This essay deals primarily with a technical point, the relationship between the human mind and the human body and the reconciliation of free will with causality. I call this a technical point because it is not strictly required of philosophy.
A philosophy without a position on the nature of reality or without one on the validity of ethical statements would be deficient. All a philosophy need say about free will is that men have it. All it need say about causality is that an entity's future states are dependent upon its nature.
There is no reason why a philosophy needs to take a specific position on how the mind and body interrelate beyond what is necessary to validate its ethical system. There is no reason why a philosophy needs to say more about causality than that causal claims are valid claims and can be investigated according to the criteria of its epistemology.
In other words, a consistent philosophical framework need say little about causality. In fact, future science may show our current notion of causality to be quite incorrect. This would not damage any philosophy that had not exceeded its proper scope. A broad notion of causality is a scientific notion not a philosophic notion.
For these reasons, this essay primarily serves two purposes. First, it serves as a further example of the utility of Objectivist principles in an area of inquiry that is primarily scientific. Second, it serves as a defense against attempts to `disprove' Objectivism based on alleged inconsistencies between Objectivism and present scientific discoveries.
Let me first state that this essay discusses my own views. My views are consistent with Objectivist fundamentals but do not coincide with those of certain official Objectivists in a few particulars. In most of these particulars, it is my position that the Objectivists involved attempted to extend Objectivism beyond the bounds of philosophy. I ask you to filter my ideas through your own reasoning and ask me to defend those views with which you may not agree.
Modern science is frequently misrepresented as supporting either of two opposing views. Some will claim that science supports the notion that causality is an illusion and all things are indeterminate -- they typically cite Quantum Mechanics.
The flip side of this false dichotomy is the position that science `requires' or `presupposes' the notion that all future facts of reality are potentially determinable from the present facts of reality. This doctrine claims that a belief in true free will is incompatible with a scientific viewpoint.
The first position, that all things are indeterminate, would make reason impotent. If all things are indeterminate, reason can reach no useful conclusions. Of course, it would then be incapable of realizing that all things are indeterminate -- `indeterminate' refers to a specific status.
Stating that all things are indeterminate is precisely equivalent to stating that all generalizations are false. To weaken it to `all generalizations are questionable' is to tell us something unspectacular that we already know. In short those who take this position must castrate it into irrelevancy, defend it into absurdity, or reject reason wholesale.
The second position, that of strict determinism, undermines reason directly by declaring it impossible. The link between freedom and reason is stronger than is sometimes realized. Nathaniel Branden discussed this issue in his essay The Contradiction of Determinism (The Objectivist Newsletter, May 1963).
If we accept the thesis of strict determinism, that future states of the universe are completely determined by its present state, men are not fundamentally free to compare their hypotheses with reality and reject them if they do not correspond. Nor are they free to act as moral agents.
It will not do to argue that men possess a built-in, self-correcting mechanism. Men could equally well be argued to possess a built-in, self-deluding mechanism. Without the freedom to choose one's values and beliefs, one believes and values what one is `constructed' to believe and value. One has no say in the matter.
Obviously, one must act as one is `constructed' in the sense that one cannot act against one's nature. The key point is that one's construction does not completely determine one's behavior. To argue that it does it to be vulnerable to the above refutation.
Strict determinism also demolishes ethics. How can you hold a person responsible for his decisions when he has no say in the matter and cannot affect the future state of the universe? How can he if it is completely determined by factors that existed prior to his conception? Without free will, men can have no volition.
Rational men do not blame murders on guns and knives -- we blame them on murderers. We do this because we know that guns and knives do not have volition. There is nothing they could have done to change their `behavior'. It is obvious upon introspection that the same is not the case for you.
One cannot retain strict determinism and still blame people for their actions. True, their `configuration' is part of the cause of their actions, but their consciousness is not. How you can justify punishing their consciousness for acts beyond its control, that it could not have prevented?
Free will is as axiomatic as consciousness because the two are fundamentally inseperable. A consciousness without volition is a contradiction in terms. Not only is it psychological suicide for a human to accept that he has no control over his future and other humans have no control over theirs, but it is philosophical suicide.
But perhaps the strongest ammunition against the strict determinist's position is the fact that it does not accurately reflect modern science. We see from quantum fact that indeterminism is the rule in the micro world. That is, our universe is a mixture of determinism and indeterminism. Philosophy requires neither, but it does require causality.
