I took criminal law way back in '87/88. Had a lovely bit of repartee after class with the professor about the absurdity of the whole mental illness defense argument, a line of reasoning that stems from the notion of "guilty mind" as a precursor to guilt in our system of laws and consequences. The limited knowledge of the functioning of the brain even back then suggested that the day will come when a defense is raised that one cannot be convicted of a crime that carries the mens rea requirement because all acts are but the involuntary reactions of the body to the synaptic firings of an organ in the head.
This question about altruism is part of a much larger question: determinism. In what sense are we free to do anything?
I have grown old and thought much about the subject, but I have never never been able to make much sense of the concept "freedom," nor been able to understand what other people think they mean when they use the word.
"I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."On the face of it, it is hard to imagine a statement more ridiculous and childish. On the most charitable interpretation, one may imagine that Henley is expressing the Stoic doctrine that he may face with calmness and fortitude all that life may deal out to him; if that is so, he expresses himself rather poorly and unclearly.
I firmly agree with the more hard-headed view of Herodotus:
"Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances."The concept of "freedom" seems utterly incoherent, for what could it mean but that something appears in the world without being the result of cause-and-effect? The only sense that I can make of
that idea is that things appear out of the blue, with no causal antecedent, utterly at random.
That, I think, is almost the contradiction of what most people mean by free choice, for it means that they have no control over what happens! If all things arise deterministically, through strict cause-and-effect, then we have no control over what happens; and if they arise randomly, by chance, then we also have no control over them! Damned if you do, and damned if you don't!
My objection to the concept of freedom, or free-choice, is enshrined in what Gottfried Leibnitz called, the "Principle of Sufficient Reason": in the outer world, in the realm of thought, and in the soul of any person, nothing arises without a cause, nothing appears "out of the blue."
Step by step, as we have extended our understanding of the world around us, the Principle of Sufficient Reason has been confirmed over and over again, and there is no reason to suspect that it will ever fail.
There is only one exception to this principle, and it is a glaring one. In certain popular formulations of quantum mechanics, quantum events may arise by pure chance, quite randomly, without causation, no hidden variablles even possible.
This is so completely at variance with the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and with everything else we know about Nature, that I think it is a good reason strongly to suspect that the theory of quantum mechanics is incomplete. Albert Einstein objected to viewing quantum mechanics as a complete theory precisely because of its violation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and I agree with him.
Having said all this, to claim that all things arise through strict causation is not to say that all things can be predicted. There many reasons to think that in many circumstances, complete prediction is impossible. I am particularly interested in one source of uncertainty in the world: the relationship between what one may call
System and
Meta-system.
There is much to be said about systems and the environments in which they are embedded. This involves some of the most complex and abstruse analysis that human thought has ever undertaken. However, let me indicate one extremely simple way in which we may approach the subject.
We are in the Mesozoic Era. Dinosaurs reign triumphant. Mammals are merely the fading remnants of one of Evolution's dead-ends. There is every reason to predict that some species of dinosaur will eventually become the first intelligent, technological species to arise on Planet Earth. Everything is running along tickety-boo in a completely deterministic fashion. Suddenly, all is changed. Something from outside the neatly running system of Planet Earth makes its appearance; a big boulder the size of a mountain strikes a region of oceanic sedimentary rock, and all bets are off: determinism has failed. Meta-system dictates system.
Of course, strict determinism is reinstated the moment one expands the system under consideration: for instance, to include everything that is happening in the Solar System. This merely postpones the problem of predictability. The Solar System itself is embedded in a wider realm, and that realm in a wider one, on and on, until one is faced with dealing with the entire universe.
In what sense is "Everything" determined? Is the concept "Everything" even logically coherent? These are subtle questions.
Descending to regions of inferior grandeur, quantum events may involve processes that extend through the entire history of the Cosmos, both past and future --- as, indeed, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would suggest. This may be the key to restoring determinism to quantum theory.
