On the Fundamental Interconnectedness of Science

Scientifically illiterate people tend to make wild claims about new discoveries after reading third-hand articles on CNN.com or in the Fortean Times. Creationists have been doing this with every tiny bit of contradictory biological evidence since Darwin. New Agers do it with quantum mechanics. Regular people do it with tiny advances in technology or overblown predictions from hack journalists.

A stark example was the big scare at CERN over faster-than-light neutrinos.When the results were publicly announced last year, a chorus arose in indignation of the clearly malicious lie the academy had been spreading for the last century, that the speed of light was a fundamental speed limit in our universe, and all the physical effects this implied. Short-sighted people, believing themselves, at their Dunning-Krugeriest, to be incredibly farsighted, proclaimed a new age of physical theories and hyperdrive travel. They scoffed at the closed-mindedness of science in making such outrageously doctrinaire claims as that there were limits on the movement of objects in space! There were certainly no limits to the human spirit! ...or some such.

What these breathless blowhards don't understand is that no one seriously considered the possibility that said neutrinos were traveling faster than light. A few theoretical physicists came up with some pet models that might allow a special variety of neutrino to do something weird, but that's because they have nothing better to do. The uproar in the physics community was not about the possibility of faster-than-light travel (many people make claims about discovering such things all the time), but rather about how a huge, extremely carefully set up, and thoroughly verified experiment could produce such results! What sorts of error could be the cause, and could that error populate other results in other experiments? As it turns out, it was a loose fiber optic cable, a simple human error, but one incredibly hard to catch on practical grounds. Nothing was traveling faster than light.

Here is the salient point, however: all of those people hailing the new age of faster-than-light physics failed to understand that if it were possible for something to travel faster than light, the universe would not look the way it in fact does. Distant galaxies would not appear as they do. Our computers would not work how we expect them to. Science is an intricate machine: one cannot simply remove a component and expect the thing to keep on working.

Creationists do the same thing. By claiming on the one hand that evolution does not occur, or that the Earth has only existed for six or ten thousand years, and on the other hand continuing to drive cars and use cell phones and watch television, they fail to understand that the same natural phenomenon that allows new medical treatments to be developed allows dinosaurs to evolve into ducks. They don't understand that the science which tells us how old early hominid remains are is the same which allowed us to build an atomic bomb. And of course they do not deny the existence of genetic therapy or nuclear weapons. But they do deny evolution. (Of course, creationists do not really hold a principled position at all — they pick and choose their beliefs based on authority rather than reason.)

New discoveries in science certainly can obviate old theories. The connection between germs and diseases completely destroyed older theories of disease. But not all discoveries are like that. While it's certainly true that Einstein's general theory of relativity was a vast improvement upon Newtonian mechanics, it was not a wholesale usurpation of it. For measurements below the astronomical scale, Newton's laws were and are still perfectly valid. That is, the level of description at which they work, while inadequate for measuring the orbit of Mercury, is just fine for balls and ramps, or even bridges and skyscrapers.

The mistake many people make, though, is in seeing the universe in the opposite way. They assume Newtonian mechanics is more fundamental, because it is more intuitive. They think that their ingenious "racecar headlight on a moving train" thought experiment demonstrates that you can travel faster than the speed of light. But they still use the GPS on their phone, which would not need careful timing corrections if relativity didn't work as Einstein described.

When science throws something we don't like at us, like quantum indeterminism, special relativity, or Darwinian evolution, we cannot simply choose to ignore it while accepting all the parts we don't dislike. All the various scientific fields and theories are deeply interconnected and interdependent. This does not entail that they are all correct, of course, but one cannot simply decide that something "must be wrong" without independent, scientific reasons for thinking so. Doing that rather puts you in the position, to quote Tom Lehrer, of "a Christian Scientist with appendicitis."

Two Types of Free Will, part 2

Previously, I set out two distinct phenomena which could be referred to as "free will". I here continue to contrast them, and attempt to show why one must be the case, while the other cannot be.

Phenomenological free will, I contend, is obvious, self-apparent, and completely, empirically true. It is very hard to find someone who will argue that they do not choose their own actions on a daily basis. It requires extremes of brain-altering drugs and abusive behavior to get someone to lose the sense that they are in control of their actions (note, however, that it is in fact possible to do so). The impression I get is that when most people hear someone argue that there is no such thing as free will, they think that the argument addresses phenomenological free will. And, of course, if this were the case, then arguing against free will would be lunacy. It's just that, as with the term "consciousness", no one bothers defining what they mean, so people end up talking at cross-purposes.

The very idea of metaphysical free will, on the other hand, suffers from incoherence in a non-magical universe. If there isn't a soul or spirit pushing and pulling the cords in our pineal glands, then where does this locus of decision reside? One cannot simply say "the brain", because the brain is a monstrously complicated system, segmented into an even more monstrously complicated collection of subsets, down to the connections between individual neurons, each portion of which considers input from sense organs, bodily nerves, and other portions of the brain. There is no "place" where a decision is made. The brain works as a whole system directing action, and conscious awareness of such decision-making is limited and after the fact.

At any level of description — physical, chemical, interneuronal, conscious — what happens in the brain is either completely random or theoretically predictable. Quantum effects do occasionally tip the scale and something weird happens, but unless you posit that that random weirdness is magically motivated, it can in no way be said to be willful. The interactions between neurons are far less random, and can be described and calculated fairly accurately, and interconnected systems of neurons can be isolated by structure and function. So, again, there is nowhere for this metaphysical decision maker to reside.

From a psychological perspective, the case is even more dire! You do what you are inclined to want to do. You take that action which the sum of your habits and motivations does in fact motivate you to take. If you chose to go running instead of eating that tub of ice cream, it's not because you are a free agent in a libertarian universe capable of making any logically possible action. Rather, your sense of guilt over not exercising recently, your motivation to look and feel better, and your desire to be healthier as you get older overcame your desire to eat delicious ice cream and feel aesthetic pleasure for a few minutes. You had these various motivations wrestling inside you, and your brain finally computed that the former motivations were more pressing than the latter, and sent the balance of these desires to conscious awareness so that you could write your "decision" to go running into your conscious narrative.

If you try to explain metaphysical free will from a psychological perspective, you get hopelessly muddled (I can't even formulate a coherent argument for such a thing in my mind), and the only fall-back I can see is on Descartian magic — souls and spirits and such.

Libertarianism (in the philosophical sense mentioned in the previous post) suffers from exactly the same problem as metaphysical free will. What would it even mean to say that the universe "could have gone a different way"? A quantum event could have had some other outcome than it did? Well, sure, in a counterfactual way. But since quantum events are truly random — that is, there is no way on principle to know which way they will come out — all you can possibly say is that it will take some value but you won't know what that value is until you actually measure it. So if there was in fact some metaphysical agent generating our wills in a libertarian universe, without magic powers its determination of a quantum outcome would happen simultaneously with its measurement of that outcome, so it would be beholden to that value no matter what. This is as bad as being beholden to a completely pre-determined outcome! It is worse, in fact, because in the quantum world you can't even make a prediction!

So, I dispose of libertarianism as hopeless. And I dispose of a metaphysical compatibilist view as meaningless at any level of analysis. Since this post is already almost twice as long as I expected it to be, I will hold off on my argument about phenomenological free will, and of my opinion on the nature of our will, until the next post.