The ideas on this site provide an explanation of free will and shed light on many other problems of science. The explanations themselves are summarised on the next page. On this page I give their background. The key is to be faithful to logic, following it dutifully wherever it might lead. We must wean ourselves off the logical fudges we've been relying upon.
In what follows on this page, I have picked out a few points from previous pages and tried to re-state them in a different light. Much of this material will seem a repetition (and perhaps a bit of a muddle).
For centuries, the two pillars of science have been observation and deduction - observation for things that can be observed, deduction for things that cannot be observed but whose existence can be inferred. In recent times, however, scientists have recognised the existence of peculiar objects that cannot be deduced in principle. These are the products of biological evolution. They arise according to a theory which explicity forbids their deduction. This puts pressure on the observation tool. If an object cannot be predicted, the only way to determine its existence is to observe it. This is the conclusion forced on biologists when confronted by evolutionary products such as plants and animals.
It is important to appreciate that the inability to use the deduction tool is not a matter of practical difficulty. It is a matter of principle, almost a matter of logic. Richard Dawkins expresses it in particularly colourful terms. He says that evolution's 'watchmaker' is blind. He means that evolution is not directed towards or away from anything, but simply happens. It is this non-directedness that prevents scientists from predicting what products will get produced by the evolutionary process.
Since the products of evolution are beyond the reaches of predictive deduction, they can only be said to exist if scientists use the observation tool. Animals, plants, human brains, and other evolutionary products, do not exist as real objects of our world until they are seen to be real objects of our world.
The moment that such objects are seen, we enter them into the Book of the World's Real Objects and they contribute thereafter to the logic of our world. Other would-be objects - God, angels, abominable snowpeople, lots of other fanciful things - are not entered into the Book of the World's Objects because they are not seen to exist. They do not contribute to the logic of our world, and are not 'real'.
In the case of biological evolution, let us say that one of the objects that we see to exist is a meringue-utan sitting on a branch. If we weren't there to see the meringue-utan, and couldn't conceive of it being there to see (i.e., if we couldn't in some way predict it), the meringue-utan would not enter the logic of our world. Things would change the moment we saw it; it would then enter the logic of our world. The change from not being part of the world to being part of the world is called coming into existence, and the act causing that to happen is called creation. Our observation of a non-deducible object is the creation of that object in our world.
That is contrary to how we imagine things to be, however. We imagine the meringue-utan sitting there long before we came along to see it, its existence having nothing to do with us. But our imagination is astray. In fact, the first thing that happened was we saw the animal sitting on the branch. Then we made some rationalisations about what we saw, including the rationalisation that the meringue-utan must have been there before we came along. In a sense, it was there before we came along, but not as a contributor to the logic of our world. It was a possible object, inhabiting one of the Many possible Worlds. It was no more a real object of our world than the heavenly cherubim and seraphim and other possible things that don't contribute to the logic of our world either.
Physics has long accepted that reality can be different from how we imagine things to be. For instance, laypeople sometimes imagine structured reality within a gas of random particles. They picture the molecules as having definite, but unknown, motions. But a physicist would recognise that a group of particles defined as random does not have structure. Structure represents information and anything possessing information is not random. Random molecules do not have definite motions. If we look at the molecules and see particular motions, then the molecules will have 'real' motions and will no longer be random. The reality of those definite motions will have been caused by our looking (but not because our looking disturbed the particles). The reality will result from the contribution to the logic of the world that our looking produced.
