Philosophical Detritus VII: Arguments About Gods.

Over the years I've met many a fundamentalist Christian online looking to troll atheists. I am technically an atheist, since I don't believe in gods, though I don't usually identify as one. I identify as a pragmatic naturalist. I see naturalism as an epistemic philosophical stance which argues that the natural world is all that we can know, since the only channel for gathering information we have is sensory experience. I have concluded, after decades of consideration and hanging out with mystics, that there are no supernatural realms, forces, or beings. And I broadly accept accounts from evolutionary psychology about what makes the supernatural seem plausible (see especially Barrett 2004).

I assert that gods, along with unicorns and time travel, are part of the human imaginarium rather than a part of nature. We cannot study gods as we might study a natural phenomenon, because there are no natural phenomena unequivocally associated with gods. The closest we ever get to gods is the anthropological study of how belief in gods affects the behaviour of believers. 

However, belief in powerful supernatural beings is more or less ubiquitous across human cultures. Despite the protestations of Buddhist modernists, this includes all Buddhist cultures. While Buddhists do not worship a creator, most Buddhists do worship Buddha or some other figure as a powerful supernatural being. Intercessory prayer to Guanyin is a major feature of the history of the Heart Sutra, which I spent 12 years researching in forensic detail. And gods of various kinds feature on almost every page of the Pāli suttas: from major Vedic gods like Brahmā and Indra (Sakka), to autochthonous gods like yakkha and kinnara.

When asked about his first act in reforming the Chinese state if he were made Emperor, Confucius opted for clarification of terminology. I like this. As a naturalist, I don't capitalise the word "god" because I don't accept the privileging of this idea or any one version of it. Since gods all seem to have conventional names, I prefer to use these. Thus, I write about "Jehovah" rather than "God". By refusing to frame this essay in terms of "God", I consciously reject the Christian framing of the discussion. This is also consistent with not identifying as an atheist. Despite writing about some Christian ideas that are part of my cultural heritage, I'm not a Christian, and I don't accept the validity of any Christian interpretation of mythology or doctrine.

This essay is about some of the ways that Christians, or more precisely Christian theologians have defended their ideas about Jehovah. Not that an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient being, with a notable penchant for smiting his enemies, needs defending from puny humans. Nonetheless, many such apologetics have been offered over the last 2000 years. Clearly, Christians felt the need to defend Jehovah long before science began to erode the foundations of all religions.

Jehovah or Yahweh is the creator god of Christians and Jews, sometimes also known as El "god" or El Shaddai "god of the mountains, god almighty". In the Semitic languages, al or el is used the way we use "god" in English; it's a generic title. In Hebrew scripture, Yahweh's name is printed as a sequence of consonants: YHGH. Yahweh is a scholarly reconstruction of the vowels. The actual pronunciation was deliberately suppressed. It was replaced with euphemisms like Adonai "Lord" when scriptures were read aloud, and the real pronunciation was eventually lost. In Hebrew, Yahweh is also referred to as Elohim (a plural used to suggest greatness), El Elyon “God Most High”, El Roi “God Who Sees”, El Olam “Everlasting God”.

By contrast, the name Jehovah was invented by Christians. It is a mongrel that combines the consonants of YHWH with the vowels of Adonai. A quirk of linguistic history resulted in the first (short) a becoming e. The name Jehovah is consciously avoided in the New Testament, where it is typically replaced by Greek Kyrios "Lord" or Theos "God". Thus, it is convenient to distinguish Yahweh, the Judaic god, from Jehovah, the Christian god.

Of course, Jehovah is not the only creator god in world mythology. There is also Allah, which is not a name but a title. Allah also means "god" and is linguistically related to the Hebrew El. Culturally, Arabs and Jews trace their ancestry to the mythical figure of Abraham; hence, we refer to "the Abrahamic religions", but the similarities end there. Yahweh and Allah are two different gods, from related cultures with related languages, whose followers both call them "God". Other creator gods include: Ahura Mazda, Brahmā, Marduk, and many more. Not all cultures have a creator god, but there are many that do. And as we will see, this simple fact is consequential for theological arguments.

Moreover, there are something like 10,000 different sects of Christianity, and many of the schisms were the result of arguing about Jehovah or the nature of Jehovah. So we need to be a bit wary of seeing Christianity as monolithic. 

Argumentation in the Absence of Evidence

The fact is that Jehovah is not a natural phenomenon even in theory. Christian beliefs place him before, outside, and above nature (the super in supernatural means "above"). Christians have never really defended Jehovah based on direct empirical evidence. There are a number of standard theological defences of Jehovah. In what follows, I look at a dozen different approaches, giving a brief overview followed by some comments on what each approach fails (which they all do). 

Cosmological arguments infer Jehovah from motion, causation, or contingency as a first cause or necessary being. These arguments originate in Greek philosophy (Aristotle, ca. 4th BCE) and are adapted to Jehovah by Philo (ca. 20 BCE – ca.  50 CE) and medieval figures such as Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274).

First cause arguments are powerful, but they don't point to Jehovah in particular. Rather, by adopting oversimplified, linear models of causation, they arrive at a dilemma: either there is a first cause, or the universe is infinitely old. And since they believe, a priori, that the world was created at a point in time (by Jehovah), and is thus not eternal, they assume that Jehovah was the first cause. But there is nothing in this argument that says that the first cause was Jehovah rather than, say, Allah, Ahura Mazda, or even some non-supernatural force. That said, causation is neither simple nor linear: everything is interacting with everything else, all at once. So this argument fails establish the existence of Jehovah.

Incidentally, Brahmins already anticipated this kind of infinite regress argument in the Bṛhadāranyka Upaniṣad, probably composed around the 8th century BCE, where Yajñavalkya cuts it off by saying "Don't ask too many questions, Gārgī, or your head will shatter apart" (BU 3.6). In my view, we have to risk head-shattering and keep asking questions.

Teleological arguments infer Jehovah as an intelligent designer from order or purposiveness in nature. Early versions of such arguments already appear in Plato (d. ca. 348/347 BCE) and the Stoics (4th–3rd ca. BCE). They became standard in medieval and early modern "natural theology". Intelligent design arguments have become popular amongst educated Christians in the 21st century.

These kinds of arguments proceed from the twin assumptions that the world was created and that a creation requires a designer. Nothing about the universe, per se, suggests that it was created. Creationism is a belief. And as my readers know, belief is a feeling about an idea.

Notably, the fact of evolution shows that no designer is needed. Organisms evolve over time through random mutation and natural selection: no design is involved, and thus no designer is required. Moreover, having a designer would have resulted in more efficient and effective designs, whereas our bodies are all too obviously kludged together over millennia.

Historical arguments proceed from alleged "historical" acts such as miracles, covenants, or fulfilled prophecy. They arise in early Jewish and Christian apologetics (1st – 3rd c. CE), associated with figures like Josephus and Justin Martyr. Such arguments presuppose that scripture is historical rather than mythological. This is not a tenable stance to take. Religious storytelling may well incorporate historical elements, real geography, and so on, but this doesn't make it a witness to history.

This style of argumentation is also common amongst Buddhists and philologically-oriented Buddhist Studies scholars who wish to assert the historicity of the Buddha despite the lack of anything a historian would call "evidence" (See Attwood 2023). As David Drewes (2023: 404) pointed out recently:

Everything that makes the Buddha a Buddha is supernatural: his discovery of the Dharma by his own power; his understanding of karma, the geography of the world, the structure of the cosmos, the path to liberation, and the makeup of living beings and the material world; his freedom from desire; his omniscience; his thirty-two marks; his special characteristics and powers.

Scripture is always mythological. It is seldom, if ever, a reliable historical source, except as reflecting the view of the people who wrote the scripture down.

