nanite1018

Well actually this idea is covered in ITOE and OPAR, that simple concepts and percepts are very difficult to define, because they are the base of your knowledge. So if you are to come up with some sort of a definition, you have to use higher level concepts. So it isn't wrong to invert the hierarchy of concepts when seeking full understanding of a particular subject, it is simply an attempt to make your understanding complete. I think this is incorrect. The universe is a noncontradictory whole, that follows immediately from the definition of universe and the law of noncontradiction. Consciousness is the perception of reality. Man is a conceptual being, who must put forth some effort in order to understand the universe and form useful abstractions, integrating all his knowledge into a noncontradictory whole. He has to do this because his mind is his only tool to survive, the nature of humans makes it necessary to apply our brains to any and every problem we face in our quest for survival. So, focusing and putting forth a great deal of effort in order to think rationally is for-life, and living in fog and behaving irrationally (or evading) is anti-life. The only possible purpose of man is to live (just as all living organisms) for his own life, and so focusing is moral and not focusing is immoral. Where is the problem in the above logic? And where do I ever say that someone must have been able to focus or not focus in order to declare something "moral" or "immoral." You still decided, because your brain went through the process of the decision to focus or not to focus. Whether it could have come out differently is irrelevant, you still picked one or the other. One path is life-preserving the other life-destroying. You chose, and thereby were moral or immoral. This is why I do not think there is any problem with saying that we live in a deterministic universe and saying that Objectivism still holds true (with that minor revision). We could debate whether knowledge is possible, but honestly the methods by which volitional and nonvolitional conceptual beings arrive at decisions are precisely the same, so I don't think there can really be an argument there either.

Entities behave the way they do because they are what the are. They are a certain pattern of various sub-components, which at the most basic level are subatomic particles. So it is not invalid to examine entities at the level of parts, in order to figure out how the whole does what it does. Many people have talked about "the brain controlling itself", both in this discussion and others. If that is what people think free will is, namely, that you (i.e. your brain) makes decisions because of itself and not external forces (beyond the obvious fact of the input of certain stimuli from the senses) that control you, than there is no issue. The brain makes decisions, it decides to focus or not, to value or not, what to value, etc. No one denies that. Its obvious. My argument is that the brain does not have the magical power to do different things given a certain state (beyond what quantum mechanics allows, which in a system such as the brain, may be quite a lot). When you decide to post on this forum, it wasn't the outside world that made you post, it was the various values that you have, your emotional state, your plans for the day, etc. All of those things are in your head. Just as "red", and all measurements of any kind, can only be discussed in relation to man, so can the results of a certain state of things can only be discussed in relation to the goings on in man's mind. When you make a decision, you made it. It does not matter whether given precisely the same situation and state of your mind you could have done something else. Regardless, you still made a choice, and the consequences are yours to bear. Your brain must understand reality properly in order for your life to continue to function, the only way to do that is through independent thought and careful mental effort, and if you don't do that then things will go badly for you. I see no moral/ethical problems with this position, and I don't see a problem epistemologically.

There is no evidence that anything else has any properties that are not simply an emergent property of its parts (which still are behaving deterministically). A table is a table, but in order to know what it will do in all situations I need to understand it at the level of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. To have a complete understanding of a thing, it is necessary to look at what it actually is (a certain collection of particles) rather than as an entity with independent existence. An entity is nothing more than the sum of its parts (if you also account for emergent properties, which really is a rather unexpected sum of the constituent parts, but a sum just the same). There is no evidence that anything else in the universe is more than the sum of its parts. I do not see any reason to think people are any different. Perhaps making a simple observation would be useful, but only if it wasn't an introspective observation. Introspection is inherently inaccurate because you can't check your observation, and it is an entity trying to twist around and understand itself. That is impossible because in order to do so you would need to look at all of you mental content, which would take up all your mental space, leaving none for the abstraction and integration processes. Introspection isn't completely worthless, but its value is severely limited. External reality and the workings of my body are the only things I can examine with any amount of accuracy I desire, and as a result are the only basis for a meaningful understanding of the world.