As another example of our imaginations leading us astray, let us consider the force of gravity. The layman thinks the gravitational force is real, partly because defying it can lead to death. But Einstein showed that the force of gravity is our invention. It is something we contrive to exist to preserve an unnatural view of the world. The world's objects want to move in a natural way - essentially to take a 'straight' path - but such movement can offend our human prejudice which is that objects left to themselves should move according to how we think they ought to move. When they don't move the way we think they ought, we imagine that there is a 'force' acting on them which prevents them from taking the 'correct' route. We give this imaginary force the name 'gravity'. Thus the force of gravity is not real - at least, not in the sense of being independent of us. Certainly it seems real, but that's only an artefact of our peculiar way of looking at the world. [Ref. 22]
We need to recognise a similar prejudice concerning the existence of animals in the world - and indeed, concerning the existence of all objects. The reason that animals and other objects exist is because our beliefs are such that they must. But in practise we confuse ourselves when we try to abstract ourselves from the scene. We don't like the idea of reality being dependent on us, so we remove ourselves from the scene and replace our presence with a quasi-mystical 'selfhood' that we presume to reside in each object. This selfhood is supposed to allow each object to exist 'in itself' and thereby avoid the need for us to see it to make it real. But this selfhood is purely our invention. It is the result of our peculiar way of seeing the world, as peculiar as seeing a 'force' of gravity to exist.
The human body is one of the objects we believe to exist (or believe into existence). It has evolved just like the other evolutionary products that we see to exist around us. Like them, the human body's real existence arises from us seeing it, and not from the mysterious possession of a self. But having the existence of the human body dependent on us seeing it seems wrong. It seems to suggest that 'we' are the cause of 'us' - a circularity. However, we can avoid the circularity of a person creating themselves by defining a person according to their beliefs rather than their bodily characteristics. Doing that allows a person's physical characteristics to be whatever they are believed to be. Those physical characteristics - real things about the world - are created by belief just like everything else about the world.
Why doesn't a biological organism - a state of relatively high energy - immediately degrade into a state of low energy? According to the second law of thermodynamics, an ordered state, if it develops at all, should deteriorate into a disordered state. Then why does an organism persist in an ordered state, and, moreover, do things to maintain that order? One of the ordered thing that the organism does is replicate itself. Why? Surely doing that contradicts the spirit of the second law?
The answer that evolution theorists give is that the organism wouldn't exist if energy took the quick and dirty route to the bottom. The brute existence of the organism is the starting point for our explanations. In effect, it causes the rest of the world to conform to its own reality. Yes, the first self-replicating molecule that appeared on Earth did represent a high state of order. By rights it should have degenerated directly into dust. But we wouldn't have seen it if it had done that. It wouldn't have existed, and we wouldn't have been able to refer to 'the first self-replicating molecule that appeared on Earth'. Since we do conceive the existence of that molecule, our explanations for the rest of the world need to fit in with that conception.[Ref. 23]
We can imagine some 'life force' stopping the first self-reproducing molecule from sliding back into the dust whence it came. Evolution theorists vigorously oppose a life force in theory, but in practice they embrace it. They don't call it a life force, they call it 'object selfhood'. They imagine the first self-replicating molecule to have a vestige of selfhood giving it a kind of personal identity. This selfhood is nothing but a life force in disguise. The theorists consider it reasonable to invent a self for a molecule because, after all, they are conceiving the molecule to be a self-existent entity, and something that self-exists ought to have a self to exist! In fact it might even have a selfish self. Having got this far with the invention of a self, the theorists then imagine the self as having a vestige of free will. That seems a reasonable step because some self-existent matter - that of the human kind - appears to have free will. Why not all matter? Then the theorists postulate that the primitive molecule in question causes certain aspects of the world to be as they are. The molecule might manufacture proteins, for instance. That, too, seems a reasonable step. There's not much point in giving a molecule selfhood and a vestige of free will unless those things are manifested somewhere.
So the theorists end up with a primitive 'organism' (the first self replicating molecule) having a rudimentary 'self', a vestige of free will, and an ability to cause things to happen. The things that the molecule causes to happen are those 'natural' for that organism.
What was the natural thing for the first self-replicating molecule to cause? A replica of itself! And that's how replication came about. It came about through the existence of an organism which had a mind to replicate. So the theorists had no need to invent a life force preventing DNA molecules from turning directly into dust. The molecules themselves would take steps to ensure that they didn't do that. [Ref. 24]
This pretend force that we give a biological object - the force exercised by the object's self - is rudimentary free will. It is a bundle of several characteristics that we unconsciously deem a self to possess: unique identity, immortality (i.e., living forever unless caused not to), and causal ability. All this is part of free will. This free will force is as fictitious as the forces of gravity, electricity, and the Coriolis force, but it's also as real as those forces. If those other forces are useful in explaining the behaviour of the world, the fictitious force of free will in inanimate molecules is equally so. It is used, for instance, to explain things the 'behaviour' of a DNA molecule.
