Is Determinism Scientific?

The Fundamental Law

Determinism is the fundamental law.

Particles, which is all there are, behave according to physical laws in a cause and effect flow.

And although evolution by natural selection is seen as a particular law producing life forms and adapting them to their environment, evolution is actually also particles obeying the physical laws. Evolution is exactly what happens when particles obey physical laws.

When life formed and began evolving, nothing new happened. It was a continuation of particles interacting as they must, according to the laws of physics (ie the laws of the universe). A new law of evolution was not required. Evolution proceeded purely as a consequence of physical particles interacting.

This line of thinking can be applied to any scientific theory or any law governing complicated physical systems. All the theories and laws of science can be reduced down to the basic laws of particle interaction. Nothing else is required for the universe to arrive in its current state since the beginning of time or the big bang.

Once the particles have exploded into existence the rest is history, including every miniscule, human-centered detail. There never was, nor is any need for anything to guide or plan a direction or future to arrive at this present moment. 

This applies in every situation and for every circumstance at every moment.

Alive

We have the word “alive” to describe life. The description covers things that use energy, grow , reproduce,move around and do things to benefit their own survival.

But life can be seen as the same as any non living object. Life is just non living materials arranged in such a way as to operate as a body, a machine that can’t help doing what it’s doing because of its atomic arrangement. And this non living material was all brought together by the non living, non thinking, non planning process of evolution  by natural selection.

The Ultimate Humility

 It appears man has brilliantly progressed in his achievement to discover what he really is. But he has really discovered he is only a robot, both body and mind. In fact, man didn't discover it at all. A robot discovered that it is a robot. The feelings of consciousness, self awareness , introspection and understanding are robotic. But just as wonderful as if they were real. But real what?

Chaos Theory

What chaos?. If a butterfly flaps its wings in Ceylon and it affects the weather in New York, that’s only chaos for mathematicians!  The air molecules obeyed the laws of  physics precisely.

The whole universe causes the weather in New York, and does so moment by moment. High and low pressure systems as well as solar flares and cosmic rays.

There is no chaos, only vast complexity. 

Using reduction and physical determinism does predict the future of matter, but it’s too complicated to carry out the computations.. Some quantum randomness may be involved but this does not lead to any chaos.

Trillions of trillions of photons of light travel in perfect order for billions of years to enter a telescope on earth and produce a precise image of a distant galaxy. Unimaginable order, rather than chaos.

A Broad Sweep

Try viewing a broad sweep of the history of the universe.

Particles formed, and that was it. Nothing else was required.

Particles formed, particles moved, interacting, creating forms of matter and energy.

Many forms, more complex and more complicated forms.

It happened by itself with no extra information needed. No guiding hand existed and no plan required. Just an unfolding of physical particles in the hands of the laws of physics. The laws existed, they didn’t change. No purpose or goal was followed.

So far it has ended up like this. Everything determined. No autonomous entities.

No free will.

All would happen again.

Random events could have happened which interact with the universe, and join the laws of causation. If the same random events occurred in a re-run of the present universe, exactly the same universe would result.

The Present Determines Everything

Life, the world , or the universe, doesn’t require any history to unfold. Only the present moment. The past was important but is now irrelevant. 

Take ten cows in a field. If you suddenly brought the universe to an end. Full stop. Nothing left. And then re-created that same moment, the ten cows and the field, atom for atom, they would all carry on exactly as normal. Eating grass, mooing, reproducing, Their bodies and habits and instincts may have taken millions of years to evolve (billions), yet no past is required for them to live and thrive now after having been re-created. The re-assembled grass also grows and seeds and spreads.

A re-assembled atom or the Earth or moon and sun would also carry on from the re-creation point exactly as they would have normally.

The now/present moment determines everything. The past creates the present and becomes instantly unnecessary. 

Emergent Levels?

Are there emergent levels of reality? Emergent from the core theory of particle physics? 

Emergent levels from the level of physics like: chemistry, biology, astronomy, neuroscience, sociology. Are any of these emergent levels?

No! They can all be reduced to physics. All reduced to particle behaviour. To particles and physical law. Reduced directly without connecting disciplines. 