Ignorance of how does interfere with the certainty of that. If you can't fit it into a noncontradictory whole with all of the rest of your knowledge, you may very well be misinterpreting something. As an example, we observe that the Sun rises and sets each day. You can say "we don't know how, but the Sun rises above the horizon and sets below it each day." And then ignorance of how doesn't seem to interfere with the certainty of that. But it does. Because you are leaving out an important part "it appears that the Sun rises..." In exactly the same way, it appears that we make free decisions and could have chosen otherwise given precisely the same conditions. But people on the pro-volition side of the argument want to turn that into "we do make free decisions..." which is an entirely different matter. All we know is that it appears to be so. It also appears the the Sun rises, or that the Earth acts on the Moon by spooky action-at-a-distance, or that light travels infinitely fast. None of those are in fact the case, but it seems like it given the inaccurate tools of perception we humans have. It is only through science that we can be sure that what we are seeing or experiencing actually is what we think it is. If logic is the art of noncontradictory integration of information, then how can anyone integrate free will with physics? It is impossible, and to be honest the only solution I see is a soul or spirit. I reject that possibility immediately, and so I'm left with the determinist position.

The argument from a determinist view is primarily an argument from physics. We have formulated physical laws which predict with enormous accuracy the behavior of particles. No one says that the particles actually go and check the set of equations to figure out where to move next (well, not anyone I'd take seriously), but simply that they describe their behavior in every context we've found. All of the equations of physics are deterministic (or stochastic, which amounts to the same thing). As a result, as far as anyone can tell all the particles in the universe act in a deterministic/stochastic manner. The determinist argument is basically complete at that point, since then you simply have to say that "All the evidence that science has accumulated about the workings of the universe suggest that every individual particle, and thus the universe as a whole, behaves deterministically. We're part of the universe, so we are deterministic." I haven't ever found a satisfactory way around this (I discount the "well its an axiom" argument because it does not address the flaw in the above argument). The only way I have ever seen is to say that there is some magical stuff we've never seen before scientifically that makes people (and perhaps just life in general) different than everything else in the universe. Perhaps its not magic, but there must be something else that no one has ever seen.

I see where Mixon is coming from. Essentially, his question put simply is this: we all know parents are supposed to take care of their children. What if they don't? Parenthood is the one area where I, too, am not clear on how Objectivism can deal with. It is, by definition, a position in which one human life cannot be independent and is totally dependent on another person. Given that the child is unable, under any circumstances, to provide for themselves, it seems then that neglect or maltreatment of children by their parents should be a crime. But how exactly do you punish them? Put them in jail? Perhaps, but then where do the children go? If you say "well charity will take care of them" then you are putting them in a very very precarious position (there is no reason to believe that all the children who are neglected, malnourished, etc. by their parents would get much better treatment from charity). The only extension of this argument I see is in the severely mentally handicapped, and perhaps the physically impaired as well (those who literally unable to do productive work). It seems like a travesty to leave the fate of those who cannot possibly survive on their own to die because their parents would not take care of them. Given that these individuals were placed into a position of dependency without their consent, but now exist, it seems a requirement that they be provided for, somehow. In essence, children should not have to pay because their parents were unfit and neglected them. How does Objectivism deal with children and parenthood?

Well if your hypothetical situation were to come to pass someone would come out with new strands of wheat and start selling them, and clone the animal, create a bacterial strain that eats the chemical but can only survive for a limited time, etc. In fact, that'd probably be a booming industry, just as I think the environmental biotech industry will be booming in 20 years (bacteria to clean up pollution, algae to trap CO2, etc.). I'm reminded of a remark by someone in a review of one of Stephen Baxter's (a hard science fiction writer) books: "If technology creates a problem, then throw more technology at the problem." That's my position on all "science gone wrong" disaster scenarios.

Lethalmiko, you obviously do not know much about science and haven't studied much about it. I would suggest looking up wikipedia articles, or better yet, picking up and reading these books at your local library: "Hyperspace" by Michio Kaku (not necessary, but its a good primer on modern physics) "The Elegant Universe" and "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene (by far the best two books on modern physics, including the origin of the universe, that I have ever read). Anything by Carl Sagan, he was one of the greatest popular science writers ever. I suggest "The Dragons of Eden" (evolution) and "Cosmos" (everything, its amazing). If you read all those and still think that intelligent design is a valuable theory, or that science is inept at explaining the origin of the universe, then there is nothing I (or anyone I think) can do. Everything I would say to refute your objections would be drawn mostly from those books anyway. Happy reading!

