A Model of Models
I. The Story
It began with a question I once asked myself: why do I learn? My answer was simple and came easily: to seek truth. Then another question followed: what is truth? Truth, I thought, must be whatever is left once all complex systems are reduced to their fundamental parts and rules. I imagined that these intricate systems were only the sum of the systems within them, like a series of concentric spheres. I wondered what was at the innermost point of this structure, and how far within it would be found. I had no name for it at the time, but later I would discover that this process is known as reductionism. Through a series of logical steps, this led me to another concept called determinism. As I investigated it more thoroughly, I would eventually question whether or not free will exists. Specifically, I wanted to know if reductionism necessarily leads to determinism, and if so, it eliminates the possibility of free will. I have concluded that when all things are reduced to their truths as defined above, true free will seems to be impossible. I have used the I-Search essay to thoroughly and efficiently refine my existing ideas.
I started by seeking the outer sphere in my metaphor. Finding it was an uncertain prospect. I decided that I could start somewhere approximate and then attempt to get my bearings from there. I considered politics to be somewhere near the outer reaches, since it is more or less human specific and not found in nature, but is still scientific and is a complex set of objects and rules. Then I considered that politics is really emergent from systems of economics.
I thought of economics as applied sociology. I felt I had strong support from a television series I had seen. The BBC's The Trap questions whether or not neoliberal economics, as exemplified by modern capitalism in the USA and the UK, are actually based on sociological, psychological, and even genetic factors. That idea was based on observations by Richard Dawkins and Napoleon Chagnon (“The Lonely Robot”). Though Adam Curtis, the director, indicated that basing these assumptions entirely on game theory and genes was wrong, I still thought that deriving economics from sociology was correct. After viewing the series, I felt that I could justify breaking economics apart into sociology, which was then reduced to psychology, and psychology itself to neurology. Neurology was easily described as applied biology.
Here I noted that the practicality of my model was rapidly beginning to diminish. Nonetheless, I had to continue inward to satisfy my curiosity. Biology could be modeled with chemistry. This made me realize that all life, since its beginning, can be considered one vast chemical reaction, especially since it likely began as a thermodynamic selection of certain types of chemicals. Before writing my I-Search essay, I had assumed that it “somehow” worked out that way. I decided to test my assumptions by finding supporting evidence. That was the first sub-topic I researched.
I worked through a lot of murky material on the Web when I searched for abiogenesis. Then I recalled a video I had seen years ago in which the theory was explained while the final movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 poured forth. I remember how exalted I had felt as I understood that it was really chemistry that gave us what is perhaps the greatest piece of music ever composed as well as my ability to enjoy it. I knew this was what I wanted to find. I did find it, but I was worried that it may have been outdated, having been posted in 2008 (“The Origin of Life”). Then I noticed that its “About” section provided a link to an overview of the work of Dr. Jack Szostack. That site was funded by the National Science Foundation and is part of an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. I thought it would be a reliable and concise source for the information I sought.
This site showed me how the Szostak Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital had demonstrated that chemicals can interact in a way that seems to be a precursor to life. Fatty acids (lipids) that exist independently of life naturally clump together (“Exploring Life's Origins: Fatty Acids”). These likely existed in the oceans early in Earth's history. Nucleotides, the basic chemicals that make up RNA and DNA, were also likely found there in many varieties. Some nucleotides can form chains from chemical processes alone, becoming polymers (“Exploring Life's Origins: Nucleic Acids”). By way of their chemical properties, they happen to self-replicate (“Nucleic Acids”). The polymers, as well as individual nucleotides, would sometimes have been caught inside the lipid structures (“Fatty Acids”). The polymers could replicate to the point where they would break, which could cause the lipid membrane to stretch and break (“Exploring Life's Origins: Protocells”). The resulting vesicles would contain some of the nucleotide chains that their “parents” had (“Protocells”). Imperfect copying of the polymer chains led to changes (mutations) and a very small number of them were such that they caused faster replication (“Protocells”). Other protocells that replicated more slowly were out-competed and evolution began. And from there, life as it is defined by scientific understanding has existed. Life is chemistry.
For me, this was the most difficult transition to make. It happened that I had to work from chemistry to biology, but the reasoning was symmetrical and made sense in reverse. I was pleased with the results of that part of the search. After that point, I felt that I had built up a considerable amount of mental inertia. It was easy to describe chemistry as physics, and physics as mathematics.
Once I had reached mathematics, I thought that if I went further inward I could no longer describe things. Still, things could be reduced to their rules. I came to rest at Boolean algebra and I thought I could proceed no further. It was a familiar concept to me because it is a critical part of computer science, which I have studied to some extent.
