Truth and Truthmaking

I recently finished an interesting book of modern philosophy on the subject of my title called “Truth and Truth-Making” (2014), a collection of essays from the 1980’s to 2013 edited by E. J. Lowe and A. Rami. The basic idea reflected in all of these ideas is that “truth” is something born by propositions, and that what gives propositions this property is something in the world independent of human mind. Generally speaking this idea makes sense but there are a few complications because we can find examples of propositions that seem true but do not seem to be connected to anything in the world independent of mind. Various solutions to this come to mind, the simplest of which allow of several kinds (as in categories) of truth-makers some of which are independent of mind, while others are themselves constructs of mind.

So truth here gets little attention which goes, rather, to the relation between truth-bearers (propositions) and truth-makers, something besides the structure of the proposition itself (if applicable) and [mostly] independent of mind, that make the propositions true. Most of the work in this arena is focused on what sorts of things “in the world” are or can be truth-makers, and in exactly what the relation between true propositions and their truth-makers consists. Truth-making, in turn, is a new twist on once popular “correspondence theories” of truth. If “the sky is blue today” is made true by there being a cloudless (unbefouled by pollution) sky above us today, then the proposition is true because its content corresponds to the color of the sky and the color of the sky likewise corresponds to the semantic content of the proposition.

It isn’t clear that this symmetry makes sense. It isn’t obvious that the color of the sky (which after all takes no notice of us) corresponds in any but the most trivial sense (because we say so) to the semantic content of a mental construct. The idea behind the truth-maker idea was that the relation is asymmetrical. The proposition “bears truth” because of the color of the sky (is made true by it), but the proposition, while true, does not make the sky blue. More precisely, the relation is non-symmetrical because the fact of the sky’s color has no particular relation at all to the proposition made true by it.

Propositions having to do with the state of the material world are therefore made true (or not) by the state of the material world. This then excludes “analytic truths” like “bachelors are unmarried men” which is made true by the definition of ‘bachelor’. When we speak of “the state of the material world” (and therefore “synthetic propositions”) we speak of something we call “facts”. Facts can be about various sorts of material states. That “water is H2O” is a proposition made true by a state of the world that has been a fact since recombination 340,000 years after the big bang, and will presumably remain true (subject to the evolution of natural law) for billions of years to come. By contrast, that “Mars, Earth, and the sun aligned on April 8, 2014” is made true by the fact of an alignment on that date, while the proposition that Mars, Earth, and the sun align approximately every 778 days is made true by the relation between the orbits of Earth and Mars, a state of affairs made true by those orbits since the stabilization of planetary orbits some 4 billion years ago. In each one of these cases, it is some fact that makes the proposition true. This can be restated as the proposition “expressing a fact”. Substances and processes entangled with the physical world can all be construed as facts. “John exists” is a fact if John is in the world at the time of the utterance. “There exists a John” is a fact if any person (or perhaps animal) named John exists.

Truth makers are of minimal and maximal sorts. The maximal types are typically less interesting because they are less specific. The examples given above are minimal truth makers. The state of the whole universe at any given moment is the maximal truth maker for all the facts of the universe in that moment. As such it doesn’t tell us very much. In the most maximal sense, all physical phenomena, even individually, are made true by the state of the entire universe. Every fact is “made true” by those phenomena that belong to it alone, and also by the universe as a whole. Truth-makers are not mutually exclusive. Most often they are nested together, the more minimal inside the more maximal. Notice that it isn’t merely the existence of the universe that makes every true proposition true, but the form of its existence, the way things (which might have been otherwise) actually are. The alignment of Earth and Mars with the sun [roughly] every 778 days is not made true merely by the existence of planetary orbits, but by the specific relation between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

A fact always involves some arrangement of physical substances and processes. In the temporal dimension, facts are “real” in the present. Some facts come into existence (for example that Caesar was assassinated) and then remain true forever more. Caesar was murdered over 2000 years ago, but that he was murdered is still true today. Other facts come to be, remain true for a time, and then cease to be facts. That Matthew is 12 years old was a fact for a year many years past, but is no longer a fact. It remains a fact however that Matthew was once 12 years old. There are not two facts here only two expressions of the same fact viewed in different temporal perspectives. The totality of facts in the universe consists of the past, the history of the universe, and such facts as are made actual, physical arrangements, brought into being in the present in a process of dynamic evolution.

There are philosophers who would say that while facts perhaps were reified in the past, they are real only now, that is in the present. The past is no longer real though it was real. There is only the present, and in the present there are facts that, among other things, can be records (in the present) of events in the past. Either view may be used to connect contingent propositions, facts of history that might have been otherwise, to their truth-makers in physical states-of-affairs. The proposition that “Caesar was assassinated” is made true either by that event more than two thousand years ago, or by present records of that event. That there are such present records is explained by the event’s occurrence in the past plus the further fact that the event was recorded, and the recording has survived to the present. Either way some arrangement of the physical is involved.

What are we to make of the proposition: “more often than not it is better to tell the truth than to lie”. If this is true, something of what we might mean is that the physical out workings of truth telling are on the whole better and those of lying worse most of the time. The qualifier is necessary because there are certainly situations, specific potential arrangements of substances and processes (for example Nazis searching for Jews hidden in your basement) in which it seems that lying results (one is to hope) in far better outcomes. Both the propositions “Often it is better to tell the truth” and “sometimes it is better to lie” can both be true now, in the present, when most realists agree, truth-makers must exist if they exist at all. Significantly, the “better outcomes” referred to are not yet facts. If the proposition bears truth it is because a future corresponds to it, a future having no facticity whatsoever in the present. The truth-maker for this sort of proposition cannot be a physical state-of-affairs because such a state of affairs has not yet occurred. It isn’t yet real.

A more traditional view of truth, one often connected to theism for ontological reasons I discuss in a moment, is that truth is one of a family of universals called “values”, the other members of this family being beauty and goodness. One of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, why modern philosophy has mostly abandoned an examination of truth as such and turned to talk of truth-making and truth-makers is because values, being entirely entities of the mind are both unavailable to third-party investigation (there is no objective accounting for taste in beauty for example) and in addition do not seem amenable to logical clarification (witness the multiplicity of moral theories).

In modern philosophy, where “value talk” is allowed, it is generally assumed that the three values (truth, beauty, and goodness), in addition to being experienced in mind, are also (and merely) “inventions of the mind”. Of course this is controversial. Just how it is that they are inventions, and what they mean for us as rational beings with individual purposes is the core of the modern debate if it is debated at all. But on one side of this debate are those who point out that in the end values can only mean something consistent and universal (that is for all minds) if they are not mere inventions, but come from somewhere. Mind, rather than being an inventor of values, is a detector of values.

It is this conception that leads in the end to some concept of God or proxy for God because human mind, at least, has not been able to grasp any other concept that would reify them! Science does not find these values in its examination of the material world as such. If one says “values come from the gods” (small ‘g’) one has to ask the question “who made the gods and how is it they have such power?”. If values are the result of “a force” (perhaps panpsychism) unsupported by deism or theism, one has to wonder how that quality arises from physics alone and how it comes to be that values are detected specifically and only by persons and not animals who, after all, might have quite sophisticated minds?

Philosophers have been seeking ways to ground values as something more than “mere inventions” but without resorting to theism for a long time. None of the proposed alternatives is without serious problems. One way or another, the only stopping point to the issues raised by the problems ends up being an infinite, personal, and purposeful God who’s character qualities are reflected to human minds by the values. The values constitute our sensitivity (such as it is) to God’s character. Much of this path (and the reason only humans detect values) is covered in two of my books and various other articles in this blog. Here I want to focus on the relation between truth qua value and truth in the modern idea of a property of propositions made so by something in the world.

It will be helpful to summarize what is common to all three values supposing them to be in some sense qualities of God detected by human mind. One supposes God (should he exist) must have qualities. God is said to be spirit and the human detection of values, it is traditionally supposed, is the sum and substance of what we, as limited beings made of meat in a finite universe of purposeless mechanism, can sense of those qualities.

We cannot say what spirit is only that what we can know of it is encompassed by our capacity for values detection. Our detection capacity is not to be taken as the totality of the quality of God’s spirit but only a minimal contact in the same sense as dipping one’s toe into the Pacific Ocean is contact with that ocean. It is precisely that minimal contact necessary and sufficient to qualify us for person-hood (see my “Why Personality“)! Nor should we assume the human capacity to detect values is the best that can be managed in the universe, even among creatures made of meat. It might well be that there are other meat-based creatures in the universe who by the properties of their biology have a natively-richer appreciation for the nature of the same three values. Be that as it may, our own, human, capacity to detect them is what we have, and we must grow our appreciation from our biological starting point as our alien betters must begin from theirs.

Beauty is value as it is detected in the physical world itself. When we use the word ‘beautiful’ literally, we are typically talking about some arrangement of substances we are able to perceive with our physical senses. Goodness is value detected in the acts of persons; value detected in personality as reflected in its actions. It is the acts of persons (and by extension the agents of those acts; the persons themselves) that are good. We might impute goodness to the acts of animals, but animals do not act “for reasons of values”, but only from the constraints of their biology. Goodness reflected in animal actions comes out to fitness, and the goodness (now a metaphor) for fitness, is something recognized only in human mind. This can be seen even more clearly as concerns the state-of-the universe. We might say “it is good that the fine structure constant is what it is or we would not exist”. Here we clearly mean that the fine structure constant’s value is fit for life in the universe as we find it. Clearly it is ourselves, that is human beings, who impute goodness to this measure of fitness. Truth is value not only perceived in mind (as all must be) but as concerns the content (for example beliefs) and judgments of mind. Propositions, after all, are products of mind, and notably products of human mind. As concerns beauty and goodness philosophers have quibbled over the dividing line between humans and animals, but I don’t know of anyone who takes seriously the notion that animals entertain propositions.

The values, being as it were detectable signals of God’s qualities, must be related to one another and must, like the relation between quantum mechanics and general relativity in the physical universe, end up being consistent with one another. Self-consistency, an absolute lack of self-contradiction, must be a quality of an infinite God. The values cannot be inconsistent with one another as they are recognized in their different domains any more than two extant physical phenomenon can be mutually contradictory.

That value propositions have any truth value is controversial in philosophy today, but their truth value is easily accommodated by their relation not to physical states-of-affairs, but to values taken to be qualities of God detectable by human mind. It is in some ways unfortunate that the word ‘truth’ is employed in its meaning as a value, and its being the quality of a proposition. For now I will call the value sense Truth with a capital ‘T’ and the propositional quality truth small ‘t’. So it happens that some sorts of propositions bear truth by their relation to Truth rather than to states-of-affairs. Remember that a truth-maker must be independent of the subjectivity of individual mind. If the values are merely invented in subjective experience they cannot be truth-makers because there is no guarantee that we do not each experience completely different qualities of them. But if value is detected by mind then it is possible for value to serve in the role of truth-maker. Although it is detected only by mind and thus subject to some individual distortion it has, nevertheless, enough shared quality across minds (human minds) to serve as a connection between the proposition and something outside the proposition-conceiving mind.

What does it mean to say that there is a connection between a proposition in mind and Truth conceived as a value detected in mind? As a value, Truth represents or stands for (to the limits of our capacity to detect) some quality of God. To be connected to a value is to be aligned (however incompletely or imperfectly) in some sense with some quality of God. Since God is unified and all his qualities perfectly compliment one another, it amounts to being aligned to some degree with God over-all. This is equally true for beauty and goodness as it is for truth. But as concerns truth the alignment specifically concerns mind and so to the subject matter of propositions, as beauty is to arrangements of particulars in the world (which are also states-of-affairs but truth-making does not preclude there being multiple truth-makers in certain circumstances), and goodness to the acts of persons which also, as it happens bring about various states-of-affairs.

As concerns facts, truth and Truth can come apart. “ISIS has murdered many innocent people” is true on most accounts, but its truth (small ‘t’) does not appear to have anything of goodness or beauty in it. If it is related to God at all it is only indirectly though its connection to a fact. If God exists, then all facts are related to him in a trivial sense because everything must be subsumed under God if he is God though this does not mean that he is personally responsible for them. Actual history has this relation while fantasy history does not. But the truth of a proposition made true by a fact need not have anything good or beautiful about it and its relation to Truth (capital ‘T’) is limited to its being made true by a fact whose actuality is subsumed by him. God apparently permits (at least for a time) much that contravenes his personal will. But Truth conceived as “quality of God” and truth as a property of propositions are not entirely unrelated. In an earlier essay (Process, Substance, Time, and Space) I introduced E. J. Lowe’s “Four Category Ontology”. It will be useful to review that here as it is a structure that works well to explicate the part values play in truth making.

Kind/Type ————- Attributes

Universals
——-
Particulars

Objects ————- Modes/Tropes

Kinds –> Characterized by Attributes, instantiated by objects
Objects –> Characterized by Modes, instantiated by kinds
Attributes –> Exemplified by Objects

We begin with a square. The top two corners are universals, the bottom two particulars. In the lower left corner are “individual substances” normally taken to be material and abstract things of the world both natural and artifactual. Particular planets, stars, dogs, trees, chairs, statues, people, sets and propositions can all serve as particulars. In Lowe’s view there are no “bare particulars”; every one of these objects (concrete or abstract) is a member of one or more “kinds” or “classes” (the upper left corner). My dog, for example is a member of the class “dogs” and also “animals”. Most classes nest wholly within super-classes (like dogs and animals) but this is not always so. A statue made of clay and one made of bronze are both kinds of statues, but one belongs also to the class of bronze artifactual objects while the other belongs to clay artifactual objects. The kinds instantiate global universals (upper right corner) which Lowe calls “attributes”. These globals include such abstract concepts as “color”, “shape”, “size”, “mass”. Taking color as a universal attribute, it is instantiated in classes like “red things”, “blue things”, etc. The last corner (lower right) are individual “modes” (Lowe’s preferred term) or “tropes” As with the classes, these also instantiate universal attributes, but this time as a “particular red”, or a “particular shape”. In turn, the modes are instantiated in the individual substances (back to the lower left corner). An apple has a particular shade of redness, a particular size, and a particular roundness. Particular sets have their members.

There exists a diagonal connection of “exemplification” between the lower left and upper right corners. Particulars exemplify attributes but they do so indirectly. The direct relations are only those represented by the sides of the square. Attributes are instantiated in kinds and modes, while these two are instantiated in particulars; individual substances. In Lowe’s view, only the individual substances “exist” in the sense of being objects in the physical universe. Kinds, attributes, and modes are real only insofar as they are instantiated (the Attributes via their instantiation of kinds and modes) in individual particulars. The class “unicorns” doesn’t exist if there aren’t any unicorns, and the likewise the mode of a size or shape of unicorn horn. There are no uninstantiated kinds, attributes, or modes. Lowe was a realist. Attributes exist (though not as substances) because they are instantiated through classes and modes in real particulars. The classes or kinds are abstractions exemplified by particulars, but the modes are not abstractions. They are real because they inhere in the particulars that instantiate them.

In Lowe’s view, it is the modes that establish most facts (the particular redness of an individual apple, the specific characteristic of Earth’s orbit around the sun) and thus ground the truths of propositions. But there are exceptions. Existence is not taken to be a property like a color or shape. “The [particular] apple exists” is made true by the apple itself, the particular, while “mammals are animals” is made true by the relation between the class (kind) “mammal” and the kind “animal”, in this case that the former is wholely subsumed by the latter.

Values, taken as a whole, i.e., the “qualities of God” to which our minds are sensitive belong to the attributes. These in turn are instantiated in three classes, beauty, goodness, and Truth, and also in modes corresponding to particulars that are beautiful, good, or True. A particular sunset and a particular rose are both beautiful. Each is an instantiation of the class “beauty” and each has its own particular mode or beauty trope. Individual acts are good likewise by being examples of the class and in having their own modes. What about Truth? In contemporary philosophy, truth is taken to be instantiated in (a property of) propositions, that is particular individual propositions. As a group, they are members of the class of propositions and each of the true propositions instantiates some specific “truth mode”. It is here in the particularity of the modes that the truth makers for value propositions are mostly to be located.

The modes ground value propositions in the same way that they ground propositions pertaining to the physical world. But in the case of values, the classes (Truth, beauty, and goodness) are not related in the same way as “animals” are related to “mammals”. They are each a distinct class, beauty being value reflected (to appropriately sensitive minds) in the material world, goodness reflected in the acts of persons, and truth in propositions or statements generally. “There is truth” is not grounded in a particular truth as was the case with existence, but in the presence of the class, while “truth is good” is not grounded in the class as was the case with “mammals are animals” but in the collective universal attribute values.

Classes, attributes, and modes can all have internal relations. Relations between modes often serve as truth makers for propositions about the world. The Earth’s “orbital mode” and Mars’ “orbital mode” are related such that they line up (with the sun) every 778 days. The proposition “Earth and Mars align with the sun every 778 days” is made true by the relation between their two orbital modes. One of the powerful features of Lowe’s ontological scheme is that it fits such different sorts (kinds) of particulars as chairs, statues, and propositions. Using this scheme we can see that truth as a property of propositions and Truth as a quality of God are related in that the truth of a proposition has to do with the modes instantiated by it. In the example above, they are the modes of two orbits and that these two modes are modes of orbits in the actual universe.

Lowe’s ontological scheme thus proves very flexible as concerns both propositions about the physical world and values. As concerns Truth (and truth), both fit nicely in the scheme while the scheme itself connects them or relates them as modes instantiating different universal attributes, the universal “history of the universe” and the universal “qualities of God”.

Response to Criticisms of Agent Causal Libertarianism

I’ve just finished a short book “Freedom, Responsibility, and Determinism: A Philosophical Dialogue” by John Lemos, Hackett Publishing 2013, an introduction to philosophical issues surrounding free will. Lemos explains several variations (each) of Incompatibilism, Compatibilism, and Libertarianism as concerns free will. As concerns Libertarianism, he discusses three variations, the first being “agent causation” and the other two (indeterminism and “indeterministic event-causal”) trying to do (unsuccessfully I think) without the agent. As concerns agent causal libertarianism he notes three types of objections. Because my view of free will, derived from the theology reflected in all of these essays, is of the agent type, my purpose in this essay is to respond to those three lines of criticism.

In the theistic view I hold, the agent is the person, personality being a non-material “information extra” on top of non-material mind. Higher animals have mind, but not personality. God can distinguish this extra pattern (he puts it there), but we cannot. To us, the mind-personality combination just looks like mind, like consciousness, our “what it is to be like” experience. Human subjective experience is an amalgamated whole, a mereological sum consisting of everything that goes into mind, plus personality. No experience of the person takes place outside of mind, and every decision of the person occurs within mind’s all encompassing embrace.

