Freedom's just another word for driving in reverse

What follows is a very strange idea, perhaps even an original idea, though probably not; I just don't know whose idea I'm stealing. Anyway, it should be viewed with great suspicion and certainly not taken on faith. In all probability it's just plain false, but I've thought about it till my brain hurts, and I want your brain to hurt, too.

In the traditional view of the three-dimensional world in which things change with the passage of time, the doctrine of "determinism" has gone something like this:

For any event e, there exist other prior events such that, given the laws of physics, e necessarily follows from those other events.

and "freedom" has meant something like this:

In at least some circumstances, agents (usually people) originate their actions by their own will, uncaused by antecedent physical events; i.e., they can act as it turns out that they do, or they can act otherwise.

Clearly, there is at least an apparent incompatibility between the two, and philosophers have exercised their art quite a bit on the issue. Roughly, they've gathered into three camps:

1. those who insist absolutely on determinism and deny freedom;
2. those who insist that we have direct experience of freedom, and that determinism must therefore be false; and
3. those who argue that that the two are actually compatible, but that freedom is actually a weaker thing, consisting only in the ability to do what one voluntarily decides to do, even if that voluntary decision itself was necessarily determined by the laws of physics and the prior state of the physical universe.

There's something more than a little stinky about the last group. To put it simply, they're cheating. If freedom is just "not being bound, gagged and locked in a windowless cell," then it's not quite the same thing you'd have in mind when you said "I'm free to go to a movie tonight, or not, as I choose," is it? So really, once we've thrown out the fraudulent option, we're left with the simple question, "Are we free, or are we determined?"

To a "hard" determinist, the indeterminist view just seems false on the facts. We do not directly experience freedom. At best, we experience the motion of our body parts, and the agreeable feeling of approving of that motion.

To an indeterminist, on the other hand, determinism has all the earmarks of a religious dogma. Sure, physics has accomplished a lot of cool stuff since Galileo and Newton took the stage, but did anyone ever prove that every event, down to its finest detail, happens necessarily because of the operations of the laws of physics on antecedent events? If we can't get accurate weather reports beyond a few days, what entitles us to such certainty about everything in the universe? Doesn't our admittedly vague feeling of freedom count for at least as much as scientists' spotty record of identifying causes?

So while the question "Are we free or determined?" is simple enough, the answer isn't.

At least it isn't in the aforementioned three-dimensional world of things changing in time; but what if we step out of time and take a wider perspective, looking at a four-dimensional block universe where time is on a par with space, not having a privileged direction? The laws of physics seem to have remarkably little preference for one direction of time over the other, so maybe this approach will lead us somewhere promising. One thing worth noting immediately is that there's no principled reason for supposing that causation can't work backwards. Sure, the thought induces nausea, but so does the Norwalk virus, and it's real enough, so let's not let that scare us off.

As I mentioned in another post the famous fuzziness of quantum mechanics can be made to disappear if one admits bidirectional causation. The fuzziness need not be interpreted as an inherent feature of the particle being studied, but can instead be seen as a result of the fact that a future event (e.g., an observation by the experimenter) is determining the particle's present state. If this is true, then determinism, as I stated it above, is certainly false, because it implies that causation works exclusively in one direction -- from past to future. But let's be nice, and recast the determinist doctrine in temporally neutral language:

For any event e, there exist (in a timeless sense of that word) other events such that, given the laws of physics, e necessarily follows from those other events.

Given this statement of the determinist thesis, every event still has a physical cause, but the physical cause may be a complex of other events, some earlier and some later. But this is very definitely not the determinism your mother told you about. In particular, it's not predeterminism, which is, I think, what raises the hackles of the devotees of freedom. Remember that we've now stepped outside of time; we're looking at the universe and the laws that govern it from a timeless perspective. From that perspective, it no longer makes sense to insist that causes must precede effects; in fact, that insistence is essentially identical to the insistence that time has a preferred direction, and that's just what we're denying. It will take some conceptual readjustment to get used to the idea that causes need not precede their effects, but it's not impossible. One simply needs to conceive of the cause-effect relation as a necessary one imposed by physical laws, without regard to temporal precedence -- or rather, without any presuppositions about temporal precedence. A deterministic universe in this sense is just as implacably fixed as a predeterministic universe. In our new-style deterministic universe, the "future" is as (timelessly) real as the "past." What's new is that the future not entirely determined by the past. In fact, the past is partly determined by the future, and conversely. To be quite strict, the whole lifetime of the universe -- past, present and future -- is tied up in a knot of necessary causal relations working backwards and forwards such that only one lifetime is possible.

