[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.
Let me explain what a philosopher is, in the original and true sense.
The term philosophy comes from the Greek philos (lover) sophia (wisdom). It means one who pursues wisdom as a lover pursues their beloved. They pursue it with abandon, neglecting all else. They prefer loving their beloved to what would seem to be their own interest.
But that is a misperception, for selves are defined and shaped by the objects they pursue.
The character of the pleasure-seeker is shaped by the character of the pleasures pursued: impulsive, extreme and transient (the Dionysian), measured and temperate (the Epicurean) or with viewing distance (the Apollonian).
The character of the wealth-seeker is calculating, relentless, nitpicking when necessary, venal, following the precise letter of the contract rather than its spirit, or any sense of fairness, that is, forever ready to opportunistically exploit any advantage allowed by markets or courts of law.
Leaders are power-seekers.
The character of the leader is both charismatic and calculating, alternating from cunning (Machiavelli’s fox) to forceful (Machiavelli’s lion) as the situation requires.
Leaders project charismatic personas, some due to their inherently charismatic nature, some by deploying squads of image-makers, publicists, artisans, mouthpieces (a tactic as old as Moses and Aaron, and older), poets laureate and court historians — in our day, talk-show hosts, influencers, media personalities and trolls. Leaders must be realists — if they are to last long rather than disappear in smoke and flame as martyrs — and ruthless when necessary.
The model of leaders is Machiavelli’s new prince, who astutely practices an economy of violence that deploys as much violence as necessary to secure his rule, and not a jot more, or Sun-Tzu’s general steeped in “the ways (Tao) of deception” (Sun Tzu, Art of War, trans. Sawyer, Ralph D. Basic Books: NY, NY; 1994. P. 168), who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, and who knows that “the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy’s plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities” (177).
Sun TzuMachiavelliAdvisors to generals and princes
The only leader who escapes this necessity is the philosopher-king, as difficult to sustain in a succession as to bring to power in the first place.
It is probably an ideal rather than a reality, but it is the face every leader wears in public, however distant it may be from their inner reality.
Machiavelli’s new prince and Sun Tzu’s masterfully deceptive general know this well.
Philosophers are truth-seekers.
The character of the philosopher is to seek truth — that elusive and evanescent substance. Given the slippery nature of truth, the philosopher must be flexible and adaptable, must never prematurely commit to any one hypothesis, seeking always the counterexamples, counterarguments and contraindications of any favored hypothesis.
The philosopher must thus be the inveterate enemy of dogmas and presumed authorities, even those that are well-intentioned and follow their hypothesis or faith from honest overcommitment rather than vanity and vested interest.
And, since sitting authorities always develop a class-interest as the defenders of the faith — the faith upon which their authority, prestige and life’s works rest (that is the true character and meaning of the Pharisees of the New Testament), the true-philosopher, the truth-seeker, is a disrupter and dissonant voice against the riptide of conventional wisdom.
And, as often as not, a voice that cryeth in the wilderness.
For the human being — the fully-realized emergence of a knower and moral agent from the mere potential of a naturally-evolving set of capacities, a becoming rather than a being, as Nietzsche, the existentialists and the post-modernists would say — can only emerge from within the range of species of survival-machines produced by nature through the blind mechanics of natural selection.
But thinking and doing right can only develop over generations (through a genealogy) of a species with the necessary potential present in the form of raw, undeveloped capacities.
And yet, every advance toward this generational realization must be led by individuals or small networks, for the lifespan of an individual does not suffice for this lengthy upward process — filled with plateaus, valleys and hills, alongside gentle ascents within an encompassing community stable enough to support them (Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”, “Sixth Proposition”.
This usually struggles against intense resistance (ranging form the subtly covert to the ferociously overt) from entrenched interests and authorities, who stand to lose much when the playing field, heretofore stacked in their favor, is leveled, or at least inclined to reflect the new bias of a new ruling class busily entrenching itself (the fate of most revolutions, even those made in the name of the people or some other society-wide or universalizing ideal.
As the new ruling class, along with their new, or newly-realigned power base, entrenches itself, the ideal devolves into an empty slogan, masking the new class structure with empty words, that become more formulaic and devoid of meaning as the new arrangements become all that anyone remembers.
Thus, human beings begin, not simply as survival-machines, but also, on top of that, as social animals, in our case, social apes.
And under stress, that is when either their survival or their social standing within their pack of peers is threatened, human beings revert from their aspirational nature as beings gifted with reason — and the attendant ability to identify themselves under the universal sign of the rational being and moral agent — to being earthbound members of a tribe of social apes, the essence of the current culture wars(not a uniquely American phenomenon but pervasive within the affluent free states, Western ones especially)— or to being predatory survival-machines — the overriding meme of tales of disasters or dystopias, from blockbusters like Towering Inferno to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
The future of humanity is always both bright and dark.
For that is what it means to be on the way to becoming, as a species, rational beings and moral agents.
To understand the political actions of another — current ally or current adversary, but especially the adversary — you must avoid wishful thinking or taking words at face value or assessing the situation through your own ideology or long-term interests or values.
Instead, reconstruct all players’ strategic interests from their own perceived short-term interests, which their preceding actions, not their words, betray.
Key #1: If you cannot reconstruct their viewpoint, alien to yourself, you will only substitute your own in its place, knowingly or not. You will then have reconstructed what they would do if they were you, which tells you nothing about them, but plants false expectations in you, to your disadvantage.