In my essays on personality and free will I explain why we must infer personality even if we cannot discern it. To summarize, we must infer it, among other things, because we experience our exercise of free will, something that a fully macro-deterministic and micro-random universe (which would include mind in the absence of personality, higher-animal mind) cannot support in the absence of a crack in physics, a crack that allows for genuine causation, and not merely event-unfolding. My view is fully committed to agent-causal libertarian free will not because of any crack in the physical except as concerns personal agency. It is plainly what we appear to experience from our subjective viewpoint; not as concerns every choice we make, but in many of them throughout our lives.
Objections to agent cause are of the following three types:

1) Uncaused cause is not scientific, nowhere supported by physics.
2) Agent Cause does not solve the “luck problem”.
3) Agent Cause is incoherent because agents persist while the events they cause happen at specific times.

The first objection comes down to scientism. Physics allows for exactly two types of causes, and in addition causal language is taken to be naieve. For physics, events, that is physical events including the movement of biological bodies, unfold into subsequent events. Thus there are two broad types of events, those that are determined, and those (quantum events) that are fundamentally random. Because of quantum randomness, physicists concede that the macro-level of description is not entirely determined, but to the extent that it is [slightly] undetermined, it is [slightly] random. There is no room in our physical description for purposeful, that is original and non-random cause; an event that occurs without any prior event other than the undetermined (more precisely not fully determined) but purposeful choosing of an agent.

This objection is question begging. The agent-causal claim is precisely that there is an exception to the two physical possibilities of determinism and randomness, and the exception is specifically personal agency! Agent causalists do not claim that the free agent is physical even as they of course concede that their bodies are physical. For physics simply to declare that no such non-physical thing can exist because there are only physical events having physical (determined or random) antecedents begs the question of agency being the exception.

On the theistic view, the exception is not problematic as God himself produces this exception, configures it on consciousness in time. Other than how he produces it, there is no “interaction problem” because the person is a cause only in mind. The interaction issue remains between mind and body and a topic for another essay. Non-material agents can be a cause in physics because they have a causal effect in mind, and mind has a connection to its physical root, the brain and from there to a body. From our perspective within time we cannot and never will be able to answer this question. First we cannot even access personality directly and second, even if we could, the mystery of how God does such things understandably resides with God. The universe is highly accessible to our collective minds, but there is no guarantee that every mystery is accessible.

The second objection builds on elements of the first and extends them in its own way. The “luck problem” is so called because scientists (and most philosophers) recognize only one exception to determinism, that being quantum randomness. Since randomness cannot be purposeful, if randomness has anything to do with choice, then the outcome (of choice) can only come down to luck. I have dealt with the physicalist aspect of this objection above, but there is another. Imagine a possible world in which there exists a doppelganger of you, exactly the same as you in every respect except at the moment of some decision she makes a choice different from yours. The problem here is that the “same you” made different choices under identical situations so it makes no sense to say that you, qua agent, determined one choice over another. Which choices you make still comes out to luck when considering all possible worlds containing you.

There are two broad ways to conceive “possible worlds”. One is to think of them as merely heuristic devices for exploring truth conditions in counterfactual arguments, and the other is to hold that they are real ontological entities. From a theological viewpoint either comes out to the same argument for the following reasons. If possible worlds are heuristic only then only the real world matters and there is one unified and infinite God. If possible worlds are real, then there can still only be one unqualified infinity (God) in the universe of all possible worlds.

Since God bestows personality, patterns consciousness with it, he cannot create two personalities between which he cannot distinguish. Since each personality is patterned on a separate mind (and God is related to each individually), God must be able to distinguish between them. That means no two persons in the universe can be “the same person”, that is identical to God’s eyes, and this across all possible worlds. A possible world containing a person who (indistinguishably even to God) is also you is logically impossible. Such a world would be, like a possible world containing a square circle, an “impossible world”.

In possible world talk, something is necessary if it is true in all possible worlds, and contingent if true in only some of them. Something is impossible if it is true in none of them, or true only in impossible worlds which comes out to the same thing; impossible. The luck objection is answered because that person in the other possible world, though she shares your history up to the moment of this particular decision, is nevertheless not you; she is a different person and hence can make a different choice for her purposes. Two different people making different choices do not raise the luck problem. The decision in your world is your decision and in the other world it is hers.

The third broad objection to libertarian agency is incoherence. As with the first charge, this one too comes out to begging the question. An action, random, determined, or volitional, is conceived as an event while the agent who is the event’s “original cause” is conceived as substance, albeit non-material. Since physics holds that events unfold (not cause) into subsequent events, how does the substance, exactly, become a prior-determiner of an event when it is not itself an event? A second component of this objection is temporal in character. Events occur at specific times but the agent is extended in time. If there is literally nothing other than the agent’s volition that determines subsequent events how is it that the event happened at some specific time? Why that time and not a little earlier or later? How is it, in other words, that a temporally extended substance that is not itself an event can bring about an event at a specific time? Put another way, how does an extended substance that is not an event interact with time and events?

I want to note first that the notion of “causal agent” as substance and “event” are not so far apart. E. J. Lowe in his “Personal Agency” (2008), demonstrates that any talk of “events unfolding into other events” can be easily cast back into substance-causal terms. Lowe suggests that all cause is “agent cause” but some (most) agents happen to be inannimate. An example can be taken from Lemos’ book. I thrust a red-hot iron rod into a bucket of cold water. The water (substance) causes the iron to cool down, while the iron (substance) causes the water to heat up. Lemos points out that what is really going on here is that events in the iron, the rapid motion of iron atoms, are unfolding into subsequent events as their kinetic energy is transferred to the slower moving molecules of water. What Lemos fails to note, and Lowe points out, is that it is just as reasonable to conceive of the atoms in the iron and the molecules of water as agents. They are not animate agents, and no psychology, consciousness (panpsychism) is imputed to them, but they are agents of the effect, kinetic energy transferred from the iron atoms to the water molecules. Some specific kinetic energy is a temporary property of the atom-agents. Any event description can be transcribed into an agent description, at least as concerns physical process.

Simalarly, persons can be cast as “extended events”. Given the human capacity for abstraction, this is not at all uncommon usage. A galaxy comes into existence and eventually, after hundreds of billions of years, passes out of existence, at least as an identifiable galaxy. Certainly a galaxy can be cast in substance terms, it is an agent for example when its deeper gravity well steals gas from a smaller neighboring galaxy. But it is also a process, an event, the galaxy’s temporal worm whose existence spans some interval.

That we can take what are commonly thought to be substances like galaxies and view them as extended events is not new. This is, after all, what process philosophy is about. By itself, this doesn’t resolve the problem of luck however. In a galaxy after all, when specific events occur is either determined or random. We can refer to measurable antecedent events to explain the timing. Although a person can be cast as an extended event the view doesn’t help us here. As concerns the agent-causal view, there remains nothing about the qualities of the temporally extended person-event other than agent volition enact-able at specific times also determined by the agent. Lowe would probably be uncomfortable casting persons as events and to be sure it is an awkward view in this case. Unlike an atom or a rock animation makes a difference. Either view works easily enough when the agent has no libertarian free will, or indeed any will at all. A substance-agency, becomes more appropriate precisely when the evocation of an event at a specific time is neither random nor determined other than by the agent because only then is it genuinely original cause and not merely events unfolding into other events.

So the question of the coherence of agency here turns on whether there is anything (in the universe) other than “other events” (random or deterministic) that can purposefully initiate events at a specific time that are neither sufficiently determined (by antecedent influences) or random. The agent-causal claim is at root the claim that a libertarian-endowed agent has precisely that power. Put conversely, the power, on the part of an extended (in time) agent, to trigger events at specific points in time determined by the agent’s purposes alone (and of course her skill manipulating her body to bring about the desired event) is one of the qualities (at least) that makes that power libertarian! The capacity, to be original cause at particular moments in time, moments elected by our temporally extended agency, is at the very core of what it means to have a libertarian type of freedom. That this should be is not a mystery theologically speaking because human freedom in time is a derivative of God’s freedom outside time, a derivative God himself bestows upon us.

In God, freedom is absolute, unconstrained (except by logic), and acts across all time. Human freedom is not absolute nor unconstrained. Indeed part of the timing issue can be understood in terms of conditioning influences, the history and present environment, in which the agent finds herself. More importantly, the capacity to initiate an original causal chain, to be an original cause, at a particular moment in time, is how God’s unconstrained freedom comes out in human beings altogether limited to the temporal world. Far from incoherent, this capacity is the essence of the libertarian claim. The coherence of this claim can be in doubt only if God does not exist, but that begs the question because if God does exist it is well within his capacity (not being a logical contradiction) to bestow that very power on personal agents.

The incoherence charge begs its own question because it presupposes the inconceivability of that quality in the agent, the power to originate events without sufficient antecedent cause, that the agent-causal libertarian maintains is in fact a special power of such agents alone. Agent-causal advocates do not deny that this power is not to be found anywhere else in the universe other than in [some] animate agents. To our knowledge (that is human knowledge on Earth) only persons are fully free (a fullness that remains, nevertheless, highly constrained in timespace) in a libertarian sense. The higher animals sometimes appear to exercise choice in ways that suggest they have some similar agent-properties, but I am not sure if in the animal case, the seeming libertarianism of the act is not imputed to them by us.

All three types of objections to agent-causality fail if God is real. The first objection fails because the nature of personal agency, the person being non-material, lies outside science’s domain. The second fails because if “possible worlds” are real, then persons must, nevertheless, remain unique across all possible worlds, and if they are not real, then only the actual world matters and no two persons can be absolutely identical. A person identical to you can only exist in impossible worlds. Two people who are the same person are a logical contradiction. The third objection fails because the very power, of a non-event to initiate an event at a specific time, declared incoherent under an event-only view of causation, is the power of agency given to personality by God. Even if physicists are right about causality being nothing more than the unfolding of events into subsequent events, personality is the exception to that rule in the universe. The exception is possible, conceivable, and not incoherent, precisely because God makes it possible.

God’s existence is a highly prejudicial matter with most scientists and philosophers today. One of the more general problems they have with the agent-causal view is that it so easily slides into dualism and from there to substance-dualism and God. In Lemos’ book, one of his characters (the book is written in the form of a dialogue) notes the association between the view and dualism of one form or another. From a theological perspective, substance dualism grounded in God is suggested precisely because it is a solution to the three objections discussed above. I have argued in many essays collected on this blog and books, that free will, our experience of it, and its conflict with physics, is one of the major reasons for evaluating the explanatory power of dualism. My answers to the objections noted in Lemos’ book flow from what I take to be consequences of God’s existence. Moreover, and this is perhaps the main point to contemporary scientists and philosophers, they justify and warrant our belief in the reality of what seems to our experience to be a genuinely libertarian free will at least as concerns some of our decisions. Agent-cause grounded through personal-agency in turn metaphysically grounded in God explains our seeming freedom the way we actually experience it! None of the other alternatives seem fully to encompass that feat.

Critique of Sean Carroll’s “The Big Picture”

Sean Carroll has written a book, “The Big Picture, On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself“. In it, he weaves two themes together. The first theme is that everything in the universe from stars and galaxies evolved to human consciousness, meanings, and values is rooted in a process of emergence that is, in turn, grounded exclusively in what he calls the “core theory” (quantum field theory plus the “standard model” of contemporary particle physics), the second law of thermodynamics, and the “past hypothesis” (the early universe was in a very low-entropy state). The second theme is simply that no other theory, in particular that there is a God and our experience of the universe is partly a product of his designs, is at all reasonable because it is highly unlikely. My short Amazon review of Carroll’s book is here. This essay is a more detailed critique of his approach to that second theme.

Throughout the book Dr. Carroll makes much of “Bayesian inference“, a process by which one comes to refine probability assessments. If, for example, I ask you what is the “prior probability” of a fair coin coming up heads on a single toss, you would naturally say 50%. Now you flip the coin and it comes up tails. The question here is “is the coin fair”. You are asked, given your new data, to reassess your estimate of “prior probability”. One throw is not going to make a difference. If I throw the coin 10 times and it comes up tails 7 of them then what? Seven tails is not all that unlikely even given a fair coin. If after 1000 throws the coin comes up tails 699 times, you think that 50% prior probability was wrong and indeed the coin is not fair. This sort of reassessment works because we can count events. We can compare what we count with what we think should happen and reevaluate our original position. Carroll applies Bayesian reasoning to God, to the probability that he exists. What, exactly, is he counting here? Not events certainly.

Actually, he isn’t counting anything. He offers assertions made about God alongside various philosophical challenges already prejudged to count for or against the likelihood of God’s existence. These aren’t data exactly, but assertions about the world, some sensible and some not. Their sensibility is nowhere independently evaluated, nowhere placed into any context that might change how we think they count for or against God.

Dr. Carroll is too casual about what counts and in what direction it counts. Most of his examples are negative, Hume’s “argument from evil” and the historical fact of there being many different views of God for example. “Why not make himself plain” asks Carroll? That there are reasonable answers to those questions besides God’s non-existence he does not mention. He does adduce a few pieces of evidence in God’s favor, for example the fact that every people comes up with some sort of view of him even if it varies greatly from culture to culture. But his sympathies clearly lie on the negative side here. With regard to Hume’s “argument from evil”, he does allude to the matter of “free will”. He speculates that it might be important to God (though not to us apparently) but fails to appreciate its potential as a part of a full explanation (perspective in this case) in much of what he counts against God’s likelihood. As it happens, free will turns out to be a lynch pin issue for Carroll’s view.

Dr. Carroll is a materialist. He warns us constantly to be alert to cognitive bias, but fails to appreciate his own. He believes that if a phenomenon cannot be measured (at least in potential) by physical instruments ending in our sensory experience, that is intersubjectively by third parties, then it cannot be real. His argument for this is not merely that we don’t find anything but the physical with physical instruments, but what we do find actually explains everything (at least in potential) and so there remains no room for anything other than the physical. Even if such an other were to exist, it has no impact, no physically measurable interaction, with the physical! Why then would we need to posit it?

How did Carroll get here? He tells the story of being a little boy and wanting very much to project causal power directly from his mind to objects lying outside him. He wanted to “bend spoons”. What boy doesn’t? After a while he realized that this is just not something humans are given to do. But he mistakenly concludes (eventually) that if our mind’s cannot bend spoons then they cannot affect any change in any material reality. Coupled with this assumption is Carroll’s affinity for the present view in physics that there aren’t strictly causes in the universe. Of course it is perfectly reasonable for us to talk of cause, a convenient fiction, but really all that is going on in the physical world is the evolution of physical states, this being a natural product of time and the thermodynamic arc from a low entropy past to a high entropy future.

At that point in his life however his materialistic leanings must have been well formed because he missed one obvious alternative; that mind does in fact affect the disposition of matter-energy in exactly one place, in the functioning brains of creatures advanced enough to be conscious! He ultimately justifies his rejection by declaring that nothing of such an influence can be measured. That part is true, we can (as in quantum “virtual transactions” with which Carroll is comfortable) only measure their effects, in this case the subsequent behavior of a body.

We can measure all sorts of goings-on in the brain and we have done an amazing job of tying subjective states to certain kinds of brain-state correlations. But there is no guarantee that in all that we detect, some part of it, some part of what we do in fact measure, is actually caused by something non-material. All we see is physical activity and correlations. If some small part of the complex resonances of the brain were influenced by something that was not in fact material, how would we ever tell? Late in the book, in his chapter on free will, Carroll denies that libertarian free will is even possible precisely because if it was it would entail that some non-material entity made a difference to some material phenomenon. This is a crucial juncture for Carroll’s thought. If there is even one place in which a non-material entity (like a mind) has an influence on the physical world then that influence would be a genuine cause, not merely an evolution from a prior state because that trigger (’cause’ being a good name for it) is not fully determined by any prior state of the universe. This is why libertarian free will is the fulcrum on which Carroll’s whole argument hangs. If he is right and all states of the universe are evolutions from prior states, then libertarian freedom is impossible. But if libertarian free will is real, if we can be uncaused causes, then physics cannot be the ultimate explanation of everything. In particular there has to be something, at least in one place, where as he puts it, “ideas cause physics”.

Why should we, that is physics, accept that there is “one place” in the universe where genuine cause exists? We do not find it anywhere else, why should we believe it happens in relation to the behavior of our bodies? We cannot bend spoons with our mind, why should we think that our minds have an antecedent causal relation with the material entity we call our brain and from there (uncontroversially enough) our body? I can’t bend spoons by staring at them, but I can grab them in my hands and bend them. Why should physics accept that subjective mind is an effective cause in the latter case and not the former? The reason is simple enough, because it is the one place in the universe that we seem to experience it! We experience ourselves being causes, even original causes via control of a body and only via that mechanism. Perhaps this is illusion? Indeed this is entailed by Carroll’s claim that libertarian free will is impossible. But as we look around us in the world and ask from where, if anywhere, new causal chains seem to emerge, the answer is plain, from people.

Carroll asks, if God is so important (as most religions claim he is) then why isn’t his activity in the universe more obvious? Why are we able to tell the complete story of cosmic evolution in physical terms without seeming to leave anything out? Here he is being a bit disingenuous. There is one place, one source, through which God’s influence can be discerned, in the behavior of people, the only locus of genuine original cause in the physical universe. Carroll certainly would ask “where besides people”, and the answer is “nowhere else besides people”! Only people have libertarian free will and it is only by exercise (and by certain exercises and not others) of this will that God influences the world. Why God set things up this way is another question dealt with at length in my books. The issue as concerns Carroll is that he misses the possibility that God did indeed set things up this way, and in so doing renders original cause in the physical (our choice to act ends after all with a behavior of a physical body) compatible with a causeless physics.

Free will is the crux of the answer to the question of why God doesn’t “make himself plain” as Carroll puts it. Doing so would abridge exactly that power, libertarian free will, whose exercise does (loving one another) or does not (killing on another) incrementally bring the world into alignment with God’s desire to evolve a physical universe transformed from a pure competition for survival to one of universal loving cooperation. Done in this way, in the end, a physical universe of love comes about through the free willed choice and not coercion of genuinely independent minds. The combination of purposeless physical mechanism, libertarian free will, and perception of values (truth, beauty, and goodness) in mind go together. God (should he exist) has to be capable of direct and personal action in the physical. Perhaps he does this on occasion, but such occasions are either beneath our notice (see below on life), or very rare, enough so that we can effectively discount their effect in the day by day unfolding of physical process.

Certainly we do not detect the “influence of God” in much of human behavior. But it doesn’t have to be detected in every act. It is enough if it is present even sometimes. What would “the influence of God” look like? Suppose I act to do some kindness, some good, to a person I have every reason to hate. I do this good (let us suppose) for no other reason than that I believe he, like me, is a “child of God”. That sort of decision, taken freely, results in the sort of action that infuses God’s spirit (however much or little of it) into the world. That is what it would look like, people doing good and especially so when they would seem to have every reason to do the opposite.