I despise seeing science misused and so this will most likely be a lengthy post. 1) Life can evolve and grow more complex because the Earth is not a closed system. In case you haven't noticed, there is a big ball of nuclear fire that lights about half of the Earth at a time. That input of energy is the origin for all the energy in all living systems on Earth (excluding the chemosynthetic organisms at the bottom of the ocean). 2) The universe may in fact "bounce", meaning that it expands from a singularity in a Big Bang then comes back and contracts producing a new singularity which then rebounds and expands to produce another universe, and on and on and on. It is true that if this process had occurred for infinite time than the universe would be flat and even. However, quantum effects will likely prevent that from happening (random differences in the initial distribution of energy in the singularity would likely prevent that smoothing out from occurring). Even if it did however, there is point 3. 3) Our universe is, according to most theories, a part of a much larger and older multiverse. Now, I imagine that entropy might hold in this larger arena as well, but I'm not certain. Even if it did, there are a number of ways to get around it. One is the idea that the multiverse is infinite in size, which would mean there is infinite usable energy, meaning that even after an infinite amount of time, there would still be an infinite amount of usable energy (infinity's are fun, aren't they?). Another is that the multiverse (or perhaps the universe) was self-starting, meaning that if you were to go back in time you would eventually hit a loop, right at the beginning, in which time has been bent into a partial circle, and the universe actually created itself (that one is a theoretical model created by J. Richard Gott). 4) As for the whole "what made the singularity unstable" business, that has been shown to be one way of looking at the problem in string theory. Basically the theory states that at the beginning of the universe there was a perfectly even distribution of matter and energy, in a 10 (or 11) dimensional space-time. There is an infinitesimal (literally) chance that this will "break" spontaneously, producing two universes, one which is 4 dimensions (ours) and another which shriveled up as our expanded which is 6 or 7 dimensions. 5) The final theory I'll put out for demonstration is that the universe has zero net energy. Namely, that gravity and the negative energy in the universe combined exactly counteract the total amount of matter energy in the universe (this does not seem to be the case in the visible universe, but all the evidence suggests that the universe as a whole is far far larger (orders of magnitude) than the visible universe, leaving open the possibility that our visible region is an aberration from the norm). If that is the case, than given an infinite space and time devoid of matter-energy, it could spontaneously be created and it would violate no physical law whatsoever. My point is physics does not know exactly what created the universe, but there are a number of theories. None of those theories have a problem explaining the universe's present condition in the face of entropy. Also, the position that the universe is all that exists and that speaking of anything "outside" it is nonsense is a valid (though perhaps unsatisfying) position both philosophically and scientifically. As a result, the arguments in the OP and those given later are refuted by every single scientific theory we have (even if they are still effectively arbitrary).

My view is very similar to fountainhead777's. A fine of 80k a song is already so high that no one cares any more, it doesn't deter anyone, because it is so ridiculous, and you can't go higher because it just doesn't affect people anymore. You'd have to be putting people away for years, even life, before you would have any significant impact, simply because it is almost impossible to detect and most people simply say "there's a one in a million shot I'll get that punishment, so I don't really care." The only way you could bring about your vision of justice would be to have not a narrowly aimed policing effort but a massive and oppressive government effort to monitor and control the Internet. It would cost billions of dollars and would give the government far more power than it can be trusted with. The movie and music industries simply aren't worth the risks involved in granting the government the power to spy on everything everyone does at all times on the Internet. For that reason, the risk of getting caught will always be small, and massive fines will do little to deter the use of illegal services. That is why I believe the industry's need to stop filing lawsuits against people (they only make enemies) and change their business model. It would work out better for them and for society than an ill-conceived effort to protect their copyright claims and their absurd insistence on extremely restrictive terms of use for their products.

It should be punative in direct correlation with the damages. So if I steal a half a pack of post-it notes maybe I have to pay the person for a whole new pack of post-its. If I stab someone I have to pay all financial damages and spend some period in jail, with counseling to help me better handle stressful situations and be a productive member of society on my release. If I kill someone, I need to be put away for a very long time as well as have my property turned over to the family of my victim in order to at least partially pay back the damages to their family from that loss. Punitive measures should get worse on a graduated scale in proportion to damages. Um, no. She took one or maybe two albums, maximum. That is not "a lot of music." And she almost certainly did not distribute it to thousands of accessors. She distributed parts of it to thousands of accessors. If it was bittorrent, then she sent tiny pieces of the file to a bunch of different people. Even if it was thousands, her part of their download was probably only a couple of percent, at most. As a result, she may have distributed the equivalent of a dozen copies (that would actually be quite high for bittorrent). She could only be held responsible for the equivalent of making a dozen or so copies and distributing them for free to other people. That is not an offense that should be punished with a 1.9 million dollar fine, because the size of the offense is so small (a few hundred dollars in damages). While she shouldn't have downloaded the music, this fine (and even her previous fine of 220k) is way beyond a just punishment for the crime. The RIAA would be better served to work on changing its business model so that people would not be tempted to illegally download music anymore, by reducing prices and making the works more widely available on ad-based and subscription services. Punitive measures just make them a target for every hacker on the planet (even more than they already are).