Is this revised sort of determinism compatible with a genuine freedom? Not if genuine freedom requires that the future be "open;" i.e., not yet real, but awaiting our choices. On this view, the future is real. just not a function of the past. But if freedom requires only that our future not be fixed by our past, then, yes, it is compatible with determinism in this sense.

How does freedom fit in? Pretty nicely, I think, but with a surprising twist. We can now say that a free act -- say, shooting an arrow at an apple on one's son's head -- is (timelessly) caused by one's self-confidence as a marksman, by a threat of execution if one doesn't do it, and by the flight of the arrow. The combination of all the antecedent factors, together with all the laws of physics, are insufficient to cause the decision. The flight of the arrow is strictly required, and working backwards from that, the release of the bowstring, the drawing of the bow, etc., all of which have a perfectly respectable causal nexus, respecting the letter of the laws of physics. The act is free because at least one of its causal factors doesn't precede it.

Interestingly, the act would be no more or less free if one missed, because the subsequent causal chain of a missed shot leads back to exactly the same event -- shooting an arrow -- as the subsequent causal chain of the successful shot.

So, if any of this makes sense, we have strict causal determinism (admittedly still dogmatic, but awfully attractive for all that), and genuine freedom for agents whose acts are undetermined by antecedent conditions, not just the bogus freedom of people who aren't in jail, and all we had to pay for it was backward causation. There is still one problem to address, though: freedom, as it's characterized here, doesn't seem to let the agent say "I did what I decided to do, but I could have done otherwise." In the four-dimensional block universe, the future is (timelessly) as real and as fixed as the past, the power to do otherwise than one actually will do is illusory. However, the agent can still say "I did what I decided to do, I did it for my own reasons, and I wasn't destined to do it by past conditions." Maybe that's good enough.

There, now you take an aspirin.

Priority access to persons with disabilities

In a building near the one where I work, the title of this post is inscribed next to every elevator door on every floor: "Priority access to persons with disabilities." It makes my skin crawl. It's wrong in every way and on every level. If Satan himself had set out to debase human communication so as to prevent us from working together, I sincerely doubt that he could have found a more apt device than the one he posted there. How is it wrong? Let me count the ways:

We'll start with the grammatically trivial: "Priority" is, or was until recently, a noun. No need to risk a hernia consulting the OED; even Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary says "priority" is a noun. Is this vile sign a harbinger of things to come? Is "priority" the new "quality?" One shudders, sighs, and moves on.

"Access" is fair enough, and "to" seems harmless, so let's move on to "persons." The author, if I may use that word to describe the person who wrote this, presumable thought the elevators might be robust enough to carry more than one person, and struggled valiantly to find a plural. Sadly, though the struggle was valiant, it was in vain. "Person" does actually have a plural in English. Yes, that's right; it's "people." So where does "persons" come from? Well, it actually is a word in English, but not in the sort of English that's suited to discussing the skills and talents of the occupants of elevators; its use is properly restricted to legal discourse. Legal "persons" come in two flavors: natural persons (i.e., people) and artificial persons such as governments, corporations, trusts, estates and other arcane inventions that are deemed fit subjects of rights that can be defended in court. Microsoft is a "person" in this sense, and so is Iceland, but even the lawyers who devised this strange sort of personhood didn't have the effrontery to call them "people;" hence, "persons."

Much as I honor and respect Microsoft, and Iceland even more, I draw the line at surrendering my place on a crowded elevator to either of them. Even if poor MIT had all of its legs amputated after a horrific accident that left WalMart dead and my grandmother's estate on afterlife-support, I would still not let the hobbled technical institute have my place. It can wait for the next elevator for all I care.