Because our subjective minds are the one place in the universe over which some non-material entity has some antecedent causal control, the behavior of our bodies, also connected to those minds, are the material locus of novel causal chains. Of course not all of these chains need originate in an attempt to infuse the world with God’s spirit. It is enough that some do! It is also not necessary that any intellectual belief in God (as in the example above) underlie the act. It is enough that the act reflects some one or more of the values truth, beauty, or goodness. Every act of kindness, of unselfishness, of reverence for truth, or creation of beauty, is part of the process of infusing God’s spirit into the world. God doesn’t “make himself plain” precisely so that such acts fully and freely belong to us.

What about a believer who says “God ordered me to kill that man”, or “God has ordered that all heretics be put to the sword”. Put plainly, such declarations are false, lies, and for two reasons. First because the values, God’s spirit detected by our minds, are truth, beauty, and goodness. Killing might sometimes be necessary for material reasons (self defense for example) but it cannot ever reflect the “will of God”. No act that does not reflect one of more of the values results in a behavior that infuses God’s spirit into the world. Second, God doesn’t order anyone to do anything good or evil. That is what free will is for. God provides only spiritual pointers. A decision to do anything with or about them, positive or negative, is entirely up to us.

The general thrust of Carroll’s argument is that what physics has discovered about the universe must be true. This doesn’t mean the discoveries are the complete story of everything by any means. What he means here is that they must be a part of the truth and indeed a major part as concerns the cosmos over all. He notes that we live in a universe that, in its deep past, had a very low-entropy. Whether or not this was the literal beginning of our universe of some stage of a longer process he, and we, do not know, but at some point in the past entropy was very low. Thanks to this beginning, combined with the forces of the “core theory”, and the fact that the universe is not yet in thermodynamic equilibrium, we live in an age of developing complexity. From Carroll’s viewpoint, everything from the gathering of primordial particles into atoms, stars, and galaxies, to the appearance of life, consciousness, and love, is all merely the physical evolution of contingent (it might have happened otherwise) complexity thanks to the potentials made possible by the settings and regularities (laws) coupled with that moment in cosmological history in between a very low entropy beginning and a very high entropy future.

I have no doubt that the physical complexity we find around us, from stars to other people, even our own brains hangs on exactly what Dr. Carroll claims here. That is, the thermodynamic arc, coupled with the core theory not only allows for all of these possibilities, but also that they are indeed physically constructed (emerge) from them. Carroll is not alone here, a number of recent books, including one of my own, builds on the phenomenon of emergence.

In building complexity Carroll notes that, from our viewpoint, as the evolution of the physical results in information being compounded upon information we find value in describing phenomena at different levels. There are many examples of this. His favorite (an uncontroversial example, another being the relation between Newtonian mechanics and General Relativity he also mentions) is the language of “gas laws” (temperature and pressure) to describe the same phenomenon as are described at the level of individual molecules with “statistical mechanics”. Same phenomenon, different languages.

In truth, this transformation of viewpoints does carry all the way up from physics to chemistry, biology, and even sociology. The reason such language transformations work in these cases is precisely because we are able, as observers, to measure these phenomena! As we study the behavior of social systems (or gasses), we are able to measure what the people (or molecules) physically do, where the money (in paper or bits) flows, how ideas are exchanged. All of this has to do with observable (measurable) behavior. In fact, as I noted above, it is in observing the behavior of persons, assuming libertarian free will to be genuine, that we sometimes (if we know what we are looking for) detect the influence of God in the physical universe.

But Dr. Carroll confidently asserts that the same phenomenon is going on, that is, what we have is nothing more than an “alternative language”, as concerns such subjective phenomena as feelings, thoughts, qualia, and decisions. He insists, that these are “nothing more than ways of talking” about physical phenomena that can be measured (at least in potential), and that once we have actually measured all of them we will discover that there is nothing else to be said about subjective experience. He insists that one day we will, from a third-party perspective as observers, be able to explain ourselves in the same way that we connect up statistical mechanics to the gas laws and Newton with Einstein.

Plainly there is a difference here, a difference of which Carroll must be aware. Unlike the phenomena described by Boltzman or Einstein, we are not third party observers of subjective experience. By definition it is individual, subjective, available only in the first person. What makes our internal states different from such things as the gas laws is that they cannot be intersubjectively quantified. They can’t be measured by third parties. Of course we can measure the obviously physical phenomenon that underlie their appearance, the functioning brain, but we can never “connect up” a pain quale or a belief with a neural event in the same way as we can connect individual molecules with their average collective behavior because we cannot measure the other [subjective] side.

Solipcism (the notion that I alone am real or genuinely conscious and everyone else is some part of my dream), isn’t much taken seriously, but that we can entertain the notion and that we do not find it obviously incoherent demonstrates the uniqueness of our subjectivity, its inaccessibility from the outside. We can find correlations between neurons and subjective content, but we can never be sure that subjective content is “nothing more” than neurons because we can’t quantify the gap. We can measure that more C-fiber firing correlates with more intense pain, but we cannot show why chemicals spewing across a synapse should manifest as the subjective quality of pain.

In a later part of the book, Carroll declares that, like libertarian free will, there can be no such thing as post-mortal existence. He says there is nothing in physics, in the core theory or anything we observe to support this idea. Of course he is correct. There is nothing in physics to suggest any such a thing is possible, but the claim as concerns such survival has nought (usually) to do with physics. True, there are doctrines that say our bodies are ressurected. Those doctrines are, to put it bluntly, wrong. If anything survives mortal death it isn’t a physical entity. How the survival mechanism might go, I address in another essay. But whatever the mechanism, it has nothing to do with physics. Carroll claims there is nothing in physics that supports any concept of a post-mortal life. Limited to the idea of a physical post-mortal survival he is right. But he isn’t addressing the real issue which is the possibility of a non-physical survival mechanism. Science has no business being anything but neutral on this matter.

Carroll here isn’t content merely to claim that a post-mortal experience is impossible. He derides it with a story of a man who, upon dying, goes to heaven and decides to spend his days endlessly having sex, eating, and playing golf. Eventually the man grows bored and begins to contemplate suicide. Carroll’s story, meant to be humorous, is akin to a kindergardner who, having been told that her career aspirations will require another 20+ years of school, imagines that those 20 years will be filled with finger painting, naps, and story-time! Really Dr. Carroll? You are far past kindergarden and you cannot think of anything more adventurous and compelling as concerns growth toward perfection than more of the same, more finger painting, naps and story time? You could not imagine something more robust? Does death alone perfect us in God’s eyes?

In another shot at a straw man, Carroll asks, if God created us, a single planet populated by creatures that can (rightly or wrongly) contemplate him, why go on to create the rest of the physical universe of billions and billions of galaxies? The rejoinder here seems pretty obvious. The doctrine that we are alone in the universe, alone “created in God’s image” is, like the notion of a resurrected body above, simply wrong, another 2000 year-old notion whose time is long past. The universe is, or will be, inhabited. To be sure I am not speaking of every rock being populated, but billions of rocks have conditions suitable for life even as we understand it. Given that God seems to be intent on making over the universe based on the free will choices of suitable creatures, all of those rocks, if they are not already inhabited by personal beings (whatever their physiology) are evolving in that direction! This speculation leads to some testable predictions.

Let us say, broadly speaking, that there are three general mechanisms by which life appeared in the universe. The first is simply random accidental association, what most scientists on Earth today believe. That this is highly unlikely, but nevertheless possible (that is physically possible) is granted. Secondly, supposing God exists, perhaps he arranged things at the beginning of the universe such that life would not only be possible, but likely to arise in all (or most) more-or-less supporting environments. The assembly of life remains, in this view, strictly accidental, but now more of “an accident waiting to happen”, a not-uncommon accident once certain environmental conditions are met; conditions found in many places throughout the universe. This view is suggested by notions like the “anomalous monism” of Donald Davidson and Thomas Nagel, or panpsychism from David Chalmers. Carroll would undoubtedly note (and I would agree with him) that there is no evidence in physics for either of these views. The third possibility is that God (directly or indirectly) has a hand in initiating life (which evolves by Darwinian mechanism from that point forward) on each life bearing world.

In the first scenario, we expect life to be very rare. Of the billions and billions of potentially inhabitable worlds only a very few would exhibit life at all, and even fewer a life that advances to consciousness. We might also find once-living-now-dead worlds where life managed to begin but was snuffed out as environmental conditions evolved unfavorably. Mostly, however, we would expect to find no life present or past on most worlds.

The second scenario results in a much different outcome. Life would be everywhere (or nearly) in every supporting environment. We would also expect to find many once-living-now-dead worlds because life starts itself easily when conditions are right, even if they are not destined to remain so. Mars is a seminal possibility here. It is widely believed that the Martian environment was once life-supporting, but evolved away from that state. If this second scenario is true, then we would expect to find evidence of ancient and extinct past life on Mars. We would also expect, since God had a hand in this scenario, that any planet whose conditions were such as to support highly complex and conscious life would eventually do so. We might stumble on such a world in a primitive age prior to the evolution of complex forms, but if we could follow the planet for a few billion years and its geophysical evolution continued to be supportive, we would expect conscious life to evolve.

In the last scenario we would expect something very different again. We would expect either that a world is dead, having no present or past life if the present environment is not life supporting, or the world has life and both the physical conditions and that life always evolves to consciousness. On every world where life is to be found, consciousness follows eventually. Why? Because God “knows the end from the beginning”. Why would he initiate life on a world (for example Mars) that was destined to lose the capacity to support it? If God starts life on a world, he would know that world will evolve geophysically in parallel with biological evolution and eventually come to support complex (and conscious) life. This is not to say that every living world has at this time evolved complex life, but under this scenario, it will.

Even given the second or third scenarios above, there is no guarantee, indeed it remains highly unlikely, that we will ever be able to detect such life across light years of space. There are too many variables, and at least one of them, is not even on the minds of astronomers and astrobiologists. Why, if life is started where it has the potential to become conscious, have we not yet found evidence of it? There are three broad possibilities.

1. Life on the remote world has not reached an electronic stage or is not industrialized in a way that leaves detectable pollutant traces in its atmosphere.
2. Life on the remote world has reached an advanced and electronic stage but we cannot detect it because: (a) it is far away and the signals haven’t reached us yet, or (b) the signals, having reached us are just too weak to distinguish from any background.
3. Life on the remote world has reached an advanced stage, but it is not and will never become electronic.

The last is a distinction to which scientists and philosophers alike seem oblivious. They assume that “advanced life” is necessarily concomitant with industrialization and electronic signalling; a very provincial assumption. From God’s viewpoint an “advanced civilization” would be one in which all or most people freely choose to attempt to do his will, to love others and be generally successful in the attempt. It would be a world that has (among other things) long relegated such phenomena as war, bigotry, and crime to its distant past. There is nothing about this sort of advancement that entails electronics. I discuss this at some length in my first book, but the bottom line is that there is nothing about Earth’s particular historical path that suggests anything similar is implied by the notion of “advanced civilization” on other worlds.

I hope I am not being unfair to Dr. Carroll. He has contemporaries in the scientific community who become apoplectic at the mention of God. Carroll does not become apoplectic. He tries to make room for such a possibility while rejecting it as “highly unlikely”. He is brave enough, and does manage, to put his finger on the crux of the matter. If libertarian free will is real, then physics must be incomplete. By itself this wouldn’t prove that God exists, but it would, in Bayesian terms, set his prior-probability very high. Rather than accepting that libertarian free will is real, the evidence being our subjective experience of it, his cognitive bias leads him to reject it, essentially denying what must be his own experience. He is far from alone in this. To me there is considerable irony in scientists and philosophers (ordinary folks mostly don’t think about it) freely denying their freedom.

Carroll has a very nice website and blog. I have tried on occasion to engage him as concerns these matters, but he has been disinclined to respond. His cognitive bias is, after all, very strong. If there is a discussion of his book on his blog I will let him know about this critique in a comment. I don’t imagine I will hear from him, but I am open to being surprised.

What is “the Soul”?

In all the other essays in this blog, as controversial as they might be, I could at least argue from some part of the content of our experience. Whether or not libertarian free will is real (or even possible) can be debated, but most people at least do admit that it seems like it is real and that we exercise it. The same is true of values: truth, beauty, and goodness. Are they illusions? Do we make them up, deliberately invent them? Perhaps we really detect their presence, they are real and stem from the same source as consciousness itself.

When it comes to the soul, however, we are at a loss. Simply put we experience nothing what-so-ever of our soul. Now philosophers of religion and theologians will perhaps disagree with me here, but their world is quite mixed up as concerns the soul. Mostly they use it as a word to mean just about anything they want having some bearing on what they take to be our “experiential core”. ‘Soul’ has been used as a synonym for ‘essence’, ‘personality’, ‘mind’, and any combination of any of them even including the body. I do not believe the soul is any of these things. To put it bluntly, we do not experience anything of the soul.

If we do not experience it, why should I think there is a soul at all? The answer has to do with the conviction that God, if he exists, must be both infinite, good, and the source of personality. If “God’s purpose” has to do with personality’s progressive alignment with the “will of God” as described in my first and third books, and more briefly my blog essay “Why Free Will”, then it doesn’t make sense if, on material death, the personality simply vanishes from the universe never again to be expressed. If we are supposed, progressively, to become perfect, like God, in a spiritual sense, this process certainly is not completed by the end of a very short (in cosmic terms) mortal life. What is the point of the fixed temporal reference of personality (see “Why Personality”), of all that we acquire, if it vanishes after a few score years on Earth?

If all this process has a point then personality must somehow survive mortal death. When we die our brain-based consciousness is obliterated, but not the information, the pattern configured into it by God. There is no consciousness here, something that we might best relate to having surgery under general anesthetic. In that case, consciousness (along with its configuring personality) is placed into a deep sleep. With no consciousness in which to operate, personality simply ceases to experience anything, and that includes the passage of time. But as our brain-based consciousness returns to wakefulness, the personality is again expressed.

The inference that there must be a soul if God is real is one of the “consequences of Infinity” I discuss at length in my books and here in “Prolegomena to a Future Theology”. In this case, a consequence that lies strictly beyond our subjective experience. Unlike personality, whose direct apprehension skirts the edge of our self-consciousness and must be present to explain, for example, recursive self-consciousness, the soul doesn’t have to be there at all as far as we, that is our personal selves on Earth are concerned. In short, it has nothing to do with our mortal lives.

Following material death consciousness ceases, but after some unknown duration we wake up again. The person emerges in association again with mind, that is, a consciousness produced by contact with Cosmic Mind (see “From What Comes Mind”). There is also, I presume, some vehicle of expression, something analogous to a body recognized by other persons as the locus of the individuality that is our-self. The vehicle isn’t material by our present reconning but it can be seen and identified by the expanded perceptual systems of its own type. Other post-mortal persons can see and discriminate one another from some environment. In this new case, the mind isn’t brain-based, but rests on something not material, not measurable by physical instruments, and within a vehicle with which the new person-mind combination can express itself. What kind of stuff is that? Is it the same “spirit stuff” of which God is made? I do not know and as we cannot detect it, we cannot say much about it. But if non-material reality actually is real, a part of the Universe’s fundamental ontology, there can be any number of levels or layers or types of “non-material stuff” between God and the material world with which we are familiar.

So we have “the person” and we have a consciousness (likely greatly expanded over our present matter-based version), and a vehicle of expression, but so far no memories. As I noted in my “Why Personality” essay the person has no purchase on its identity without memories which, in our case, are brain-based and so vanish when we die. This, I believe is where the soul comes into the picture. It is, if you will pardon the metaphor, the lifeboat, the escape mechanism that retains memory of the mortal existence. Memories with which we are re-associated when we “wake up”.

What memories? All of them? In our present estate the soul must evolve, grow, along with us even if we experience nothing of it. It is something like a baby within us albeit a baby we do not experience. Possibly it contains all of our memories, God must remember them after all, but I do not think so. Human life is filled with experiences of no spiritual value, that is no bearing on the free willed choice to “do God’s Will”. Experience of physical pleasures are obvious examples, but there are many others. What does have bearing on our future, what is of “spiritual value” are the experiences we have as result of instantiating (or attempting instantiation) of one or more of the values (see “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness?”) the only “stuff of spirit” with which we, with our brain-based minds, have contact. I hypothesize (and this is purely a speculation) that the memories we retain and wake-up with are the instances of value choice we make during our mortal life. Every time we make a positive spiritual choice, a choice to fit or instantiate some value into the world (more precisely to attempt that instantiation since we are not always successful and often only partly successful) that choice is recorded in the soul.

If true, this has interesting consequences. Notice in describing this mechanism I have said nothing about any intellectual belief in the reality of God. Atheists and theists alike make “spiritual decisions”, choices based on and for “reasons of” truth, beauty, goodness, or some combination of them. We commonly relate these to “the moral” and choosing “the moral” in any given instance has nothing directly to do with the intellectual baggage carried by the choosing individual. It might seem that “a believer” has more reason to make value-laden decisions than “an unbeliever”, but this is only theoretical. There are, in real life, many atheists who make more of these decisions than many theists. All of them have a soul.

Suppose we take two normal people (atheists or theists it doesn’t matter). One of them makes some value-instantiating decision on average every day of her life, at least those in which she was aware of herself and values. Lets say she had 50 years of such experience since becoming “self-aware” and before she dies or dementia degrades her brain enough to destroy her sensitivity to values. Our other person, on average, makes only one value entangled choice once every month over the same 50 years.

Upon waking in the post-mortal life our first candidate will retain some memory of every day of those 50 years, more than 18,000 memories. Even those she has forgotten in the mortal life will be available to her. By contrast our second candidate will have memories of 600 days of his previous life. Our two candidate’s status, as concerns personality, consciousness, and expressive vehicle when they wake is the same. But one of them retains far more memories of her prior experience (even if she was an atheist and never attended a church in her life) than the other even if he believed in God and attended church every week! To the extent that “going to church” motivates you to make more spiritual decisions the experience is of value. If it does not then, as with what you believe about God, it makes no difference what-so-ever.

Although this is the variation that recommends living a better, more value-entangled, life on Earth, I do not know how much of a difference it makes in the end. Like two siblings born 3 or 4 years apart, the difference in ages makes a considerable difference in their comprehension of the world for a few years, but by the time 30 or more years have elapsed the age difference is washed out. This is the meaning, I believe of Jesus’ parable of the harvest. Everyone gets the same thing in the end. Even a 75 year life on Earth is but 28,000 days. It might take trillions of days measured in Earth-time to reach some provisional end to the process of “becoming perfect as God is perfect”, more than enough time to obliterate the difference of a few thousand memories. But in the early times of the post-mortal career, there will be a difference. Our first candidate will advance in the program more quickly than the second.