All those categories of matter do exist, but only in the minds of humans. Human conscious minds have categorised these disciplines using language and thought and communication between individuals and groups.

But although this is helpful to humans in deriving a living from the world, or studying the world it is not necessary at a fundamental level.

All these categories are part of a smooth undivided universe that has evolved over the last 14.8 billion tears.

The original particles have interacted and become today's universe with all its qualities, without any further input since the first nanosecond.

No purpose, no meaning, no guidance, no instructions. Just the original boom!,  and what has followed from it.

Of course we ourselves seem to have come a long way from particles. We claim free will and choice and identity and self awareness. Way beyond just particles.

Yet these qualities are also built from particles, and have evolved by particle interaction all due to the laws of physics. Evolution by natural selection is a process that arises naturally due to particle behaviour. It isn’t really an emergent process. It is exactly what happens when particles interact in this universe.

My personal current ‘thinking’ about all this and writing it down is determined to the last thought and the last atom by physical law. It has nothing to do with me making it happen or creating it out of thin air.

This Moment

This moment is the big bang………… only later!

Nothing Special

Natural selection and evolution and life itself are not a special development requiring any new laws of physics or special particles. They are a natural consequence of the universe and its contents under the right conditions.

Thinking that humans living on planet Earth is an amazing, one in a million chance event, is a common but unrealistic thought. In any case one in a million would be far too common given the number of suitable planets.

Everything is natural and normal. Even the extraordinary. If something happens, no matter how unlikely, then it is inevitable.

The Default State

The Natural State, the default state, is to be unaware. Unawareness has no problems and no questions. It simply carries on unhindered by thoughts of how or why.

We are designed to act on our motivations - whichever ones win out.

Folk psychology and folk philosophy and folk science, based on our intuition and feelings and “common sense”, combine with our instincts to move us through life without seeking the real truths.

The discipline of science has revealed how wrong our intuitions and folk beliefs actually are.

Yet even so, knowing what we know, it is almost impossible, even for a scientific mind, to rise above nature’s primitive default settings.

Viewpoint/Perspective

You can see all the ducks and geese and fish and worms in a reedy billabong as directing their wills and their bodies to swim, dive, feed, fight, mate and so on. A mass of creatures each carrying out their own actions and purpose.

Or you could view all the creatures, (birds, fish, shrimps, shellfish, beetles etc.) as the product of, and a creation of the billabong. There is no central will nor divided wills. Only an interacting whole of physical matter created by the environment. A particular goose does not visit the billabong for its own purposes. It is made of aquatic vegetation and aquatic creatures as was the egg from which it hatched. As will be the egg it lays. There is no central point  of beginning, just being. The whole thing is really one thing behaving exactly as it does.

It is even pointless to talk of living and non-living components because both are made from the same ingredients. And both are recycled from one to the other.

There is only the billabong itself, in all its facets and complexities- its extremely simple complexity of being the one thing through and through.

And to take the bigger picture. The billabong is the world.

And the world : the universe!

Determinism

Determinism is not a scientific theory that is applied to the universe.

It’s not a philosophy of science chosen as a possible explanation of how things work. There is science, and science has discovered that a deterministic universe is what we have.

We can then observe and talk about the consequences of that discovery.

Determinism itself is not up for grabs.

If a Zen Tree Fell 

Many animals communicate. Humans used noises and grunts which evolved into language, using words with meanings. Unspoken sentences became private thoughts. Writing and recording followed.

It’s easy to accept this as happening by itself, through natural selection. Eventually leading to the evolutionary creation of a “person” being the owner of the thoughts and even capable of introspection. Yet if the “thinker” is created by an impersonal deterministic process, how could it be a “real” thinker?

Without introspective, personal consciousness there would be no problem. No questions asked, no search for knowledge and no answers required.

The universe would be the Zen tree falling in the forest with no one to see or hear it. Did it really fall? Does it actually exist? Without any evidence?

Amazingly, even with personal aware consciousness, this must still be the case. Determined particles arranged themselves into impersonal persons, within a universe that remains silent.

