APPEAL OF DETERMINISM

F Richard Singer III         edition date 11/15/07

website: www.conceptualstudy.org      email: richardsinger3@sbcglobal.net

Overview: This paper consists of reflections on the main barrier I once encountered in learning to think about transcendent action and originship (see below). It was once first written circa 1974. This current edition retains the perspective I had at that time. Mostly I have only edited in order to make the terminology mesh with what I am now using. This paper does not develop any concepts, and thus is not a conceptual paper in the usual sense. It focuses on my 1974 attitudes and on my understanding of some parts of the kind of conceptual nets that I was conditioned to use prior to that time. I find this useful in understanding my current net for crucial concepts. It may also be of use to anyone else who has encountered similar barriers. These barriers were primarily emotional, rather than intellectual. The main theme of this paper is the negative influence that the appeal of determinism has had on my personal origin quest.

Transcendent action IS the form of deliberate action in which the achievement parameter is to bring about a state that differs from the state that would have emerged if what had been done had been a result of chance and/or causality. I refer to transcendent acts as origin acts when I want to focus attention more on the person than on the act.

An origin IS a person with a noteworthy history of transcendent action. Transcendent actions may vary from minor to major significance, so there are various ways to act as an origin. My personal origin quest is to become a more effective radical origin. This means that I endorse the fact that the ultimate grounding of all my choices is in me. This includes my ideals and all the criteria I use to evaluate my actions. Originship IS the art of acting as an effective origin.

Determinism: The major barrier to the formation of my net for crucial concepts was my inability to liberate myself from the influences of determinism. It was not until about 1974 that I became secure enough to ignore determinism and simply say that persons engage in transcendent action and moreover to regard this as vital knowledge. An account of the incoherence of determinism described by Peter Ossorio, in What Actually Happens describes my attitude better than anything I have ever written. He presents determinism as a failed degradation ceremony, one proclaiming that none of us is one of us. Since this is what I would have to proclaim if I tried to be a determinist, there is no coherent way for me to be one. I suspect that most people who claim to be a determinist may be making such an incoherent claim, but perhaps they have no use for anything resembling our person concept. For them no degradation ceremony is possible.

A Behavioral Attitude towards Transcendent Acts: My experience of transcendent action confronts me with a dilemma. I have a strong tendency to think deterministically, yet the only authentic way I can interpret such experience is by affirming indeterminism. This is an emotional rather than a conceptual dilemma. It is rooted in a desire for closure, for a kind of rationality that demands that in principle every state of affairs can be accounted for as a causal outcome of previous states. I cannot satisfy this sentiment of rationality and at the same time affirm a claim that I sometimes act as an origin. Yet when I seriously doubt my creative power, my desire for rationality fades, the utility of my knowledge vanishes, and the concept of deliberate knowing looses its utility. A denial of originship leads me into a quiet chaos of ignorance and apathy. Yet its affirmation runs counter to my deep emotional need for rationality and opens the door into an active chaos of uncertainty.

In practice, I avoid both apathy and uncertainty because I have learned to adopt what seems to be a useful behavioral attitude toward my actions. I implicitly feel like an origin, but I do not focus on this in my conceptual images of the situations I confront. Instead, I ignore me and focus on an abstract substitute for me that I think of as a pawn whose acts can be explained causally. I apply my analysis to him and abstract versions situations involving him. I often adopt a moderately deterministic mode of thinking in such matters. This may be simplistic, but it is convenient. It allows me to explain my behavior in a way that makes other people comfortable. It allows me to think about my past behavior without brooding over options that I could have chosen. It allows me the illusion of living in an environment devoid of uncontrollable factors that can thwart my efforts. This behavioral attitude allows me to feel like an origin, while ignoring the insecurity and complexities deeper thought might bring.

Most of the time my behavioral attitude toward being an origin is useful. When doing something, thinking about being an origin is more likely to interfere with transcendent action than to assist it. However, there are times when ignoring my knowledge of being an origin is troublesome. It provides only a superficial explanation of my behavior, since it ignores the deepest personal reasons for it. I realize this when I turn my thoughts deeply inward. Altho I am willing to explain much of my behavior in terms of a common sense deterministic perspective, I am not willing to use this for thinking about the choices I experience as rooted in my actions as an origin. I am also unwilling to regard persons with whom I have had close contact primarily as biological organisms.

My Sentiment of Rationality: I was once impressed with the power of rational thinking, and I unconsciously absorbed the attitude that the only trustworthy knowledge about the universe was based on rational analysis. I was naive enough to regard the concept of the universe as precise, and I felt that I was expected to regard the universe as a deterministic physical system. This disturbed me because it seemed to imply a total determinism. So I fought this portion of my educational conditioning. Since my desire for explanatory power was strong, my demand for a total explanation slowly began to undermine my belief in free choice. I only had one major need calling for a belief in choice, my need to feel like an origin. Since the need for choice did not seem to rise at all when I focused on the impersonal, and since at the time I felt insignificant in comparison to the universe, deterministic thinking began to carry an aura of authority, while my belief in choice seemed like a concession to a private purpose. I had difficulty resisting the argument that the success of physics was strong evidence that the universe was a deterministic system.