Miovas that ruling is absurd and offensive. It is not justice in any sense of the word. She is being fined 80k a song when she could purchase them on iTunes for a dollar. When most people steal 24 dollars worth of merchandise from a store (she only downloaded 24 songs illegally, or at least that is all that is being tried in this case) and gets caught, they normally just have to give it back, or pay for it. At most they might have a fine of 500 dollars or a night in jail. No normal company cares enough to file a massive lawsuit that lasts for years in order to get their stolen 24 dollars back. Its ridiculous. Now you might make the argument that she helped a number of others steal it through bittorrent. So there are two ways to figure out a proper fine: fine her based on her seed rate (how much of the file she sent to others), in which case it should be no more than a few hundred dollars, or fine her based on how many people got a tidbit of the file from her computer, which would be no more than a 1000 or so and so her total fine should be no more than 25k. 80k a song is way beyond what her total fine should be under any rational court decision. The purpose of a court case is to establish guilt and repay the owner for the lost property. It is not to make an example of someone. And at 1.9 million dollars for 24 songs, that is obviously the only justification for the sentence.

Because they are created from simple things obeying a particular set of rules, and given the rules and precisely the same initial conditions the same thing happens over and over again. New patterns may emerge on higher levels of abstraction (such as groupings of particles), but the individual things are still behaving deterministically. No nondeterministic system has ever been created in a computer model. I did not say it cannot exist. I simply say that is supernatural, outside the bounds of science and scientific inquiry, by its definition. And the origin of the universe may well be settled in time based on theory and experimental evidence (there are already a number of theories with some supporting evidence). Also, existence in the widest sense (and thus the universe, or multiverse, or multimultiverse, or whatever) is an infinite, existence cannot stop nor can it come into being because otherwise there would have to have been something there for it to arise in or to die out. By definition, existence (as in all existents in the widest sense possible) is infinite in age (and perhaps extent spacially as well, though that isn't as clear to me).

I demand the possibility of a reductive explanation. Wholes are merely the parts arranged in a particular order. Emergent properties are still deterministic, as is chaos theory, as is quantum mechanics and all its uncertainty. Volition (in the sense that given the state of the entire universe at a particular moment, our decision did not have to be what it was, and was not stochastic on some level) doesn't fit with the findings of the natural sciences, in particular physics, since it states that the behavior of every part is deterministic (and thus the evolution of the system is deterministic, even chaos theory recognizes this). That is why I have trouble integrating it into my total worldview. Something nondeterministic and nonstochastic, such as volition, is something about which no theory can be created to describe its behavior, about which science has no explanatory power and can never have it. That is the definition of "supernatural." Saying that there are two different ways of looking at consciousness, one is introspection, which by its nature can only go so far in explaining how your mind works (since you cannot be directly aware of the physical action in your brain) and so cannot go back beyond the decision to focus or not to focus, and the other is science, which explains everything through physics, chemistry, and biology and can include everything including how that decision is made, is not a contradiction. Introspection is limited by its nature, science is not. Since philosophy, ethics, politics, etc. are all dealing with man as a conscious entity rather than as a physical system they are perfectly valid, but you have to keep them in context.

I am assuming the laws of physics are complete. Not saying we would be able to necessarily say what they are, but that there is some complete set of rules that determine the behavior of every particle. That may be a theory of everything or multiple theories that can be used to collectively cover all reality. Science is about all phenomena that can be examined, it is about physical things and events in objective reality. Supernatural means things outside the science's possible explanatory power. All natural sciences are based on physics at their core, and as a result anything that is beyond physics's realm (such as volition) are supernatural. That is the principle I am using when I say that volition can only exist in a strict sense if the supernatural exists.

