Free will and other bargains
This is going to be an interesting blog - for me, anyway. Usually, I start out knowing pretty much what I intend to say and then it keeps morphing into the blog that ate Cleveland. Becuz I know SO MUCH STUFF! (Aren't you glad?)
This time, however, I'm writing to find an answer, as in the classic psychotherapist trick, "Well, if you were able to answer the question, what would the answer be?" So, I'll assume that I have the answer - or a way to get there - or something - regarding "free will."
Why bother? Or, "no matter, never mind," as a summary of objectivist metaphysics. But the issue is whether anything matters at all. After all, if we are just the consequence of a buncha atoms bouncing off and attaching to each other, then everything I do, typing this nonsense included, is not of my choice at all. Choice? Where did that come into the picture? Even my belief that I have free will or "volition" is determined to be. It couldn't be otherwise, or, if you want to throw in the idea that maybe God does throw dice, that the universe is an array of probabilities condensing into realities moment by moment, then what is it about that picture that allows for any more free will than the atomistic determinism?
Here's the problem in a nutshell: We know (or we are determined to think that we "know") that each event - interaction between entities - in the universe is totally predictable from the nature of the entities, their mass, charge, spin, charm, velocity, etc. We could plug the numbers into any computer and calculate to an arbitrary degree of precision what will happen next. If we are wrong, it's because we made an error, didn't include enough information, didn't use sufficient precision...
And, of course, there are those who try to find "free will" in uncertainty, specifically the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that there is a limit to our precision in our knowledge of both the position and velocity of a particle, because our measurements themselves disturb the particle and alter the results, and it can be shown that there is a lower threshold of precision beyond which we simply cannot go. It's a universal law. But how does that give us free will? I never see these people who clutch at that apparent blurring of causation demonstrating just how that makes any difference.
So, maybe there's no free will and therefore no knowledge... Just an illusion that we know anything... But if I claim that there is no knowledge, that itself is a claim to knowledge, just as if I declare that "existence does not exist" then the problem is that I'm not just contradicting myself, but I'm lieing as well, as I had to assume that the statement existed as I uttered it, and, of course, if anything at all exists, then existence, the set of all things that exist, also exists. And note that that claim, false and a lie to boot, is also a claim to knowledge as well. And if we do know anything - all knowledge being about something - then there must be identities in existence, entities with specific attributes. What would it mean to say that something exists but has no specific identity? It is only by the interactions based on the attributes - the identity of things that we know them.
So, we can't not assume that we exist and that we know something and that things exist with real identities - that we're conscious. But how we reconcile that with causality is the problem.
One convenient solution that the Christian Apologetics are excedingly fond of is to assume that God did it. How God can create free will for us is not explained, and how God escapes the problem Himself without violating causality and therefore identity and therefore knowledge and existence, is also left hanging, much parallel to those who call upon uncertainty as some sort of solution.
My guess: maybe we haven't properly defined causality.
My previous level of solution on this, which I had relied upon for decades without serious doubts as to validity, ran as follows:
Whatever atoms made me up originally were irrelevant to the discussion. Once "I" exist, as a person, then "I" am just as much a determinor of "my" self as any atom, in fact more so. Causality does not descriminate by size. A big atom is not more causal than a small one, and a pair of atoms joined by electromagnetic interaction into a molecule is just as much a causal unit as the separate atoms were before they conjoined. However, note that the two-atom molecule now has new characteristics possessed by neither of the separate atoms.
For one thing, there is orientation. Imagine two golf balls connected with a tube. If you hold them so that they are in line away from you, then you only see the front one, but if you turn them 90 degrees on any axis, then you will see both of them equidistant from you. They can rotate about their common center in three dimensions, and which plane they rotate in is very important to how they can interact with other molecules or with photons or electromagnetic fields in general.
Also, the tube - in the case of the atoms anyway - is flexible like a spring - disturbing one of the atoms differently (which will always be the case; it will never be absolutely identical) than the other will invariably introduce a vibration between them. a bounce and perhaps a twist of sorts along the spring. The orientation, bounce, and twist, of course, could all be used to store data, as well...