With only two values, true and false, and three basic operations (and/or/not), I thought I had finally found the absolute center of my concentric sphere model. I was able to move inward just a bit more to find an “is/is not” dichotomy, which I thought was probably irreducible. I needed to name this idea, and some digging through Wikipedia revealed that what I was thinking of is called the principle of bivalence (“Principle of bivalence”). From there, I found a link to another Wikipedia article named “Three-valued logic”. In the article, it is explained that this adds a third value to bivalence which is the equivalent of “unknown”. In this I was continuing to check my model against others that could refute my own, yet mine seemed to hold together well. I thought that the idea of “unknown” was useful but unnecessary, as facts are true or false whether or not they are known. Simplicity was better for what I was trying to say.
The idea of something being itself or not itself seemed to be universal. All that is required for that is “a thing which exists”. The only rules needed are “does/does not” or “is/is not” and so forth. My model of existence is consequently this: certain things exist and they follow very simple binary rules. Once again, I wanted to know if my own logic had any basis in reality. I acquired copies of my favorite physics books and tracked down the facts I was looking for.
Experimental evidence seems to support my model, since every elementary particle in the universe appears to be identical to others of its kind (“Particle Physics - Are all electrons identical?”). In our observable universe, the laws of physics are the same everywhere and appear the same when observed from any direction (Greene 222-223). These concepts are known as translational and rotational invariance (Greene 222-223). Therefore, there are discrete things and consistent rules to which there are no exceptions at the lowest level of everything humans have ever observed or measured.
Long before I had embarked on this research, I was thrilled to think I was justified in thinking that everything in human experience could be reduced. I was satisfied that I had generated a sound postulate, but I had never thought to ask what it really meant. It was a novel way of thinking about reality, but I had never taken it further.
Then at some point, I stumbled upon a web comic that presented an illustration in which scientific fields were arranged by purity, following precisely the order I had previously determined (“xkcd: Purity”). I realized that perhaps I had independently assembled a model that was already known to some. I decided I had to see what others have said.
That was the next part of the research I undertook for this essay. Though my ideas were my own, I realized that in our postmodern world, someone else had likely thought them up before I did. I was surprised to discover that there are philosophical and religious traditions describing similar concepts that were conceived centuries ago. Eastern traditions such as Philosophical Taoism, Hinduism, and Zen describe the deterministic “flow” of the universe and how humans can work within it (“Determinism”). In the West, in the 3rd century BCE, the Stoic Chrysippus wrote that nothing is accidental and that all things have a hidden cause (Zeller 178). Bertrand Russell, an influential logician, describes in A History of Western Philosophy how the Stoics “believed that there is no such thing as chance, and that the course of nature is determined by natural laws” (276). The Abrahamic religions logically implied determinism, since an omniscient and infallible god would know everything that will happen and as such, things must only happen in that one way.
Labels, if not too broad, could be helpful, I thought. Retrieving definitions from Wikipedia, I discovered a number of useful philosophical positions that had already put into words what I had been thinking. Determinism was my starting point. Reductionism, the position in which all things are only the sum of their parts, allowed me to describe exactly how things could be reduced (“Reductionism”). From there I found materialism, which I could use to describe specifically to what things are reduced. Materialism is the position that reality is made only of physical matter and that all things emerge from its properties (“Materialism”). These two ideas seemed obvious to me but now I had a name for them.
I wanted to liberate absolute reality – what I called truth earlier – from the problems of relative perception. By that effort I came upon eternalism. In this system of thought, past and future events are always “there” no matter what (“Eternalism (philosophy of time)”). It would be logical that if we exist in the pasts of the versions of us that exist in what we call the future, then whatever we will do has already been determined because it has already happened.
Our perspectives as humans are limited and thus we perceive passage of time. C. W. Rietdijk and Hilary Putnam point out that if Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity is true, then what is considered to be the present by any observer is always relative to all others (“Rietdijk–Putnam argument”). Because of this, it would seem that any specific frame of reference in time cannot be any kind of absolute present. This supports eternalism.
I also questioned what “free will” means. I searched Academic Onefile from the GRCC library and I found a relevant article called “Determinism determined” that was published in Appraisal, the journal of The Society for Post-Critical and Personalist Studies. In this article, Jasper Doomen argues that free will is always vaguely defined and that it actually emerges from “decisive factors” only, exactly as I have suggested (“Determinism determined”). As I read further, he also addressed one of my pending questions. He wrote that quantum mechanics and chaos theory are often used to refute determinism, but that such things may only appear random due to the limitations of the observer (“Determinism determined”).
One might put forth John Bell's theorem to argue against reductionism and determinism. While an explanation of the Bell theorem's workings is beyond the scope of this essay, it effectively stops determinism at the quantum scale. This alone could falsify a deterministically modeled universe, so I looked into it more deeply. In GRCC's library, I found the book The Ghost in the Atom. He described a super-deterministic universe in an interview. “Not only is inanimate nature deterministic, but we, the experimenters who imagine we can choose to do one experiment rather than another, are also determined”, he said, “[and] if so the difficulty which this experimental result creates disappears” (Davies and Brown 47). He seemed uncertain of whether or not the universe is super-deterministic, but this loophole was exactly what I was hoping to find. Finally, I was ready to synthesize all the material I had gathered into an elegant model, which I would then use to examine the possibility of free will's existence.