I articulate my previous attitudes toward determinism primarily to purge remnants that contaminate my current thinking. While still somewhat impressed with physics, I suspect its success may be due to its limited subject matter, rather than the ubiquitous power of its paradigm. Physics depends on having some precise remote concepts, and whatever conceptual powers others possess, my attempts to form a precise concept of the universe were hopelessly simplistic. My desire to have a precise concept of the universe is rooted in a strong emotional desire to feel closure, a part of the desire that William James called the sentiment of rationality. I first realized this when I understood Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The realization that mathematical intuition would always be able to take us beyond any such set of axioms came as a severe shock to my sentiment of rationality. Ideas from quantum theory also provided a challenge to my sentiment of rationality. However, it was primarily my study of mathematics that convinced me that I must resist my emotional demands for closure.

I cannot adequately account for any transcendent act. I can merely explain the background which suggests the options, and without which the action could not have emerged. Origin acts do not appear rational to me at their source, but they may appear extremely rational in their consequences, since after the choice has emerged, I can attempt a rational account of what follows. I do not need to explain the source of an origin act. Instead, I merely acknowledge their occurrence as a brute fact, something directly experienced, but not subject to reductionistic explanation. When I acknowledge them, I admit a limit beyond which explanation seems pointless. I cannot have total explanation. Given principles, I can always ask why these principles or why not others? In the face of any mystery that is a fact that I cannot imagine explaining in a way that satisfies my sentiment of rationality, I imagine two options. I can reduce my sense of mystery by emphasizing experience and de-emphasizing interpretation, or I can make interpretations that push the mystery away from me. It is comforting to do the latter when the mystery is very close. Yet my experience of transcendent action is stubborn. I cannot shove this mystery conveniently into the past or out into the mysterious cosmos. Instead, it remains a mystery that lives with me always, close and very uncomfortable. I sense that in essence I am an origin. To deny this, to decrease my options and to narrow the related inner resource, is to decrease my existence. So I reluctantly face the duality of my experience. I cannot deny that I engage in transcendent action. I struggle to believe that I have such a power. I resist my desire for security and total explanation. I resist my feelings of inadequacy.

My Vague Notion of Determinism: The realization that I cannot have closure, except for limited systems, has affected me profoundly. I no longer pretend to find the notion of a deterministic universe comprehensible. Some years ago I felt I could at least formulated the conjecture that we live in a deterministic universe by saying that the total course of events, down to the minutest detail, is completely determined. I can no longer conceive of what I might have meant by this. It is of such cosmic scope that it staggers my imagination. It seems to appeal to some absolute order transcending all potential experience. I do not see how such a conjecture can be understood. Any attempt leads me to ask a multitude of questions. When was the total course of events determined? Was it at the first instance of time or was it predetermined from negative infinity? Does it presuppose some absolute order? Where would this order exist, in nature itself, in some eternal realm outside of nature?

These are not intended as paraceptual queries, but as reminders of why I find the notion of universal determinism vague. Such questions are vague, because I am trying to come to grips with a conjecture that I find hopelessly vague. The best I can do in making sense of it is to say that it might point to a mystery beyond my comprehension. Perhaps some people are more attuned to this mystery. They may have some feeling for the uniformity of nature that goes beyond what I can grasp. I expect regularity, and I expect surprises. The fact that most surprises can be accounted for after the fact may suggest even more uniformity than is immediately apparent, or it may suggest that we have a great talent for inventing order amid chaos. I also often discover that I am not as much of an origin as I think. Since I have limited trust in inference by mere enumeration, I do not find this compelling evidence for some inviolate uniformity of nature. When I try to think that way, everything evaporates into nonsense. I cannot discuss this in a systematic fashion because I have difficulty being systematic as I approach nonsense. However, I can illustrate what happens when I try by reflection on some quatrains from the Rubaiyat.

With Earth’s first Clay They did the Last Man knead
And there of the Last Harvest sowed the Seed:
And the first morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.

Yesterday, this Days Madness did prepare;
Tomorrow’s silence, triumph, or despair;
Drink! for you know not whence you came nor why
Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where!

Since the first six lines pose an absolute determinism, why do the last two read like advice? Is it not already predetermined whether you drink? Perhaps the advice is a factor that predetermines this. Is the advice predetermined? Is the poem itself predetermined? Are beliefs and attitudes, as well as arguments about such matters as determinism predetermined? Why should I trust any conclusion that it is predetermined that I hold? Perhaps because it is predetermined that I will trust the conclusions that I trust, and that I will mistrust those I do not trust. But if I believed this, I would stop trusting those claims that I now trust. At this stage, I know that I have slipped into a mode of thinking that is not deterministic.