That leaves us with "disabilities." Disabilities are in plentiful supply. Let's see; there's blindness, deafness, stupidity, Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's aphasia, cleft palate, attention deficit disorder, coma, stuttering, stammering, cerebral palsy, bad judgment, astigmatism, anorgasmia, and, oh yes, there's being crippled, too. People -- sorry, persons -- with any of these afflictions get to jump the queue for the elevators. Well, most of them can jump the queue. The crippled ones just have to ram the queue with their wheelchairs, or clear some space with a few strokes of the cane.

One wonders, though, why all these variously imperfect persons should have "priority access" to the elevators. Do the blind really have a better claim than the rest of us to vertical transportation? The deaf? I suspect not. In fact, I suspect that the sign was really only intended to give special consideration to the crippled, but the authors dared not say so in English, because "crippled," as a word describing an undesirable condition, is an undesirable word, and not fit for use in public. To the various problems that plague the lives of the crippled, we add one more: They're banned from polite discourse, to be hidden away in a crowd of other nondescript persons with disabilities.

In one final irony, the building in which the sign appears is managed by forward thinking people who are always on the lookout for ways to improve the work environment of their human resources. One very bad thing that may occasionally happen in a work environment is that someone might smoke in it; not out in the open, of course, but hidden away in the stairwells. So the managers nipped the problem in the bud; they locked the stairwells, making the stairs accessible only in case of fire. By this simple and considerate act, they have put us all on the same plane together. The blind, the stupid, the crippled and the mountaineer are all equal persons in their disability; none can get to the fourth floor without an elevator, and thus, our cherished sign -- "Priority access to persons with disabilities" -- is rendered absolutely meaningless at every level.

Morality: What's religion got to do with it?

Churches (not to mention mosques, synagogues, temples and revival tents) are generally quite keen on morality. That's a good thing; everybody should be keen on morality. But the interest in morality displayed by a church is typically quite different from the interest displayed by, say, a hardware store; churches seem to behave as though their interest is proprietary. Why is that? What special qualifications does a minister of God have to hold forth on good and evil, right and wrong? More importantly, why should a minister of God have a greater say than a bus driver in determining what children are taught about good and evil, right and wrong?

About 2,400 years ago, Plato took up this issue in a dialog called The Euthyphro. There, he asked the question -- paraphrased to give it a slightly more modern feel -- "Is something good because God loves it, or does God love it because it's good?" If it's good because God loves it, the implication is that God has no moral opinions whatsoever; we just have to do what he says because that's the way he likes it, and we'll be in big trouble if we don't do what he says; that's a pretty degraded God, and decent people should be ashamed of worshiping Him. On the other hand, if God loves something because it's good, the implication is that its goodness is totally independent on God's attitude towards it; God recognizes it as good for some reason, and He has no privileged access to that reason. We can understand it, too, with no help from the Almighty; His opinion on moral matters is no more decisive than yours or mine (or, to restore a proper balance, Yours or Mine). That's a knockout punch to the whole idea that we need religion to instruct us in moral matters. If you do things just because God tells you to do them, you're just cowering before the snarls of the biggest bully on the block. You'll burn in Hell if you don't truss up your son, cut his throat and set his body on fire? A moral person, unlike the patriarch of three great religions, will choose Hell every time.

Religion has certainly done a great deal of harm since it was invented. Oceans of blood have been spilled, and thanks to the special appeal of fire to western civilization, millions of acres of skin have been burned off living bodies. Nevertheless, there may still be a point in keeping religion around a little longer. It seems to be a source of comfort, meaning and perspective to people who would otherwise be lost in a vast, uncaring and impersonal universe. However, it is about time that we stopped letting religious leaders -- priests, imams, rabbis, yogis, lamas, televangelists and celebrity Scientologists -- tell us what our moral obligations are. Their profession gives them no expertise in these matters, and we owe them no special deference on account of their position -- just the same decent consideration we owe equally to every concerned person.