[Revised and improved, Thursday, February 8, 2024, 2:32pm]
Some words are worth a thousand pictures; some moves are worth a thousand random steps.
Science & the Forces of Nature
Science says the world is determined by causes acting relentlessly as dictated by the universal laws of nature, impervious to worthy human ends and values.
Realism says the world of human affairs is analogous, with the situational requirements of national survival dictating conditions that limit the range within which suitable policies are found, regardless of the internal constitutional form of government.
From that follows the notorious claim that nations are as identical in their geopolitical imperatives and policies as billiard balls (Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 18).
Both claims are true, so far as they go.
No human agent — whether an individual man or a collective agency like a nation-state — can act against the laws of nature.
There are no such things as superheroes, and nations are even farther from idealized agents free from limits than are real people.
So, scientific reality must be deferred to, even when sects arise that deny the evidence of science because it undermines claims upon which their ideology’s support rests.
But reality can be ignored for a while, if the consequences are long-term. Those lacking foresight or a deep understanding of the accelerating changes going on around them may not see or recognize the consequences in their lifetimes. Sometimes a generation can pass before the consequences become apparent to all. People and nations can argue and dither, delaying effective measures until the late innings.
The risk here is that by the time the signs of trouble are too evident for even the most resistant observers to ignore,the threat may have become lethal, the cancer metastasized, leaving he who hesitates trapped in an untreatable condition (Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 3).
If the threat is grave enough, science will steamroll public opinion, in its own sweet time.
So, science wins in the end, winnowing out all those who cannot or will not adapt to shifting empirical realities.
History and Its Underlying Currents
Geopolitical realism works similarly.
As with the relentless and incessant forces of nature, so with the irresistible undercurrents of history.
Leaders and nations that fail to perceive changes to which we must all adapt — whether for lack of understanding or a contrary will –will be winnowed out by the sifting processes of natural selection and its social equivalents in demographics, economics, geopolitics, and the technological advances and social reactions that drive or follow them.
They will decline or disappear, leaving standing the survivors of the old order and the emerging powers of the new order.
Evolutionary competition eliminates those unprepared for what is coming, whether natural or historical events. Those who cannot or will not adapt to changing circumstances leave the world to those who do.
But when ill-informed and unprepared leaders run nations, they can take whole nations down with them.
Both scientific and geopolitical claims about what’s coming can be disputed. Such claims, whether true or false, can win or lose the battle for public opinion.
But underlying causal forces will grind on regardless.
Sadly, in the arena of politics, manipulation, rhetoric and persuasion are more powerful than knowledge or understanding.
Wrong decisions, whether formed in free nations by public opinion, filtered through the election process, or by the proclivities and obsessions that lurk in the inner chambers of an autocrat’s mind, the causal forces at work in nature and history, not mistaken perceptions about them, determine outcomes.
Room for Maneuver; Room for Hope
So, there are causal limits against which one cannot fight. One can only adapt to them, preserving human values as best one can.
But as an agent/agency adapts to changing circumstances, it can leave room for human values, both pragmatic and moral, within its range of feasible choices, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always to some degree.
In the most extreme cases, choice may be limited to the scope of a prisoner in a concentration camp holding to their nature and their principles despite all that is done to them which they are helpless to prevent.
So, there is room for moral agents to maneuver in this relentlessly causal world that envelops us. They may not always be able to prevent undesirable outcomes, some of which are inevitable (given the circumstance that lead up to them), but they can always show the strength of their nature and their principles as they struggle against the odds.
And there are some inevitable outcomes — death and taxes among them — that cannot be prevented, but only deferred to our own advantage.
But, by deferring the inevitable, moral agents can build a life worth living — and worth having lived, when it comes to that.
…and multiply their net worth with tax deferral and the magic of compounding growth.
And, honestly, life works pretty much like that, too.
[Note: This title presents this escape in methodological terms.It can also be presented as a shift from theory to practice or as a shift from universal laws acting on identical units to information-guided choice within unique local configurations (i.e., strategic scenarios).]
A new wrinkle!
With biology, information is transformed from being structurally implicit (a simple readout of the interplay of universal laws with initial local configurations) to being encoded and transmitted through local lineages that begin to develop characteristics partly determined by the local determinations of species-specific DNA, and not simply by universal physical and chemical laws.
Biology creates local conditions that uniquely determine local configurations, namely those determined by the DNA of distinguishable local species and the habitats with which they interact.
