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Comment: ",Freedom", and ",free will", attributed
to indeterminism (observer participancy)
John Jay Kineman
I argued very similarly to the body of ideas in V. Turchin's PCW
",node", on Freedom in a chapter that I was privileged
to publish in Schneider, S. 1992 Scientist on Gaia, Chapter
7: ",Gaia, hypothesis or worldview?", MIT Press. This
book is out of print now, but it did exist in various university
book stores for a while. I wonder if this somewhat obscure source
has found any readership among the PCW contributors??
Non-determinism seems like the only potentially all-inclusive
approach to me. A common criticism to the quantum origins idea,
however, is the label of ",reductionism.", In a way, Turchin's
comments that modern epistemology is moving away from concepts
of ",reality", may be a way of avoiding the criticism
of reductionism, however I don't think it is necessary to entirely
abandon a concept of reality to achieve this. One of the many
things I attempted to argue in the above referenced paper was
that the great advances of Physics resulted from a striving for
better and better approximations of ",reality,", which
many agreed might be ultimately elusive. The idea of ",reality",
is a goal, or direction if you will, not an achievable or describable
condition (from our perspective). ",Real", constructs
exist within a given worldview and may change between them, but
the attempt to find shared real constructs is one of the things
that advances our knowledge. I argue in the above paper that this
proceeds by a process of crisis resolution, or resolving genuine
paradox (a method described by Einstein). A complete instrumentalism,
which some have argued for, seems like giving up on the goal because
it was finally proven to be not reachable. [*aside]
The physicists may have had some justification for this view at
the time, but other branches of science, with far less justification
(for example ecology and evolution) have now taken a similar view
that each system is unique and that fundamental laws of reality
are illusory, thus uninteresting. But they are in a real no-man's
land, having abandoned classical reality and also avoided indeterminism,
thus replacing ",reality", with nothing at all. The result
is a body of interacting theories that seem to weave endless circles
and lead nowhere (please excuse the personal, and possibly out
of date, opinion here). It still seems useful to construct ideas
about real quantities in our attempt to understand nature, even
if we know in advance that those ideas will eventually prove to
be yet another approximation -- at least in most sciences. The
problem in physics may be more unique in that any new ",real",
objects that are proposed behind the uncertainty veil cannot be
tested from our perspective, so the term 'reality' becomes truly
arbitrary. I think this has reached a level of ontic uncertainty
(at least in classical terms).
But I hope we are not abandoning real constructs simply to avoid
the criticism of reductionism. For one thing, the whole reductionist
label seems inappropriate when the thing one is reducing to is
itself fundamentally uncertain and leading into hidden dimensions
or infinite numbers of simultaneous universes, or various other
theories that are now necessary to account for the fact that we
cannot wholly comprehend our own reality. What's so reductionistic
about that? It reduces to infinity.
Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Turchin's conclusions
in this piece. The real issue is not reality vs. instrumentalism,
but mechanistic determinism vs. ",freedom", as Turchin
puts it, or a ",participatory universe", as JA Wheeler
puts it. Somehow, life itself is the creative agent, and I find
no alternative to attributing this to a complexification (or amplification,
as Niels Bohr argued) of a basic decision event -- describable
in quantum theory in terms of observer-participancy, and experienced
in life as free will.
So, even if the ultimate reality does appear to us as ontic uncertainty
at some level, and owing to our space-time perception, that does
not, to me, invalidate the construction of ",real", quantities
in theory development, as long as we are always ready to replace
them with seemingly more ",real", quantities.
The reality of space, as Turchin discusses in the ",Space",
node, is a good case in point. It is a useful ",reality",
in Newtonian and Cartesian terms, but becomes an encumbrance at
relativistic and quantum scales. That does not mean it is not
",real", because ",real", is relative to one's
prespective or worldview. Perhaps I am now arguing instrumentalism
and don't know it, but there seems to be a distinction here. The
idea that space is an illusion seems inescapable considering relative
causality and simultaneity issues at these extreme scales. Nevertheless,
I'm still going to calculate the mileage before going for a drive,
and use space/time concepts to navigate. These are related but
distinct worldviews, which require different reality constructs.
Within each worldview, however, I believe it is very important
to pursue the testing of presumed real quantities, and if done
thoroughly enough, the will yield great practical knowledge and
ultimately reach a theoretical paradox, the resolution of which
will require a more expanded worldview, within which the whole
process begins again.
END
Footnotes:
Aside story
This reminds me of the story of the male mathematician and male
engineer who were given a challenge to race to a beautiful woman,
but constrained to move in discrete steps, each being exactly
1/2 the distance. The mathematician immediately gave up because
he realized it would take an infinite number of steps to get there.
The engineer raced ahead, figuring he could ",get close enough
for practical purposes.", I left out the physicist, of course,
because he is free to invent an alternative reality, and effectively
change the rules.
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