I do not have the ability to think about persons from a strictly deterministic perspective, since many ordinary concepts I use would then be vacuous. What would I mean when I use such words as avoid, error, choose, possible, trust, hope, think, deliberate, advice, true, should, false, please, consider, want, alternative, care; and a host of others and still think deterministically. What a real determinist might be talking about when using such language is beyond my comprehension. I have no argument with determinists, for I do not know what they are proclaiming. This is especially the case when I focus my attention inward rather than outward. When I am aware of me as choosing either purposes or means to fulfill these purposes, I at least must pretend that not all is determined.

Intelligence and Determinism: My main problem in obtaining a rational grasp of a deterministic perspective is that it makes intelligence irrelevant. If all is predetermined, what use is cognitive competence? Given a deterministic system what is the essential difference between instinctive behavior and intelligent behavior? The notion of predetermined intelligent behavior seems like a conceptual monstrosity. I must ignore my own concept of intelligence to even pretend to converse with anyone who uses such terminology.

The sense of irrationality that comes when I consider determinism also comes when I consider any other apparent alternative to my origin claim. It is not merely the non-existence of novelty that I find irrational, but the denial that novelty can originate from persons. My knowledge of novelty comes from a direct interpretation of my experience. If something really can be decided here and now, as my experience leads to me think, then I sense that I introduce novelty in a way that is personal rather than arbitrary. The alternative of an indeterminate universe, but with novelty only a matter of chance, also makes intelligence irrelevant. Both determinism and chance indeterminism give me a world in which I cannot actively participate. The same can be said of divine indeterminism or pantheistic indeterminism (only the gods are origins or only the cosmos is an origin). In any type of universe in which I am not an origin, I am powerless. There are times when I feel that way, but when I believe that I am essentially powerless, I can make no sense of my experience. Furthermore doing verbal gymnastics in order to revise my ideas of power and intelligence does not allow me to escape from the essence of this experience. In a sense, all I have to say about any universe that denies that I can act as an origin is that it violates the most fundamental core of my experience. In Place, Ossorio gives several relevant maxims. However by I can best express this in the words of William James.

This life feels like a real fight.

The Appeal of Determinism: I believe that the appeal of deterministic thinking is rooted primarily in a desire for simplicity and certainty. Deterministic thinking is useful when formulating theories. This is especially useful when the focus is on the natural systems and we want to eliminate any type of influence that would interfere with prediction. However, there are physical states of affairs that seem to be extremely resistant to deterministic models. Prior to the kind of observations that gave rise to Quantum Theory, the use of deterministic theories made things easy to work with. Since observation never fits theory exactly, it did not matter in application if reality is a bit indeterminate, since in practice we could always intervene to take care of minor uncertainties arising from a failure in prediction. However, as long as we concentrate on theories that emphasize total predictability, our thinking may have a bias towards determinism.

My Resistance to Indeterminism: I can curb my desire for certainty in the external world, but still find that I have only been partially liberated from the pull of determinism. I can view the external world as indeterminate, but I still resist the reality of my transcendent acts. My desire for certainty is not restricted to the external world. I also want to be able to explain my own behavior. Since I was taught to explain my behavior, part of this may be my desire to accommodate others. I suspect this is because other people want to be able to rely on it, and thus I learned to think of myself as reliable.

I also have deeper personal reasons for believing my behavior is reliable. It is easier for me to cope with the more remote fact that things out there are uncertain than the manifest fact that things in here are uncertain. I am faced with the appalling feeling that if my behavior is not determined then I am a victim of chance. Rather than accept this, I prefer to explain away the uncertainties in my behavior. Since originship is only one factor in my behavior, and never an immediate one in past behavior, I can always appeal to other factors to explain it. These other factors, such as need, duty, feeling, external pressure, etc., are more comfortable to think about. They serve not only to explain, but also can themselves be rationally explained, unless I push the explanation to an infinite regress in time or back to some primal first cause, in which case the whole attempt at explanation appears irrational. Thus I can appease my desire for certainty in specific cases and give myself and others the comforting illusion that no insane impulse on my part might upset things. At the same time, I can satisfy my passion for explanation.

Of course, all of this is merely a pretense. Underneath I maintain the attitude that I can act as an origin. This attitude emerges when the experience of choosing is vivid. When I look forward to choices, rather than reflect on past behavior, my feeling that I can act as an origin returns to haunt me. I can explain away every specific transcendent act from my past, but altho the present is fleeting and often involves behavior governed mostly by habit and external pressure, my personal will refuses to stay submerged. The only escape I have from feeling like an origin is by failing to choose. When this happens, my very being seems to shrink. I strike back, and I am faced with an experience too immediate to explain away. At such times I know that my behavior is neither determined nor a matter of chance. There may be a host of factors influencing me. My options may be restricted to narrow limits. The hand of the past may grip me tightly. But the significant factor in the present, if I will it, is my will. This does not follow from reasoning. It is part of my vital knowledge.