Apophatic arguments propose that Jehovah must exist while exceeding all finite description, making him accessible only through negation. They originate in late antique Neoplatonism (3rd – 6th century CE) and enter Jewish and Christian theology via figures like Pseudo-Dionysius (fl. 500 CE).

This is not really an argument for Jehovah, per se, since it explicitly assumes his existence. Apophatic arguments are only a workaround for his being supernatural and thus indescribable. Again, this approach doesn't single out Jehovah from the plethora of creator gods, for whom all the same claims to supernatural puissance are made.

Ontological arguments claim that conceiving Jehovah as a maximally great or necessary being entails that he must exist, because existence is a perfection that such a being cannot lack. This style of argumentation originated with Anselm in the 11th century and was later reformulated by Descartes (1596–1650) and Leibniz (1646–1716).

This is all too obviously circular. It relies on the a priori belief that Jehovah is a being, rather than, say, a fictional character. And it assumes the characteristics that Christians attribute to Jehovah are real characteristics.

Ontological arguments have the same problem as the cosmological argument. Nothing about the "greatest being" points to Jehovah unless we assume that Jehovah is the greatest being. The argument cannot distinguish Jehovah from other "supreme beings".

Moral arguments claim that objective moral facts or duties require Jehovah as their ground or lawgiver. While antecedents exist, the recognisably philosophical form emerges in the 17th –18th centuries with Hugo Grotius (1583 – 1645) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804).

The idea that morality has to be imposed from an external source is an assumption. And this idea finds political expression in Thomas Hobbes, one of the most influential English philosophers. Hobbes was born as the Spanish Armada sailed to England, and lived through the 30 Years' War and the English Civil War, leaving him with a very jaded view of humans. He came to believe that being at war is our natural state and that humans require a tyrant to force them to stop being violent. This is ironic because the wars Hobbes lived through were very much the result of the ruling classes fighting over who got to be the tyrant.

In fact, as Frans de Waal (2013) and his colleagues have shown, morality emerges from evolving to be a social species. We can unpack morality from just two capacities that are shared by all social mammals and many social birds: empathy and reciprocity. (see also The Evolution of Morality, 18 November 2016). We don't need gods or tyrants.

Moreover, once again, even if we were to stipulate that morality was an externality, this would not point to Jehovah in particular, only to a supernatural "law giver". Which could just as easily be Ahura Mazda or Marduk.

Arguments from religious experience treat experiences interpreted as encounters with Jehovah as prima facie evidence. They are articulated explicitly in early modern philosophy (17th – 18th c.), notably by John Locke (1632 – 1704) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768 – 1834).

This is a style of argument for the supernatural that I have frequently encountered amongst Buddhists. We know that religious practices often lead to hallucinations. I have particularly drawn attention to the common phenomenology of sensory deprivation and meditation (See Attwood 2022). Beyond this, common religious practices—such as fasting and sleep deprivation—heighten susceptibility to hallucinations.

When religieux experience hallucinations, or even just altered states, they interpret these through the lens of their religion. So, again, the arguments for Jehovah from experience are circular because they take Jehovah to be axiomatic.

I already noted in my exposition on time that experiencing timelessness, or being in a seemingly timeless state, is not the same as actually being outside of time. Experience does not easily translate into metaphysics.

Thomas Metzinger's treatment of out-of-body experiences is a paradigmatic example of refuting arguments from experience. He not only shows that his mind never did leave his body, but his alternative rational explanation is so powerful that he can now reliably induce out-of-body experiences in naive subjects under laboratory conditions.

Argument from revelation: Appeal to the authority, coherence, or fulfilment claims of texts taken to be revelations of Jehovah. They developed in late antiquity (1st – 4th c. CE) alongside canon formation and apologetics.

This is a wholly circular argument based on belief in Jehovah. Many Buddhists fundamentalists make the same kind of argument about the Buddha and Buddhist scripture. Scripture is only considered authoritative by believers. This is not an argument that can carry any weight outside of fundamentalist cults and sections of religiously inspired academic Buddhist Studies (see Attwood 2023).

Pragmatic arguments seek to justify belief in Jehovah by its practical or existential benefits rather than demonstrative proof. These arguments originate with Pascal (1623 – 1662) in the 17th century and gain prominence in modern sceptical contexts.

This is largely a reference to Pascal's wager. Pascal's argument was that one cannot know for sure if Jehovah exists or not. But if he exists and if Christian descriptions of his behaviour are accurate, then one can make a calculation of risks and rewards involved. And Pascal concluded that the inconvenience of being a Christian is massively outweighed by the risk of eternal damnation and the promise of infinite rewards.

Note how much work "if" is doing in these sentences. Pascal's wager makes sense if the only choices are Christianity and atheism. The calculus breaks down when we acknowledge that other supreme beings are claimed to exist. And after all, other religions with other gods are no more or less plausible than Christianity is. What if we bet on Jehovah, but "God" is actually Marduk or Zeus? There is no clear wager here.

Arguments from reason or intelligibility claim that logic, rationality, or the intelligibility of the world presupposes Jehovah as a rational source. They are largely modern (19th–20th c.), reacting to naturalism and materialism.

Again, this is simply a circular argument that treats Jehovah as axiomatic. Moreover, it also suffers from being Jehovah-centric. The criterion of intelligibility does not distinguish between supreme beings. What if Ahura Mazda is the supernatural being required to make the world intelligible? In that case, Jehovah contributes nothing.

Argument from consciousness: Hold that subjective experience or intentionality cannot be adequately explained without reference to Jehovah. This line of argument is mainly late modern (19th–20th c.), tied to debates over physicalism.

I have expounded at length on how consciousness is a useless legacy concept that no one can define. It cannot be used as the basis of an argument without a consensus on what it means. And no such consensus exists. Worse, consciousness is an abstract concept. An ontological argument based on abstractions is an oxymoron.

Again, the failure of science to adequately explain being conscious of experience does not point to Jehovah per se. If some supernatural input is required, then why not invoke Baal or Marduk? There's nothing special about Jehovah.

Argument from beauty or value seeks to infer Jehovah from irreducible aesthetic or axiological features of reality. It becomes explicit in the 18th–19th centuries, especially in Romantic and post-Kantian thought.

Here, Jehovah is presupposed to be a viable explanation of beauty or value. This, in turn, presupposes that Christian descriptions of Jehovah are accurate. Proponents also presuppose that Jehovah has no competition from other religions. They also presuppose that aesthetics, like morality, must be imposed on us from the outside rather than emerging from within us.

This is both a classic god-of-the-gaps argument and something more. There is a gap in our explanations of axiological matters into which Christians shoehorn Jehovah. But the failure of science, history, and philosophy to explain beauty in a satisfactory way is not an argument for Jehovah. It's just a gap in our understanding of the world.

In fact, simply invoking Jehovah doesn't explain anything. If you presuppose that Christians accurately describe Jehovah, then this, effortlessly, explains everything. And the rest is just details we needn't bother with. No one ever says how Jehovah explains beauty. No mechanisms are presented. And thus, in the end, nothing is explained by invoking Jehovah.

Conclusion

In my experience, science is not the preferred tool for critiquing religion (and most religieux don't understand scientific arguments anyway). Rather, my preferred tool is historical perspective.

For example, the majority of arguments for Jehovah are vitiated simply by acknowledging that other supreme beings are proposed by other religions, and on exactly the same basis. All of these arguments about Jehovah seem to presuppose that Jehovah is the only choice of god that we have. If we step outside Christian parochialism and acknowledge that other religions exist, then arguments for Jehovah are trivially invalidated in almost every case. None of the traditional Christian arguments that they claim point to Jehovah's existence is capable of singling out Jehovah from the plethora of available gods.