I would make two quick observations before ending this. First philosophers have debated the nature of such identity transfers or duplication. Usually these are cast in terms of clones or star-trek-like transporters, but the notion has been applied to God. Does God move the person (and/or soul) from Earth to somewhere else, or does he use his omnipotence and perfect memory simply to recreate them? While such thought experiments are indeed puzzling as concerns clones or transporters they amount to a difference that makes no difference as concerns God. God is not subject to the second law of thermodynamics. Either way, the resulting copy, if that is what it is, is perfect, suffering no degradation whatsoever. From the subjective view of the individual no difference could be discerned. Either way, we will wake up aware that we are the same person who lived another life in another place and that the memories we find in the contents of our new consciousness belong to that person, us.

Second there inevitably arises the question of soul death. Can a soul die? Since it is non-material I do not think it can suffer death by accident or be murdered. But if free will is genuine, we must be able to commit suicide, to choose not to continue in the post-mortal adventure. Suicide of this sort is probably very rare if it ever happens at all in the post-mortal experience, but it must be possible if we are genuinely free. There is nothing to suggest that the post-mortal experience is timeless, the soul is not immortal in an unqualified way. On the other hand, I am not sure simple cosmic-suicide is possible on Earth. We can kill our body, but in that case the automatic life-boat mechanism kicks in and that person/soul combination survives having developed up to the point of physical suicide. In the next life, we begin where we left off here whether we were 80 or 10!

It might be possible to kill our souls on Earth through consistent, repeated choices of evil, choices in opposition to what is represented by the values. If we are (individually) evil enough, so steeped in evil that we lose the capacity to discern values altogether, we also lose the capacity to know right from wrong, and not just most of the time but always. We become, in short, iniquitous! It is possible (though I do not know) that in such a case our souls can wither and die. From that point on, in the life of that mortal, no survival raft exists and such personality vanishes (perhaps merging back into the infinite as a drop of water merges with the ocean) on physical death. Notice that this suicide entails the repeated exercise of free will choice. A single horrifically evil decision would not seem to be enough to obliterate the soul. Accident or disease, the degradation of the physical brain to the point that value discrimination is no longer possible, might freeze the soul in its present status at that time in the life of the individual, but God well knows that the individual has not chosen this outcome of his or her own will and the survival mechanism remains operative.

My speculative story ends here. I have gone into these things in more detail in my books (the first and third). More importantly it is there connected up with what we do experience of spirit. I emphasize here, in conclusion, that this is nothing but a speculative story based not on direct experience but on inference from basic assumptions about the nature of God and the purpose of experience, in particular the point of free will in a physical universe of purposeless mechanism. I tell this tale because it fills a hole in the theology I describe in my first book. If God’s “perfect universe” takes billions of years to complete, then the short mortal experience, something usually less than 100 years, we have on Earth cannot be the end of the story even though we have no experiential (subjective or otherwise) evidence of this mechanism’s operation.

Why Personality?

This entire essay is substantially re-written in April 2019 to bring it in line with the evolution of my thinking expressed in more recent work. Additional work in November 2019 better clarifies the connection between mind and information.

I am not merely a dualist, but a tri-ist. Mind is not the only substantive entity in the universe of our experience that isn’t physical. To understand why my ontology makes room for a personality which is in the human (not the animal) case a facet of our selfhood experience, I have to explain what it is about human experience that demands our postulation of it. To do this, I must begin with mind in general and not “personal mind” or “personalized mind”. The higher animals give us what we need here.

Physics alone cannot give us mind though to be sure it is one of mind’s roots (see in particular “From What Comes Mind?” for a general over-view of the model, “Physics and the Evidence for Non-Material Consciousness”, and “Fantasy Physics and the Genesis of Mind”). Over-all the metaphysical ground of my views on this is theistic, specifically a theism sketched here in “Prolegomena to a Future Theology”. I am not going to go into the theology here, but I must delve a little bit into mind because the point of the essay is to argue that even postulating a substantive (in a quasi-Cartesian sense) mind is not enough to account for human experience. There is something else in addition to mind. That is to say, there are certain experiences that suggest such a thing exists, and this something I call personality.

Mind broadly speaking is purposeful. Animals have purposes for which they engage in their various behaviors. They do not articulate these purposes as such but it is clear that there is a reasonable sense in which higher animals can be said to be both minded (having some content of consciousness) and “act with purpose”. Indeed it can be said that life in general, even non-minded life (say paramecia) act purposefully and indeed they do. But lacking consciousness, it is less reasonable to say that such animals “act volitionally” and more reasonable to say that human beings impute purpose to life in general. Paramecia act, but the purposes of those actions are not the purposes of an individual, as these become in the higher animals. It is consciousness generally that adds both individuality and purposefulness.

But we notice limitations in animal mind that are absent in humans. Animal purposes are always local, limited to the present time. To find food if hungry, reproduce, shelter, even to socialize, all of it for its own sake. Humans by contrast exhibit all of these same sorts of local purposes, but they also exhibit purposes extended in time, purposes for next year, or a lifetime.

Animal do not recursively evaluate their purposes. They do not abstract. A lioness, being hungry, engages in the hunt for food. She decides on the specific course that hunt might take as new data emerges to her senses concerning the presence of food. But she certainly does not deliberate on the purpose of hunting in the abstract. Humans do exactly this. We are said to be “self conscious” and are able therefore to deliberate not only on the process of executing a purpose, but on the purpose itself.

Humans are also creators in a way that animals are not. Apes can modify sticks or other objects to use as tools, but only humans create new tools, even vast engineering projects that are more than mere modification of existing things. There is also the matter of art, social institutions, religion, and abstract-capable language.

It is these qualities that signal something special about human consciousness that needs explaining. At the same time, I have to explain how it is that we cannot locate this entity in a recursive examination of consciousness. Our self-consciousness does not permit discrimination of the personal from consciousness as a whole, even in the first person!

I follow here briefly with a sketch of my theologically-grounded theory of mind. See above linked articles and my first book all covering this in more detail. God is the source of the physical universe of spacetime. Into this universe, besides a physics of purposeless mechanism, something I have called “Cosmic Mind” is also added. Cosmic Mind is not a person, but rather a sort of field pervading space and time analogous to an electromagnetic field. Important here is that the field is in space and conditioned by time. It is non-material however. It does not convey any sort of proto-consciousness or panpsychism on the universe, but interacts only with certain complex organizations of matter-energy that we call brains. When nervous systems (of animals) become complex enough they are able to be perturbed or in some manner affected by Cosmic Mind and it is this interaction that manifests subjectively as consciousness.

This is the quasi-Cartesian aspect of my view. It is quasi-Cartesian because mind is not added to brains in Cartesian fashion, but rather emerges from brains, a property dualism, in response to, or because of, the universal presence of Cosmic Mind. Yes, there is an “interaction problem”. As it turns out attempts a purely physical explanations of mind (other than eliminativism) all have variations of the same problem. See the aforementioned “Fantasy Physics” article for much elaboration on this.

The point of Cosmic Mind in the theory (it may have other roles in the universe) is to effect subjective experience in sufficiently evolved nervous systems. Brains are, in effect, detectors of Cosmic Mind and consciousness constitutes that detection. Evolving mind at first detects very little of this signal producing minimal consciousness — perhaps a “what it is like to be” a fish or a lizard. More evolved brains are affected in richer ways and the nature of those individual minds deepens.

When we reach the human level, indeed the definition of humanity from a God’s-eye-view, the brain begins to feel the impact of parts of the Cosmic Mind signal not detected by any other animals. Specifically human brains begin to detect what the Cosmic Mind signal conveys of spirit, the hypothetical stuff of which God is made and the antecedent source of both physics and mind. From the subjective viewpoint, spirit is conveyed in the form of the values, truth, beauty, and goodness. See “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness” for further elaboration on these.

The detection of the values by human (and not animal) mind is not an automatic “good judgement” concerning what has values; what is true, good or beautiful. It is the discrimination of their three-part existence. The “spirit component” of the Cosmic Mind signal is always there. It impacts animal mind. But animals do not discriminate it as distinct elements in consciousness. Humans do.

Continuing the theological picture, something else happens when brains and therefore mind reach this level of physical complexity and signal-detecting richness. Such minds are personalized by God directly. In the fashion of Thomistic or Aristotelian Hylomorphic dualism, God configures each such individual mind with extra information (a form) that becomes fused with that consciousness in such a way that from any perspective (even in the first person) it is not possible to tell what part of subjective consciousness comes from Cosmic Mind alone, and what part from the fused-in personality.

No other mind in the universe, personal or otherwise, can make this discrimination, but it cannot be lost to God. Other minds, including ourselves in the first person are aware only of the combined result, mind simpliciter in the third person, and the content and structure of our own consciousness in the first. God alone knows what was done to each value-discriminating mind to personalize it. To emphasize, the added pattern is not physical. It is a form imposed on immaterial mind itself.

The relation between a value-discriminating mind and a personalized mind is contingent (nothing forces God to immediately personalize every value-discriminating mind) but constant. Value-discriminating minds are all and always personal, they are the minds of persons.

The idea of a substantive personality within the mind is derided in philosophy as a homunculus, a little controller commanding the rest of the conscious arena like the captain of a ship. This model proves to have many philosophical problems, but it is an incorrect model. When a captain steps onto a ship, you have a ship and its captain. The captain is added to the ship and remains distinct. But personality is not added to mind in this sense. Rather mind itself is personalized in the manner of a lump of clay turned into a statue. One does not “add statue to lump”, but rather transforms or forms lump. Once transformed, there is still nothing but a lump of clay albeit in a more structured configuration.

From any viewpoint other than God’s, “personalized mind” is still only mind. Even the individual (the person) whose mind it is cannot segregate itself from the mental arena as a whole that includes it. Even we, subjectively, cannot find personality through self-examination, because as Hume noted all we find are properties of mind. The character of our subjective mind includes personality (the imposed form) but we cannot isolate that inclusion. We do however experience its presence as a part of our mind-personality amalgam, our phenomenal sense-of-self. Our minds are what they are after all, but human mind has capacities that mind alone (animal mind) does not appear to have.

Information

It can be useful to examine mind from an information perspective. In physics, information is another way to express the structure of and relation between physical objects. The more structured, the higher their information content. Information is an inversion of entropy. Stars are information-rich compared to clouds of hydrogen gas, but in the case of stars, the information added comes from nothing more than macroscopic and deterministic behavior described by natural law. Life is far more information-rich than stars and it is not clear all of life’s information assembled itself from nothing beyond the operation of natural law. There are those who quite reasonably suggest (having math to support it) that life’s information is unlikely to have assembled itself accidentally. But this is another subject.

As we move up the evolutionary chain of our biology we encounter artifacts of mind. A beaver dam for example is a configuration of sticks, logs, and other natural products suitable for habitation and young-raising by beavers. We can examine such a dam and quantify the information it contains in its configuration, but it is clear in this case that the specification for that information came from outside. The dam didn’t build itself. One way or another, the specifying information was imposed on the physical ingredients by the labor of beavers. If there is something it is to be like a beaver, then that information, the information to cut and configure the trees, lodges somewhere (from our third-party perspective) in “beaver mind”.

Beaver mind emerges from beaver brains plus its contact with Cosmic Mind. There is no doubt that the structure of brains can be described in information terms. Brains have all the information contained in life and then some. There are those who claim there is nothing more to mind than information coded into brains, but this is controversial. Nevertheless, from stars to life to brains we grasp that information is expressed in physical structure of one kind or another.

On my “Cosmic-Mind-Perturbation” model, can consciousness itself be understood in information terms? The structured perturbations of electrons by an electromagnetic wave in an antenna are information. Whatever goes on in the interaction between Cosmic Mind and brains it is reasonable to suppose that information is involved. If the interaction affects any part of the physical (electro-chemical) resonances of the brain we would expect to be able to measure it, though there is no guarantee we would recognize the significance of what is being measured. In any case, it does seem like the content of consciousness (as distinct from consciousness as such) is information rich. Qualia in particular are often cast in terms of information.

It isn’t as clear that consciousness per se can be cast in information-language. Information is quantifiable. Subjective experience simpliciter is precisely not quantifiable. Consciousness is an experience of a subject. It’s content is information-rich, but it might be the case that what can quantified of that information is a product of the brain alone. The information content of mind need not be a contribution of Cosmic Mind.

When we come to human mind, personalized mind, there comes to be, necessarily, information in mind itself, in its form not merely its content. Personality if it is conceived as a hylomorphic form on mind can only be information added to mind, structuring the gestalt of the emergent consciousness. But we can only infer this is the case, that human mind includes some directly incorporated information, from qualities we subjectively experience! We cannot ever hope to identify it. Personality is utterly transparent!

Individual mind, even apart from personality is likely unique. Given that no two brains (human or animal) are absolutely identical, no two minds are identical. But personality adds an additional quality of uniqueness, a unique pattern joined with and as that mind.

We can say that personality is an additional configuration on top of mind analogous to the way brains are a configuration on top of life. But even if life origin involved some purposeful addition of information to the universe, life remains self-sustaining from that point forward in time. Consciousness, by contrast (with or without personality) is dynamic and depends on the constant interaction between Cosmic Mind and brains. Mind’s presence (at least in animals on Earth) cannot be maintained in the absence of a properly functioning brain. If the brain fails or becomes functionally distorted in some way, consciousness is impacted and in severe enough cases disappears altogether. If the mind disappears, so does its personal configuration.

The specifics of the addition being a non-material extra-configuration of a non-material entity cannot be measured by any instruments. Any third party distinction is likewise forever out of the question. Even to our view, personality isn’t segregated from mind. God can distinguish it, but we experience nothing other than the mental arena that results from the fusion. From a phenomenological viewpoint it is all “merely mind”, in the same way that a lion’s mind is all merely mind.

Personality is epistemologically transparent in the first person because we cannot distinguish its information as such. We cannot distinguish where mind leaves off and personality begins. Everything that we do and experience as persons, what we subjectively experience to be ourselves, takes place in and through mind, the amalgam of personality and mind-simpliciter. We are forced (discussed further below) to infer that personality must be real and distinct, ontologically, from mind as such, but even the evidence that this inference is valid is experienced only in and through the amalgamation. The reality of personality is a metaphysical inference made with some phenomenal, but not epistemological support. It is to that phenomenal support that I now turn.

The Metaphysical Requirement for Personality

The evidence for our inference comes down to recognizing that human consciousness has qualities that cannot take origin in mind alone. This is the phenomenal evidence that something is going on besides mind. There are three such qualities: self-consciousness, persistence without change in time, and a partially a-temporal free will. The first and last are consequences of the personality’s separation (though we cannot discriminate it) from mind. The second quality is characteristic of personality itself.

— Recursive self-consciousness

Animals experience contents of consciousness and can evaluate those contents. They have limited free will. A lioness can choose between two zebras, one a bit nearer but appearing younger and faster than another somewhat farther away. She is quite able to evaluate both and make a decision (perhaps in error) concerning which is easier to catch. But the lioness is not able to evaluate consciousness as such, she merely accepts its nature and content as given. Only humans are capable of making this second-order evaluation and we are able to make it because our consciousness contains the extra personal information. Although we cannot find that extra information, its presence enables recursive evaluation analogous to the way having two eyes gives us a direct perception of depth in three dimensions.

Self-consciousness is the most uncontroversial of the three qualities personality contributes to consciousness. That is, it is uncontroversial that we, humans at least, are self-conscious. There is some dispute over this matter as concerns some animals, but I believe that these cases constitute a reading-in, an anthropomorphic imputation similar to metaphorical imputation of purpose to simple life. Most of this controversy comes from observation that animals exhibit complex emotions including feelings of compassion, affection, and even awareness of the possibility of other selves when they are not immediately present to the senses. At the same time, there is no direct evidence of self-evaluation.

In humans self-evaluation seems to compel attempts at expression. It is one of the drivers of language development. We see no evidence of a “compulsion for expression” in any animals. Animals who have shown remarkable ability to acquire human languages do not seem to use what they acquire to construct abstract propositions concerning consciousness itself. If an ape, taught to spell English words, in blocks wrote out “is my green the same as your green?” I would have to modify my view here.

If from our viewpoint we cannot discriminate personality from mind what then is contrasting about it to us? Self consciousness is an automatic consequence of amalgamated mind. The signature quality of personality itself is its changelessness. Even Cosmic Mind lies inside time and is subject to it. Mind, our mind’s, change over our lifetimes. Personality, the specific pattern or form amalgamated with a temporal mind never changes.

— Changeless identity

The person of God is changeless absolutely and for all eternity. He (perhaps with his two coordinates in the Trinity) is the only literally changeless entity in the universe. This needs some elaboration. Persistence in the material universe is not ever absolute. We say that material objects persist even though we recognize that they slowly undergo change over time. Not only material objects, but consciousness too changes with time. The contents change of course, and the overall quality and structure of the arena undergoes change as well. Yet the part of the “personalized mind” recognized by God as the person never changes and this self is but vaguely sensed by the subject as that entity takes and has taken ownership of that conscious life in and through all of the changes it otherwise undergoes.

There is no direct third-party access to subjective consciousness. To phenomenal experience, the person, my “I” is even more private than consciousness. I can to some extent examine my own mind, but even I cannot examine my personality distinct from that mind. Yet the amalgam does provide a distinct experience that is independent of what does change, our character, that which we express. Character can be measured. It is the expression, the output, of the internal personalized mind acting to control a body, evolving and changing along with everything else in the universe.

Anything about a human being’s behavior or inner state that can be observed or queried (e.g. “personality tests”) comes under character. None of it, internal (a sunny disposition) or external (observable behavior) is personality as I am using that term. Because consciousness (and more obviously the body) changes, character changes.

The persistence of a changeless self throughout the history of that character is even more invisible than the presence of a consciousness behind its expression in character! But the owner of those changes remains the same and is aware of being the same throughout. Despite having traversed many changes in character (and physical characteristics) over the course of our lives we are perfectly aware, under normal circumstances, that the same person owns all of those changes.

In theory, if we had an instrument that could measure, perhaps make graphic, a subjective viewpoint without personality, and then the same individual mind personalized, it would be possible to subtract the first measurement from the second and identify what it is about consciousness that constitutes its personalization. That is, it would be possible to recover the information difference between the two. But there is no such instrument nor can there ever be because the only detector that exists in the universe for this phenomenon is the personalized mind.

There is yet another reason why such a subtraction would not be possible. Human mind, mind capable of detecting value, is always personalized. Value detection (or its potential) appears to be the necessary and sufficient condition for the immediate awarding of personal status. This is another one of the reasons for the phenomenon’s epistemological transparency. We cannot have even a memory of a time when our consciousness was not personalized.

The quality of changelessness has everything to do with our (that is human) relation to time. Humans alone among the animals can project purpose into the future as such or act for the sake of the past. We can do this thanks to a fixed reference available as a temporal background in our experience. There are examples of what appears to be such capacity among the animals; squirrels storing nuts in the fall to eat in the winter come to mind. But I question whether the squirrel is projecting a purposeful self into a future time or merely following biological imperatives at any given time-of-year.

