Posted by Colin Temple on December 15, 2009 in Ethics, Metaphysics
Determinism is the view that all things in the physical world are determined by previous physical causes, including human action. Two asteroids collide in space because they’re on a path that brings them together. Water falls off a cliff because gravity pulls it down. And you are reading this because some physical process in your brain has led you to browse the Internet and stumble across this article.
Determinism is the result of applying our scientific notion of causality to ourselves, which we intuitively believe to be somehow immune to the tides of causality. But determinism says that we’re a part of the system.
What, exactly, that system is, we’re not sure. It may be that everything has been determined since the beginning of the universe — the big bang set things in motion, and everything that has happened is simply further consequence of that event, or even an earlier one. It may be that things are determined by the quantum nature of the universe — if quantum mechanics is true, then there’s some element of randomness, but things are still determined by physical events. But both of these are forms of determinism.
So, no free will?
If determinism is true, there’s no free will. (The compatibilists will disagree with me — compatibilism tries to marry the ideas of determinism in the physical world and freedom of will in consciousness.)
In other words, the things you do have been determined by physical events, and, when you act, you could not have acted differently.
Why should I be OK with that?
If your will is not free then every action you make has been determined by something outside of yourself. You can’t choose what you’re going to do, or rather, you can’t choose to act differently than you do.
When some people encounter the possibility that we lack free will, they freak out. What they imagine is a situation in which they want to do something, but are unable to act according to their will. They imagine that they want to make one choice, but are forced into another.
This is not the consequence of determinism. If determinism is true, then, like actions, the will is determined. You’ll never will something you don’t want to will, because your desires, your thoughts, your will itself is the result of a physical process. It will never be the case that you will against your own will — this is a logical impossibility.
So, your actions will always correspond to your will. You may still err, experience internal compulsions, or be forced into things just as you would if your will were objectively free. But you’ll never be in the situation where you want to will something other than you will, or where you will one thing but act differently. You will never experience the force of determinism, because you will always feel that you are doing what you will to do.
As a result, you are OK with determinism, because if determinism is true, it has absolutely no bearing on what you want. You’ll always be able to act as you will to, exactly as you would if determinism were false and your will were “free” in the sense that it was undetermined.
Hard determinism says that all events, including your actions, are caused by a
chain of causality, like the movement of balls in a game of pool.
What about responsibility?
The biggest problem with the absence of free will is an ethical one. Here is where we have a problem coping with the lack of free will, because we have the notion that we must be responsible for our actions. If our actions are ultimately caused by things external to us, then it seems wrong that we should be punished for those actions, or that we should feel any guilt. If I were to steal money, unjustifiably, in a determined world, that theft would not be my fault, or not totally my fault, because my decision to steal, and my action to do so, was determined by some physical processes that I do not control.
There are two ways to deal with such a problem. The first is to point out that, even though I may not have chosen to unjustifiably steal because of a strictly internal decision, it is still my will to steal. My consciousness believes that, whether or not the idea originated with me, I chose to steal. Even if the desire to steal came from outside of me, there is no desire within me strong enough to have stopped me from stealing. So, even though perhaps I am not at fault for the theft as if I were an individual self-contained agent, there is no claiming that I am truly innocent, either. I stole because some physical process both made me steal and made me want to steal. It may not be my own choice that led to my moral corruption in this example, but nevertheless, I am a thief.
(I’ll clarify that this is just an example — believe what you will, I am not a thief.)
The second way to deal with this is by pointing out that whether it’s right or wrong, both my actions and the response of others are determined. The idea that we ought to do something else is pointless, because we will do what we will necessarily do. There are no alternative possibilities. If I am determined to commit a crime, I will commit it. If you are determined to punish me, then you will punish me.
That’s not to say that we do not influence each other. It would be an interesting world if everyone suddenly thought in this manner. If everyone suddenly believed in determinism, people may become apathetic. Economies may fall apart, the justice system may disappear, and anarchy would result. This may make people suddenly believe in free will again, since their actions obviously changed based on their belief.
But that would not actually imply free will. Rather, it would merely be the case that the determined system led us to that unorganized social state because of our determined attitudes. If we believe that morality is important we will behave according to morality, but not because we chose to believe that morality is important, but because we were determined to form this structure and follow it.