When the existence of Jehovah is axiomatic in your thinking, then your reasoning will always arrive at the conclusion that Jehovah exists. Because axioms are what we take to be true a priori and they become the criteria by which we validate conclusions. When we presuppose Jehovah, then any conclusion which seems to affirm the existence of Jehovah is judged to be true. And this circular, and thus invalid, logic is present in all of the traditional arguments for Jehovah.

Finally, when Jehovah is treated as an ultimate explanation of life, the universe, and everything, then invoking Jehovah becomes a way of shutting down awkward discussions or obfuscating ignorance. Simply saying "God" explains everything does not actually explain anything. An explanation generally involves pointing to causal sequences of events. Which Christians have never been able to do.

Such arguments begin very early on in the history Christianity . And they have been persistently employed and updated down to the present. Christians appear to know that there is an ongoing question and keep trying to come up with ways to shut down the discussion. Nevertheless, the discussion is ongoing.

~~Φ~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava (2022). "Sensory Deprivation and the Threefold Way." Unpublished essay. https://www.academia.edu/83896358/Sensory_Deprivation_and_the_Threefold_Way

Attwood, Jayarava (2023). "On Historical Methods in Buddhist Studies and the Disputed Historicity of the Buddha." Unpublished essay. https://www.academia.edu/121900443/On_Historical_Methods_in_Buddhist_Studies_and_the_Disputed_Historicity_of_the_Buddha

Barrett, Justin L. (2004). Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Altamira Press.

Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.

Philosophical Detritus VI—Time and Time Travel

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day;
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
-- Pink Floyd.

One of the most striking things about getting older is that time seems to go by much faster. No sooner has the year started, when suddenly it seems to be over. Another striking thing is being able to remember growing up in the analogue era, without mobile phones or personal computers. Things have changed so much in 60 years. And I've been writing this blog for 20 of those years.

The question "What is time?" is both completely banal, since we all experience time passing and in general have no problems understanding the concept, and at the same time deeply puzzling in that it's difficult to define exactly what time is or how it works.

My general approach in these essays has been to start with the fact that no one has epistemic privilege. We're all in the dark when it comes to metaphysics, which seems to be why philosophy is devoid of any consensus on any metaphysical matter, at any time. No one is ever compelled or obligated to accept any particular metaphysical proposition. Whereas we are compelled to accept experiences such as having weight, or being extended, oriented and located in space.

In this essay, I explore a number of time-related themes from a pragmatic perspective. While we may never know the reality of time, the experience of it is compelling enough to argue that we cannot do without it. We experience time passing, we remember past events, and we age and these are all salient. I touch on the metaphorical nature of our concept of time and the arrow of time. I don't find time deniers to be of much interest. I deflate the notion of "timelessness", and I briefly explain why time travel is impossible (not related to paradoxes).

On Time

When you finish reading a sentence, you have to recall what you read at the beginning in order to make sense of it, but you cannot do both at once. You have to start somewhere and end somewhere else. In every situation we encounter, there are sequences of events and they occur in a specific order that is salient to our understanding of both time and causation (the latter is a separate essay, but see There is No Cause & Effect, 5 August 2016).

So deeply do we experience such sequences, and understand the order of them, that most people can instantly spot if a piece of video is being played backwards, precisely because things happen in the wrong order.

Some of the experiences we have are iterative: they happen over and over. Such experiences include our own breathing and heartbeat, as well as day-night cycles, lunar cycles, seasonal cycles, and life cycles. We call these "cycles" to emphasise their iterative nature.

Iterative experiences allow us to begin to quantify durations of time. I could say, for example, that it took so many days and nights to go from location A to location B. This is useful information. If for example, I'm crossing a desert and the next watering hole is 3 days travel away, then I need to ensure I carry 3 days supply of water. Or I will die.

The obvious downside of using iterative experiences such as heart beats is that they vary in duration. If two people wish to agree on the timing or duration of events, then they must first agree on a measurement of time. A measure like "three days from now" only works because the two people experience the same day/night cycles.

Living in cities tends to create a demand for time keeping because we do things in large groups and need to coordinate. Living a coenobitic monastic lifestyle requires time-keeping for the same reason. For example, Buddhist monks who originally lived a solitary, itinerant life for most of the year, would meet up at times linked to the phases of the moon. One they began to live communally and engage in collective practices that meant they all had to arrive on time. In 2015, after puzzling over the Pāli term yāmagaṇḍikaṃ koṭṭetvā, I wrote an essay about time keeping in early Buddhist texts. I noted various early time-keeping measures such as a sinking bowl water clock, dating back at least to the Achaemenid Persians.

We define external standard durations of time like seconds, minutes, hours by linking them to some iterative process. These days, scientists define the second in terms of oscillations of an atom of Cesium.

It is a curious fact that until rail travel was invented time was more or less always defined locally. But once you had railroads connecting cities across Europe, the fact that each city was effectively its own time zone, became a hindrance to coordination. The hegemony of the British Empire when time was being standardised meant that universal time is based on the Greenwich meridian, which passes about 10 km west of my home in Cambridge.

Coordinating actions in large groups of people, is one of the most important functions of time-keeping. Societies that don't do big communal projects don't need to keep track of time in the same way.

The Arrow of Time and other Metaphors

In some cultures, TIME IS A PATH that we travel along. We "see" the future ahead of us and move towards it. We do not see the past since it is behind us and gone from view.

In other cultures, TIME IS A RIVER that flows past and around us. We are stationary and facing downstream. The future approaches us from upstream and, being behind us, we cannot see it coming. The past is downstream and we can see it stretching away from us.

When we say things like "time is a path" or "time is a river" we are using metaphorical language. I use the convention begun by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson of stating such metaphors in small caps.

Interestingly, many of the metaphors we use for time come from the spatial domain. We can talk about a duration in terms of length, for example. "How LONG must I wait?", "Will you be LONG?", "He's doing a STRETCH in prison". These emerge from metaphorically treating time as a path.

I've already noted that humans can usually spot a video being played backwards almost instantaneously. This is because time has a direction. Whether we conceive of time as a path or a river, we know that the past in in one direction and the future is in the opposite direction. And when we see a video with the direction of time reversed artificially, it's immediately obvious.

It is common to illustrate this using examples like knocking a cup off a table and watching it break. We never see a broken cup spontaneously reassemble itself and leap back onto a table. Physicists like to say it's "theoretically possible" for this to happen, but in practice it never does.

We can artificially create some situations in which the arrow of time is ambiguous. For example, imagine that I set up a video camera looking vertically down on a snooker table. If I set a ball in motion off-camera and record it bouncing off the cushion then leaving the frame, you won't be able tell whether you are seeing the recording forwards or backwards. Similarly for a collision between two balls, when you don't see the initial impetus or the final arrangement. However, with three balls, or if I show the cue striking the cue ball, the arrow of time once again becomes clear.

That is to say, when we look at isolated, decontextualised events in which the antecedent events are hidden from view, the arrow of time can be made to seem ambiguous. However, in practice, without these elaborate attempt to hide it, the arrow of time is always completely obvious. In practice, we never experience confusion over the direction of time. Every experience we have reinforces this.

A few years ago, I was cycling along the greenway from Haslingfield to Grantchester. Near the latter village, a field of sugar beets had been dug up and the beets were piled up waiting to the trucked off to the sugar factory in Bury St Edmunds. The loader driver was standing around for the next truck to arrive, and I stopped to chat with him for a couple of minutes. Two days later, I passed by the same field going in the other direction. And to my surprise, I saw a mature crop of beets where, just two days ago, there had been bare earth. I stopped and I really got a chill, because this was the closest thing to "a glitch in the Matrix" I'd ever seen. It was unnerving to say the least. I replayed the memory of seeing the field harvested several times. I looked closely to see that it was indeed a mature crop, several months old. And yet I knew I had seen it harvested just two days ago. At length I got back on my bike and started pedaling. About 200 m further down the track, I realised that they had only harvested the bottom half of the field. I just just assumed it was the whole field.