I know humans are different than rocks, but I don't see a fundamental difference at the bottom level. The difference is in the arrangement of the particles making up our bodies as opposed to a rock. But they obey the same laws, I don't see how, without invoking mystic ideas of the supernatural, we can declare human beings as fundamentally different than rocks at anything deeper than the arrangement of matter. And if the only difference is the arrangement, than both are deterministic. I don't start at the level of atoms, I start with observable reality, which as we keep going deeper and deeper eventually gets to atoms. The whole point of physics is to understand how the universe works at the most basic level, the other sciences work on higher levels of abstraction from that point (and as a result do not have absolute laws, there can be unexpected things that happen if you can't model the underlying physics, thanks to chaos and quantum uncertainty). I simply think introspection as far more faulty than directly observable reality which I can check with other people and do repeated experiments on. My introspections on my own mind do not violate my views on determinism, they seem in agreement (as I've described elsewhere). If my view about determinism could not account for my sensations and introspections than I would not hold it. It does not. And since it is in line with physics as well, I think it is the case. As Grames pointed out, determinism without predictive capability loses its moral threat. If a toddlers mind is determined, then how it reacts to new information is determined. How it interacts with reality is determined. Every step is determined as it gains new knowledge. Whether it will properly form its first concepts is determined by the contents of its as yet determined mind. Each step along the path is determined. I do not and have never seen how, if you start with determinism (even without predictive power) you eventually can get to something undetermined. That transition seems impossible. So either babies are not determined or else determinism is the valid position.

The fallacy of composition does not apply in this case. There is a difference between saying that, for example, a machine part is unbreakable with a hammer, so the machine cannot be broken with a hammer, and arguing that every particle in the universe obeys a set of laws which determine its actions in all cases, so the brain acts deterministically. That is a logical conclusion, and arguments about whether we could ever predict the behavior of a given system (such as the brain) do not change the basic fact that all physical systems obey the laws of physics and act either deterministically or stochastically. The brain is composed solely of particles, and every action of every one of those particles is determined by the laws of physics. As a result, the brain's actions as a whole are determined by the laws of physics. The only way for that to not be the case is if there were something other than matter/energy in the brain, a "soul". There is a difference between what I see on the inside of my brain and what I see on the outside, I cannot redo my inner experiment nor demonstrate it for someone else or have someone else perform it. As a result, introspection is far more prone to error than the physical sciences. Nevertheless, that is not the main point. Knowledge can exist without volition. The three basic axioms are self-evident, they can't be countered without accepting them, etc. As a result, the universe and all knowledge must form a non-contradictory whole. From experience we have learned that one way of thinking leads to fewer contradictions and as a result allows us to live our lives better than another method, namely reason and focus is better than irrationality and mental fog. I don't see why we can't then say that reason and focus are good and that they promote life, which must almost by definition be the primary value of man and living things in general. Everything else in Objectivist ethics follows from that. We can go through a process which is more likely to lead to non-contradictory and thus life-promoting results, and ideas and findings which come from that process are legitimate knowledge.

I do not believe it is possible to predict the behavior of something as complex as a human being with perfect accuracy (or, a perfect estimation of the likelihood of various behaviors). The laws of physics alone prevent that due to things like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, chaos, and quantum entaglement. Perfect prediction is impossible, and I never said it was. The main thrust of determinism is not predictability, not in a strict sense anyway. It can be boiled down like this: 1. Objectivism states there is no mind-body dichotomy. Therefore, every mental action is equivalent to a physical process in the brain and vice versa. 2. The brain is a physical system. 3. All physical systems obey the laws of physics (granted, we do not have a complete theory describing all four fundamental forces, but two, one dealing with gravity, the other dealing with the remaining three, but it doesn't really matter given the argument). 4. The laws of physics are deterministic and/or stochastic (it really doesn't matter). 5. As a result of 2, 3, and 4, the actions of the mind are deterministic or stochastic. Now, I do not argue that we could ever predict what the brain will do with perfect accuracy, or even perfect probabilities, no matter how advanced our technology gets. I do not even argue that the equations we would generate from physical laws are solvable with any known technique, or that even the solution would necessarily be unique given the maximum information we could get about the physical structure of a brain. Instead, all determinism argues is that whatever the true state of the brain at this time, the laws of physics will determine the workings of the brain and thus its future actions. Now, I don't see a problem with that logic, and it is the logic which I have trouble refuting with a simple "well I feel myself making choices", perhaps I don't grant my feelings and introspections enough importance, I don't know. 1, 2, 3, and 5 (given 4's truth) are absolutely true (or you'd have to be a mystic). The only one whose truth may be in doubt is 4. I tend to think it true since we have no evidence otherwise (except introspection on volition of course). In my view, introspection is an invalid means of understanding physical reality. Volition is, apparently, a claim about physical reality. I don't think it needs to be necessarily, but it seems that Objectivists are not willing to say that their view of volition is based on the inability of the conscious mind to think about its workings prior to its existence. That is, my preferred solution is to say volition is valid on the cognitive level, on the level of "mind", in our introspections, since our consciousness cannot work back beyond the point of the decision to focus or not, as Rand correctly pointed out. As a result, the only explanation on the cognitive level is that we made a choice, a self-caused choice. Of course we could say "Well no it was actually blah blah in the brain" but that isn't really meaningful when it comes to human knowledge, consciousness, or reason. Where do you place the flaw in the above logic, since you have a background in both physics and philosophy, Miovas? And is my proposed "solution" of any merit in your opinion?