The Blind Watchmaker

In evolution, the blindness is not just there being no plan or foresight in the mutations that natural selection chooses from, but also no planning or foresight by natural selection itself. Just the environment filtering out the less successful  mutations. It happens blindly, deterministically by itself.

There is also a profound and total blindness by the mover of life- DNA. The DNA that creates life and also facilitates its evolution has no idea of what it is doing. The DNA molecules are what evolves. The bodies it builds are not seen by the DNA. When a new body is born, lives and dies, the DNA has no idea what happened. It saw nothing and knew nothing of the life it had lived. 

Nothing Supernatural

The particles of the universe exist in relationship to the laws of physics. 

The physical laws determine exactly what each particle will do in this moment and the next.

Anything made of particles (like us) is also subject to those laws and what we do in the next moment is already determined by them.

Everything is caused by previous states of the universe and nothing is able to independently affect or influence the world except as  a result of the physical chain of cause and effects.

Determinism is the word used to describe this process in a philosophical sense.

Determinism is the scientific view of the world, and although not everything is known, nothing supernatural has ever been required to explain events. Natural events are all that exists, and to be expected. 

There are supernatural beliefs, but they are ideas stored physically in physical brains. The whole universe can be explained without the need for anything non physical.

A Whale

A Whale living and feeding in Antarctica is an amazing thing. How it swims, how it dives and feeds, how it knows what to do and how it evolved from a land mammal breathing air and returning to the sea.

But this creature can also be viewed as a very  complicated chemical reaction. Built by DNA and interacting with the environment. It can be viewed as a molecular machine obeying the laws of physics.

Everything else is the same as this. Everything is chemical reaction (ie physical reaction). Non life, life, and consciousness. The ocean, the whale, and its brain. All are naturally evolved forms of particles interacting. Including ‘thoughts’, memory and behaviour .

Seamlessness

Even evolution can be seen as purely physics in action. There is no need for “biology”, only a seamless process of material interaction.

At no point is it necessary to see life as an amazing event. Life was inevitable given the natural process of the universe.

Determinism Rules

Determinism overrides everything. Even the rest of science.

Evolution, for example (including natural selection and DNA and genes), provides a clear description of how matter evolved into all the myriad forms of life. Yet DNA can be described in terms of molecular and particle physics.

Evolution is simply and actually physical matter obeying the laws of physics.

This is determinism.

Every micro and macro event is the result of the universe unfolding according to universal law.

Once determinism is understood to be the case, there is no need to know all the details or insist on ongoing proof.

The whole universe now, is the result of the universe in the last moment, and the cause of the universe in the next moment and so on. This includes you, your life and your thinking, and mine!

At no point does mind or will take over. Everything is caused by previous things. Mind or will is a result, not a cause. Everything is the ongoing result of the initial cause.

Emergence

Basically, emergent processes do not exist. There was only one emergence, and that was from the big bang. Even the bang itself was part of a continuous causal chain of physical law, operating on fundamental particles.

Could it be said that language emerged from evolving human life? Could it be said that life itself emerged from inanimate matter.

It didn’t. Neither did. Both language and life are the inevitable result of particle interaction.

We can talk in terms of biological evolution of cultural evolution, and we do, but those very thoughts and words and concepts can be pinned down as particle behaviour and traced all the way back to the beginning of the universe. Nothing ever emerged except by particles interacting with each other, totally without purpose, plan meaning or guidance.

Nothing emerged that has the power to do anything independently. Nothing is autonomous and cut off from the chain of interactions.

A mind appears to be thinking things over and making decisions in a way that inanimate matter cannot. But the mind is inanimate matter having evolved into what the owner would see as a free will, self aware, thinking machine. But a mind is constructed by ordinary particle actions, and its activities are particles interacting in the present moment. Nothing ever emerged from that causal chain.

This universe was always that chain in action. And still is. This is exactly it!

The Physics of Matter

You can read up on behavioural science, human psychology and social science. But in the end (or actually in the beginning) it boils down to the physics of matter. How matter behaves. Because how matter behaves is how we behave. There is no other behaviour.