Biologists might be satisfied with an explanation of molecular behaviour along these lines (i.e., by the attribution of a life force in the form of object selfhood), but physicists are not. Physicists recognise that a DNA molecule's 'behaviour' can only be something we unconsciously project onto it. The second law of thermodynamics says that such molecules should not exist, so when they do exist, we need a 'force' to come into action to explain why things are not as we expect them to be. This force - the rudimentary free will of the molecule - which the physicists would recognise as fictitious as the Coriolis force or gravity - gives a reason for biological order to persist and grow instead of degenerating into disorder.
The original idea of a life force pre-dates Einstein and was taken seriously in science for a long time. Eventually, most scientists decided that they were only interested in 'real' forces like gravity and electricity. A non-real life force was a kind of superstition. But now that all scientific forces are accepted as our inventions, scientists would not be so antagonistic to reintroducing the life force into the biological sciences. It's status would be as another convenient fiction. The modern understanding of the life force would be our human free will projected onto inanimate objects, a projection so ably conveyed by Dawkins' metaphors. A key difference from the past use of a life force would be that we would openly recognise the projection, and not pretend that it was independent of us.
Evolution theorists such as Richard Dawkins have wagered that scientists will never move away from a dogma of realism. Scientists will continue forever to assert that things exist before they see them, that reality is independent of them (and even independent of them saying it is independent of them). If scientists can be relied upon to stick to that, evolution theorists can be confident in sticking to their own particular fantasy, which is that inanimate things have selfhood and elementary free will.
But surely it is a house of cards. It's all based on the brave hope that physicists and other scientists will stick to a 'realistic' view of the world. But physicists have been moving away from naive realism for a long time, as have philosophers. Biologists are the ones that need to get up to date. They need to appreciate that when there is a conflict between dogmatic realism and logic, logic is certain to be the winner.
Having asserted a real world, biologists assert that it just happens to have had the right characteristics to evolve man. Their justification for this assertion is the evidence of man's evolution. This is illogical, but there we have it. The biologists seem not to be bothered by the extraordinary particularity that their theory requires of the environment. The environment does the selecting in their theory and it must have been truly exquisite if it was determined to select man. 'Determined' is the right word. Richard Dawkins is adamant that the environment does not act randomly.
My guess is that evolutionary theorists have taken heart from some scientists' espousal of 'anthropic' reasoning, which purports to use man's brute existence as an explanation of why the world happens to have characteristics permitting the existence of brute man. John D Barrow and Frank J Tipler describe how almost any deviation from the world's initial conditions would not have allowed man to exist. But those two gentlemen have failed to appreciate that anthropic arguments start with observing the world. Therefore observation must exist before anything else. So a theory of observation is needed before one starts reasoning anthropically.
For me, the process of observation is one of logic. It is a software feature of the world that pre-dates the world's hardware. For Richard Dawkins and others like him who are wedded to a bottom-up explanation of reality, observation is not a process of logic, but of eyes. For them, what happens in eyes can be reduced to sub-processes within eyes, and to sub-sub-processes, etc. Eventually in this reduction they reach a process that's so tiny that nobody can be sure what's going on. That's the point they are unconsciously aiming for. If nobody can be sure what's going on, it's an ideal place to wheel in randomness, selfhood, free will, observation, and anything else you can't explain.
The ultimate sub-sub-process for Dawkins is gene replication in the presence of a modest amount of randomness. (The meaning of 'modest' is chosen to suit, of course.) Having reduced all biological processes to this ultimate process, Dawkins is able to build up a world of reality wherein every biological thing that we see to exist is magically explained.