What about predictions?
Another possible consequence of determinism is that we could, in theory, make very accurate predictions about the future if things are perfectly determined by past events. For instance, if the universe is determined in the sense that classical physical causality carries forward, and that all events were determined way back at the beginning of the universe, then we would simply need the technology to know the position and velocity of every particle in the universe in order to predict the future, and essentially create prophecy.
I use the term “simply” very liberally. It’s obviously no simple undertaking to record such vast amounts of information, and we’re nowhere close to this — so you don’t need to worry about someone calling your every move before it happens anytime soon.
Even if we had such technology, quantum mechanics seems to make this fundamentally impossible anyways. According to quantum mechanics, the more we know about the position of a particle, the less we know about its velocity, and vice-versa. Therefore, if quantum mechanics accurately describes physical processes, then it’s impossible to predict the future even if it is determined. Again, it looks like determinism wouldn’t be such a big problem.
Convinced?
This may not have you embracing the idea that you do not have freedom. The idea that we have free will is generally an important concept to the way we think about ourselves, and the way our societies function. We value responsibility and choice as important features of the human experience, and the idea that these are merely illusions can be unsettling.
My point is simply that, even if this position (of determinism and incompatibilism) turns out to be true, you won’t miss free will. There’s simply no practical consequence, at least in the sense that there’s nothing you would miss about free will.
(Sorry for coming back suddenly with such a long post! One note that I will make about this account of determinism and free will — the effect of determinism on free will described here presupposes a physicalist response to the mind-body problem. That is, we’re assuming that consciousness is caused by physical events, and that the mind is not a separate ontological substance from the body.)
What do you think? If free will turned out to not exist, would you be disappointed? Why? — Am I missing something important?
PHOTO CREDITS: (1) stevendepolo / (2) Nic’s events / CC BY 2.0
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Posted by Colin Temple on September 8, 2009 in Epistemology
I want to talk about something I find interesting, and that is the impact of luck in epistemology.
If you’re familiar with the study of knowledge, you may know that, traditionally, knowledge is defined as justified true belief.
However, not all philosophers agree with this assertion. Edumnd Gettier famously created what’s known as the “Gettier problem”, by presenting some examples (the Gettier counterexamples, as they are known) of instances of justified true belief that do not correspond with our intuitive notion of knowledge. Since that time, more examples have surfaced that closely resemble what we would normally call knowledge, but challenge the traditional definition. I’ll use one example that was not given by Gettier, which I think sums up the idea of luck in epistemology very well.
Carl Ginet of Cornell University provides this example of lucky knowledge. He imagines that a person, Henry, is driving down a country road and sees a barn. In his mind, he forms the belief that he sees a barn. His belief is justified, because the object he sees appears to be a barn — it matches his understanding of what a barn is, how a barn looks, etc. His belief is also true, because what he sees is, in fact, a barn.
However, things are more interesting than that. For, in the area that Henry finds himself, the locals have an odd hobby. They like to construct facades of buildings, which, from the road, appear identical to actual buildings. In fact, the majority of the things that look like barns from the road are not actually barns, but wooden facades that only look like barns.
Now, here’s the problem. Henry has a justified true belief that he sees a barn, which, in the traditional account, means that he knows that he sees a barn. But it’s only by sheer luck that Henry is actually correct in his belief. If Henry had happened to be looking at any of the other barn-like objects in the area, he would have been wrong. This begs the question: Does Henry really know that he is looking at a barn?
If you answer “yes” to that question, then consider the following. Suppose that someone next to him is familiar with the area, and tells Henry that, “actually, the people in this area construct facades of buildings, and most of the things that look like barns around here are, in fact, not barns.” If Henry is told this, but nobody confirms that he is actually looking at a real barn, does he still know that he is looking at a barn? It would seem that his true belief is no longer justified — given what he now knows about the area, he doesn’t have a good enough reason for believing what he previously knew to be true.
Did Henry go from knowing something to not knowing it? If so, than to what degree is knowledge dependant on our state of mind? If not, did he ever know it, and can we ever know something luckily, or are there other qualifications to knowledge other than it being justified and true?