When we study human behaviour at the cultural or social level we have left the building blocks of matter way behind. If we begin tracing back what causes what, we end up with the fundamental particles and the laws of physics. No other understanding is needed to understand the mystery of our existence or the workings of the universe.

Truth about Determinism

If all observation and experiment and research is determined, and all theorizing and thought and communication is determined, how can that determined rigid process lead to anything true?

Scientific truth is facts built up on facts with ongoing and subtle adjustments by brilliant mathematical and scientific minds. How could determined particle behaviour produce that?

It is certainly true that evolution by natural selection has produced amazing forms of life that do feign a knowledge of truth. For example the birds wing (aerodynamics), the eye (optics), the liver (chemistry) and so on. However no designer, planner or knower is involved in this. Only determined particle behaviour.

Can the same be said for, or applied to, scientific or philosophical thought? Can logical thinking, scientific knowledge and the truth of determinism itself, be due to determined particle interactions?

Has particle behaviour discovered the truth of determinism by the development of human minds? Has it done this in the same “blind” way that determinism produced the human brain or the kangaroo?

By natural selection.

What would be the explanation of human minds grasping the true process of all matter, and even their own thoughts, in the true theory of physical determinism?

Living the Truth

When you’ve done all the hard work of reading the many books for the layperson on understanding what life and the universe are. Then after that indisputable and satisfying knowledge comes the desire to not just know the truth but to live the truth. And feel the truth.

When the truth science has discovered strips away nearly everything we felt and assumed about ourselves, how does what’s left arrive at understanding what it really is?  Is this possible at all?

Or is everything included in the grand illusion?

All of it?

Science

Science doesn’t in any way set out to develop a philosophy of, or to prove determinism. Science simply discovers facts about nature. Facts about matter, about living things, about brains. 

Determinism becomes an obvious truth when the facts are put together. All the facts discovered by science fit the behaviour of the natural physical world. Nothing supernatural is needed to explain anything.

How the world works becomes obvious, even if difficult to take on board.

What is Fundamental?

Is evolution the fundamental topic to explore, to give the ultimate explanation of what we are?

Or is science a more fundamental method including physics, chemistry, biochemistry, cosmology etc?

Or is fundamental particle physics the most fundamental science that reduces everything else to the basic building blocks of matter and the interactions that govern them?

Whatever it is, viewing the universe (and ourselves) in the true scientific way, is the total upending of folk science ( ie “common sense”).

Put differently, it’s the huge and total gap between what we believe we are, and how we act, and what we scientifically really are, and how we could act with that knowledge.

Truth and Illusion

Given determinism, there is no reason to call nature “red in tooth and claw”, or describe it as a “battle for existence” or “the survival of the fittest”.

Nature is a neutral, non competitive process that occurs for no other reason than the laws of physics. Any interpretation we may put on it is part of that determined process.

You may want to think about how your ideas can form, or how knowledge can come into being, but that thinking is also determined.

There appears to be logic and thought and connection by communication, and yet those processes are not happening according to individual powers or wills, but by determined physical interactions. The human mind or will appears to be a free agent which is the doer of things, but it is actually an effect which is the result of things.

The universe rolls along by cause and effect and so do we. Neither has any choice. There is no purpose or goal. It is thought the universe will all fizzle out in the end.

Yet to make it all worthwhile and riveting, we are programmed to enjoy the illusion of the feeling of free will and choice.

Physical Reductionism

Physical reductionism means everything can be reduced to physical events and physical causes. Including thoughts, subjective self, all decisions, actions , and interactions. All personalities.

Everything was physical in the beginning and nothing has been, or needed to be, added to end up with conscious human minds on a planet in the universe.

Artificial Intelligence

Never before have we had the scientific knowledge to truly understand 99.9% of what we are, and how we came to be.

Compare that with 300 years ago, or current religious creation stories, or primitive tribal customs and teachings. Born into that you have no chance to learn the truth. But in the last 150 years, and particularly the last 75 years we have had a wonderful chance to understand what science has discovered:

Evolution produces all adaptations.

Evolution produces brains.

Evolution produces self (subjectivity).

Evolution produces thinking which unravels the truth of the physical world.