Humans uncontroversially project themselves, their “I” into the future and choose courses (in the present) to affect that future as such. If I am a competent architect with many successful projects, I do confidently project myself, that is the same self that today begins a new project into a future time when that project will stand completed. Of course I understand that contingencies beyond my control might block the future I envision. My present choices do not determine that future, but much experience supports our confidence that we can, under most circumstances, bring about that which we project and that the same “I” will own the completed project in the future as now takes ownership of its beginning.

Many people tell me that their person is not changeless. They look back and remember themselves as much younger people and declare that, of course they have changed since then! But when I point out that they also remember being the person who was once “that way”, the person who owned those differences at an earlier time they admit that this is so, but attribute this seeming merely to memory. This is not correct. They are confusing character with personality. Yes, their character has changed, and yes, they remember their old character. But they are also aware that a single entity has been present throughout those changes, an entity that owns and is responsible for them all. That thin sense of “awareness of sameness” is our only direct phenomenal handle on personality.

Memories are, as it were, complicit in our sense of changeless ownership because even that sense is had in and through consciousness. Personality is the core of our sense of changeless ownership, but it is that plus memories and synchronic (moment by moment) awareness that constitute the sense of identity as a gestalt. That memories are not the sole source of our identity is demonstrated by wide gaps (years perhaps) in memories of early childhood while we yet we retain the sense of ownership over those coming both before and after the gaps.

Even when my memories of some particular event completely disappear, for example as concerns my very young childhood of which few memories remain, there is nothing in my experience to suggest that I was literally a different person at that time. We have a very strong intuition that in that past we were still the same self as we are today even if everything about that self, memories, character, etc, have changed. But memories are important to our integrated mind/person sense of self. Without them, the personality has no purchase on what, exactly, it is a changeless core of…

— Free will

Free will is a power of mind. It is mind’s capacity to initiate causal chains in the universe that are both volitional and purposeful; causal chains that are not fully determined by prior physics. Higher animals have it. Human mind, has the capacity to discriminate values (truth, beauty, and goodness) and thus can exercise free will with respect to them. Animal mind is in someway affected by the values but they cannot choose with regard to that which they cannot as such discriminate.

Animal mind however is temporally constrained in two ways, human mind only in one. Humans and animals can exercise will only in the present. In addition, animals can only exercise will for the sake of the present. By contrast, humans can exercise will for the sake of the past and especially for the future. Like self-consciousness, this difference in human consciousness is a function of personality’s substantive reality, in this case, its changeless persistence. We have a binocular appreciation for the depth of time, the relation of past to present and future, because we have a reference, a thin awareness of changeless ownership of our experience beginning sometime in the past.

This awareness of ours has both a qualitative and quantitative character. As we “grow up” we are qualitatively aware of a significance to larger intervals of time. We are quantitatively aware of the magnitude of the interval through we ourselves have passed. We can be aware of these things because we have a changeless reference providing the temporal contrast to present experience.

The future has been open since the big bang but not until consciousness comes along is there something in the universe that can take advantage of its openness. Not until personalized consciousness comes along is there something in the universe that can freely elect purposes with which to direct action having only a contingent relation to the present in which the choice is made. We must begin somewhere to constrain the future and shape novel outcomes that are the end-products of those purposes plus our skills in acting over time to fulfill them.

This sort of freedom, not only the freedom to choose but the freedom to choose for the future cannot come from physics in which no mechanism, individually or in their totality, exhibits any present let alone future oriented purpose. Because our (human) partial-temporal-liberation is a function of personality’s changelessness, it can have only one source, a “changeless God” who can ground (is the only possible ground) of changelessness. God is the direct cause of personality.

The metaphysical inference

Neither of the three contributions of personality to consciousness appear to exist in animal consciousness. If consciousness is an emergent combination of brain resonances and Cosmic Mind, personality is a further information imposition on that consciousness. From our viewpoint, it all just looks like consciousness. Only God knows what part of our phenomenally unified consciousness is “the person”. That explains personality’s “epistemological transparency”.

Constancy is nowhere to be found in the physical universe except in personality. That constancy is personality’s distinguishing passive characteristic. Changelessness in time, in turn, sets up our capacity to experience directly the relation between past, present, and future. Our fixed point of temporal reference in the past that permits projection into the future. Animals have only the present and memories. It isn’t clear that their memories engender any intellectual sense of an abstract past in animal experience, but clearly we have one.

Self-consciousness is a property of the relation between personality and consciousness. Personality provides the contrast, the transcendence, needed to reflexively examine our own consciousness. What we find in that examination is of course partly the person indistinguishably (from the subjective) fused with the consciousness being examined. But that we have this recursive ability at all can only be because something about the fused entity transcends consciousness simpliciter. Changes in the content of consciousness of all kinds can be viewed abstractly thanks (in part at least) to the contrast generated by personality’s constancy. Finally, a temporally liberated free will is personality’s distinguishing active power. Persons are free to become purposeful original-causal agents and elect to effect (attempt to effect) temporally distant purposes.

Personality therefore belongs in our ontology. It must be real even though we cannot identify it directly and it must come from God because he is the only possible source of changelessness in anything. It is transparent, in the final analysis, because nothing distinguishes it from the mind gestalt in subjective experience (epistemic transparency). Personality permits mind to recursively examine itself, but there is nothing further to provide contrast to personality — and this puts paid to the homunculus problem. We experience personality only within the fused whole of our consciousness.

In a wider theological context there is more to be said about personality, but that “more” has nothing to do with our present [phenomenal] experience of it, but other inferences that can be made from its existence and origin. I discuss one of these in another essay. see “Why Free Will?”

Early Comments on “The Big Picture” by Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll has released a new book, “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself” Penguin Random House 2016. He was interviewed about his book by Clara Moskowitz, Scientific American’s senior editor for space and physics.

I have not yet read Dr. Carroll’s book, but in the process. This little essay is not a critique or review of his book. I’m sure I will get around to that when I have finished reading it. But the over-all point of Dr. Carroll’s book as it is introduced in the Sci. Am. interview titled “Godless Universe: A Physicist Searches for Meaning in Nature” and stated clearly in his prologue is pretty clear. He aims to fortify the not uncommon idea among contemporary scientists and philosophers, that the physical universe is all there is and that the only evidence that really is evidence of anything fundamentally real is physical evidence.

Now I like Dr. Carroll. Never having met the man, I have enjoyed another of his books and numerous of his essays. He is an eloquent writer. He works hard to find room for mind, meaning, and free will in the physical universe which is, to give him credit, something many of his contemporaries merely explain away. In my own books I have tried to show that the physical universe is not enough, not a sufficient cause, to be declared the sole origin of these things. Dr. Carroll is not alone struggling with this “fitting together”, and indeed contemporary metaphysics and epistemology, not to mention popular physics and cosmology, is awash with ideas about how it is that a purposeless physical mechanism coexists in the universe with what appears to be agent directed purpose!

In this little essay my only aim is to comment on Dr. Carroll’s answer to the first question put to him by Ms. Moskowitz, and a short quote from the prologue to his new book reinforcing the intent of that answer. My purpose here is merely to point out that in these very straightforward statements as concerns the naturalistic part of what he calls “poetic naturalism”, he ignores the claims of those, like me, who do not accept that the only evidence of what is real is physical evidence, and instead rails against a straw man version of it.

The first question and answer of the interview goes thus:

Q: Just because we have no evidence of another realm of reality beyond the physical world, how can we conclude it doesn’t exist?

A: It’s not a matter of certainty, ever. I would make the argument that if there were a supernatural element that played a role in our everyday life in some noticeable way, it’s very, very likely we would have noticed it. It just seems weird that this kind of thing would be so crucial and yet so difficult to notice in any controlled scientific way.

In the prologue to the new book, Dr. Carroll reinforces this idea.

“There is much we don’t know about how the world works, but we have extremely good reason to think that the Core Theory is the correct description of nature in its domain of applicability. That domain is wide enough to immediately exclude a number of provocative phenomena: from telekinesis and astrology to survival of the soul after death.”

I want to unpack these statements beginning with the last. The “Core Theory” to which he refers (his capitalization) is quantum field theory and the “standard model”. These, along with General Relativity account for what we know about the physics of the big bang and all of modern physical science, including cosmology, quantum mechanics, chemistry, and biology.

Let’s look at the three “provocative phenomena” he names. Telekinesis is the ability to move physical objects with the mind unassisted by the natural body (as is common) or brain implants and wires that replace damaged nerves — and thus move the body. We can indeed scratch this one off the list because it concerns physical objects whose movement can be measured physically! Astrology is the notion that the physical planets and stars have subtle effects on our bodies and otherwise (in some quasi-deterministic way) influence the course of our lives. Well, we know the moon and sun at least have some gravitational impact on us, but astrology is normally taken to refer to more far-reaching impacts. We can scratch this one off the list too because the planets and stars are, after all, physical things. Their influence on us can be measured, and there isn’t anything there.

The last claim is problematic. Perhaps Dr. Carroll is thinking of the Catholic doctrine that one is resurrected “in body”, certainly a physical thing. We can measure bodies as they decay. We often cremate them! We are justified in ruling this out. But Dr. Carroll surely knows that this is not the only interpretation of “survival of … death.” He specifically refers to “soul” which he does not define but is commonly taken to be something immaterial. So what Dr. Carroll is telling us is merely that there is nothing in physics that supports any sort of physical survival of death, not of a body, and not of a “physical soul” whatever that might look like. But if, as asserted by most faiths, the soul (and like metaphysics and epistemology there are no end of theories among theologians as to just what this might be) is non-material (a quality of common agreement among theologians) then there would be no way to tell, physically, if it survives material death or not. If Dr. Carroll is telling us that there is nothing in physics that supports the notion of an immaterial soul I am sure he is is quite right. But that isn’t at all surprising if it isn’t a physical entity.

In his answer to the interviewer, Dr. Carroll simply declares that no one has noticed the influence of a “supernatural world” on our everyday lives. This claim despite thousands of years of testimony to the contrary; testimony to the impact of “the spirit” on individual lives. Surely he cannot be unaware of these claims? He means “physical influence” of course as he finishes up by saying that he finds it strange that something [purportedly] so crucial to our lives would not be detected by science, that is by physical measurement! Yet it is precisely the contention of all those thousands of years worth of testimony that this influence is not physical! Dr. Carroll is too well educated and has been around too long not to know this! Not to know that his answer addresses nothing but a straw man. He presupposes that the influence of a “supernatural influence” would be a physical influence and says there is no evidence for that!

In both claims, Dr. Carroll begs the question of evidence to get his point across. The hidden assumption in both the prologue and his answer to the interview question is that physical evidence is the only evidence that is evidence of anything! Of course Dr. Carroll is not alone here. He shares this assumption with 98% of the working analytic philosophers and scientists of the present day and indeed the last century. One could say he is doing no more than burnishing his materialist credentials here because, after all, in spite of his matter-only ontology, Dr. Carroll is going to argue that there is nevertheless freedom and meaning to be found in our lives, both phenomena being controversial among that same group of thinkers.

So with apologies to Dr. Carroll for calling out his fundamental assumption based on an interview and his prologue, I enthusiastically plunge into his book. As I said, he writes well, and his thoughts are insightful. I look forward to seeing how he puts meaning and freedom together from within the purposeless cosmos! I will report again when I have finished.

Why Free Will?

Let’s begin with physics. I love physics! The mechanisms underlying the physical universe in which we live are fascinating to me. What most strikes me about these mechanisms is that they are purposeless. Underneath the deterministic behavior of macro-physics (expressed today in classical Newtonian Mechanics, electro-magnetic field theory, and both special and general relativity) there is the quantum realm in which a true randomness replaces determinism. This is important. Randomness becomes determinism as quantum phenomena emerge into the classical. Neither exhibits any evidence of purpose in its mechanism.

Authors note: Since writing this essay I have come to learn and understand that quantum phenomena are not random, but indeterminate. The difference is technical and has to do with there being a definite and determined statistical distribution of quantum outcomes. The outcome is NOT determined, but the distribution of outcomes is. That’s indeterminate! The argument in the rest of this essay does not, however, depend on this difference.

If there is any evidence for the existence of God it does not come from physics. Oh we can observe the universe, note its fantastic propensity for delicate structure from strings of galaxies to the operations of the living cell, recognize beauty in it all, and suppose that all of this was brought to be in a purposeful way by a God having some purposeful end in view. As it turns out, this association might be true and not interfere with the progressive discovery, by physics, of purposeless mechanism. We attribute to God the power to paint his purposes on the canvas of purposeless mechanism. But when we get down to the physics of it, we discover not that God couldn’t do this, but that God’s hypothetical purposes are not needed to explain the effect. Gravity, heat, and the values of the physical constants together can get the job done. Of course that these things got this particular job done (including life and what has followed from it), and not some other less amazing result, was simply an accident as far as physics is concerned. But that’s ok. Physics’ job is to uncover the mechanisms, not to pronounce upon their justification in a wider context.

The evidence for God’s existence, if it comes from anywhere, has to come from consciousness, the fact of a libertarian free will (at least in persons), and the detection of values – truth, beauty, and goodness. All of this is discussed in far more detail in two of my books (published in Amazon Kindle format), “Why This Universe: God, Cosmology, Consciousness, and Free Will” (2014) and “God, Causal Closure, and Free Will” (2016). I’m not going to reprise those arguments here. Let’s assume that what I take to be “evidence of God’s existence” really is the evidence we need, at least provisionally, to accept God’s reality. The question I want to address is what the combination of a purposeless physical and libertarian free will accomplishes and how it helps to answer the question, why this universe? Why are free will and purposeless mechanism juxtaposed?

The Nature of Free Will

Free will comes down to our capacity to initiate novel chains of causation in the physical. Chains whose beginning cannot be attributed to an infinite regress of physical causes. The higher animals also have something of this power, but human-initiated causal chains, are novel in a much stronger way than chains initiated by animals. If a lioness hunts and kills a zebra for food, feeding parts of the carcass to her cubs, there are causal chains precipitated from those events, chains that would be absent if the lioness misses the zebra(or chooses to leave it be), while other causal chains would ensue – perhaps her cubs would starve.

Animals can manipulate purposeless physical mechanism to initiate different futures by manipulating pre-existing agents and processes. In doing this, they introduce purpose into universe process. For animals, such purpose is limited to manipulating what already exists. The zebra already exists when the lioness sees it. She can leave it alone or hunt it. If she hunts it, she can succeed or fail. The result is a still-living zebra, a dead zebra, or a tired (but still living) zebra. None of these things would be new in the world.

Humans can also manipulate existing objects and processes in this way, but we can do something animals cannot. We can create genuinely unique objects and processes. These begin with ordinary pre-existing things, but we are capable of assembling such things into new things that did not exist before. Human initiated causal chains not only rearrange what existed prior, but from that re-arrangement build up new things whose effect on the world is entirely novel, emergent, an effect that never existed prior to the object (or process’s) creation.

Human purpose imposes an entirely new level of order on deterministic physics, an order that did not exist prior to its imposition. In Aristotelian terms, mind, including animal mind, adds “final and formal cause” to the universe. But in the animal case, both are restricted to the biological demands of the organism. Human mind, our capacity to create new realities, novel orders on top of deterministic mechanism, is novel in itself. We create much that is but tangential or has nothing whatsoever to do with our immediate biological requirements. Human volitional choosing incorporates both abstract time and [sometimes] the values into its purposes. Something no animal can do.

Let’s imagine an analogy. God is a master artist, and we are his beginner student. The master can work in any medium, any paint, on any surface, sculpt in stone, clay, or bronze, compose and play magnificent music in any style, write masterpieces of literature, write, produce, and act in dramatic work. One might notice right away, that art is in fact one of the channels through which humans use free will to create what is new, but here the art analogy stands for novel creation in general. As beginning students of our master, we are given only one medium on which to create, a canvas which happens, in our case, to be a purposeless physics. Further we are given only one physical instrument with which to create, that being our bodies. It’s pretty obvious how the analogy goes. We impose purposeful order, the purposes being chosen by ourselves (freely) on the canvas we are given, the physical universe, with the only instrument we have, our bodies – and other instruments that we create using them.

But what purpose are we to impose? What are we to create on the canvas that surrounds us? We began by creating simple tools, stone axes, and clothing. A million years later and we have reached atomic bombs, aircraft, computers, vast scientific instruments, medicines, and more. Much of what we have created has, over all, benefited human life on Earth, or at least some portion of it. Much of course has brought also misery on a scale not imagined by our stone-ax-wielding ancestors. Here is where the values come back into this picture. In the theistic view, values, truth, beauty, and goodness, are not invented in human minds, but detected by them. They are the compass, a suggestion from the master (keeping to the art analogy) as it were, for what sorts of novelty we are supposed to create. But for free will to be genuinely free, the master can suggest but not dictate the creation.

Why not? Surely many masters dictate to beginning students. Here I have to leave my teacher-student analogy. In our real case, in the real world, the decision as concerns what to create lies only and exclusively in our will. Why should that be? Given that this can, and has, resulted in much misery throughout human history. Couldn’t God have arranged everything so that we were free in just about anything except as concerns the kinds of choices; choices that initiate causal chains having direct and deleterious impact on other human beings? I have to suppose he could have so arranged things, but the restriction must have an impact on the intended outcome (and God would know exactly what the difference would be) such that it wouldn’t work out to be what God intends.

How can we begin to say what God intends? In fact though, supposing God to be both infinite and [infinitely] good, allows us to say something at least of what must be true of what God wants. It must be the most repleat possible manifestation, in the physical, of God’s values, pointers to his intentions, which for now we know only as our dim detection of truth, beauty, and goodness. This idea is expressed by the phrase “best possible universe”. Whatever else he might want, God must want the “best possible universe” that can be made. Clearly this is not the case now, at least not on Earth. This place is literally hell, tormented existence, for billions of people alive to day, and countless more who have come and gone since human history began. If we can imagine better, so can God.

Of course we do not know the status of life on other worlds, but a generally inhabited universe is easily supported by theism. More importantly, even as concerns this world, time must be factored into the eventual emergence of “best possible universe”. Since “God’s will” must be the highest truth, beauty, and goodness, a “best possible universe” emerges in time when every creature freely chooses to do that will to the best of its ability at any given stage of that creature’s life. Doing God’s will means doing that which increases the value content of the world’s particulars.

Human beings (value-discriminating personalized minds on this and other worlds), must make this choice of their own free will. They must choose purposes and create novel reality based on what they perceive to be alignment with the values! God cannot create a logical contradiction. He cannot make a square circle. Nor does God do anything purposelessly. If the best possible universe could be brought about without free will and its attendant potential problems (evil), God would have done that.

What God must want (at least. among other things) is that world resulting from that choice when the choice is utterly free and made by everyone. Apparently, those people will live in the best possible universe and it will be better, even than a universe that evolves through the same amount of time but in which humans were not free as concerns value entangled choices.