Now, information of merely local significance matters: habitable planets, environmental habitats, lineages — and, where lineages face bottlenecks, even individuals can matter.
Biology oozes out of the zone of determinism by purely universal laws acting on identical units of matter or energy into a gray zone where unique local configurations partly determine outcomes.
But that’s not all, folks!
The next stage in the development of information is the emergence of biological species that survive within their habitats by decoding information.
In animals, motor capabilities allow the organism to react to decoded information about its environs (sensory stimuli) in real-time and (for practical purposes) with an immediacy beyond the reactions of plants (even Venus fly-traps are just vegetative mousetraps, not sentient hunt-enabled predators).
Initially, this animate hunting and fleeing behavior is only the decoding of transient information regarding obstacles, dangers and resources, predators and prey. But, more advanced neurological systems, respond not only to sensory stimuli, but also to stimuli not currently present but remembered, imagined or foreseen.
And with human-level cognitive powers, organisms construct mental generalizations about classes of objects, and arts and crafts for dealing with them. Later, such beings can develop the methods and powers to decode both implicit physical information and encoded biological information, amplifying their powers by first creating scientific knowledge and then engineering its technological applications.
The View from the Top Down
I will now depart from bottom-up analysis to give a top-down view of the matter, to give the reader some idea of where all this is headed
Two caveats:
1) I’m not trying to pull a fast one here, but you’ll be the judge of that.
2) In critical thinking, the exploratory journey matters more than the destination, which too often becomes ossified into dogmatism.
In reality, all you have is the journey, the successes and mistakes made along the way, and what you’ve learned from them. So, take from this exploration what works by the light of your highest standards of critical thinking. Treat the rest as leftovers, to be reheated, doctored or dumped, as you see fit.
I will begin by defining two polar extremes of definition in the free will vs. determinism controversy. My own position is best categorized as compatibilism, the halfway house between the two extremes, influenced by such bright lights as Aristotle, Kant, and Daniel Dennett (the last of whom still breathes as of this writing; I cavort with a somewhat larger society than that of dead white men). In particular, see Dennett’s Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting.
AristotleKantDennettHey!We got a live one here!
Free will (arguably better designated by the Aristotelian proairesis, in English, choice) must be understood in reference to determinism, more precisely, the absolute determination of effects by their causes in the classic sense of physical causation. This conception evolved from the sense of efficientcause— one of four causes in Aristotle’s schema for analyzing changes, both mechanical and mental, physical and historical — to the mechanical causality envisioned by early modern empirical science. That conception relied heavily on the analogy of clockwork (a cutting-edge artifact and mechanism of the time, geared to produce precise and predictable results, namely, an accurate model of the passage of time).
In either conception, the common element was that causation in the sense of an immediate trigger of physical motion was devoid of any indirect causation, especially that of purpose or intention.
(As modern empirical science first emerged in largely Christian lands, indirect intentional and purposeful causation was allowed, but only to God or his agents, and only by suspending the laws of causation that would otherwise apply, in the performance of a miracle.)
The world we know at the levels of physics and chemistry, the two most basic levels, is effectively described by modern empirical science.
In part, this is because the characteristics of physics and chemistry seem reducible to measurable units of space and time.
In part, this is because the scientific method — the method whose practice generates modern empirical science — was explicitly and intentionally designed to register as cause and effect only what could be observed and measured.
Consistent and recurring measurements, when observed, can be expressed as mathematical expressions (e.g., ratios, formulas, constants) which, in the more complex case of formulas, correlate variable inputs to outputs determined by them.
So, hypotheses expressible as formulas can be tested and verified or refuted by measurements which do not vary from one observer to another. This allows confirmation between observers, and thus reduplication of observed results becomes the standard of proof.
This is all possible because the scientific method assumes, in order to operate, that observations are themselves determined by universal laws that apply similarly to all similar cases; this outcome is guaranteed by the method’s requirement that all credible results must be reduplicable by independent observers in independent labs.
And the similarity — strictly speaking the identity — among observed cases is underpinned by the assumption that all complex things observed can be reduced to ultimate units that are identical (except for their location on the grid of space and time) and not further reducible.