The sense in which Quantum Mechanics supports free will is that it provides a counter-argument to the following invalid argument: suppose someone `chooses' to fire a gun at someone. At some point in the past, there must have existed two possible future states of the universe for the same `time', one in which he fired the shot and one in which he didn't and his volition alone had to make the choice.
But how could this be. Suppose we `roll' the two possible futures side by side and stop the `projector' at the first state where the two differ. Suppose in one an electron goes left and in the other right. Well, wouldn't this violate conservation of momentum? Supposing that some other electron goes the opposite way, we can preserve momentum, but what of conservation of energy?
In other words, Quantum Mechanics provides a refutation to the claim that science has demonstrated determinism. Of course, science could never do any such thing -- I am as certain that I have free will as I am that I am conscious.
At this time, there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that one's consciousness `operates' the body through manipulating the collapse of quantum wave functions, and this is not what I am claiming. What I am claiming is that strict determinism can no longer claim any scientific support for its view, and it never had any philosophic support.
Man's nature includes his free will. He can choose to go to sleep early, but he cannot choose to disappear. The future states of a man depend on his present state, the present state of the universe, and his nature as a rational, free-willed being (and possibly upon truly random factors).
This is why Objectivism's principle of causality is phrased according to the potential future states available to an entity and not its actual future state. This is also why Objectivism's principle of causality does not itself refer to causes or causation.
This may seem paradoxical, but it is actually quite important. There is no a priori reason why the universe need be structured as a succession of causes. This will be discussed in detail in Existence and Cosmology, Part Two.
We need entities. To know that one exists requires knowing that there are existents. We need a link between future states, else man would not be equipped to survive. What we need not specify philosophically is the precise nature of the implementation of these requirements. That is for future (and present) science to illuminate.
Objectivism makes existence and consciousness primaries and declares both axiomatic. Existence means the existence of entities that one can perceive. Consciousness refers to one's own ability to do the perceiving (among other things) and the existence of perceptions.
This brings us to the issue of the relationship between existence and consciousness in the specific case of the relationship between a conscious mind and the body that houses it. The problem arises when we attempt to explain how conscious decisions manifest as physical actions; I choose to raise my hand and it rises. How does the decision, a mental event, result in the raising, a physical event?
Objectivism grants existence axiomatic status because it cannot be denied, is implicit in any claim, and can be gestured at and perceived directly. Objectivism grants consciousness axiomatic status because it cannot be denied, is implicit in any claim and can be perceived directly.
Present and future science has uncovered connections between mind and matter. These include the correspondence between mental states and brain electrical activity, the correspondence between damage to the brain and mental impairment, the explanation of the physical operation of the senses, the discovery and explanation of the operation of the peripheral nervous system and so on. All of these discoveries form an argument that human mental phenomena depend on a physical structure to support their existence.
But it is important to remember that the mental events are not their physical structure. A pin jabbing me is not the same as the pain I feel when a pin jabs me. The neurons that fire in my body and my brain as a pin jabs me are very closely associated with the pain I feel but they are not the pain I feel. The pain itself is a mental phenomenon.
However closely associated the pain and the physical event are, they are not the same. They are entities of fundamentally differing types. Just as `three' is a fundamentally differenty type of thing thing than three of anything in particular.
The sense in which the pain is the physical activity is the sense in which seeing two sides of a coin is seeing the same coin. These are two different appearences or modes of manifestation of the same underlying phenomenon. To call that phenomenon physical or mental (and thus one merely a manifestation of the other) accomplishes nothing; it is clearly both.
An analogy to consider is feeling and seeing the same object. The object is not the sight of it and not the feel of it. The object is the existent whole that manifests itself in both sense modalities.
Note that this position is very different from a primacy of consciousness position. Primacy of consciousness refers to the notion that mental events can exist without any physical existents to support them. There is certainly no reason to suppose that this is the case.
This position is also not Cartesian Dualism. Cartesian Dualism is the position that mental existents and physical existents are independent. There is no reason to suppose it possible for mental existents to exist without a physical substratum to support them. In fact all of the available evidence suggests that complex physical structures are necessary for complex mental events to take place.
Nor is this position idealism. Idealism is the notion that mental existents are somehow more real than physical existents. There is no such thing as degrees of reality in this context. All that is, is.
Entire contents Copyright (C) 1994, 1995 Joel Katz,
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