So there we’ve got the whole thing sort of summed up. To make the “best possible universe” human beings, all of them and for all future time, must (and will eventually) choose to align themselves with the values, with truth, beauty, and goodness, and all of that happens to come out to God’s will (metaphysically) and love in human experience. God could, by himself, have created a fantastic universe. But what seems to be the case is that an even better universe can (and will) come from a partnership between God and creatures who detect values and freely choose to incorporate what they detect in the causal chains they initiate. This cannot happen unless human beings are actually free to make those kinds of decisions. That means they are free not to make them, and that, in turn, leads away from the best possible universe, at least temporarily. I will return to this last point below.

The Relation between Free Will and Values

I want to say something more here about values, in particular how and why they figure in this process of human instantiation (literally making-an-instance-of) of God’s will. Three things are traditionally taken to be values as such; truth, beauty, and goodness (see “What are Truth, Beauty, and Goodness”). Separately, they are the root concepts of three major branches in philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics respectively. Within these separate domains there are outcomes or instantiations within the world of values, and these outcomes are taken to be “of value” because they do in some sense embody one or more of the core values. A true proposition is “of value” because it instantiates truth, fairness is “of value” because it embodies goodness. Beautiful things are “of value” because they are beautiful, etc. Truth is value in the intellectual domain, beauty is value represented in physical, while goodness is the value of personal choice, the value of interpersonal relationships.

Taken together, all the values raise the same metaphysical question: from whence do they come? In rejecting any theological metaphysics, most philosophers assert one or another version of human invention of values. Phenomenally, they are entirely subjective although it might turn out, as we share much of our phenomenology, that they come out roughly the same in most persons. Their subjectivity is under normal circumstances constrained to a range. Your notion beauty might be different than mine, but it is rare that I would find beautiful what you find repulsively ugly. Truth we normally take to be somewhat more objective, less tolerant of subjective interpretation, while our sense of goodness falls somewhere in between beauty and truth. This view seems to explain how it is that while most persons seem to have some shared sense of values, many do not. Not only are there persons who perceive values in almost exclusive terms, there are those who do not appear to respond to them at all.

Importantly however, as much as philosophers have tried to ground “objectivity of value” on our shared biological experience, such grounding offers no reason why any one individual should pay attention to values. If on the whole the universe is purposeless, its only purpose being our purposes, who is to say that your purpose, to love others, is any more right than my purpose, to make all people my slaves? You might argue that more people will come our happier given your purpose. I might even concede your point but note that if values are invented by us, in the end, the happiness of the many is not any more intrinsically valuable than the satisfaction I derive from being slave-master of all. As concerns the purposeless universe, from my viewpoint, neither outcome is intrinsically to be preferred. If values are metaphysically subjective, the happiness of others can be justifiably irrelevant to me.

As already noted, in the theistic view values are not invented they are detected. They are extrinsic to us, a signal as it were from God, detected by human (and not animal) minds. Now as it might happen, minds are not equally sensitive to this signal, sometimes altogether, and sometimes separately. This explains some of the variation we have as concerns them, but more importantly, however well we perceive them, we are free to ignore them and this explains the rest. Of course our detection capability is imperfect as is our capacity to effect what we detect on the universal canvas. Importantly, value’s metaphysical objectivity provides the reason why any given individual should pay attention. Your purpose to love is in alignment with God’s will, while my purpose, to make slaves of all, is antithetical to it! “Knowing the end from the beginning”, God’s will must eventually come to pass. Your free will choices are dedicated to assisting in the bringing about of that end, precisely the use God (apparently) foresees will result in the best possible universe! My will, by contrast cannot possibly contribute to that inevitable outcome. It must be, that while I might appear to gain something for a time, that which is gained has no intrinsic value. It incorporates nothing of truth, beauty, or goodness. This has consequences not only for others made miserable, but for me. I will deal with some of these issues in a future essay.

There is another important property of our relation with values. Our value-entangled free will choices are the only choices about which we are absolutely free. As such, they are the crucial link in the chain of process that (apparently) brings God’s will into the world; evolving purposeless mechanism into the best possible universe. All our other non-value related choices, while yet free, are hemmed in, constrained by what we can do physically with our tools. Only as concerns value-laden choices are we free in an unconstrained sense. It is with respect to this freedom that we become agents of the connection between God’s will and the physical universe. True our capacity to instantiate value in the physical is limited by all the constraints that limit our other choices. We can act only with our bodies and the tools created with them. But the choice to attempt that instantiation (or to refuse to do so), however imperfectly, is radically open.

The best possible universe not only requires freedom, it requires radical freedom. Given that we are otherwise constrained to the physical, it is only with respect to value-entanglement that we are radically free. It isn’t merely through choice that we incorporate God’s will into the world, it is specifically through choosing to instantiate the values! The values are the link that connects God’s will and purposeless mechanism with human freedom. It is by following their compass that human choices remake the world over into God’s image of what must be the best possible world.

None of the foregoing is meant to suggest that the process of human partnering with God in the making of the best possible universe is straight forward. Although we are radically free with regard to attempting some mapping (instantiation) of value as we perceive it into the physical world, the process of carrying out that decision depends on our skills utilizing the same tools, starting with our bodies, that we employ in carrying out any other action-demanding decision we make. As concerns the individual’s relationship to God it is said that only the motive of the agent is important. An omniscient God knows us each most intimately, and would be an unfailing discerner of motive. The consequences to the individual of such choosing can be the subject of another essay, but I note that as with many kinds of physical action, practice contributes to skill.

As concerns the world however, that is as concerns the effect of some individual act on the world, much depends on both the skill of the actor in effecting the action, and also on the state of the world (including other actors) in which the action is set. Although this last is outside the control of the actor the two arenas do interact. A part of what constitutes skill with respect to a particular act at a particular time takes the state of the world into account up to some limit of which the actor is capable. I’ve already noted that we do not detect value perfectly. As some people have better eyesight than others, some are better value detectors. Detection capacity contributes to an individual’s skill as concerns value instantiation, but it is the state of the world that underlies the apparent relativity of values as they manifest in the world.

Any attempt at value instantiation that impacts more than one or a few near-by persons comes to interact with a wider milieu of states and personal actions that affect its outcome. On a crowded world, vastly different economic, social, political, and geographic circumstances, along with their specific outworking as concerns any particular individual, guarantees that no attempt to do good, aver truth, or enhance beauty will have straight forward and universally beneficial effects. This can be true even as concerns two individuals! If I give some money to two hungry people on the street one might buy alcohol while the other buys needed food. True I might have been more skillful in my choice of action, perhaps bringing food instead of giving money, but even in this case I have no way of knowing (unless I subsequently follow these individuals) how my meager attempt at bringing some goodness into the world plays out.

On larger scales the problem becomes more severe. Ethiopia wants to dam the headwaters of the Blue Nile, electrifying parts of the country for the first time, bringing economic opportunity to millions. But if the dam is built, the flow of the Nile will be much reduced and those nearer the mouth, in Egypt, will loose economic opportunity and their food supply as the river level falls. These kinds of problems are playing out all over our world, and anything the world community agrees to do as concerns these things invariably helps some and harms others. This would remain true even if the community’s motives were purely moral. As it happens, many more motives are typically involved.

The values are not a formula for success in building the best possible universe. They are a compass pointing in a direction but otherwise incapable of yielding specific measures having desired outcomes. Those measures, their implementation and adjustment as one comes to know their outcomes, is our collective task. The compass is important however, and for reasons noted above recognizing its objectivity is also important. But all of that only gets us to justifying the demand for action and that the action be motivated by a desire to benefit those affected. The rest, the creativity, will (personal, economic, and political), and specific action to take are all entirely up to us. Not only is it our mission (at least as concerns God’s intent) to bring values into the world we must learn progressively how to do it! Part of that learning experience involves comparing outcomes of acts back to the compass! But this would make no sense, it would not be guaranteed, or even likely to work, if the compass were not objective.

Theodicy: Free Will and Evil

I have covered this subject in great detail in my first and third book. Here I can only summarize it all. Philosophers divide this problem into two parts, natural and human-caused evil. Natural evil is an oxymoron. The universe God needed includes physical events (for example stars exploding, earthquakes, and naturally-evolved diseases, that harm (or can harm) human beings. Death by gamma ray burst, earthquake, or disease are all bad for us, but they are no more technically evil than are the natural events that give rise to them. No one would assert that an exploding star is morally culpable.

Philosophers also accuse God of being evil for just this reason. Why would he create a universe in which such processes harmed human beings, or for that matter any sentient beings? Consider that the meteorite that ended the dinosaurs was very bad for them, but without those animals disappearing from the face of the earth we likely would not have evolved. The universe God needed, where an animal capable of perceiving value and freely choosing to instantiate it, who evolved through purposeless physical mechanism, could not function if the same mechanism that gave rise to that animal could not, sometimes, also destroy it. The “accidents of time” are not as such evil. An earthquake that kills people is no more evil than an earthquake that doesn’t, either because people have learned to mitigate its effects (earthquake-proof buildings) or because no people happened to live where it occurs. Either way, it is just an earthquake. Remember also that there are other aspects to this theology, personal-survival of death (see “What is the Soul”), but lets move on.

Besides natural evil, human beings also cause harm to other sentient beings, humans included. Philosophers call all of this evil, but they fail of a crucial distinction here. Humans cause harm in two ways. One is by making mistakes. We make decisions and perform actions, both moral and amoral, that cause harm to others because we do not have a full understanding of the future consequences of our actions. It is not our intent that these actions subsequently cause harm, but they do. Mistakes are not evil, they are just errors.

But there is another category. Human beings can deliberately and freely choose to do that which they know is a mistake, to do deliberately something that is antithetical to the values. These actions are true evil. It is through error, deliberately and knowingly chosen, that evil enters the world. It is for this reason that free will is so intimately related to both the building-in-partnership-with-God the best possible universe, and to the degradation of any progress made in that direction, by the willful choice to contravene it. That choice is evil.

My view has been criticized on the grounds that “death is death” whether from earthquake, some error, or evil. This of course is true, but not to the point. Theology coheres together as a piece or not at all. Death from any source is temporary (see above link on the soul). What is important about the difference is that with evil human will is being freely (willfully) deployed in opposition to the direction of value compass. Because free will is so deployed there are consequences in addition to whatever might have stemmed from the action had it been purely a mistake.

Besides those impinging, psychologically and spiritually, on the person who commits evil, the consequences of evil are sociological. They impinge on human life in ways that error alone does not. They are, for example recursively reinforcing (one evil act leads to others by the same agent and others) where error is recursively-correcting. Agents, including the agent committing the error, tend to work toward mitigating the negative effects of a mistake once they are known. Errors serve to teach. Evil can also serve to teach, but typically those who commit it resist such teaching and it is left to others, using their free will, to mitigate its effects.

To make the [future] “best possible universe” God juxtaposed free will and purposeless mechanism in a physical universe capable of evolving value-discriminating mind. He could not do this without allowing that sometimes the physical mechanisms destroy the very minds (and bodies) that evolve from them. In the same way, he had to allow that free will might, if it was really free, be deployed in direct opposition to the universe plan.

The plan must eventually come to pass and be completed. That means the consequences of evil can only be temporary albeit from our viewpoint can extend in time over multiple human generations; all a blink-in-the-eye from God’s viewpoint. As concerns our agency, God must permit much more than he himself wills if free will is to be genuinely free.

Process, Substance, Time, and Space

If we examine the cosmos and its history we face what appears to be an amalgamation of process and substance. Substance refers to the objects and types of things that appear to comprise the physical universe, all the objects that occupy space from gas molecules to galaxies and everything in between including ourselves. Substance might also include such abstract objects as numbers and ideas. Process is what animates this collection, the transformation of substance into other substance or into new arrangements of substances. There has long been a dialectic in western metaphysics between philosophers who take substance and those who take process to be the foundation of reality.

“Radical monism”, a substance view, argues there is really only one substance, the universe taken as a whole. Apart from certain Eastern religions, radical monism has been out of philosophical vogue for many centuries. Substance ontologists today, the Western ones at least, are pluralists. They may argue as concerns the particulars that comprise the foundational “furniture of the universe” but most accept that the furniture is plural; the universe has more than one real thing in it.

Substance-first ontologists all accept that substance participates in processes. No philosopher today accepts the Parmenidian idea that the universe is fundamentally static and all the dynamics are illusion. Process philosophers, by contrast, argue that process is not only fundamental, but that all of what we commonly take to be substance is, under the surface, nothing but process nested in other process. Substance is, if not an illusion, nothing more than the way process external to observing minds manifest to the processes that comprise those minds. They defend this view on the grounds of parsimony. Process “all the way down” is said to be simpler than an ontology of both process and substance.

But simpler does not automatically better represent of the world. Nicholas Rescher is a contemporary process philosopher and pragmatist as concerns such things as the progress of science. He believes that scientific progress is measured in the control it gives us over the world. In Rescher’s view, to the extent that control has been purchased with implicit substance-grounded ontologies (from quarks to galaxies) there is nothing wrong with a substance viewpoint. It has obviously (that is pragmatically) been useful. But Rescher maintains that while useful heuristically, substance is not fundamental while process is. He notes that process cannot be derived from a purely substance view of things, while substance can be derived from a purely process view. Substances, at least what we ordinarily think of substances are, metaphysically speaking, only nested processes.

Although the concrete particulars of the world might perhaps be envisioned from a purely process-centric viewpoint, I do not think this view encompasses everything as Rescher intends that it should. In what is, in my opinion, one of the seminal examinations of cosmology in the 21st century, “The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time” Roberto Unger (philosopher) and Lee Smolin (cosmologist, quantum-gravity physicist) have offered up what they call a “proposal in natural philosophy”. Centuries ago “natural philosophy” was a phrase meant to encompass all the sciences as science was understood in those days. Today the phrase is not much used, but Unger and Smolin invoke it deliberately because in principle the work encompasses all of science although the book’s focus is cosmology. Their argument leans heavily on process.

To summarize the outcome of their view (not the arguments for it), time is real. In fact time is the only brute and non-emergent reality in the universe and must therefore go back (prior to the big bang) and forward indefinitely. Everything else, space, the cosmological settings, even the laws of physics (descriptive and not antecedently controlling) evolved to their present values in time. To be sure some of these evolved in the earliest moments of the universe and have remained quasi-constant ever since, but it remains true (for Unger and Smolin) that the regularities and constants of the universe emerged as they did through a process of evolutionary change and might have fallen out having other values. This all means that process cannot occur in the absence of time even though, at universe extremes (the opening Planck times of the big bang for example), process might be entirely lawless and irregular.

Compare this to Rescher’s answer to the question “what is process?” from his book “Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues” (2000 U. of Pittsburgh digital books collection)

“A process is an actual or possible occurrence that consists of an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in programmatic coordination: an orchestrated series of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally. … A natural process by its very nature passes on to the future a construction made from the materials of the past. All processes have a developmental, forward-looking aspect. … The inherent futurition of process is an exfoliation of the real by successively actualizing possibilities that are subsequently left behind as the process unfolds.”

This quote fits rather well into what Unger and Smolin believe concerning time. Rescher does claim (elsewhere in the same book) that process always takes place in time, but he also claims, somewhat contradictorily, that time, like space, is emergent. That would make time dependent (emergent from) causal process (in the manner of Michael Tooley’s “Time, Tense, and Causation” (1997) Clarendon Press). But something has to be real and non-emergent unless the universe is a case of emergence from nothing. Rescher points to quantum mechanics as an example of a physical realm that appears to be nothing but process. David Albert (“After Physics” (2015) Harvard Univ. Press) would seem to agree with him arguing that the Schrodinger wave (a process) is a sort of holographic fundamental source of substance and not the other way around.

In her book “Understanding our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles” (2015 Imperial College Press) Ruth Kastner offers up another possibility. Her transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that the solution to quantum riddles lies in quantum phenomena occurring outside spacetime. This is not some supernatural realm, it is still physical, causal but not deterministic. Instead, it is fundamentally random. But the measurement problem and the mystery of action at a distance fall out easily from her idea that at the quantum level, process lies outside spacetime. No energy is exchanged in quantum “virtual transactions” until they become “real transactions” and emerge into spacetime subject to measurement. In exchange for an expanded ontology, timeless and spaceless physics, Kastner’s idea fully resolves quantum riddles without explaining them away. For example, action at a distance seems faster than light, in fact infinitely fast from a temporal perspective because the effect is atemporal.

If Kastner is right, then for Unger and Smolin time can’t cover everything. In particular it doesn’t cover the quantum realm of virtual transactions. But Kastner doesn’t claim that time (or space) are emergent from the quantum realm, only that virtual transactions emerge into spacetime becoming real transactions in which energy/information is exchanged. Unger and Smolin are safe because in their view the present universe did not begin with an infinite singularity. For their part, infinities belong in mathematics, but not in physics. “There are no infinities in the physical universe.” The big bang proceeded from some fantastically dense, hot, pressured, tiny region, but not literally a mathematical point of infinite density. Something proceeded the big bang in time, but not in space, or at least not in our space.

So long as we limit ourselves to the spacetime realm, time can “go all the way down” and remain non-emergent. It is conceivable that the same quantum realm (Kastner likens it to the underwater part of an iceberg, much larger than what sticks out above the surface) underlies all of indefinite time. That is, this universe along with its predecessors and successors rest on the same timeless and spaceless quantum realm. What about Rescher? As concerns spacetime he is unaffected by Kastner, but he must abandon his idea that quantum process is necessarily temporal. It seems reasonable to anoint it with the ‘process’ appellation, but it becomes atemporal process.

I think Rescher gets into trouble if he tries to apply his system to such notions as the cosmological constants. The proton/electron mass ratio (1836.15267389) is nothing but a dimensionless number, certainly not a process and perhaps does not belong in a catalog (ontology) of the physical. But it does represent a fixed physical relation. It is not just any arbitrary number. Its value is absolutely vital to the composition of all the substance (if any) and the way all causal process unfolds in the universe.

If we try to substitute process language for substance language as concerns mass we cannot make sense of the notion of ratio. Rescher has not to my knowledge shown us how to reduce something as substantively fundamental as mass to process. Functionally speaking we can measure mass by its effect on spacetime and this effecting is a process, but a thing’s effect is not the thing in itself only a proxy for it. Rescher has not given us an example of a process that is input, sequence, and result simultaneously; atemporally. By his own definition a process requires time.

This brings me to Edward Jonathan Lowe. Lowe is my favorite philosopher not because of what he says but because he writes so clearly and unfolds his arguments so well. Alas he passed away a couple of years ago at the young age of 54 with many books yet to write. Lowe is a substance ontologist but his aim is much narrower than that of Unger, Smolin, and Rescher. He is not trying to formulate an ontology that covers the historicity of the universe, but rather a simple way of dividing up what we find in the universe now so we can talk about it consistently.