Physicists explain the apparent direction of time—which they call the "arrow of time"—by referencing entropy. Entropy is itself often quite poorly understood by lay people. It is often wrongly associated with complexity for example. Entropy is a measure of disorder. Sean Carroll introduced an image for this that is now everywhere

• On the left we have coffee and milk, unmixed. This is low complexity, and low disorder.
• In the middle, the coffee and milk have begun to mix. Complexity is high and disorder is medium.
• On the right the coffee and milk are thoroughly mixed and now complexity is low again, but disorder is high.

And this is how our universe seems to be. We're currently somewhere in the middle, with high complexity and medium disorder. Around the time of the big bang, the universe was simple and had low entropy. And we expect the universe to become less complex again over time, but for entropy to keep on increasing.

When we see a cup fall and break we see something becoming more disordered. Seeing the video backwards we something quite disordered becoming more ordered, and we know that, practically, this doesn't happen in our world.

The second law of thermodynamics says that the entropy of a closed system always increases over time. Lay people often overlook the "closed system" part. A closed system in one in which energy cannot enter or leave. The earth for example is not a closed system. Nor is a biological cell. So living things, which persist in ordered states (low entropy), do not contradict the second law.

Time Denial

Hardly a week goes by without some pundit breathlessly telling us that "time is not real" or "time is an illusion". Or, maybe, "time is not fundamental". In the previous essay, on Determinism, I noted that the "it's an illusion" move doesn't explain anything.

Once again, this denial of what we experience is a dead end. Once you assert that time is not real, there is nothing left to say. There is nothing to explain. "It doesn't exist" is supposedly the explanation, but this simply leaves us hanging because as already noted, we experience the passing of time. Saying that "time doesn't exist" does not explain the experience. Writing it off as "an illusion" is also not an explanation. If all experience is an illusion, we are none the wiser, since we still have such experiences and if we try to act as if they are illusions we rapidly run into trouble.

If the government says "you must pay your taxes on or by the 1st of April", one cannot defend a failure to comply by arguing that "time is an illusion". Even if it is an illusion, it's one that we all share, and one that we are compelled by circumstances to take seriously.

The idea that time is not "fundamental" (and sometimes it is fundamental) comes from reductionism. Metaphysical reductionism equates "fundamental" with "real", and treats anything that is not fundamental as not real. Sometimes reductionists will tacitly admit to a hierarchy of reality in which the lowest level is specially marked as "fundamentally real". But this is nonsense by their own criteria. If it's not at the bottom, it is not fundamental. This only matters to true believers in reductionism. It's a doctrine, not a truth. The rest of us allow that structure is objective and that time being a structural feature makes no practical difference to us. Time is still objective.

So any philosophy that denies the passing of time rather than explaining it, is a dead end and practically useless.

Timeless

Most philosophers don't comment on the experience of timelessness. We've all had the experience of being absorbed in an activity and failing to notice time passing. Sometimes in meditation one loses touch with the world of the senses and it seems that time stands still.

Here I reference Thomas Metzinger's book The Ego Tunnel. Metzinger spends some time in his book discussing his out-of-body experiences. But he also describes how his initial intuitions, based on folklore about out-of-body experiences, were wrong. And he explains how he arrived at an objective account of them. Importantly, Metzinger describes how his objective explanation allowed him to reliably induce out-of-body experiences in experimental subjects under laboratory conditions using a variety of methods including virtual reality. I now see this as the gold standard for explanations of experience.

The fact of having experiences of timelessness, does not mean that time is not real. "Timeless" describes an experience, not a fact of the matter. Not being aware of time passing doesn't stop it passing. And we all have relevant experiences.

Every time we sleep, we spend at least some of the time in a dreamless state in which we have no awareness of time, space, self, world, or anything else. And yet, when we emerge from this state, it's apparent that time has passed. I go to bed in the evening and I wake up in the morning. The timeless state of deep sleep is not a metaphysical timelessness, it is an epistemic timelessness.

Becoming absorbed in meditation involves becoming unaware of all the sensory information we use to create our virtual maps of space and time: resulting in an experience that is spaceless and timeless. This is often interpreted as meaning that one was literally "outside space and time". Some interpret it to mean that mind is not tied to body. And so on. The fact is that time itself does not stop. Only our awareness of time passing stops. As with sleep, time continues to pass even in deepest meditation.

We might lose track of the world, but the world never loses track of us.

Time Travel

Time travel is one of the most enduring themes in speculative fiction. Both travelling to the past, with all the attendant paradoxes, and travelling to the future have been imagined many times. I grew up watching Patrick Troughton as Dr Who on a black and white television. I read H. G. Wells' The Time Machine as a teenager and have seen the classic 1960 film adaptation, produced and directed by George Pal many times.

Towards the end of the 20th century, physicists started to say things like "Time travel may be possible." If you search this phrase you can see that it regularly turns up in newspaper headlines. However, if you dig behind the headline, it usually leads to some theoretical physics paper that never really says that time travel is possible.

We get some mileage from the fact that if we make the present time t = 0 then we can put negative values of time into many physics equations and use them to retrodict the past. But we run into the problem that on the largest scale, physicists insist that t = 0 is when the big bang occurred. So the present is not t = 0.

Let us stipulate for the sake of argument that time travel is possible and that somewhere in the formalism of relativity it is possible to reverse time, or to alter the speed at which time passes.

What's not possible in any account of objective phenomena is the idea that you could move in time and not be affected by such movement. Because when you think about it, this is the key to fictional time travel. In all of the famous time travel stories, someone steps outside of time, they move along the time axis and arrive at a different time, whereupon they step back into time and are affected by it again.

For example, when Marty McFly and the Doc Brown go back 30 years to 1955, they don't become 30 years younger, but (fortunately for teenage Marty) retain their ages from 1985. No version of physics allows this.

Forget the "grandfather paradox", the real sticking point with time travel is travelling through time without being affected by time. This is what all time travel stories have in common, and yet it is precisely this that cannot be explained and cannot possibly happen in practice, even if moving arbitrarily in time is theoretically possible. This is my own insight, I don't recall ever reading any time travel stories that tackle this problem and I'm not aware of any philosophers who do either. It seems to be generally overlooked that time travel always tacitly allows moving through time without being affected by it.

Conclusion

I've briefly covered a range of topics in this essay: what time is, the direction of time, time metaphors, time denial, and time travel. I also touched on causality once or twice.

Time is a central and unavoidable aspect of our experience of the world. We cannot make sense of the world without it. Arnold J. Toynbee's facetious comment on the naive view of (chronicle) history as "just one damn thing after another" is in fact a truism about time. Time is unavoidable, it is visible in sequences of events, and measurable via quantities of iterative events. Time really is just one damn thing after another.

Time is objective, in the sense that we all experience it and it can be measured in ways that we all agree with. For example, we can predict when and where solar eclipses will happen decades hence. If time were not objective, what would it even mean to predict such events?

Time passes for everyone (all observers) at one second per second (time dilation notwithstanding). Time also has an objective direction, which is the same for all observers. And we instantly know when we see a video in which the "arrow of time" is reversed, because such a thing never happens in practice.

The experience of time passing is subjective in the sense that we may experience time passing faster or slower. But we know that this can be explained by relating it to the emotional intensity of the experience and the rate of memory formation.

However, the question of the reality of time is not one we can ever answer because no one has epistemic privilege, i.e. know one has privileged access to reality to perform comparisons with experience. We have experience and comparing notes on experience, and we have reason and imagination. That's all we have to work with. Reality, whatever it is, remains forever inaccessible to us.