I do in fact like the term cognitive self-regulation far more than free will, it if it is a more exact way of saying what you mean. My main issue with the implication, and the thing I've never gotten my head wrapped around, is what that really implies about the workings of my mind. It seems like, in order to "self-regulate" my mind or to have "volition" there has to be a part of my mind that is somehow outside the rest, and that part has to make "self-caused" decisions or actions. Now, in this context self-caused seems the same as uncaused, in that context does not determine what happens, just some sort of magic occurs that makes something happen. I don't mean to be snippy or degrade the idea, but it just seems like it would have to be supernatural or something in order to exist. Causation is identity applied to action. Now, the actions of an entity are a result of the context it is in and its nature. The idea that man's consciousness can do something that is not a result of the external environment or the context of its own memories, beliefs, ideas, emotions, etc. but rather just happens without a prior "cause" is impossible for me to integrate into my understanding of reality. I know you wouldn't say that volition means that something "just happens" without a cause, but rather that it is self-causation. But for me, they seem the same. An action taken by an entity in a given context which is not determined by the context implies, in my mind, some sort of magic involved. I recognize that volition or cognitive self-regulation or free will is limited to the choice to focus or not to focus, and that choice cannot be tracked back in our minds any further. But it is unsatisfying and goes against my entire view of the world to just say that that decision happened without an actual cause, some prior thing or context which made it turn out that way. Science requires an explanation, and something just happening isn't a real explanation. My major issue, I think, is that I see no fundamental difference between humans and anything else, particularly other living entities, and particularly other higher mammals with fairly developed brains. Everything else in the universe does things in without volition as far as we can tell, and the idea that there is only one single example of a self-caused action in the universe just seems impossible to believe. It seems to necessitate a soul of some sort in order to explain the difference.

Thomas M. Miovas your arguments and remarks (while often funny) aren't helping much. We all recognize we feel that we have a choice, what myself and some others are asking is how that can be reconciled with physics. After all, humans are just an assemblage of particles (since our minds are no different from our bodies and our bodies are physical things whose most basic components act in accordance with the laws of physics, whatever they may turn out to be in the end). So, how is it that a nondeterministic system (neither uniquely determined or stochastically determined) can arise from that root? Saying "well it must because we see it does" does not give an answer to how it is possible, which is what many many people have trouble understanding. Now, you can say "well that's a scientific question" but so what if it is? Science is our means of gaining knowledge about physical reality, we are a part of that reality, so science must be applied to us as well. Our knowledge has to form a single noncontradictory whole, and as a result an answer to "how" is crucially important. If it seems impossible, then either physics is crippled and science undermined as legitimate or the philosophy of Objectivism has a flaw somewhere. Since neither of those are desirable options the discussion of how a nondeterministic system can arise from determinist roots needs to be carried out. That's why this discussion is important and why it comes up so often.

