to be moral, even if we still have only a very vague perception of what morality actually is.  In the day to day interactions among individuals, we will act morally because it is our nature to do so.