Lowe’s best known book “The Four Category Ontology” (2006 Clarendon Press) is an effort to find a minimal description with which we can relate (to one another) the qualities of what we find in the present universe including both substances and processes. Lowe does not deny that there are processes. The point of the Four Category Ontology is not to find the fundamental substance of the universe but rather to develop a simple scheme by which we can characterize what seems to be the case about the substance and process of the universe as this is reflected in mind. All the categories of the scheme and the relations between them are not a part of the ontology itself. A crucial point with which Lowe avoids set-paradoxes. The categories as such are mental constructs. This is not to say that mental constructs, for example concepts, cannot be fit into the ontology. Lowe’s goal was to find a scheme that works under various views of what is real.

The four categories and some of the relations between them are sketched crudely below. [I could not get this drawing to come out right, so imagine there are vertical lines between the four corners so forming a square] Objects are the stuff of the physical world, but they can be abstract like sets, particular concepts, or processes. Note that objects can be particular instances of various kinds. A particular cat is an instantiation of felines, mammals, and animals. Similarly objects can have many tropes. A particular green apple has a specific shade of green, a certain mass, size, shape, etc.

Kind/Type ————- Attributes

Universals
——-
Particulars

Objects ————- Modes/Tropes

Kinds –> Characterized by Attributes, instantiated by objects
Objects –> Characterized by Modes, instantiate kinds
Attributes –> Exemplified by Objects

Material objects fit the scheme easily. A green apple is an object. It instantiates the kinds apple, fruit, and plant. It’s attributes include mass, size, color, while its modes are its particular mass, color, and size, etc. What about that proton/electron mass ratio? The number is not particularly a problem. It is, for Lowe an abstract object in this case a set of one member, that number (1836.15267389). It is an instantiation of the kind/type/class number which, in turn, is characterized by the attribute property magnitude. It’s specific mode (property) is the proton/electron mass ratio. But Lowe has a problem with non-intrinsic relations being in the ontology.

That Mo is three inches taller than Joe is a relation and there is even a dimensionless number that is the ratio of their two heights. But the relation’s properties all belong to Mo and Joe as such. Nothing is “added to the universe” by noting the Mo/Joe height ratio. The relation isn’t intrinsic to the pair. Lowe doesn’t think this kind of extrinsic relation belongs in the ontology at all. But imagine the continuation of life on Earth was dependent on the Mo/Joe height ratio. If Mo grows taller or shorter, the ratio would change and all life on Earth would cease. Suddenly this extrinsic relation is no longer arbitrary and its value, in the cosmological case, depending on the mass of the proton and electron is a lynch-pin in our physics without which the cosmos would unravel. Something is added to the universe by this ratio, namely the capacity of process to generate stars, galaxies, and everything else with which we are familiar. Surely such a lynch-pin belongs in our ontology and clearly it is not itself a process! As goes process, Lowe says:

“A process, then, might be thought of either as being a temporally extended trope, or as being composed by a temporal succession of different momentary tropes, depending on whether or not the process is a qualitatively unvarying one.”

One of Rescher’s examples (of a process) is evaporation. Evaporation occurring in a certain puddle would be the specific process, our particular object. It is an instance (type) of evaporation which might have the attribute property of phase change, and a mode of evaporating.

Alas, I cannot ask Dr. Lowe his opinion of my use of the categories. But Lowe is open to the categories being used in various ways depending on the nature of the particular being characterized. Again his goal is not to identify the fundamental stuff of the universe, but to find a way to classify it all as it manifests particulars and their properties to mind. That Lowe is open to the fact that his scheme may not be the “last word” on the subject is another reason I like him. He is unafraid to pursue lines of reasoning that might lead him to “change his mind” as concerns some of his core commitments. He notes this possibility in several places of the aforementioned book as concerns events, processes, concepts, and other particulars that are not physical.

By contrast, I think Rescher commits an inductive error that might be called “the fallacy of abstraction”, the tendency, having discovered some aspect of truth to say that it encompasses the whole truth. Clearly Rescher identifies process as something that belongs in our ontology. But just as clearly, not everything that exists-as-such is a process. The cosmological constants are not processes though they certainly could be the outcomes of processes as they emerge into substance. The mass of protons (all baryons) results from the energy of quark/gluon interactions. Mass is therefore the result of process. Is the outcome of that process, mass itself, also a process? The values of the constants cannot be processes and yet they are not arbitrary either. If any of them varied by much there would be no cosmos, or at least not one within which we could evolve.

An ontology that includes both processes and substances is more complex than an ontology having only one or the other. But as Einstein famously noted “A theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler”. I am quite willing to accept (along I believe with Unger and Smolin) that every substance in the universe emerged from process at some point in history beginning with the big bang. But having emerged it becomes past-fact and thereby perduring, if yet mutable (by process), substance. To assert that every such substance can be (theoretically) traced backwards in history to its emergence from process might be true. But having emerged it is substance now.

Physics and the Evidence for Non-Material Consciousness

There is an old story of the net and the fishermen. A net having a weave that lets any object smaller than 10 inches long slip through it. Fishermen cast the net in the lake and harvest fish always ten inches long or longer. The fishermen mistakenly conclude that there are no fish in the lake smaller than 10 inches. Philosophy 101 students easily recognize the fishermen’s mistake. If there were fish in the lake smaller than 10 inches they would slip through the net.

Now imagine that there is some constraint on these fishermen that prevents them from weaving nets any more finely than they have. Is there any other means by which they might acquire evidence of fish smaller than ten inches long? As it happens there is. They can take some of the larger fish, keep them alive in captivity, and mate them. If successful, they would see that fish lay eggs, eggs hatch into little fish, and little fish, properly fed, grow into fish ten or more inches long! Having done this sort of thing many times, our fishermen can correctly induct, from many particular observations, that there are indeed fish in the lake smaller than ten inches because those smaller fish are the descendants of the bigger fish and one day will become bigger fish themselves.

Although the analogy is imperfect, physics, that is the present state of our body of science, has something in common with that net. Our senses and all the instruments and physics we can derive from them are physical. No matter how refined we make our instruments they are physical things and cannot measure or detect anything that isn’t also a physical thing. Quantum mechanics doesn’t help here. Ruth Kastner (“The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”) goes so far as to conclude that the solution to various quantum puzzles is to locate quantum phenomena outside of spacetime. But they remain very much physical nevertheless. As indeterminate quantum phenomena emerge into spacetime they become deterministic, fully participating in the time-bound causal web, subject to causal closure.

No one, even died-in-the-wool physicalists, deny that there is any logical proof of the absence of anything real that isn’t physical, but nevertheless most commit themselves to the proposition that no non-physical entity can be real based on the capacity of physics to be self-explanatory. There are also those who simply define ‘reality’ in such a way as to preclude anything that isn’t physical from being real, and therefore chalk up anything historically adduced for such reality to utter illusion, a mirage.

As with the problem of the net, we ask if there is any possible evidence for there being something real in the universe that isn’t physical? Unlike with the fish, we cannot merely encompass some part of the physical and watch it to see if it produces something non-physical. We can try of course. Experiments and observations have been going on since Newton, some would say since Galileo, without such a transformation ever being witnessed. Scientists and philosophers have long conceded that the non-physical, should it exist, cannot in principle be detected and measured with physical instruments, the only kind we can build. They further concede that it is, technically, an inductive error to conclude there is nothing other than the physical in the universe based on this incapacity alone.

What warrants that further conclusion is the observation that physics is causally closed on itself. It is one thing to concede that we could not in principle measure anything non-physical. But when we measure that which is physical, we discover that these measurements alone fulfill all explanatory requirements for the present state-of-the-universe. Physical causes and nothing but physical causes result in all the effects we can measure throughout the cosmos. Physical causes result only in physical effects and physical effects spring from nothing more than physical causes.

For my purposes, as with physics, ‘reality’ is associated with causal efficacy in the physical. Anything that is or can become a cause in the physical is real. Cause is to be taken to mean “contributing cause”. It need not be the sole cause, nor the physically proximate cause. To be a cause it is only required that some physical effect is the ultimate result. The causal closure hypothesis is related to the observation that physical effects have, at least, physical proximate causes. All measurable physical effects seem to have, immediate antecedents that are also physical. But this does not preclude the existence of non-physical causes. For a non-physical cause to be real, it is only necessary that an observer be able to connect up a purported cause and an effect measurable in the world. I will have more to say about this “connecting up”.

Among modern philosophers there are some (Chalmer’s, Nagel, Lowe, Haskers, Foster, O’Connor, and others) who push back on the physicalist claim. They argue that there is reason to believe that there is something both real and non-physical in the universe, specifically consciousness, that is a subjective through which we experience anything at all including our observation of the physical. Physicalists rejoin that this phenomenon, consciousness, is not a “non-material reality”. It is merely a way of viewing the material itself. A rain cloud looks very different from above and below, but both views are merely different perspectives of the same single thing. We confirm this assertion by tracing, physically, from the top to the bottom of the cloud and determine that it is the same entity viewed two different ways.

This does not appear to be possible as concerns consciousness. No physics has ever traced, physically, all the way from subjective experience to the physics (technically biology — brain states) that purportedly underlies it. Many (mostly scientists) argue that we just haven’t got there yet and we will someday make that tracing. Others, many more of them philosophers, argue that the physicalist rejoinder is more hubris than reality. That it might turn out impossible, in principle, to ever make that mapping. Of course this doesn’t mean brain states have nothing to do with consciousness for obviously they do. What it means is that consciousness is not (or may not be) merely “another view” of brain states.

I am not going to address those arguments here but I am going to explore the question whether or not this phenomenon we call consciousness is in fact evidence and in what way it is evidence for the existence of something real that is beyond the reach of physics because it is non-physical.

For any evidence to be evidence, the phenomenon for which it is adduced has to be real. There cannot be evidence for anything that is by definition unreal. At the same time any evidence, if it is evidence of anything at all, has to emerge from, or become available to, our subjective experience as observers. The evidence must appear in consciousness. From our own subjective points of view there is no evidence of anything in the universe, physical or otherwise, that doesn’t emerge in or through our experience — aided or unaided by instruments or quintessentially mental formalism like logic.

How do we fare here as concerns consciousness? Its reality is one of the matters in question. The independent reality of consciousness is controversial. We cannot demonstrate, physically, that it is real. On the other hand, as all evidence of any kind emerges through experience it seems strange to insist that our experience is nothing but illusion. What happens to the evidential status of physics itself if the consciousness that interprets physical evidence as such is only an illusion? Can evidence be real if the status of the “evidence interpreter” is not? What happens to the truth status of the proposition “physics is causally closed” if the subjective arena asserting that proposition is an illusion?

This threat to the veracity of physics is a real problem for physicalists who insist that consciousness cannot be real. It at least suggests that it might be real, that its reality cannot be ruled out by fiat and might have to be accepted for the sake of our seeming capacity to comprehend the world.

The evidence for the non-material character of consciousness also emerges in consciousness! An idea cannot be weighed but it nevertheless appears that ideas are instrumental in the process of moving our bodies and thus our capacity to control aspects of the world confirming the correspondence between experience and physics. All of human society, our technological infrastructure, political institutions, and history are a function of this relation between quintessentially non-material ideas and the physical world. Somewhere in the distant past lies an ancestor, a hunter-gatherer who carried a club and a piece of chipped flint. Having both of these objects and a knowledge of making rope or twine from plant stems, this ancestor thought to attempt tying the flint and the club together producing something novel and more utilitarian than either the flint or club alone. An idea became a physical thing, an ax, through the controlled (purposeful) movement of a body that tied the flint and club together.

Many of the actions we take appear, to experience, related to the ideas we have. Using our bodies, we can pattern the physical by mapping ideas onto it. This is what I spoke of above as a “connecting up”. That I use an idea, a mental picture perhaps of some intended physical end-product, along with appropriate motions of my body, to produce that end product. The connection between the idea and the end product is obvious and immediate to us. It is not a connection between the physical and something non-physical outside of ourselves (magic unicorns perhaps), but between ourselves (subjective experience), our bodies, and the final physical output. We understand that our physical hands fashioned the physical end-product and that our hands moved in response to physical nerve impulses. The connection backs up to what it was that set those nerve impulses in action; a non-physical idea coupled with a non-physical intent to attempt its implementation (a mapping) in the physical.

We take this relation so “for granted” that mostly we do not even notice it. The productive conjunction between ideas and objects, mediated by bodies, means that ideas are real. Through the mediating influence of the controlled body ideas are causally efficacious. This could not be so if ideas were nothing more than illusions. True ideas have correlative brain states that are physical, but we do not subjectively manipulate brain states. We juggle ideational contents of subjective consciousness directly and these have a quintessentially non-material character.

The non-material quality of ideas is not of course proven by their association with physical actions whose consequences are also manifest in consciousness. Deterministic brain states not manipulated in consciousness might result in both ideas (and all of consciousness) and movement thus explaining their apparent connection. If this were true however it would have to be true about every product of humanity from the first struck flint to the space station and for that matter all the institutions and historical contingencies resulting in the present state-of-the-world. A staggering set of deterministic coincidences for which we, that is subjective experience, can take no credit whatsoever.

One cannot have this both ways. Either the subjective arena has no causal efficacy whatsoever or there is here a genuine connection between non-material cause and physical effect. If we wish to suspend judgement on this dilemma we yet must acknowledge that subjective experience does at least rule out physicalist declarations of its impossibility. Our experience counts as enough evidence for the reality of the non-material to question the physicalist assertion that there cannot possibly be anything other than the physical in the universe. Subjective experience seems to be telling us that the non-material is real and the entire history of human civilization at least warrants our concession to the possibility.

The evidence suggests, if it does not formally demonstrate, that something real and non-material is possible and obtains inside the otherwise physical universe. Consciousness (broadly speaking) is that reality. All of the philosophers cited above are materialists but not physicalists. They share with the physicalists a conviction that everything inside the material universe, including consciousness, takes origin in nothing more than the physical. They break with the physicalists in asserting the non-physical can, in fact, emerge from the purely physical and that in this universe, consciousness is that non-physical emergent entity.

Once emerged, they assert, the non-material cannot be fully traced-back to the physical. Subjective experience is not merely another viewpoint, another way of “looking at” something physical, but a novel thing in itself. Once it comes to be, from out of the physical, it can no longer be fully reduced to the physical. This view is called “property dualism”. Two phenomenon, mind and physics, but ultimately a single source, physics. But this view has its own problem with the contents and qualities of experience. Even if the non-material cannot be reduced in any logical way to the physical (more or less the position of all the philosophers cited above) it must, nevertheless originate from nothing more than the physical and this means that some evidence of the transformation from physical to non-physical should lie in the physical past, in the history of the universe. That no such evidence has ever been observed is not proof that non-material origins are not purely physical.

To date no mechanism has been discovered in physics that would plausibly result in such a transformation. If it is true that no such mechanism exists, physics is really causally closed, then the emergence of the non-physical from the physical alone is not possible and no historical marks are there to be found!

Every one of these property dualist theories of the non-material amounts to presupposing either an opening in causal closure or an invisible (to physics) set of causal laws or properties in the physical that add the qualities (to physics) required to produce the non-material. The first approach implies some evidence of itself within physics as noted in the previous paragraph. None has been found, and none of our present theories of the world require any provision for it.

Metaphysically speaking, the second approach is no less supernatural than the hypothesis of a divine being. It may lack the being’s anthropomorphic qualities but its presence and interaction with the physical are no less inexplicable. The “coming to be” of these psycho-physical laws (Chalmers’ term) wants explaining, and their interaction with the physical is no less a mystery than the interaction problem posed by a substance-dualism of mind or for that matter God. For a more detailed treatment of this issue specifically see my “Fantasy Physics and the Genesis of Mind”

To wrap up I summarize what I hope I have accomplished.

1. Physics can measure only the physical.

2. Physics leaves in abeyance the question of some non-material reality inside the physical universe. It remains logically possible. Physics has no evidence for it, but all physics can assert with authority is that explanations of indisputably physical phenomena require no reference to it.

3. There are subjective observers inside the physical universe. These observers all have bodies made of matter and subject to measurement by physics. But they also have “subjective experience” whose qualities are not subject to physical measurement.

4. Either the qualities of subjective experience are not real or they are real and can make some contribution to physical cause; they can configure physical cause (movement of a body) to produce physical effects patterned by a non-material idea. The non-material idea can be mapped to physical reality or put conversely physical reality can be patterned, configured, by non-material ideas.

5. Either the whole of human history and achievement is a blind accident or non-material ideas are causally efficacious and therefore must be real.

In “An Epistemological Argument for Free Will” I argue that free will is real and our experience warrants that belief. None of what is discussed above impinges directly on free will. Our ideas might be both real and non-material without our having free will. The connection between ideas and the physical might, after all, be fully determined even if ideas are in fact the initial patterns of the physical result. But the subsequent free will argument does rest, metaphysically, on the reality and non-materiality of consciousness.

An Epistemological Argument for Free Will

Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that has as its subject the various concepts we label ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘belief’, and also about how we come to “know something”. I begin with a phenomenological observation: I believe I have free will. I appear to exercise it, to manifest my will by controlling my body. Throughout my lifetime my experience suggests to me that I have exercised choice that was not coerced upon me nor determined in the same way that physical events are determined, but instead were determined by my-self, metaphorically an entity that sits about 2 inches behind my eyes.

This is a phenomenological observation. The epistemological issue is: do I have knowledge of freedom or is it a phenomenal illusion? Is my belief in the ontological genuineness of free will justified? Is that belief knowledge? If the proposition “free will is real” is true, any freely made choice would constitute its truth maker. But surely this begs the question because the free-ness of the act is the very matter at issue.

The knowledge of which I speak above cannot be analytic. It isn’t the same sort of thing as my knowing that two plus two must equal four. Rather, it seems to me that my life’s experience, for example my decision to compose this essay, has been a series of choices from an often broad set of alternatives of which I was aware and the the particular choices I made resulted in a history that might easily have been different. Not only my own choices, but those of my fellows near and far, proceeding back into the early reaches of human society could, had they been made differently, resulted in various possible worlds, contingent histories some only moderately different and others vastly different from the history of the world as it has unfolded.

I write here about what philosophers call “libertarian free will” and not merely compatibilism, a doctrine that seeks to establish something to call “free will” even in the face of determinism (and micro-indeterminism) . In that case, we are free when we seem (illusion?) to be able to do “what we want” even if that desire too is determined (or random) and not freely chosen in the libertarian sense. This is not what most of us mean when we speak of free will. We speak of being direct and original causes, volition-directed causes that are not merely the appearance of “bringing into existence” by our agency, but actually are brought about by that volition. If such a thing is real, then determinism must break down in one place.

If free will is genuine, there must be some phenomena with which causal chains begin without having been determined by some physically prior state of the universe, but only by the choice of a volitional agent. Causal chains are what drives event-unfolding. We identify joints in the history of unfolding events. Places where a particular cause directed the unfolding such that in the absence of that cause things would have turned out differently. If free will is real, there should be joints that have no sufficient deterministic causes and simultaneously are not merely indetermined. They would be sufficiently determined by a volitional purpose originating in an agent. Can we identify such joints?

