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(Back of the class, Mr. Fear...)
Ok, so on determinism and free will (excuse the lenghty quote):
Determinism is not a single entity, but rather a description common to a number of different views of the universe. The most common form of determinism is one in which God (for want of a better term) knows everything that has happened, will happen and is happening. A variant of this, known as the watchmaker theory, is that, although God is not currently overseeing his creation, he set it up in a particular way and it is now "running down" - heading mechanistically to a particular set of conclusions. Both of these have implications for free will, int he sense that, as dear old Robert Rankin puts it, if a divine being has known since the beginning of time what you're going to be having for breakfast today, it rather invalidates the notion fo free will. This is a simplification, but more on that later.
This is propostion (a). Proposition (b) turns up in strength in the 16-17th century, when the doctrine of free will is pretty much accepted by the church as a necessary element in the dialogue of salvation, but also when physics was developing a relationship between cause and effect. One way to reconcile this, originated by Descartes and developed by Guelincx, was to presume that the body was bound by the laws of physics, and thus in effect a marionette of the divine (the laws of physics and the universe in general being a construction of the divine), although Descartes subsequently modified his opinion to allow for the mind acting upon the body. Guelincx's "rwo clocks" idea is a handy one here, for its purity; he argues that the mind and body are both running simultaneosuly, but that there is no connection between the wish to raise an arm and the raising of an arm; the two are concurrent through divine plan rather than through volition. More moderate variations on the same theme have the body as physically dictated but the mind free to think independently, and thus make moral judgements and decisions, which are more important than the actions of the body that they dictate to a greater or lesser extent.
Skip a few centuries. The modern conception of preordination is *scientific* preordination. In scientific preordination, every action is the result of certain scientific principles, down to the action of cause and effect in the electrochemistry of the brain, and therefore ever action is in the purest sense predetermined by every cause feeding into it. Thus, if somebody understood precisely all the rules by which the universe works, and all the conditions operating in the universe at any specific time, then they can extrapolate the conditions operating in the universe at any point before or after that time.
Point being, it's impossible to know either the rules by which the universe functions or the condition of the universe in every particular; it would require absolutely infinite understanding, and thus basically divinity. There's a comparative argument that al lhuman reactions and responses are socially and culturally determined, which basically exists to claim that ethics are cultural rather than instinctive and that absolute morality doesn't exist. We don't need to consider this case too closely outside the broader argument of scientific determinism for the moment.
One of the arguments cited both in favour and in opposition of this model of determinism is Chaos; those in favour supplementarily using the argument that both posit a model of the universe that is in effect infinitely complex and bound by infinitely complex rules, and those against arguing that the extra level of complexity introduced by emergent properties makes the idea of the status of the universe at one moment being a map by which the status of the universe at another point can be determined meaningless. You'd have to talk to a mathematician about this for a more detailed look.
The point of this? Well, consider when one is looking at a complex sentence in another language or a complex equation, and the instinctual human capacity to recognise patterns and remembered understanding of the rules provide an apparent revelation, when the conscious mind becomes suddenly aware of the solution, yes? Well, one might see precognition ,in this view of the universe, as a moment when the finite but significant pattern recognition capabilities of the human mind, enhanced perhaps by trance state, mystic power or similar according to one's wishes, might at one moment and without conscious application recognise with some degree of accuracy some emergent possibility the conscious mind would not in itself be able to detect.
I'd like to draw on the work of G.E. Moore, notably the Principia Ethica and Keifer Sutherland, notably 24.
In one sense, the determinist sense, Keifer's actions might be said to be motivated by his past experiences, and as such are not in fact "free". In another sense, of course, his actions are also not free, because at various points in the series he is being compelled to act in a certain way because his family are being held hostage. So, we have conception of freedom (1), in which Keifer takes actions as responses to stimuli which, although more complex, are in fact not much more surprising than Keifer deciding, as he has decided every day for the last twenty years, to begin his day with a cup of black coffee if he finds himself awaking in his own house with fresh coffee available. Conception of freedom (2) is a bit more complex. leaving aside the question of determinism for a second, Keifer could presumably respond to the kidnap of his wife in any number of ways. He could say "fuck it" and go golfing. He could have a nervous breakdown. He could go by the book, or he could behave in a way that he would not normally behave if there was a security threat to a presidential candidate, on the grounds that they have his daughter/wife/border collie. His decision may be as predictable, in a determinist universe, as his decision to have a cup of coffee in the morning or indeed as predictable as the knowledge that if you drop a piano on him he will go squish. In another sense, however, his will is clearly not free here, or as free; his choice is being compelled by extraordinary factors. I think it's Strawson who says that we only consider actions praiseworthy or blameworthy if those actions are in some sense of the term free. Therefore, despite repeatedly breaking protocol, Keifer would not be considered as blameworthy as he would have been if he had, for example, driven a coworker out to a deserted location and shot her in the chest, having previously provided her with a bulletproof vest, on a whim or because a friend phoned up and suggested it.
We're moving away from precognition here, but work with me. Moore's maxim is that an action can be said to be a free action if it agrees with the statement I could have done otherwise, that is that I made a conscious choice to do so, and could, if I had chosen, have done otherwise, because that choice was open to me. So, Keifer could say that, given who he was and what the course of his life had made of him thus far, he could not have done otherwise than to break protocols in the pursuit of his daughter's safety. His choice was determnined *and* compelled, in a way that his decision to have a nice cup of coffee is not.
Now, that commonsense approach comes up against both the precognitive determinist perspective, in which compulsion is irrelevant, or rather just one of the predictable, non-stochastic factors affecting an equally non-stochastic action seen in advacne by the precognitive, and for that matter the quantum perspective, that sees causality break down at a quantum level. However, the quantum approach is in moral terms at least pretty irrelevant. If Keifer is holding a bad guy at gunpoint and suddenly another bad guy appears from thin air and tackles him, causing the gun to go off and perforate bads guy the first, then we can hold Keifer responsible for pointing a gun with the safety catch off at another person, we can hold him responsible possibly for not waiting for backup, who might have seen the man emerging from the hidden trapdoor, or for not anticipating that a man might suddenly appear out of thin air, et cetera, but shooting the man was not his personal choice and he is not in a sense to be blamed for the actual action of bullet on human flesh.
Question being, can he be held responsible for anything else, if his actions are determined by previous actions in his past and the actions of elements upon him at that moment? In what sense can he be held responsible, if somewhere in a tenement block in New York somebody successfully predicted that he was goign to shoot bad guy number one? Is there a part of us that can originate action independent of previous circumstance and current environment? |
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