This may be why time is so problematic for physicists. They cannot decide whether time is fundamental or not; whether it is real or an illusion. And so on. But no matter what they eventually decide, it won't change how we experience time.

However, we can and do infer useful information about the world. Comparing notes about sensory experience allows up to create and maintain virtual maps, which in turn allow us to navigate the world. Describing experience without time doesn't seem possible, but even if it were, it would not be useful. In our universe, everything is interacting with everything else, everything is changing, all the time. Time is integral to how we conceptualise this.

Unlike the previous example, therefore, where I concluded that no good ever came of thinking in terms of "determinism" or "free will", I believe we have to retain the concept of "time" and resist those who wish to deny it. Even if time is only an inference drawn from experience, we cannot do without it. Nonetheless, there is still no epistemic privilege so our definitions must be pragmatic rather than absolute.

~~Φ~~

See also: Time for a Change. (03 March 2017). In this essay, I'm still talking about "reality" in a careless, reified, way. However, I think the notes on metaphors and time are still useful. These essays are not merely academic. If you watch this blog—this 20 year sequence of essays—you can see my worldview changing over time. You can see understanding dawning on me. If I do my job as an writer well, you can have the same experience with considerably less effort.

Philosophical Detritus V: Determinism and Free Will.

I'm about write an essay about determinism and free will. No one is compelling me to do this; I just noticed that a lot of people were confused, and I hope to arrive at some clarity. I do not know in advance what each sentence is going to say or how many sentences there will be. I don't even know, as I start writing, all the ideas that I'm going to explore. I do research and learn things as I go. But I sit and write, usually in several sessions, until I think I've covered the topic adequately, and voila, another essay emerges.

English has a large vocabulary, with many nuances and synonyms. It also has a very flexible grammar, allowing ideas to be stated in many different ways with slightly different emphases. Moreover, the issues I want to write about are complex. 

There are a million essays I might have written. How did I come to write this particular one? It certainly feels like I chose the words and sentences as I sit and  deliberate on what to say and how to say it. Most especially when I write a sentence one way and then subsequently change the wording or phrasing. But what is really going on?

Do I choose words on a coolly rational basis, with no input from any other faculty, including my own emotions? Or were the words that I apparently chose to write actually predetermined by the laws of physics at the time of the Big Bang? Are either of these two widely believed possibilities plausible? Should I appeal to some middle ground, or should I find some completely different way to frame the discussion? How would I even know?

Of the legacy philosophical concepts I've commented on in this series of essays, determinism and free will are probably the least coherent. And this essay has been the most difficult to write. There are so many different approaches that even a basic overview of the main currents in this topic would be longer than I intend this essay to be. For any given statement one can make, the contrary is likely to be vigorously asserted by someone else. As before, my aim is to try to cut through the bullshit with some pragmatism. There's just so much of it in this case.

The plethora of approaches for both determinism and free will (viewed as standalone concepts) are only multiplied when they are combined into one argument, where they are sometimes mutually exclusive and sometimes compatible. There is no consensus on either term on its own, and no consensus on how the two relate. It's not just that we disagree on details. There is no consensus on how to conceptually frame this discussion. In the case of free will, those who take a determinist stance argue that it simply doesn't exist, so there is nothing to frame. The situation is not helped when commentators tacitly assume a worldview and proceed as if that view is normative, which is all too common.

In matters related to determinism and free will, there is a profound dissensus and continuing divergence of views amongst intellectuals. The issue only becomes more complex over time. This abject failure to agree is sometimes presented positively as pluralism; however, in genuine pluralism, we expect a range of coherent positions that compete to explain some phenomenon. Here, we cannot even agree that there is a phenomenon to be explained.

Discussions of this type have been documented for thousands of years. Nowhere are the failures of academic philosophy and science more starkly revealed than in such long-term unresolved issues. I agree with Einstein that concepts should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. I'm not arguing for an enforced unity or some naive oversimplification. I'm genuinely perturbed by wanting to understand such issues and finding them so hopelessly lost in the weeds. At this point, it would take considerable effort to do worse than professional philosophers.

Academic philosophy seems to have devolved into competitive sophistry, completely unrelated to the lives that most of us live. Of course, people who like arguments find competitive sophistry endlessly entertaining. While arguing can be a diverting hobby for some, the rest of us find it annoying and counterproductive: it doesn't really change anything. 

One of the main themes of these essays has been the lack of epistemic privilege. No person has privileged access to reality. Ergo, no one is in a position of authority vis-à-vis reality. And this was strongly pointed out by both David Hume (1711 – 1776) and Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804). Rather than admit this, priests, scientists, and philosophers all seem to charge ahead regardless. And so confusion reigns. And I find this intensely irritating. Unlike some of my other suggestions about legacy concepts, I don't see anything here worth rescuing.

I think the whole, millennia-long exercise of arguing about determinism and free will has been a gigantic waste of everyone's time. If you are confused about this topic and go looking for clarity amongst philosophers, scientists, or historians, all you will find is a great deal more confusion. The topic is a tangle of shifting definitions, hidden assumptions, and conflicting ideological commitments. No layperson has any hope of finding genuine clarity, but all kinds of pseudo-clarity are on sale.

Pragmatically, we all experience making decisions and choices; we experience the impact of the choices we make and the impact of the choices that others make. This has to be our starting point. But we also have to acknowledge that we are often baffled by our own decisions. Decisions involve conscious and unconscious mechanisms. Any philosophy which does not say something constructive about these is not worth our time and energy. 

Demonic Determinism

The modern idea of determinism is often traced to the great French mathematician  Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827). In 1814, he wrote:

“We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.”
— Essai philosophique sur les probabilités. (tr. by F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory) Chapman & Hall, 1902. p.4.

The "intelligence" (une intelligence) mentioned by Laplace somehow became known in English as "Laplace's demon". While we credit Laplace, this mechanistic idea about the universe seems to have been quite widely accepted at the time. 

These days, we usually sum up the idea by saying that if we knew the location and momentum of every particle in the universe with perfect accuracy and precision, and if we also knew all the laws of physics that govern particles to the same perfect degree, then we could perfectly predict the future. 

In this hypothetical, the word if is doing a lot of work. For example, it is assumed in this view that such knowledge is theoretically possible. Remember that Laplace was saying this a century before quantum physics had been conceived. His view of the universe was purely classical and mechanistic.

Laplace also assumes that we can always recover the past by putting in negative values for time into some mathematical description of nature. This is true of classical laws of motion, but it's not possible in statistical mechanics (and thus thermodynamics) or in quantum mechanics. And note that all we get from this exercise is knowledge of the past, not the actual past (I will come back to this point in an essay about time and time travel).

The idea of "conservation of information" is quite popular, though it's unrelated to physical conservation laws based on physical symmetries in the universe (Noether's theorem). As far as I can see, the idea that "information" is conserved relies on a series of ontological presuppositions that cannot be true, not least of which is the assumption that the universe is absolutely deterministic. Arguments along the lines that, apparently, lost information is only hidden and unrecoverable, rather than truly lost, seem to have a weird definition of "lost".

The basic idea of determinism is that events can only occur in one way. All events are absolutely predetermined in advance by the starting conditions of the universe and the combined laws of nature. This view is similar to the absolute fatalism of Advaita Vedanta theology, which attracted Erwin Schrödinger in his later years. 

Determinists believe that, even though we experience ourselves making choices, there is never any doubt about the outcome. In this view, everything can be reduced to particles following rules. Obviously, if we have no choices and make no decisions, then there can be no such thing as "free will" or any other kind of will. An important corollary of this fact is that there can be no coherent morality or ethics. If no one chooses to do actions, then no one is responsible for those actions (Buddhists who deny the existence of agents also have this problem). Indeed, the idea that evil is blameworthy is entirely negated. Determinism is a form of nihilism. Nothing we do, say, or think makes any difference. Concepts like morality, fairness and justice no longer have any meaning. Nothing matters.