Of course not every joint in the course of history can be related to free will. Natural processes also influence history. In fact some of the characteristic differences between natural processes and human action seem further to support a judgement for the genuineness of free will. The causal chains that yield up a particular volcanic eruption can easily be traced back thousands, even millions of years. But the causal chains that result in a particular human choice, say to pull a trigger and kill someone in cold blood, cannot be indisputably traced back farther than the decision itself. Yes we speak of reasons, individual history, desires, etc, but even these cannot be definitively connected to the choice to shoot or refrain from shooting in the same way that a “hot spot” under the pacific ocean can be definitively connected to the formation of an volcanic island a million years later. When the hot spot formed the volcano became inevitable unless the Earth was destroyed in the intervening years.

As concerns the trigger, our intuition, based on years of having made and unmade (changed our minds) decisions ourselves, it seems that the inevitability of its being pulled was not determined until the instant in time at which it was pulled. This does not imply that the decision is not associated with a physical correlate, a brain state. The ubiquity of this association is the crux of our problem from a third party perspective.

Note that to deny even the possibility of free will and to assert that what we think are genuine choices are only pseudo-choices because what we actually choose is determined by what amount to a natural process (whether a just antecedent brain state or going all the way back to the big bang), requires a metaphysical assumption not required by advocates of free will’s genuineness (though they too have assumptions that come in at a later point). It requires one to assume that there is nothing more than a deterministic physics in the universe. Making a case for illusion demands a prior commitment to free will’s impossibility. By contrast accepting the possibility of free will based on the phenomenal appearance of it requires only that we not accept the prior commitment.

Setting the Problem

If I step to the edge of a cliff to admire the view, I am aware that I can take another step in the same direction and fall off the edge plummeting to my death. Alternatively, I can step backwards away from the cliff, or turn around and walk away from it. Each of these choices makes a difference in the world. Stepping off the cliff will initiate causal chains having many consequences for my family, friends, and people who do not know me, but must become involved in the outworkings of my death: police, funeral directors, etc. If I walk away from the cliff other causal chains will begin. I will go back to my work and discover something that makes my employer millions of dollars they would never have otherwise had.

I am certainly not coerced by any external force. No one has a gun to my head. Yes at this time I have a desire to remain alive and engaged with the world, and this desire is one of perhaps many reasons for my stepping back from the cliff, but a reason is not a cause. I am fully aware of this and other reasons for choices I make every day, but at the same time I am aware that I can (and have in my life) choose in opposition to reasons. My reasons clearly justify (or not) my choice after the fact but they do not determine, that is compel me, to make that choice.

All the same many philosophers (and scientists writing as philosophers) deny that free will is real. They base this denial on observations (measurements) of the phenomena of the physical universe. They discover all these phenomena to be “causally closed” meaning that physical effects come only from physical causes and physical causes have only physical effects. A third quality associated with causal closure is reciprocity: an effect has a reciprocal impact on its cause. If a moving billiard ball strikes a stationary one momentum is exchanged and the direction and speed of both balls is changed. Reciprocity is important because it is often the quality actually measured by science. There are often cases where we can observe (measure) a cause but not detect some effect — perhaps our instruments are not sensitive enough. But we do measure some change in the causal agent and from that change we can infer the effect that could not be measured directly.

The “free will” business, if it truly existed in the full libertarian sense violates these three principles. If I make a choice, and nothing prior in the physical universe determined that choice, then something to which I refer as a self must exist and have to power to initiate physical chains of causation without there having been any prior determining physical cause of that chain (see note on the self at the end of the essay), the ubiquitous presence of correlative brain states notwithstanding. That the history of the cosmos leading to us and our particular lives at this time is the result of chains of physical cause and effect is not particularly controversial. Whether we speak of gravity, colliding masses, electromagnetic energy, or the actions of human agents, the forces that propel history forward are all physical.

To initiate either of the causal chains envisioned from my position on the cliff’s edge I must move my body. It is my body, a physical thing, whose interaction with the rest of the physical world engages with the causal web. I don’t know anyone who disputes this. Free will, if it exists, is antecedent (metaphysically) to such motion even if the choice is simultaneous with it physically. The issue is not that my body isn’t the physical agent of potentially alternative causal change but that there is something else that is the agent of that body’s action, something not physical, a self with the power of volition, initiating novel causal chains by moving a body! Not only is the exercise of volition undetermined it is fundamentally uncaused by any antecedent physical cause or effect. The cause originates in the agent.

The “not physical” part is the crux of the problem. We certainly find physical bodies and in this respect our causal powers are much like those of any inanimate object in the universe. If I throw a rock that breaks a window, the rock is the agent of the window’s breaking, and my arm is the agent of the rock’s movement. Momentum was imparted to that rock by my arm, both physical and no different than two rocks colliding in outer space exchanging momentum and thus velocity in precisely predictable ways. So as we trace back physical effects in the universe, we find only physical causes including the movement of arms. In this tracing, we account for everything that happens since the big bang. There is nothing left over for free will to explain. Quantum mechanics does not help us either. It is true that quantum phenomena introduce indeterminism into the causal web, but while quantum phenomena might provide some metaphysical space for a hypothetical free will to operate, they are not characterized by any volitional purpose. If there is such a thing as free will, volitional agency, the agent must be non-physical because we cannot find it in any catalog of physical cause-effect relations going all the way back to the big bang.

Why don’t we find the agent? Because its presence and power violates the principles of causal closure. Being “original cause” of a physical effect (movement of the body) there is no prior cause of which it, the choice, is an effect. Significantly, from an epistemological viewpoint, there is no reciprocity. When my arm moves with the rock in my hand I am imparting momentum to the rock and there is a reciprocal resistance from the rock. I can feel the rock pushing back (as it were) on my arm as the rock gains momentum. But I have said that the “original cause” of the arm’s movement was an uncaused choice. The movement of my arm has no reciprocal effect on the choice to move it, a choice which is immediately past and unaffected. This is the evidence that the original cause, the choice, is not physical. Physics doesn’t find such causes in the catalog of the physical because there is no reciprocity to measure.

Free Will is Impossible (supposedly)!

I am familiar with three general arguments as concerns the illusory nature of free will, one logical, one epistemological, and one empirical. The logical argument is simply that free will is impossible thanks to causal closure and that is the end of the matter. That we appear to be free willed must be illusion because there is no logical way for a causally closed universe to produce it. This argument entails of course that it is not physically possible for a causally closed physics to produce a non-physical thing, but it is more. It notes there is no connection by which the doings of the physical can be mapped to the non-physical because the physical’s closure is axiomatic. This argument ignores question of what it is that is having this illusion and by implication extends to consciousness in general and self-consciousness in particular. Everything that we take to be our inner lives is illusion. None of the other arguments even matter as they can pertain to nothing other than a fantasy.

The empirical argument revolves around the experiments of Benjamin Libet in the 1970s. Libet found that a detectable brain state preceded a subject’s report of having made a decision. But the subjects in Libet’s experiments were very constrained as concerns their decisions. Even under natural circumstances it is common to find a decision associated with a just prior qualia or a mental event such as the emergence into consciousness of a reason. But that we act because of a reason does not mean the reason causes in any physical sense the motion of a body. How could a reason, a mental thing if ever there was one cause a physical thing anyway? We understand pretty much what reasons are. They have no magical property of initiating causal chains in the physical. But some entity appears to have that power and to choose a particular act from among alternatives whether for reasons or not. It still should not be surprising that there is some “set up”, some change in the content of consciousness, detectable in a brain state, just prior to many of our decisions. The decisions themselves remain free willed.

The epistemological argument begins by noting that naive human experience proves unreliable as concerns the “true workings” of the world. This argument relies on a duplicitous maneuver, deliberately conflating perceptual reliability at every size level (graining) of the cosmos. It is true that our naive senses are not reliable as concerns the workings of the very large: the cosmos, galaxies, the physics of stars. Even the sun seems, after all, to go around Earth! Likewise with the very small. The sub-atomic and atomic worlds, even up to the realm of simple life like bacteria which are made of many atoms, are all beyond our ability to explain given only our unaided senses. But there is a middle range on which our sensory systems are focused and about which it conveys remarkably reliable information. If you make a turn on a trail and come upon a lion, your next decision, for good or ill, had better assume that there is indeed a lion in front of you. Even primitive man knew what substance composed a sand storm. Even believing some god caused the wind, they knew that the wind was blowing sand!

This is a range of sizes, from roughly mountains to grains of dust at which our sensory experiences, the content of consciousness that emerges from our perception of these things, can be taken to be reliable under normal circumstances. As it happens, our own recognition and implicit reliance on the freedom of our will occurs at exactly this level. As concerns the freedom to initiate original causal chains in the physical we are strictly limited to our bodies and these uncontroversially occupy the middle ground of reliable perception and inference. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that our seeming to have free will is not a reliable indicator of its reality, there is nothing about the nature of our experience of it, the experiential world of our bodies which it seems to control, that suggests that it is anything other than free.

The Theistic Alternative

How has philosophy dealt with this issue? One way is to posit something in the vicinity of God who is, like the volitional agent not physical but nevertheless both the source of the physical and the volitional power of a causal agent. Theism puts everything together. There is a physical universe whose mechanisms are purely physical, and there are free-will-endowed agents who can initiate uncaused causal chains. Both are real and their combination in the physical universe is made possible and takes origin (directly or indirectly) in God. But this option leaves something to be explained.

How does God, who is presumptively non-physical, have the power to “make the physical” and further make a non-physical entity, the conscious agent, with the power to interact with the physical and originate uncaused causal chains within it? What is the mechanism of this creation? We notice that the interacting physical and non-physical have, under this metaphysical alternative, a common origin. This at least grounds the possibility of interaction even if it doesn’t explain either how it works or how the two sides were made to begin with. As concerns mind and free will, the theistic alternative is associated with what is called “substance dualism” because mind has qualities that do not emerge from the physical alone.

Philosophers who believe that there are meaningful questions that are in principle unanswerable often have this sort of question in mind. We become self-conscious as non-material agent-observers constrained to physical bodies in a physical universe. Our phenomenological universe lies within the physical universe whose only mechanisms we can sense (often aided by instruments) are the physical ones set in motion by the fact (or the act) of creation. God, should he exist, is not measurable, not detectable physically. Even hypothetically speaking we should expect this to be so. To understand how, by what mechanism, God interacts with the physical we would have, ourselves, to transcend the physical, to be able to examine it as it were from the outside.

Intellectually, God’s reality is an inference based on our observation of causal closure in the physical when coupled with an acceptance at face value of the reality of free will. We are able, at least in principle, to grasp the possibility of original creation (of the universe) because we know ourselves to be “original creators”. In our case the power of uncaused cause is limited to the movement of a body while in God’s case (we suppose) there are no limits other than the consistency of logic, but we do not know this. If we wish to take the theistic route, we only know that whatever the limits of God’s powers, they are at least sufficient to generate the physical universe and self-conscious observers with a limited free will. In the final analysis, as concerns the mechanism of both creation and interaction between the physical and non-physical once created, no answer from our perspective is possible. God presumably knows the trick or we wouldn’t be here, but that is as much as we can say about it (see note on God at the end of the essay).

Naturalism, Physicalism, Materialism, and Property Dualism

Philosophers (not to mention scientists) generally do not like the theistic alternative. Often they cite “occam’s razor” and a somewhat more modern expression in a famous statement by Albert Einstein that “A theory should be as simple as possible but no simpler”. By this Einstein meant to call attention to the requirement that a theory actually explain the phenomena it covers. If it fails that requirement its simplicity is irrelevant! But the aim of the philosophical objection to theism is to remove the theistic demand for an entity that is in principle beyond detection by science. Not only does assuming this entity raise the “interaction problem” (the matter of just how the physical and non-physical interact), but also other metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical questions none of which can be verified or falsified by any physical measurement (see note at end of essay). If the free will that seems justified to our experience could be explained (and not merely explained-away) without reference to a non-material agent with the capacity to produce that power in, or in some sense grant it to, an otherwise physical agent that would be a simpler theory.

But the presently popular non-theistic alternatives also fail to fully explain the seemingly strong epistemological warrant for free will. I review these in the context of a useful distinction between physicalism, naturalism, and materialism. A very good and in depth review of these doctrines can be found in an excellent book by John Foster “The Immaterial Self: A Defense of Cartesian Dualism” (1991) and another, “The Emergent Self” by William Hasker (2001). Also see my essay expanding further on this: “Fantasy Physics and the Genesis of Mind”

Physicalism is a metaphysical doctrine. It states basically the real physical, the stuff that can be measured with physical instruments (including the quantum background which cannot strictly be measured but is presumptively physical all the same), is all there is. Further there is no such thing as evidence for any real non-physical thing because, by fiat, there is no such a thing as a non-physical thing! As one might imagine, physicalists are often associated with the “consciousness and free will are an illusion” position. A few have struggled to find some way to warrant the reality of consciousness (failing other than to say “we just don’t know how it works yet”) but free will is even more difficult because it would so obviously, being “uncaused cause” represent a violation of physicalism!

Naturalism is an epistemological doctrine related to physicalism. It says that there is nothing, no phenomenon in the universe (including consciousness and free will if either should exist) that cannot be explained by reference to physical mechanism. Naturalism is related to physicalism in that if physicalism is true, it would follow that anything that is real in the universe has to come from nothing more than (and thus be explained by) the physical. If naturalists do not deny the reality of consciousness or free will (they frequently do however), then the burden on them is to explain these things in purely physical terms. In this, they have not succeeded.

Materialism takes another path. Like physicalism it is a metaphysical doctrine and it shares with physicalism the assertion that all the phenomena of the universe must begin from nothing more than the physical. But it denies that everything the physical can produce is subsequently explainable in purely physical terms. What materialism does is deny that physical causes can have only physical effects. It opens causal closure asserting that complex physical processes can result in emergent phenomena that, once emerged, cannot be explained in physical terms. It is significant that the only phenomena that count here, the emergence of which materialists speak, happens to be consciousness and phenomena associated with consciousness including free will! Such emergence from the physical is called “property dualism” because while the mind emerges from the physical it exhibits properties that are not physical and cannot be explained (reduced) to purely physical terms.

Materialists are fond of citing other emergent phenomena in the universe. A common example is water. Liquid water has properties that are not to be found in oxygen or hydrogen alone. Water’s special properties only emerge from a set of conditions involving water molecules, pressure, and temperature. But it is significant that liquid water and its properties remain incontrovertibly physical as are the water molecules, hydrogen, and oxygen that compose it. In fact, the properties of liquid water are the outcome of the special shape of the water molecule, and that shape, in turn, is indeed the result of the properties of hydrogen and oxygen. In theory then it is possible to predict the properties of liquid water from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen alone if we understood them well enough. This is even more obvious as concerns the water molecule. Understanding the implications of its physical chemistry would tell us what liquid water was like, and under what conditions it would form, even if we had not encountered it before.

This is the problem with all the examples of emergence cited by physicists or philosophers. All of them are physical with the exception of the one that wants explaining here, consciousness and free will. That these things are an example of just another emergence like water is part of what is at issue. In 300+ years of physics since Newton no physicist has ever observed physical causes resulting in non-physical effects. If materialism is true then this must be possible but that it is possible and that it has actually happened in the case of consciousness (and free will) is an assumption not grounded by the slightest physical evidence. As a metaphysical inference, it has no more empirical standing than God and it suffers from an analogous set of problems.

Property dualism has an interaction problem! How the physical results in the non-physical is the inverse of the problem of how a non-physical God can create the physical. Similarly, the reverse holds in that the question of how it is that non-physical mind can control the physical is the same problem from either the theistic or the property-dualistic direction. It is not controversial that a brain state is the proximate cause of my moving my body. At issue is what causes (if it is a freely willed movement) that brain state! Property dualism explains this no better than substance dualism. In both cases something quintessentially non-material becomes a cause in the material universe.

The philosophical issues with theism stem from having to suppose there is a supernatural being. The philosophical issues with materialism stem from the absence of any observable power in physics to produce anything non-physical let alone a non-physical uncaused cause! Property dualists can only assume that this must be possible just as theists, in the final analysis, can only suppose that God must be real. Theists can only wave their hands and say “God must know how to do it because we experience it.” Materialists can only wave their hands and say “physics must be able to do it because we experience it.”

The epistemological problems are identical in substance and property dualisms. The nature of the subject and the relation between what seems to manifest as a “willful agent” and consciousness is identical. There are even parallel ethical issues. In the case of theism the ethical issue revolves around what responsibility we have to God should he exist. In the case of property dualism there is a question of whether we can be held responsible for anything as there is no guarantee under property dualism that free will is genuine even if consciousness is!

So the theistic alternative posits a “magical being” while the materialist alternative posits either “magical properties of the physical” or special relations between physical particulars that have a magical (non-material) effect. Neither explains how, that is the mechanics of the mechanism, by or through which free will, uncaused cause, comes about in a physical universe governed by the strict causal closure we observe in physics. The theistic alternative at least posits a being with the power to perform the trick, but we are no closer to knowing how the trick is performed either way.

We are back, therefore, where we began. Free will seems real enough in our experience and beginning by rejecting its possibility renders experience meaningless. But we cannot empirically identify causes that could not have been purely physical thanks to those always present correlative brain states! Either we accept by assumption that it is real (restoring sensibility to experience), or we deny that free will is real and live with the fact that we cannot explain either how or why it seems to be. For my two cents a belief that “free will is real” is true, is justified by the absence of reciprocity in our experience of its exercise, and this despite the fact that, other theism, no adequate metaphysical ground for it has yet been articulated. To my mind the task of philosophy is to explain what grounds our experience. We can explain why the sun seems to go around the Earth even though it doesn’t. But we have not yet explained why we seem to have free will if in fact we do not.
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NOTES

The many issues raised by the theistic alternative are discussed at some length in my two books (Amazon Kindle Books) “Why This Universe: God, Cosmology, Consciousness, and Free-Will” (2014) and “God, Causal Closure, and Free Will” (2016).

The SELF: The idea of “a self” is highly controversial in philosophy. There are many explanations advanced for what appears to be a self. Even more than as concerns free will, philosophers almost universely accept that a self is an illusion. I cannot get into this argument in the space of this essay, but I note that almost every philosopher, even categorically denying that a self exists, continues to use language implying a self when discussing free will, consciousness, and any other subject having a subjective aspect. I deal with the nature and reality of the self, personality, extensively in the two books noted above.

GOD: Actually we can infer much more as concerns the nature of God because human consciousness has access to values: truth, beauty, and goodness. I have no time to cover this ground here and it has little direct bearing on the epistemological evidence for free will. Again I refer the reader to my two books listed in the first note above.

Ruminations

"And a woman is only a woman but a good cigar is a smoke" Kipling. "The Betrothed"

Category: Philosophy