First to Grames: Your explanations are by far the most satisfying of any I have heard on this forum or, for that matter, in any discussion on this subject. Generally, people who believe in free will/volition are not able to articulate any possible cause or root of it and just fall into "I feel it" or "If its not true, what's the point?" Prospective Objectivist: I think what Grames is trying to say is that the determinist position, while "true" in that nothing can break the laws of physics, it is useless on all meaningful scales. For one, it may very well be impossible to actually create a supreme mathematical construction of consciousness from the basic laws of physics. Might we recreate a brain in another medium, like a computer? Sure, but we won't be able to construct a mathematical model that will predict its behavior as a function of time, it will have to be computed and approximated laboriously at all times. Unlike, for example, an atom, whose wavefunction can be calculated without much difficulty (well, relatively speaking), it may never be possible (we don't know) for that to be done with the brain, we may end up with an undefined wavefunction, something mathematics cannot simplify beyond brute force modeling of the system. Beyond even the fact we won't be able to simply create a single unique wavefunction for a conscious entity's "brain", if we were to try to model its behavior with perfect accuracy, we would never be able to do so, since our measurements are restricted by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and we would have to take in to account all of the behavior of every object in the universe. Since the universe can only model itself at the same rate it is going now (for obvious reasons), determinism gives us nothing of value. Dictating that one must do the impossible, or assume it, renders the point meaningless. Essentially, the point is that while determinism in the most wide sense possible, that nothing disobeys the laws of physics (whatever they happen to be), is obviously true, that does not really have any meaning when we are talking about conscious entities and their process of making decisions, since you can never, ever, ever, know what that entity will do before it does it (since doing so changes the conditions, even in the most minute of ways; and you'd have to have knowledge beyond any being's capacity to gain). Just because a given system (the ENTIRE universe) will work out in some particular way (stochastically even), it has no real relevance when talking about volition in the sense that Objectivists use it. Given whatever information we have (even an astounding, yet finite, amount of information) one can always say that I may have made a different decision given the initial conditions (even that it may have turned out with different odds of happening that it turned out to), and so we have volition in the only sense that it is meaningful to speak of it. Now, do forgive me Grames if that is not your point. It is only my best understanding of it, and to be honest, it has allowed me to reconcile my issues with volition in my mind. If incorrect, correct me, for both my own and Prospective Objectivist's understanding.

Marc K. your post is one of the most worthless I've seen in discussions about determinism and volition. Just because you say "wiggle your finger 2 times" and I do it does not mean that you "made" me do it, that you were the determining factor. More importantly it certainly does not mean that you are then granted the power to make me wiggle my finger any number of times. Everything is contextual, and you are dropping context an astounding amount in your post. Your dismissive post doesn't further rational inquiry into the subject. I doubt anyone believes that people do not in some manner decide their actions, we obviously experience choice and decision-making. The main problem that many people have is how to reconcile our introspective information with science, physics to be exact. That is an important question, and the answer is not, despite what many say, obvious. Attempts to make determinism sound absurd by asking someone to make a choice are silly, since no determinist says that people do not come to conclusions in some manner, only that the conclusion had to be that way given the laws of physics (or was somehow random).

I have read Merrill's essay "On the Physical Meaning of Volition" linked by Grames. I found it most interesting that Merrill links volition to the self-referential nature of consciousness (as that is my preferred explanation for the origin of consciousness from the physical system of the brain). Merrill's argument seems to be basically that the brain is a self-referential physical system and this property makes it impossible to create a single model of it in the terms of quantum mechanics. Now that does not seem contradictory to my position, honestly. To say that if I try to build a quantum mechanical description of the entire system I end up with several different possibilities with no way of selecting one, and so I can't make any prediction about what the system will do in a few moments, is not a problem for my definition of "determinism." It does not say that the mind is outside the laws of physics thanks to a soul or magic, but far more simply states that it is impossible to describe the brain as a whole with a single mathematical model of it in terms of quantum mechanics. It must, by its nature, abide by the rules of quantum mechanics, but the system is not reducible or describable by one and only one mathematical model. If that is what Merrill was saying (which I think it was, please correct me if I am incorrect Grames), then I have no problem with that model for "volition", and I honestly don't even think it is a problem for my understanding of "determinism" in my sense of the word. They are, it seems to me, compatible. I had been working on how to make volition and my sense of determinism compatible, I had gotten somewhere around there. Thank you for linking that article, it was enlightening. Again, please correct me if my understanding of the main thrust of the article was incorrect.