My sense is that while determinists make some powerful arguments, almost no one is willing to simply abandon the concept of morality. Which means that while some people (especially some physicists) argue for an uncompromising version of determinism, most intellectuals understand that morality needs to be retained and preserved. Indeed, the mainstream of academic philosophy has always promoted so-called compatibilism: a range of ideas that embrace determinism but argue that it (somehow) does not rule out free will.

Importantly, the idea of determinism is largely absent from our judicial systems. Notions of agency and responsibility appear to be indispensable to a society. This is a theme I plan to circle back to by way of a conclusion to this series of essays.

As an aside, note that male intellectuals like to call their favoured, often uncompromising, stance on any given topic the "hard" version, and any compromise the "soft" version. So, an uncompromising approach to determinism is often called "hard determinism", and compatibilist approaches are called "soft determinism". And one cannot help but think that, while Freud was wrong in most respects, he was not totally wrong. I try to avoid penis-based terminology in my writing.

In practice, there are dozens of different perspectives on determinism and even taxonomies that are supposed to help us grapple with the definitional promiscuity. If this problem is unfamiliar, I've posted a structured list at the end as an appendix. No doubt some will find the list inadequate, which only reinforces my point about the proliferation of definitions. However, I don't find any of these approaches interesting or meaningful. I don't think the idea of metaphysical determinism is coherent or cogent, at least as far as Laplacian determinism is concerned. There are numerous problems.

Mechanics of Various Kinds

Newtonian, Hamiltonian, and Lagrangian formulations of physics are deterministic as conceived, but also incomplete: they cannot account for events in systems with very large masses, very high relative velocities, and very high energies. Einstein's relativity theories are deterministic and can account for the exceptions. However, relativity is also incomplete, since it cannot be reconciled with our theory for very small masses and it clearly makes a wrong prediction for the Big Bang. We don't know of any classical—i.e., deterministic—theories that are complete. They all break down beyond certain limits. 

Moreover, we cannot even see the entire universe, and we have no idea what lies beyond the limits imposed on us by the speed of light. We can infer that parts of the universe exist from which light will never reach us. We have no way to infer the extent or nature of those parts of the universe. We can infer that physics is the same across the visible universe, but we simply don't know if this holds beyond the limits of our knowledge. Our "universe" could be a tiny bubble in a much larger structure. 

Incidentally, I don't find any multiverse theories cogent. This is simply what happens when you canonise mathematics and adopt the procedure of bending reality to fit your theory (a procedure that has more in common with medieval theology than with empirical science). Which brings us to so-called "quantum mechanics".

As far as I can see, quantum mechanics is not deterministic at all. While some people like to assert that it is, I showed why this is not the case in my previous essay: quantum mechanics can never tell us where a particle is. Precise location information is simply not a possible output of the Schrödinger equation. Indeed, to do a location-based calculation, we have to tell the Schrödinger equation where we expect the particle to be (often based on classical approximations). And all it does is tell us the probability of finding it there. This means that Laplace's demon has no starting information, so even if it knew the laws of physics, it couldn't apply them. 

That is to say, there are no deterministic rules in quantum mechanics that govern where a particle is now or where it will be 1 second from now. But it gets worse.

The uncertainty principle says that the precision with which we know where a particle will be (based on its momentum) is inversely proportional to the precision with which we know where it is now. This means that if we could know exactly where all the particles are at some time, we would necessarily know nothing about where they are going. Even a quantum Laplace demon could not know exactly where a particle is and simultaneously know exactly how it is moving.

Another problem is that quantum mechanics is not a scalable theory. The Schrödinger equation for hydrogen, while being a complex problem in three-dimensional calculus, is nonetheless solvable. The Schrödinger equation for helium is not solvable, even in principle. Rather, in order to use quantum mechanics in a three-body system, one has to impose a series of simplifying assumptions, not least of which is treating the nucleus as a classical object. Rather than admit the implications of this for determinism, physicists simply ignore the fact and proceed as if quantum mechanics is a complete description and fully deterministic.

It's widely known that physicists themselves are deeply divided over the ontology of quantum mechanics, see:

• Gibney, Elizabeth. (2025) "Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows." Nature News 30 July 2025.

Again, this is not simply a failure to find a consensus on details. With the mathematics treated as canonical and inviolable, physicists are left to propose increasingly bizarre speculative accounts of how "reality" might be bent to fit the maths canonical. In philosophy, we call this a Procrustean bed. 

If you accept canonical quantum mechanics, then you must abandon determinism.

Structure Matters

I wrote three long essays exploring the idea that both structure and scale are important factors in any description of nature (NB: I was still using the term "reality" in a reified way a lot back then; I wouldn't phrase it that way now, but the basic intuitions about structure and scale are still relevant).

• A Layered Approach to Reality. Part I.
• A Layered Approach to Reality. Part II.1
• A Layered Approach to Reality. Part II.2

Here I owe a debt to Richard Jones, see

• Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.

Incidentally, Jones is also the most underrated Nāgārjuna scholar on the planet. He has published English translations of all Nāgārjuna's major works and a good chunk of Prajñāpāramitā. His commentary on Prajñāpāramitā was a major influence on me. But like me, Jones is an outsider. 

Structure refers to (relatively) static arrangements of stuff, be it particles, bricks, or people. A structural property is a property that an object obtains by virtue of the arrangement of its parts. A good example is the buoyancy of a ship made of steel. Steel is ~8x more dense than water. A 1000 kg lump of steel would have a volume of about 125 litres, about the same volume as a bathtub. In water, it would sink like a proverbial stone. However, if you take that 1000 kg lump of steel, flatten it to about 5mm thick, and shape it into a hollow cylinder that encompasses a volume greater than 8000 litres, then that steel structure will float on water.

I use "structure" as the general term, but I mean it to include systems. Structures are relatively static and stable, while systems are relatively dynamic and can be unstable. 

Reductionism focuses on parts, aiming to find something irreducible at the bottom of the well. Metaphysical reductionism says that "reality" resides only in the lowest level of structure that cannot be further reduced to parts; the corollary being that macroscopic objects are not real. Reductionist methods aim to first eliminate structure to expose the underlying parts.

The problem with this becomes apparent in biology. Simply atomising an organism tells us little about it. Even dissecting it only tells us so much. To understand a biological organism, we have to leave it whole and observe how it interacts with surrounding structures and systems (ecology), which themselves are inevitably only parts of much larger systems all the way up to the universe as an all-encompassing structure (cosmology).

Life cannot be understood via reductionism alone. The alternative goes by several names: holism, antireductionism, and emergentism.

It seems to be true that the universe is made of atoms, for example. And that atoms are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons. And that protons and neutrons also have some structure. But just as a pile of bricks is not a house, a universe of unstructured atoms is not what we observe. Atoms form molecules. Molecules form crystals, polymers, cells, and other kinds of structures. Cells form organs. And organs form bodies. And bodies form societies.

Structure exists. It persists over time. And it confers causal properties on complex objects. These properties are sometimes vaguely called "emergent", but "structural" is more accurate and precise, and less open to abuse. Importantly, while lower levels of structure place constraints on higher levels, they do not determine higher levels (I'll come back to this).

In order to understand the universe we actually inhabit, we do need to use reductionist theories and methods to understand the substantial foundations. But on its own, this is not enough. We also have to use holist theories and methods to understand the structures that the foundations support.