Caveat: Kant argues (Critique of Pure Reason, “The Antimony of Pure Reason, Kemp ed., pp. 384-484) that science can proceed empirically while leaving unresolved the question of whether matter reduces to ultimate indivisibles or not (the 2nd antinomy), along with 3 other unresolved questions: whether space and time have limits (the 1st antinomy), whether conditioned causality is without limits or free will exists (the 3rd antinomy), and whether the world is without limits or whether God, its Creator, exists (the 4th antinomy). Having broached this perspective, I’m not entirely sure where it leaves the thrust of this whole essay, which argues that free will has a meaningful use in a conditioned world. Let’s just say that multiple perspectives can be brought to bear on the matter, and leave it at that!
Physics and chemistry are almost totally explicable within the methodological limitations of the scientific method, as above described, which amount to the parameters within which the scientific method is operationally competent and effective.
Put differently, physics and chemistry are the foremost disciplines for which the paradigm of empirical science — defined, powered and limited by the scientific method — is both necessary and sufficient.
Put yet another way, those two disciplines need nothing beyond the scientific method to complete their observational and predictive mission, and thus to serve their practical mission — producing applied science and technology — the primary reasons that the practice of science is permitted and often subsidized by governments (power) and societies (money).
However, never forget that regimes (and demographic subcultures) that feel threatened by science have little compunction about controlling, directing, adulterating, ignoring, and even outlawing and punishing ,the practice of science itself or of those parts felt as threatening.
Physics and chemistry are fully explicable by the scientific method — geared, as it is, toward expounding universal laws producing the same results wherever they can be observed and tested — because they study the causes and effects that work upon aggregates of simpler units that can, in principle, be analyzed and reduced to identical units subject to universal laws. Physics studies and expounds the universal laws that control the observable behavior of particles/waves/probability-distributions and force-fields in the aggregate. The laws predicting outcomes of controlled experiments are universal laws because they apply to every simple unit, subject to identical forces and conditions, over the entire field of units being observed.
Chemistry is similar, except that it deals with larger compounds (atoms and the molecular compounds of atoms) even though these compounds all follow, in some sense predictably, from analysis of the simples (protons, electrons, neutrons, and the ever-growing zoo of lower-level sub-atomic particles) of which they are composed.
Chemistry is thus merely a higher level of organization of the objects observed in physics, adding nothing unprecedented, just organized in more highly structured configurations, and following the limits inherent in those configurations (e.g., the number of electrons that can tolerate one another within a given orbital shell).
Whether the epiphenomenal characteristics of atoms qualify as emergent properties – not fully understandable except in terms unique to their level of organization — is a matter of fine semantic disputation that need not concern us here.
Locally Significant Contexts
If this one shoots first, then that one goes down, but if…
Biology, however, represents a true break in this bottom-up explanatory chain, not because it escapes causal determination but because it, by its very existence, creates locally significant contexts, captured in and carried forward by self-replicating structures like genes and DNA.
For the first time, it matters where, and with what species, and under what conditions of habitability calibrated to those species, the observed events are occurring. Local differences are decisive, and very few universal laws apply in determining the rise and fall of species and of the individuals that comprise them.
Now the process by which all biological development occurs — its ultimate causation — is the thoroughly deterministic process of natural selection.
Crucially, however, the replication part of that process is imperfect, producing the DNA-transcription errors known as mutations, without which evolution would not produce the permutations that allow it to explore every possibility within the matrix of possible combinations that define the open pathways for evolutionary experimentation or exploration.
Whether these transcription errors are themselves predictably deterministic or not, is another semantic complexity we need not here concern ourselves with.
All that matters here is that such errors, when they by chance produce traits that survive natural selection, create viable new species with survival-enhancing new characteristics, and that these new traits, much like advances in military equipment or doctrine, determine the strategic outcome of the ongoing competition (both strategic and evolutionary) between biological species for available resources, and thus, for survival.
The introduction of a strategic element changes everything irrevocably, for now the accurate accumulation and processing of data is the biological weapon of mass destruction, and thus the key to survival and dominance.
Thus, homo sapiens made short work of megafauna, which survive today only in the ocean depths.
This strategic element may be more crucial for predators than for prey and for social than for solitary animals. Social omnivores may be the optimal showcase for natural selection for strategic capacities.
For the first time in the history of the planet, information and analysis, foresight and strategy, become the crucial factors in natural selection. More precisely, the history of the competition between human cultures displaces the biological chronology of competition between species as the fastest driver of biological changes on the planet.
When All Is Said and Dunn 