Alright, I'm going to take this one up again because I've read OPAR and ITOE and feel better prepared than I was before. I see this as on one level an issue of definitions and connotations, the meaning of words make talking about the subject difficult ("choice" "decision" etc. cannot be used in the same way by a person arguing for determinism as they are by one arguing for volition, each misunderstands the other, or will bring up problems which aren't problems if you understood what the other is trying to say). I could never have made any decision other than the one I ended up making in a given situation given all of the past events in my life (beliefs, actions, state of the world, etc.) as an absolute given. I may have felt that I had, but I never really did, when I think about it. All I do when making a decision is create a number of options (pick up glass, put down glass, read ITOE, read Critique of Pure Reason, etc.) and then go through a process of selection (comparing my desires at that moment, emotional state, etc.) eventually coming to a conclusion about which I will do. Before the selection process, I feel like I could do any of those things (because if I didn't think it possible that I might want to do it, I wouldn't have brought it up for consideration). I have the sense "I could do anything, no one can predict it, not even me, at least not accurately." In a way, I "could" do any of those things, because no one could know which I will actually end up doing. Then I go through whatever selection process (whether it be a vague guess based on emotional reaction or a long process of careful processing of my values, time, conditions, etc.). After I have selected a course of action and carried it out, I remember that feeling of "I can do anything" and say "I made a free choice." Well, no, not really. I just came up with some options and selected one by some process. That whole process was "determined" by my conditions (both physical and mental, including beliefs, habits, attitudes, and values) and couldn't have been any other way. This is why people feel they have freedom of choice, its the feeling one gets before someone has chosen, and it is a result of the sometimes unpredictable nature of our thoughts (that is simply because consciousness isn't primary, our brain is, and a "thought" isn't a conscious thought until it comes into contact with our ego, the "I" in our minds, the concept I have of me, that is, until it becomes conscious. Either our mind is simply subatomic particles arranged in a certain way acting according to certain physical laws (whatever those may be, there must be some since there can only be a finite number of particles and they must have a definite nature which will determine their behavior in all situations) which has the ability to do certain things (create models of other objects, even a model of itself, compute information, etc.) or there is something nonphysical which is outside of the range of physics and thus outside science's domain (physics is the base of all science, because it is about the interactions of everything which makes up the universe at the most basic level) which creates consciousness. There is no middle ground. Magic or science, you can't have a "neither" option. Just because your brain came up with a course of action to take doesn't mean it couldn't be incorrect or end up harming you, it simply means that you came to a conclusion. You aren't infallible (in the sense that you are not able to make a decision which would end up worse for you than another that you "might" have made), and so you still must apply reason as best you can because it has been found time and again to be the best way of optimizing your life, since it is based on the unalterable fact that existence exists and that A is A. The idea of "self-generated, self-directed action" can still exist in a deterministic universe in the same sense it exists in a volitional universe (so long as it doesn't have any non corporeal souls or other supernatural gobbledygook). When you perform an action, who selected that course of action from some set of initial possible alternatives? You did. When you choose to not think of some important piece of information, who selected to do that instead of working out the implications? You did. When you choose to not focus, who selects to live in a world of fog instead of one of clarity? You did. Your brain went through a process of selection. Yes, that process arose from previous events in your life and the current conditions around you, but how could it not if you accept that humans are born tabula rasa? Your brain still went through the process. You are your brain and body, that physical system went through a process which resulted in a course of action, and so you chose that course of action. We can talk about decision-making in two ways, the physical/material/scientific or the psychological/philosophical but they are the same thing because they are reflections of a single reality. If they don't mean the same thing, if its impossible to translate between them then there is an error somewhere. I am my body, if my body did something, I did it, if I came up with some options and picked one, I chose it. That's the resolution, in my mind, between the so-called "mind-body problem" and the "determinism v. volition" issue.

While I find Card's Ender series to be fantastic (particularly the half focused on Bean and Peter), I have to say that Stephen Baxter is by far my favorite science fiction author. His stories are based in actual science rather than the space-fantasy that many, albeit good, science fiction works try to get by with. I find his stories always ring true with me, even when the protagonist is defeated or the message (as in his Coalescent) is depressing or seemingly at odds with Objectivist standards. He always portrays reason as the correct answer, and even though the universe he often presents is bleak, he never takes a fatalistic attitude. When technology creates a problem, the answer is always, for him, more technology, and that is refreshing in this day and age. His stories often pit humanity against near impossible odds, but always we find a way to continue on. Just writing this makes me want to read all his books over again!