Scale Matters

As we move between different scales, our explanations of nature often break down. It was larger scales made visible via telescopes that exposed the incompleteness of Newtonian physics. Structure imparts structural properties to stuff. Microscopic effects are lost at larger scales, and macroscopic effects are greater than the sum of their parts.

For example, quantum mechanics simply ignores gravitation because the impact of it on the scale of electrons and protons is so small that ignoring it has no meaningful impact on precision or accuracy, and the simplification offers a huge advantage in computability. But if your theory ignores gravitation, it has no claim to being "deterministic" in the Laplacian sense.

Scale matters because, as I noted already, substantial properties constrain but don't determine structural properties. We cannot doubt, for example, that the properties of molecules are constrained by the properties of atoms. A molecule cannot have arbitrary properties. However, the properties of water (OH₂) are also strongly related to the asymmetrical arrangement of the three atoms. It is this structure that gives the water molecule its polarity, for example. Organic chemistry is even more fascinating since the possible arrangements of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms are almost endless.

As we scale up, we lose track of microscopic details. In chemistry, we talk in an idealised way about individual molecules, but, actually, 1 gram of water contains ~3 x 10²² water molecules. This number is unimaginably large, and individual molecules are unimaginably small. The only way to deal with such large numbers of molecules is with abstractions and statistics. Hence, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics.

For example, the temperature of a volume of gas is proportional to the mean kinetic energy (= ½mv²) of the molecules in that volume. The pressure the gas exerts on its container is proportional to the average speed with which molecules collide with it. And so on.

In any case, determinism is a relic of reductive, mechanistic thinking about the universe. Uncompromising determinism is a castle built on sand. Physics is far less complete than it would need to be to support determinism, and quantum physics is not deterministic at all (at least in the Laplacian sense). Moreover, the absolute fatalism of determinism seems to fly in the face of experience, requiring us to abandon the whole concept of morality, which almost no one outside of academic physics is willing to do.

If anything, the situation with free will is even worse.

Free Will

We cannot even agree on how to spell this concept that may or may not exist. Three spellings are in common use: "free will", "free-will", and "freewill". Research suggests that most people opt for two words these days and that the other options are out of fashion. But the concept is singular, and the phrase seems like an obvious compound to me (in Sanskrit we'd call it a karmadhāraya compound). Sigh. 

If you look at general histories of free will, you will see claims that discussions extend back to antiquity, but my sense is that this is not quite true. People in antiquity may have speculated about how we make choices, but the particular idea of free will seems to be somewhat later.

However, we are hampered in such deliberations by the absence of a consensus on what free will means. Again, I have supplied a structured list of major views in the appendix for easy reference.

Apart from ancient discussions, ideas about free will embrace a range of influences. Early modern philosophers such as Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, and Kant all wrote about free will. Many scientists, such as Laplace, Darwin, and Einstein has commented on the issue, most often as a consequence of their commitment to determinism. Freud also commented on the issue. It's one of those issues on which the great and good all have (different) opinions.

One of the most striking forms of evidence that physicists cite against free will is the experiments performed by Benjamin Libet in the 1980s. This suggests that we make decisions around half a second earlier than we become aware of having made a decision. I noted in an essay titled Free Will is Back on the Menu (11 March 2016) that few of Libet's colleagues accepted his interpretation at the time, and it has been thoroughly debunked since. What Libet measured was conscious anticipation, not unconscious decision-making. See, for example:

• Clarke, P. G. H. (2013). "The Libet Experiment and its Implications for Conscious Will." Faraday Paper No. 17. Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. http://www.bethinking.org/download/faraday-paper-17-clarke-en

And yet, it is still common to see Libet cited in arguments about free will, especially by physicists. Notably, when Libet is cited in this context, no other neurophysiology authors are cited, and, notably, none of the neurophysiology literature that discussed Libet's work is ever cited. Which flies in the face of scholarly methods. The "literature review" remains an essential part of any research project.

Part of the problem with free will is the idea that there is one and only one decision-making faculty. And this faculty is all or nothing; it either makes all the decisions, or we don't make any decisions. Which is not even remotely consistent with my experience of making decisions. For a start, most decisions don't involve any conscious deliberation. And according to Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber—authors of The Enigma of Reason—the reasons we give for such unconscious decisions are merely post-hoc rationalisations, fabulated on the fly. 

One of the main sources of argument about free will is Christian theologians responding to the problem of evil, starting in the fourth century CE. The problem is relatively simple. If Jehovah is both good and omnipotent, why is there evil in the world at all? If Jehovah cannot do anything about evil, then he is not worthy of worship; if he can but does not, then Jehovah is evil. The theologians decided to blame humans, or more precisely, to blame women via their mythical progenitor Eve. God gave Adam and Eve free will, and Eve used it to disobey Jehovah's stricture not to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, thereby bringing evil into the world. Obviously, the theology of free will requires applying some rather torturous logic to some rather implausible fairy tales.

And the result of all this attention from intellectuals across centuries, if not millennia, in at least a dozen different cultures? A vague, poorly defined, hotly disputed, abstract concept that may or may not exist.

It is already clear that if one adopts determinism, then one is forced to abandon morality. This result is so appalling that many philosophers and other intellectuals have tried to have their cake and eat it. They embrace determinism, but still claim that morality is meaningful. This kind of view is called compatibilism. 

Compatibilism

Here is Albert Einstein in 1929 (by which time he probably knew that quantum mechanics was not deterministic, even if few other people did):

I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will... I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. (from an interview published in the Saturday Evening Post. 26 Oct 1929, p.114)

However, Einstein immediately contradicts himself:

Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.

If no actions are the result of decisions, if "we can only wish what we must", then no one is responsible for their actions, and thus they are not culpable for transgressions. The very idea of transgression has to be deprecated. Einstein's position is incoherent. Which just goes to show that physicists, no matter how great they are, often make lousy philosophers.

Compatibilism is not a single unified idea, but generally speaking, compatibilists do what Einstein does. They begin by claiming to accept determinism. For example, they will agree that all events, including human actions, are fixed by prior states and laws. They try to get around the morality-denying fatalism of this statement by redefining morality or some other fudge. For example, one approach is to argue that an action becomes morally significant when it flows from the agent’s internal psychological structures—desires, reasoning, character—without external compulsion.

Unfortunately, under determinism, the notion of an "agent" is incoherent. There are no agents; there are just entities evolving according to laws. Agency implies choice, and choice is eliminated by determinism.

Compatibilism is also simply incoherent.

Deciding to go Up Hill

Every adult human has vast experience of making decisions. This is something we all do all day long. Banal choices like what to wear or eat, and morally significant choices like choosing to be honest or non-violent. Life choices like where to live, who to live with, or what job to do.

As with choosing which words to write in this essay, there are almost always many options for what to do next in any situation.

Anyone who denies that we are making decisions, as Einstein did, is bound to provide an alternative explanation of what is actually happening. If that alternative explanation is determinism, then agents, free will, and responsibility are automatically eliminated, and we lose morality entirely. So, rather than explaining human behaviour, determinism simply eliminates it from consideration.

We have the category "agent" precisely because agents are not like other objects. Water has no choice but to flow downhill: water is not an agent. A thrown rock follows a parabolic arc. Rocks are not agents. A planet orbits a sun in an elliptical orbit. Planets are not agents.

Agents are not passive in the face of physics. An agent can go up hill or around hills. Some agents can fly over the hill. Humans often simply remove inconvenient hills or tunnel under them. As a being that experiences having agency, I would say that, where agents are concerned, there is something more going on than merely following laws. 

Agents use energy to do actions that are allowed but not favoured by the laws of physics; actions that would never happen spontaneously in nature. Agents can remain in overly energetic states over long periods of time, consuming energy to remain so. 