Duncan Pritchard, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, performs what is probably the first thorough examination of this concept in his book, Epistemic Luck
.
I’ll leave it at that, for now, to bring up the idea of epistemic luck. It’s something that I’ll be keeping in the back of my mind this year as the epistemology topics come up. I’ll be beginning my second year tomorrow, which, fortunately, has a greater focus on philosophy than my first year. I’ll probably come back to this idea in a later post, as epistemology is one of my favourite areas of philosophy.
PHOTO CREDIT: iowa_spirit_walker / CC BY 2.0
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Posted by Colin Temple on July 15, 2009 in Ethics
I have rights. You have rights. She has rights. He has rights. They have rights. We all have rights! Hooray for rights.
So we have the right to live, to be free, to be treated equally, and to say and do whatever we want so long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others. Awesome. What a wonderful, modern world we live in where we’ve come to realize our inalienable human rights.
But if these rights are so fundamental to our being, where do they come from, anyways? So much about ethics today, especially in law and politics, concerns whether or not certain actions infringe upon human rights. It would probably be wise to be sure that these rights stand on solid ground.
So let’s consider a few sources of our beloved rights:
Natural Justice
Natural justice, or natural law, is the idea that there exists a fundamental idea of justice — one that is somehow either a property of humanity, of life, or of the universe or cosmos in general. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. They’re something real, beyond what any law says at any particular point in time. They’re obvious to us, and laws that oppose them are foolish, wrong and unjust.
The religious version of the natural justice idea is that rights are granted to us by the divine. Right is right and wrong is wrong, because God/the gods/the spirits will(s) it to be so. In some religions, not all rights are universal: some religions prescribe different rights to men than to women, to people of higher or lower social status, or to people of certain lineage.
But the idea is generally the same: some acts are just or unjust because there is some absolute morality driving our ideas of justice. United States law is one prime example of natural justice as the “official” source of human rights, as demonstrated by the U.S. Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The bolding is mine, to highlight the obvious.
The Social Contract
If you’re not inclined to believe that there exists some fundamental justice in the world, which may be the rational conclusion if you are an atheist, or perhaps an agnostic, then we need a source of rights that doesn’t depend upon some universal moral constant. If justice exists, it must be a human creation. But how did we create justice, and if so, how can it prescribe fundamental, universal rights?
Social Contract theory is important to ethics, but also to political philosophy. The idea for both is the same: human beings once existed in what the philosopher Thomas Hobbes called the “state of nature”. In his magnum opus, The Leviathan, he describes humanity in a state of constant war with itself, where men lead “brutish and short” lives. In the state of nature, morality does not exist.
The Social Contract is the man-made solution to this dilemma. We create societies, in which we agree to follow a set of rules because it’s the smart thing to do for our own survival and well-being. We agree to give some authority to our governments, because someone must maintain the peace. If we agree to this contract, we leave the state of nature and enter into the realm of law, where a sense of justice now rules us. The agreement need not be explicit — we obviously haven’t all signed a contract. But the fact that we live in countries with certain notions of rights, participate in those societies and, at least generally, abide by those laws, we are part of the social contract.
However, if one decides to reject the contract, that person exists in the state of nature. If someone is in the state of nature, we can choose to punish them in any way we please. They have no rights, because they rejected the source of rights, and nothing we do to them can be deemed just or unjust — moral or immoral.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism, as a moral theory, is a little different. In general, utilitarianism holds that what is just is what produces the maximum amount of happiness for the largest number of people, and the least amount of misery. Utilitarianism is all about the math — whatever produces the most positive effect and/or the least negative effect is the correct, or just, course of action.
What does that mean for rights? Not much. In a purely utilitarian view of morality, the rights of the individual are of little consequence to the more important needs. It sounds pretty Vulcan: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”. (That’s right, a Star Trek reference.)
But we quickly find scenarios in which Utilitarianism produces “just” actions that seem wrong to most people. For example, let’s consider Jimmy Winters. Jimmy Winters is an investor, and a banker. Jimmy Winters loans people money when they need it most, and charges huge amounts of interest. Jimmy Winters helps people buy houses they can’t afford, and then sells their mortgages for a profit. Jimmy Winters is the reason the housing market fell apart in 2008. Jimmy Winters then took money from the government, and paid himself a nice bonus with it. Jimmy Winters sleeps on top of a pile of money with three different women he’s paid to sleep with him every night. Jimmy Winters has never given a dime to charity. Jimmy Winters is worth $50 million that the government knows about, and at least $30 million more in offshore holdings. Jimmy Winters is a douchebag.