II. The Results
Reductionism led me to materialism and eternalism which then led to me absolute determinism. If all things can be reduced to tiny parts that follow logical rules, then there is no such thing as randomness. Complexity causes the illusion of randomness, but nothing is actually so. Even if we do not know or cannot know the rules, they still exist. If randomness is not real, then all things are necessarily deterministic. It then follows that if these rules determine how all things interact, then there can only be one way in which anything happens. I see no way to circumvent the logic, but there is the question of what is practical.
One physicist who is quite practical is Stephen Hawking. I was able to find his and Leonard Mlodinow’s book The Grand Design at GRCC’s library. They wrote that the modern understanding of biology acknowledges that all biological processes, including anything that happens within a brain, are controlled by the laws of science rather than by some external agent (Hawking and Mlodinow 32). Since a human body is made of around one thousand trillion trillion molecules, there is little use in attempting to predict anything with this knowledge (Hawking and Mlodinow 32). Hawking and other physicists use a framework called an effective theory to create models without being concerned with the exact details underlying what the theory describes (Hawking and Mlodinow 32).
It might then be said that free will effectively exists. I suspect that it still does not. One of my favorite books, Gödel, Escher, Bach, probably had what I needed, I guessed. After some searching, I found the section I was looking for. “You can't “think” your neurons into running some nonneuronal way, although you can make your mind change style or subject of thought”, wrote Hofstadter (686). Therefore, everything we feel that we have control of is a result of the mechanistic actions of our neurons, which we do not control. The self seems to exist because the rules allow it, but it can never exist outside of the rules.
Kurt Gödel's second incompleteness theorem supports that. In basic terms, any theory that has sufficient completeness to describe itself is inconsistent since it is complete enough that it can “break” itself. The English language, for example, can be broken in this way with a single sentence: “This sentence is false.” If it is false, it is true, but if it is true, it is false.
The theorem can be applied to the human mind. All we have to examine our own minds is our logic. How can one know if one's logic is consistent and actually logical if one has only their own logic by which to judge it (Hofstadter 696)? How can one know that one truly chooses anything? I think that free will is impossible because there is no way to describe the workings of a mind any way but deterministically. Determinism is inescapable.
III. The Significance
Thus, I conclude that that free will does not exist and cannot exist. Whether or not that matters is something I leave to the reader to decide. My view is that this is a beautiful, elegant thing. Everything that is has arisen from the most elemental parts and laws to form the experience we call the universe, and what we observe is the only way it could be. There are no other possibilities, at least not in this universe. Everything of beauty, even the human experience of finding something beautiful, exists because the universe is a clockwork machine.
One may then question whether or not there is meaning in anything. I would answer “probably not”. I am familiar with Camus and Nietzche and their famous advice on how to deal with such a dilemma. One of my sources even mentions Camus in the introduction to one of his books as a major influence in deciding to study the nature of reality (Greene 3). I acknowledge that though I think I know some of the truth, it means nothing. I can pretend to have free will because it feels good and ultimately makes no difference. Writing this essay, even this sentence, was going to happen and there was nothing that could have changed that fact. Even if I undid it, that too would have been determined by a near-infinitely complex chain of causal events. But I do not feel helpless, because I understand why whatever happens is inevitable.
In retrospect, this was a very ambitious topic to cover. My first step was to attempt to gather all of my independent thoughts into something structured and useful. I was reasonably confident that Wikipedia was a trustworthy source for stable subjects such as overviews of philosophies, so I relied on it to get started. Branching off from there, I found a large amount of material that had supported my claims. Online sources were a great overview, but the books I referenced were much more precise. I think both broad and specific viewpoints were useful. Searching academic papers was a bit more difficult, as surprisingly, there seemed to be a strong resistance to the nonexistence of free will in those that I had found. In the future, if I further research this topic, I would like to have a dialogue with someone who is well versed in the concepts I investigated.
Most significantly, my research has opened many doors in my mind. Finding all these new ideas was exciting. I want to better understand the exact details of everything I have written about. I want to understand the science and the philosophy and the pure mathematics and logic to which I have alluded. I want to view this model I have built through the lens of Gödel's second theorem. Maybe the model does not truly hold because it could be reduced, or perhaps it will break itself when it becomes detailed enough. Perhaps I am stuck in an infinite recursive loop of models of models and so on. I suspect that no human model will ever define reality as it absolutely is, yet I will try for one. I will concede that sometimes I want to be wrong because confronting the unknown is so thrilling.
Very surprisingly, I feel that I may want to look into Zen traditions for further abstract understanding, though I am a strictly non-spiritual person. I could say that if I am only a part of the same stuff as everything else, existing eternally, following the same set of rules, then perhaps I am truly one with everything, and there is only “here” and “now”. Perhaps that is a part of the truth for which I search.
Works Cited
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