It would be easy to fill a book on the deficiencies of evolutionary theory. But most people - particularly scientists - are reluctant to articulate these deficiencies. To acknowledge the questionable nature of evolutionary theory would be to admit that we have no proper scientific account of how man arrived on Earth. That would be very serious situation. How can a scientist conduct science without knowing how he came to exist?
On this website, I have been proposing that the observation of existent things - including the 'thing' called man - should be generalised to the belief that these things exist. Belief is to be seen as an element of logic and not as an emergent property of hardware.
But not having belief determined by hardware is seen by many people as going too far against the prevailing philosophy of materialism, which holds that the only existent things are hardware. According to materialism, if beliefs are existent things, somehow they must be hardware. Many people agree with this by pointing to an obvious hardware location for our beliefs, brains.
However, let us consider the following question. If scientists believed that a particular brain state represented a certain belief, would that be the truth of the matter or only their belief in the truth? This is a trick question, of course. But it must be faced by anyone who wants beliefs to be caused by hardware. Consider the first option, that what the scientists believe to be true happens to be true (as judged by an omniscient deity). Then the scientists are using their beliefs to bring this truth into their world. Now consider the second option, that what the scientists believe to be true is merely their belief as to what is true and not necessarily the truth. In both cases they would be relying on their beliefs to get at truth. That being the case, it is not possible that their beliefs be determined by truth.
Scientists must face the uncomfortable fact that replacing belief by hardware will fail if they allow themselves secret beliefs to judge the success of the replacement exercise. I am suggesting on these pages that we replace belief not by hardware but by logic. Even the most dogmatic of materialists will admit the existence of logic. Actually, it is not so much that belief is replaced by logic but is an aspect of logic. As I put it earlier, the 'mental phenomenon' that we know as belief can be seen as a sensing of the logic that governs the world.
The good thing about logic is that it is timeless and existed before the world was created. Thus it pre-dates evolution and is logically able to guide evolution over the millennia. I agree that it seems preposterous that our beliefs should exist before the world. But we need to keep in mind the difference between logical priority and temporal priority. Our beliefs are prior to the world in a logical sense. That says nothing about the sequence of things temporally.
The pre-eminence of belief was in fact proved by Godel, who showed that true things can exist that cannot be proved true. We only know them to be true because we observe them so. We cannot deduce (prove) them. What Godel did was take mathematical deduction to an extreme level then look to see what else existed other than what deduction could demonstrate. What he saw was truth determined by the act of seeing. In effect he proved that naked observation is an act of creation. He did not go on to identify observation with belief, but that generalisation should have been his next step.
I argued earlier that the world must have had an element of irrationality at its start (from even before the big bang). The argument was that if that were not the case, the world could not have any irrationality now, it being impossible for a rational agent (the world evolving rationally) to make an adoption of irrationality. An adoption like that would be irrational and not within the power of a rational agent. So if the world has any irrationality, it must have had it always. Thus, given the obvious irrationality of free will, the world must have had an irrational aspect before the big bang. However, the only things that existed back then were logic and (arguably) God. God is certainly irrational. (Irrational here means non-rational, or not explainable by reason. It does not mean crazy.) God is not believed to be a suitable answer by scientific people (or by intelligent religious people). It suggests the real answer does in fact lie in logic.
But logic is traditionally understood to be 100% rational. Therefore we need to recognise something additional about logic that is irrational and has lain undetected. The undetected element we now recognise as belief, something that has the required irrational character and has long been suspected of having a connection with logic. [Ref. 25]
Belief's role in logic, in the theory presented here, is that it specifies what objects shall exist in the world. Traditionally, logic has been the manipulator of pre-existing objects, but it has always been a puzzle as to where those objects might have come from. The puzzle is acute in evolutionary theory. There, the pre-existing reality (in the form of the environment) was extraordinarily specific and able to determine man.
The mysterious pre-existence of reality - its status as a given in current science - can be removed by having something create it. In the theory here, the creation is done by logic in the form of belief. The world's objects exist because they are believed to. Or we can say that the world is what it is believed to be. Normally we say that the world is what it is 'observed' to be, rather than 'believed' to be, but it is a small step to generalise observation into belief.