You could feed a lot of people with that money. You could build hospitals and save many lives with that money. You could do great things with that money. So if what’s right is the thing that has the greatest positive effect for the most people, the just and correct thing to do is to kill Jimmy Winters, steal his money, and do good things with it.
It’s Robin Hood on crack, and as much as we may think that Jimmy Winters deserves such a fate, and nobody would miss him, most people feel that it’s still wrong to kill someone for their stuff.
(Jimmy Winters is a fictional guy, by the way. I just made that up. If there’s some Jimmy Winters out there reading this, I’m sorry. You’re probably not a douchebag.)
In the case of utilitarianism, rights appear as a “fix” to this kind of problem. We have the sense that this is wrong because it infringes upon a right to life — there are certain rights that are paramount, that have a value so high that the situation must be incredibly dire for them to be outweighed by anyone else’s needs or wants. The right to life is such a right.
So, uh, where do they come from?
We’ve looked at three possible sources of rights: natural justice, the social contract, and a fix for utilitarianism. As with any important question in philosophy, none of the answers are perfect.
In the case of natural justice, we’re relying on some idea of universal morality which is essentially unverifiable. We’re never going to agree on the source: good luck getting religious groups to agree on anything, and if you’re not considering a divine source, it’s hard to pin natural justice on any real source.
In the case of social contract theory, we may be closer to something that makes sense, but it doesn’t cover everything. What about children who aren’t able to make the decision to join the social contract on any level, conscious or unconscious? What about those with mental disabilities, especially if they have no close relatives who can make the agreement on their behalf? We seem to want to grant them rights, even if they don’t have the ability to truly participate in the moral community. And what about future, nonexistent people? Surely they have no rights by this theory — but then why are we so concerned about ruining their lives with global warming? Why do we feel a moral duty to future generations?
And for utilitarianism, as I mentioned, rights only appear as a fix to a moral theory that gives us so much moral ambiguity that we must assign rights before we slip into a world of vigilante justice.
The alternative to all of these is that rights don’t exist until they are assigned directly by law. So, in the U.S., the right to bear arms is a constitutional right because it is a constitutional right. It exists because it is written into the laws of that country. In Canada, that right does not exist, and there’s no truth to the ideas that it “should exist” or “should not exist”. It simply does not, because justice is law. That’s a great idea in countries that have laws which are, for the most part, compatible with our values. But there’s a huge flaw there: how confident are you that lawmakers are and always will be just?
Yeah, me either.
So much for solid ground. Many of these ideas come close to our common understanding of rights, but most people don’t agree whole-heartedly with any one, and if they do, they don’t agree with everyone else.
But despite all of these inconsistencies, we tend to believe that we have rights. We believe our rights exist because we feel they ought to. We believe in a right to live, a right to believe and say what we choose, a right to be somewhat secure and free, and perhaps most generally, a right not to be subjected to suffering by others.
That last one — the right not to suffer, or be forced into suffering — is something I’m going to come back to very soon. I have more to say about rights in a future post. We’re just glazing over the basics here, of course.
In the meantime, what do you think about rights? Are our rights as fundamental as we tend to believe they are? And if so, do any of these theories adequately describe why? Have I missed something important?
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Posted by Colin Temple on July 1, 2009 in Politics
Not much time for a post today… or at all lately, really, but I just wanted to quickly say: Happy Birthday, Canada! 142 years and still looking fine!
I hope you’re out celebrating, Canadians. Now, I’m off to drink some fine Canadian beer in honour of this great nation.
Happy Canada Day.
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Posted by Colin Temple on May 1, 2009 in Philosophy, Science
One of the major objections to the idea that time travel is possible is the apparent fact that we haven’t been visited by tourists from the future. If travel to the past is possible, it’s likely that future historians may be tempted to take advantage of it, that terrorists or criminals may travel back in time to alter history, that someone would go back to visit their ancestor… and that, with those and so many other possible motives, it’s unlikely that the technology would never be used.
