Loved your post, and I'll certainly attempt to explore Chaitin. Thanks.
You keep saying mechanistic determinism is dead, and I hope that is true, but
it is not dead among a very vocal segment of the population. (Dawkins, Gould
and their supporters.) It is not dead among those hysterical critics who
are denouncing the Kansas school board for refusing declare neo Darwinism as
*the* known mechanism of macro evolution.
Are you saying this:
Freedom, free will, and the ability of organisms to affect the physical
universe exist, and are random, in that they are spontaneous and not
predictable? That the existence of free will precludes any "cause" or "law
of nature" from being absolute and deterministic?
Bertvan
PS. I'll ponder your post some more and maybe have some more questions
Brian wrote:
I suppose I would have more to say about freedom than about
souls. In the case of souls we may need a distinction. As
I understand it, the Old Testament speaks primarily of man
being comprised of body and soul while in the New Testament
one encounters three aspects of man, body, soul and spirit.
I tend to think in terms of the latter. So, for me, what
people have been talking about as soul I generally refer
to as spirit while what people were referring to as mind I
think of as soul.
Perhaps one might think of an analogy with information
wrt soul. Information transcends the medium on which it
is stored, nevertheless we always encounter information
recorded on some physical substrate or another. Perhaps
in a similar way, soul is something essentially nonphysical
that requires an attachment to a physical body in order
for the soul to interact with the physical world.
[disclaimer: this is just speculation. My real answer
is that I haven't a clue how it works ;-)]
Now, regarding freedom. Here I want to deal only with
physical freedom. Is a human (body/soul/spirit) capable
of interacting with the physical world in such a way as
to not only make choices from alternatives but also to
have some effect upon what those alternatives are?
First I want to take a look at something John wrote
earlier in this thread:
========begin=========================================
"(1) In your view, is morally significant freedom compatible with all of our
thinking and behavior ultimately being completely determined by events
beyond our control? (I might add: I think if -current- science is
considered exhaustive on this subject, this determination inevitably
follows, even accepting quantum indeterminacy, which is traditionally
understood to be indeterminate, but not in a way under our control.)"
-- John Rylander
=============end========================================
I disagree quite a bit with this assessment. It seems to me that
the pessimistic view above comes from "ancient science", not
from modern science. The "ancient science" I'm referring to is
mechanistic materialism, by which I mean the type of materialism
which states that all there is is matter and motion.
To argue that the future is completely determined by things
beyond our control seems inconsistent with relatively recent
findings in nonlinear dynamics, complexity and chaos.
Before getting into a positive defense, let me first argue
negatively. The notion of man's lack of freedom comes from
this mechanistic view of the world which I believe is dead
and buried. If not quite dead, then at least like the old
man in Monty Python's <The Holy Grail>: "I'm not dead yet" :)
Since lack of freedom was built on a foundation now crumbled,
then wherein is the argument for our not being free?
OK, more positively. In nonlinear dynamics (ND) we see fine tuning
to initial conditions suggesting that intelligent agents
can influence the future even by seemingly minor inputs.
We also see unpredictability in ND even in relatively simple
deterministic systems such as a double pendulum.
Also consider the branching behavior found in many nonlinear
systems. Imagine plotting some function on a vertical scale
versus time on the horizontal scale. At some time we may have
just one solution to our nonlinear equations but, as time increases,
there may be a branch following which there may two or more
solutions. Each of these branches then further branches into
two or more and so on and so on. So then, there are many many
possible futures, only one of which will be actualized. Which
one? Well, usually there is fine tuning in this type situation
wherein a particular branch is followed by just minor fluctuations
in local conditions. Once again, we see that an intelligent agent
could conceivably affect which branches are followed.
The last thing I would like to mention is Chaitin's fairly recent
work on undecidability. Kevin asked me a long time ago for a
definition of this term. Unfortunately, I was unable to follow
through with that thread due to time restraints. Actually, there
have been quite a few threads lately where I haven't followed
through as I should. Apologies to those I should have answered
but didn't.
Well, for a thorough understanding of Chaitin's work, the best
place to go is his web page at:
http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/
This seems to contain all of his papers in electronic form
(either html or postscript) as well as many of his books.
In a nutshell, undecidable has the same meaning as random,
provided (!!!) you use the definition of random found
in algorithmic information theory. Random means incompressible,
without pattern. We can say, for example, that the toss of
a fair coin is undecidable.
Since many have perhaps not heard of Chaitin, let me just
mention that Casti (in one of his books) referred to
Chaitin's undecidability as one of the greatest achievements
in modern mathematics. It is comparable in significance to
Godel's incompleteness and to Turing's uncomputability.
Basically, what Chaitin showed is that there are mathematical
facts that are true for no reason. Maybe I should let
Chaitin speak for himself. Here is a short quote from one
of his papers:
======================================================
The most important application of algorithmic information
theory is to show the limits of mathematical reasoning. And
in particular what I've constructed and exhibited are mathematical
facts which are true for no reason. These are mathematical facts
which are true by accident. And since they're true for no reason you
can never actually prove logically whether they're true or not. They're
sort of accidental mathematical facts which are analogous to
the outcome of a coin toss, because the independent toss of a
fair coin has got to come out heads or tails but there's no reason
why it should come out one or the other. And I've found mathematical
facts that mirror this very precisely.
-- Gregory Chaitin, "How to Run Algorithmic Information Theory
on a Computer," <Complexity>, 2(1):15-21.
=======================================================
OK, to tie this back in. The language of physics is mathematics.
If there are facts that are true for no reason in mathematics
then wouldn't we at least expect that there may be things that
happen in the world for no reason?
To anticipate a possible complaint by Bertvan :-), let us remind
ourselves that the words being used here are in a technical
context. When we say that there may be things that happen in the
world for no reason we are not making some philosophical statement
regarding lack of purpose. All we are saying is that the world
may not be deterministic. You really can't have your cake and
eat it too. If you're unhappy with the implications of determinism
then you better grow fond of the notion of randomness :).