Science does indeed rely on observation to specify the world. Scientific observers are like a deity sitting above the world and pronouncing upon an independent reality below them. Richard Dawkins was uncomfortable with man having an outside role like this so he invented a trick to make observation an inherent part of biological science. His trick, as I outlined, was to formulate the theory of evolution in terms of genes doing things. Genes do these things because if they didn't, their survival machines wouldn't survive and the genes wouldn't exist. Thus the genes' existence does not depend on man observing them, but on an intrinsic ability to 'do' things. This amounts to giving these inanimate molecules a rudimentary personal identity and free will. Science has always treated inanimate objects as having a notion of free will (as when a rock 'tries' to roll downhill in a gravitational field) so Dawkins was confident that scientists would not dispute his giving free will to the objects of his own interest.
But in reality a gene is just an inanimate object and it does not have free will. It has no ability to 'do' things at all, not even to 'cause' blue eyes or anything else. If it does cause things, this is only because we project that ability onto it (i.e., we define it in terms of that ability). Richard Dawkins explicitly gives genes a smattering of free will by metaphorically referring to them as 'selfish'. He gets away with this because the layman prefers metaphor to clinical science. Dawkins said that we can always translate the metaphor into scientific language if we wish - but he never does that himself. To do that, he would be obliged to remove from his works all instances of the 200-odd subjective words I listed earlier. By keeping those words in his theory, we cannot be sure he isn't assuming the existence of humans and their subjectivity in his attempt to explain humans and their subjectivity. Removal of those words would also remove the projection of free will onto inanimate objects that he relies upon. Dawkins would not be able to say that a gene 'specifies' certain phenotypic behaviour because 'specifies' is a word of human action and means nothing in physics.
Strictly speaking, evolution theorists should not use the word 'evolution' either. 'Evolution' contains an implied notion of self-action, of things doing their own thing rather than being determined by something else. It implies not only that the things have selves of their own, but that they can do things in the manner of free will. So to use the word evolution when explaining the appearance of man is to prejudge the issue. It's like explaining the epicyclic nature of heavenly rotation by a theory of epicycles. If we do that, it is only to be expected that the answer will be epicycles!
The explanation of free will in the theory here is very simple. It is just a matter of us believing a state of the world to exist. That's all there is to it. I move a chair from here to there by believing it to be in its new position. This is an event that the whole world finds plausible. When scientists examine the brain processes and other biological actions that went on in my body when I make this change to the world, they find the movement of the chair to be 100% determined by the arrangement of matter that exists in the universe prior to the movement. The movement particularly correlates with the arrangement of matter in my brain. Yes, the new state of the world is entirely plausible. If the scientists were unable to find deterministic causes like this, the event in question would be unbelievable. Then it might be called a 'miracle'.
We need to replace the references to plausibility that I have made here by references to belief. The new state of the world is believed, rather than merely believable. We also need to recognise belief as an element of logic. When we do all that, we end up with an explanation of how free will is entirely logical in a deterministic universe.
In formal speech, we also need to delete references to 'we' and 'us' as the agents of belief. There are six billion people in the world and a theory of reality that depended on what each of us believed would be quite uneconomical. The solution I gave was to replace the multitude of agents of belief with a single process of belief. It allows us to say that the world 'is believed' to be what it is, without referring to anyone in particular doing the believing. Thus the beliefs of six billion people are neatly summed into one.
This procedure might seem a bit of a trick, but it is justified by what we do in practice. In practice, we do have a shared belief about what constitutes the world. Just imagine the chaos if the worlds each of us believed in were different! The traditional explanation of this shared belief is the postulation of a mysterious 'reality' lying behind what we see, a reality that is supposed to comprise independently existing hardware objects forcing their existence onto passers-by.
But that cannot be the correct explanation. It relies on the magical existence of hardware objects that can force. No, the right answer involves the existence of software that creates objects on the fly. The software is logic in the form of belief. Whatever is believed to be true is true. (But we can never know what it is that we believe. We can only have some belief as to what we believe). We end up with a world that is not different from what it is believed or observed or determined to be.
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