The most obvious answer to why we haven’t seen travellers from the future is that backwards time travel is either impossible or never gets invented. Maybe humanity dies out before inventing it, for example. But obviously we don’t want humanity to die out, and time travel is too cool to go uninvented, so what are we left with?
Fear not… all of your twisted sci-fi dreams may yet come to pass. Here are some possible explanations for why we haven’t met any time tourists yet:
We’re living in a timeline that will be erased by time travel.
I’m not sure this one makes sense, because if this timeline, before time travel’s initial invention, will be overwritten by the consequences of time travel, it would seem that we wouldn’t exist as we do today — that if time travel can exist, it must create some kind of self-consistency, resulting in a timeline in which the timeline created by time travel produces time travel at some point after the time travellers first arrive. Thus, there wouldn’t exist a timeline that wasn’t effected by time travel. However, at least one initial version of the timeline has to have existed before time travel was invented the first time. Maybe that’s this one, and somehow we’re to be forced out of existence when time travel exists.
I don’t like this option, because at worst we will have the totality of our existence erased, and at best, it just sucks. Let’s try to do better.
Backward time travel has occurred, or does occur, but we’re unaware of it.
This one has a few possible options. It may be that time travel has occurred but we’re unaware of it, because the resulting timeline has resulted in the human population, or at least most of it, lacking the knowledge of its occurrence.
One scenario to this effect is that, for reasons unknown, nobody goes back this far. Perhaps the time travellers have yet to arrive — they’re more interested in seeing 2012, or 3009, than 2009 or earlier. Maybe the human experience gets better, and they all think that experiencing our epoch would be torture. Not the strongest of these options but one of the possible ones.
If time travellers have gone back this far, or further, perhaps it wasn’t documented, or very few people are aware of it. Maybe tourists have only gone back to times in prehistory for scientific study, but wouldn’t risk contaminating human culture. Or, perhaps the only travelers operated in secret, using technology or mundane disguise to conceal themselves, not revealing the fact that they were from the future. (Perhaps you are the descendant of someone not born yet!)
If you want more of a stretch, perhaps the simulation argument is correct, and that its third possible conclusion is true. This would mean that we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. Think The Matrix. Maybe we’re living in a simulation in which time travel is either restricted or not occurring, but in the external “real” world, of which we are unaware, time travel occurs.
Time travel occurs between, or creates, multiple universes
Some current theories and models in physics, including string theory and some interpretations of quantum mechanics, suggest that our universe may be one of many. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in particular, supports the idea that all possible outcomes of random events (and decisions) may occur in separate, ever-branching universes.
If this is true, we may simply be living in a universe that has not ye been, or won’t be, influenced by time travel. It may be that our universe is the preservation of the original time in the first proposed scenario above — that when time travel occurs, the traveller does not, in fact, travel back to their proper past, but to a copy of it. Time travel itself may spawn new universes, creating a new branch in the same way that other decisions would.
You can’t travel back to a time before time travel was invented
It may be that time travel requires some special conditions at the destination end. In other words, you can only travel to a location in space-time that is ready to receive time travelers.
Stephen Hawking was one to propose this option. He suggested that backwards time travel may require a special distortion or warping of space-time in the spatial location where the travel occurs, and as a result, time travellers won’t be able to arrive in a time where those conditions haven’t been created yet.
The movie Primer
, which is one of my favourite movies, presents this option. In the movie, the characters create a time machine, which is essentially a box in which time flows backwards. They turn on the box, wait for a certain amount of time, climb into the box, and then wait for the same amount of time, emerging from the box at the point in which it was first turned on. If that’s the only way time travel works, the limitations are severe. It would prevent travel over long periods of time, unless the people in the time machine could be put into stasis, because you would need to exist within the machine for as long as the period of time you wish to travel. And, of course, it means you can’t travel back to any time before the time machine was turned on.
So there you have it — four general reasons why time travel may still be possible despite the fact that we haven’t, to our knowledge, witnessed visitors from the future. I like the fourth option best, as it seems to make the most sense and grants the most security to our timeline — until we invent time travel, that is.
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