Key #2: Use their short-term interests rather than their long-term interests, because, in the heat of conflict, all parties focus on winning the present conflict, not on longer-term goals.
Key #3: Pay far closer attention to their actions than to their words. Actions reliably show short-term interests because only current actions advance short-term interests. Words, especially between parties in conflict (and even in alliance) are means to ends first, and heartfelt communications second.
Adversaries will say what needs to be said to keep allies and supporters on board, and enemies at a disadvantage.
But they will act in ways that advance their short-term interests, not caring much if words and deeds slip out of alignment.
And if the disconnect is noticed, they will explain it away with ambiguities, unverifiable claims, and other sleights-of-hand.
T they can even lie outright to those whose perceived interests align with theirs, not caring if their committed enemies see through the lies.
The same broad principles apply to emotional interpersonal arguments. In the heat of the moment, people are driven by their short-term interests (usually, salving hurt pride or winning the argument) rather than their long-term interests. That’s why a cooling-off period works, if there is a shared underlying long-term commitment.
In sum, only the coolest players, those most able to detach themselves from current excitations and irritations, keep always before them to guide their actions their own long-term interests. You want to be one of these, not one of the others.
This applies especially to politics because without winning the next election and maintaining your support, political power fades quickly.
You made this mess, Vlad, you clean it up. I’ll back you publicly, but your risks are yours alone. You’re convenient but clumsy, and you need me more than I need you.
This article co-authored by Neo Machiavelli and Nu Sun-Tzu.
Good thing I decided to cover my ass in Update #2, huh? It would not have been a pretty sight.
A word about strategic thinking and adjusting hypotheses to events on-the-fly.
Strategic Thinking & the OODA-Loop
Strategic thinking is information-intensive, intention-speculative and rationalist only to the extent that accessible information is correct and complete, as must be both the model you construct of the decision-frameworks of the actors and the actor’s commitment to rational frameworks.
That’s a lot of conditions, but it’s all you’ve got. It’s also what makes poker scary-fun.
So, strategic thinking develops in stages:
Gather significant data
Make sense of that data by organizing it around a realistic hypothesis
As incoming data require, rethink and modify or discard your existing hypotheses for ones that better suit your updated information.
Strategic interpretation — what we’ve been doing here — thus mimics the strategic thinking of the actors themselves.
I explored this in a previous post on the OODA-Loop, a model of strategic thinking initially designed to aid the split-second decision-making of fighter pilots. Here’s a link to that post: OODA Loop
As in a game of poker, each successive round of newly dealt cards triggers a new round of betting, and both cards and bets are incoming data.
This is primarily a critical thinking website, not a geopolitics website. I am not a regional or military expert. But most of them got it wrong along the same lines that I did. And they (and I) could still be right about the rational decision framework — if not about the immediate factual outcome — if this proves, over time, to be a blunder on Putin’s part.
So, Where’s Ukraine Headed Now?
Putin’s move signals to me that he viewed his pre-invasion situation as more desperate for him than I did. This is of a piece with his moves in Belarus, whose citizens are now a captive subject people, and he and they both know it. He’s given up on winning Russo-Slav hearts and minds outside Russia itself.
His goal is decapitation not occupation. My mistake was to think that his only option short of full invasion was a punitive strike. From what I now see, his aim is decapitation (removing the head) not occupation. He is going to remove President Zelensky and his key lieutenants from power, and then withdraw from Ukraine (comparable to what the US did in Iraq, had we exited completely and not left in place an occupying force).
His message to Ukraine would be: “We can do this anytime we want. Stay away from NATO and further economic integration with Europe, and we’ll leave Ukraine, but we’ll be watching you.”
If doable, this would maximize the benefits while minimizing the risks for Putin.
The clearest available data for this (as of Friday morning) are: 1) relatively light casualties, given the broad front and the quick penetration to Kiev, and 2) Russian forces seem to be skipping over Ukrainian army concentrations and heading straight for Kiev and a few key cities. This looks less like a war of collapsing borders waged to take territory and more like a surgical strike to take out leadership targets (like what the US did in Pakistan to take out Osama Bin Laden, but with the added threat, and partial execution) of a massed ground assault). And Ukraine’s President Zelensky has himself said this is Russia’s primary objective.
Putin has given up on a Pan-Slavic or Pan-Russian united front in a “clash of civilizations”. This is Russia First and Only. Putin is accepting the role of the big bad neighbor you don’t want to mess with.
An alternative view is that NATO crossed a line in raising the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine. However, much that should be Ukraine’s right as a sovereign nation, Russia is still operating under a Cold War and realism-based mindset in which Ukraine going over to the other side is an intolerable provocation. It is the West’s job to understand the decision-making framework actually used by Russia and act accordingly.
But whatever might have counted as prudence yesterday, Putin’s actions have alienated the majority of Ukrainians and Belarussians, a fact he must now live with.
Russians now face a stark choice, and the safest path is complacency and political disengagement.
They can accept that their lot is better than that of their Slav brethren, or
They can challenge Putin and take on the status of Belarussians, if not Ukrainians.
There was an immediate backlash in Russia, not small but still a minority (1,700+ people arrested in 50+ cities). I wouldn’t expect a backlash strong enough to perturb Putin without years of economic decline or ongoing war casualties, which Putin may hope to avoid with a successful decapitation and withdrawal.
This all seems to me to signal a further decline in Russia’s standing as a great power, but that does not necessarily bode well for anyone else, particularly in the near-term.
When All Is Said and Dunn 