Evolution produces subjective awareness, which feels that its own logical processes understand the truth of the physical world.

Consider:      “All intelligence is artificial intelligence”.

But How?

It’s all particles without purpose or meaning or plan. Science proves this. Yet two people talking definitely appears to entail meaning and purpose. How could that be due to particles blindly interacting according to physical laws? Yet it must be!

But how?

How can this written sentence (and accompanying thought) be without meaning and be “simply” particle behaviour?

How could meaningless, unorganized particle behaviour lead to human knowledge, language, meaning and purpose as experienced by human consciousness itself.

What is thought? What is communication?

If you care to read up, science is unravelling this, and eventually it will become common knowledge.

The Two Approaches

There are two proofs or approaches to the fact of determinism and lack of free will.

One is studying human behaviour, consciousness, neuroscience and genetics which reveal that human actions are caused rather than chosen. Free will is an illusion evolved by natural selection as a survival and reproductive adaptation.

The other is that everything is made of fundamental particles, full stop. Fundamental particles obey the laws of physics and nothing else. The complex and intricate workings of human beings can be reduced to particles obeying physical laws.

Free will is an evolved illusion, an adaptation shaped by natural selection improving survival and reproduction. In this case done in a purely determined particle by particle process.

Living Determinism

If I can’t really imagine how to live my life as if there’s no free will then there being no free will is a theory that I don’t really believe. Yet I do believe there is totally no free will.

It’s scientifically and logically true. It’s as true as anything can be. Like the theory that the Earth spins on its axis making the sun appear to rise and set when it actually doesn’t move.

We do believe that theory yet we could say we don’t live it. And we don’t train ourselves to feel the Earth rolling towards the East while the sun is motionless. We are happy to experience the illusion that the sun rises and sets, although an astronomer might experience the truth. This is how we (including scientists) experience a deterministic life with no free will.

I believe the science and logic that says there is no free will, but that truth is not lived by me. It is only known. Not felt and lived. It’s quite possible that living the experience of determinism is impossible.

In a determined world, the subjective awareness of consciousness itself must be determined (not free). The thinking self identity that would observe itself, based on its own logic, is determined. Its thoughts and conclusions are determined.

So are determined thoughts genuine introspections or enquiries? Are the answers and conclusions freely worked out by the mind?

If determinism reigns, how can there be any progress based on free will? How can this situation be? It can only be the past that is causing the now, like clockwork. So how can any progress in knowledge be made by free will pondering?

How can a mind/person/self actually think anything through if everything, including all thoughts, are determined? They must be determined by something else. It must be that all thoughts are the result of previous physical causes, rather than the result of a freely pondering mind.

There is no neutral space where the mind can freely wander this way or that while it weighs up what to conclude or decide. We do experience decision making and undecidedness yet these experiences must also be determined. As is the experience of reaching a conclusion. 

Why is there such a stunning and convincing appearance of free will in the subjective experience of thinking, when science and logic show it can’t exist.

It appears that the mind communicates with itself to work things out. Asking itself questions and mulling over information in memory and trying out different solutions in thought before acting on conclusions. 

The mind appears to communicate with other minds as well, using language, writings, video etc.. Sometimes educating itself and at other times bouncing ideas around in real time to try and come up with thoughts that may not be available to the single mind alone.

It’s hard to reconcile this intricate and apparently meaningful communication with the mechanical and meaning-free rules of physics.

It seems possible to acknowledge the deterministic nature of all living creatures, and the material universe, all except human thought. Including human language. Especially my own thoughts which I think of as “me”. Yet if dogs can bark and growl at each other, that is it! If one ant can show the way to others, to a food source, that’s it also!

Communication, knowledge, awareness have evolved deterministically, by natural selection, by molecular biology, and ultimately by particle physics.

But how does true knowledge of the world, and true meaning in thoughts and communication come about? How could human thinking free itself from being determined and become truly logical and scientific? 

It can’t and it didn’t. Somehow the appearance of creative free will became the illusory framework for human social life and a means to model the world.

And there must be a clearer and more precise and satisfying way to describe this mystery. I have made a note to myself to “keep at it”.