The Choice of Illusions

Simply saying "choice is an illusion" is not an explanation. If we go down this road, then reductio ad absurdum, all experience is an illusion. In which case, we have not explained anything. An illusion ought not to be able to participate in causality. However, it's quite clear that my choices translate into actions and events that are causal.

For example, I start writing in the morning with a flask of pǔ'ěrchá 普洱茶 or Pu'er tea (普洱 is a toponym that cannot really be translated). From time to time, I take a sip. When my cup is empty, I refill it. When my flask is empty, I make another pot of cha. Each action has objective consequences in the sense that it results in a repeatable sequence of objective events that would not happen if I chose not to do them. This is how we objectively define causation. This causal sequence of events is not an illusion. My cup being empty is objectively not the same as my cup being full. My desire for more tea causes me to refill my cup. But it doesn't compel me to refill it, nor does it compel me to fill it with tea, let alone Pu'er tea. There's no inevitability in this situation. 

It's one thing to performatively state the belief that "experience is an illusion", but in practice, people who act like experience is an illusion typically have a psychiatric problem such as dissociative disorder, and they find it difficult or impossible to function socially.

It would be weird to believe that our decisions are not influenced by our cultural conditioning, the language we speak, our peers, and environmental exigencies. The idea of a perfectly free will—sometimes called contracausal free will—is clearly nonsensical. Like the fictional "rational faculty" that operates without any input from emotion or external influences, free will in this sense is a unicorn. And yet it is precisely contracausal free will that many people tacitly have in mind if they have not thought much about it.

Framing the issue in black and white terms—either free will exists or it doesn't—virtually guarantees failure to understand decision-making. And yet this is what most commentators seem to insist on, and certainly this framing of the issue is by far the most common one amongst the general public.

A better, more pragmatic approach would be to enquire into what factors influence our decisions. I've already mentioned some of the main influences.

As I write, for example, my word choices are governed by the rules of the English language, by my vocabulary, by the style I adopt, by my knowledge of the subject and its conventions, and so on. Language itself is constrained by human anatomy and physiology. There is no arbitrary or abstract "freedom"; it's not a standalone idea. There are degrees of freedom within an elaborate set of physical and social constraints. That's what we should be talking about. 

Conclusion

Growing up, my moral education often consisted of simplistic aphorisms. This may help explain why I'm still fond of aphorisms (see my collection on the about page). One of the most common aphorisms I heard as a kid was: "Two wrongs don't make a right." In determinism and free will, we have two wrongs. Added together, they do not make a right.

Determinism seems attractive because, superficially, it offers a level of objective certainty that religious fanatics can only dream of. However, beyond the surface, determinism unravels because none of our working theories of nature is truly deterministic or complete enough to support determinism. Moreover, the tendency to combine uncompromising determinism with uncompromising reductionism creates a false picture of the universe. Importantly, such views ignore the influence of either structure or scale.

Our principal microscopic theory of matter, quantum physics (in its various manifestations), doesn't even scale from a hydrogen atom to a helium atom, let alone to the macroscopic world. The calculations are simply too complex to ever be solved without making radical assumptions like treating the nucleus as a classical object. Which, incidentally, proves that nature is not performing calculations when a helium atom comes into existence. 

The addition of layers of structure is significant. Because structure makes a qualitative and quantitative contribution. Structure is objective and causal.

Certainly, the macroscopic world is constrained by features of the microscopic, but it is not determined by them. Molecules are more than the sum of their parts. And that "more" is not mystical, magical, or emergent: it is precisely the contribution of structure. This is why reductionism fails as a universal approach.

Compatibilism is not unlike bleeding heart liberalism, the proponents of which acknowledge the evil done by capitalism, and strive to meliorate or mitigate the damage it does through acts of charity, but who nonetheless wholeheartedly embrace capitalism. 

The real problem with determinism, and the reason that even ardent determinists like Einstein adopt compatibilist approaches, is that it denies all forms of morality. The most fundamental assumption of morality is that we make choices that are reflected in our behaviour, especially our behaviour towards others. Without this assumption, all of our ideas about morality, fairness, and justice go out the window.

Religious theories of morality are even worse, since they divorce moral sensibilities from human experience. In theistic religions, morality is perceived to be imposed by some external agent. The Abrahamic religions have a very dim view of humanity. Buddhism, quite frankly, sees most people, and all non-Buddhists, as moral idiots.

I follow the primate ethologist Frans de Waal in seeing morality as structural feature of living a social lifestyle, and as rooted in the capacities of empathy and reciprocity. For a more detailed account, see my series of essays on this.

• The Evolution of Morality. Introduction and Deontology. (18 November 2016)
• The Evolution of Morality. Two Pillars of Morality - Reciprocity (25 November 2016)
• The Evolution of Morality. Two Pillars of Morality - Empathy. (02 December 2016)

And the source:

• Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.

In this view, we are naturally moral, since we inherit the capacities for empathy and reciprocity. If we are immoral, this is probably the result of deliberately suppressing empathy or subverting reciprocity. It is detrimental to the group, and the group is essential to our survival and the passing on of our genes. Ergo, the group acts to curb and prevent actions that undermine the group, which helps to keep the group functioning harmoniously. The main job of the "alpha male" chimp is to interpose in conflicts on the side of the weaker party. And to ensure that any members of the group who are in conflict find a way back to harmony. Rather than being the strongest or most violent, the alpha male is generally the most trusted and respected male in the group. 

The social primate code is "United we stand, divided we fall. All for one, and one for all." 

Any philosophy of nature that denies the centrality of morality in our (social) lives is practically useless. As I said at the outset, I don't see anything worth rescuing from this mess. Neither determinism nor free will is even a good idea. Whereas morality is a great idea. If the choice is either determinism or morality, then I choose morality without any hesitation. 

~~Φ~~

Appendix

Approaches to Determinism

• I. Determinism Proper (what is fixed?)
• Global determinism — the complete state of the world plus laws fixes all future states
• Local determinism — determinism holds in some domains but not others
• Nomological determinism — determinism relative to the laws of nature
• Causal determinism — every event has a sufficient prior cause
• Logical determinism — truth-values about the future fix what will occur
• Theological determinism — divine foreknowledge or decree fixes outcomes
• II. Indeterminism (denial of fixation)
• Ontological indeterminism — the world itself is not fully fixed
• Causal indeterminism — causes do not necessitate effects
• Event-level indeterminism — some events lack sufficient causes
• System-level indeterminism — higher-level descriptions are indeterminate
• III. Hybrid Views (mixed structure)
• Soft determinism — deterministic structure with explanatory slack
• Probabilistic causation — laws constrain outcomes statistically
• Emergent indeterminism — indeterminacy arises at higher levels
• Chaotic determinism — determinism with practical unpredictability
• IV. Epistemic Positions (about knowledge, not reality)
• Epistemic determinism — the world may be deterministic even if unknowable
• Epistemic indeterminism — indeterminacy reflects limits of description
• Predictive scepticism — determinism undecidable in practice
• V. Deflationary / Quietist
• Instrumentalism — determinism as a modelling choice
• Pragmatic determinism — determinism adopted for explanatory utility
• Semantic deflationism — disputes about determinism are verbal or framework-relative
• VI. Metaphysical Rejections
• Anti-realist determinism — no fact of the matter about determinism
• Pluralist metaphysics — multiple incompatible but adequate descriptions

Approaches to Free Will

• I. Denial
• Eliminativism — no such thing as free will
• II. Deflationary / Revisionary
• Pragmatic / practice-based — “free will” fixed by its role in responsibility practices
• Revisionism — weakened notion retained for moral or social purposes
• III. Accounts of Agency (what kind of thing acts?)
• Reductive event-causal agency — actions explained by mental events
• Non-reductive agency — agency irreducible to subpersonal processes
• Emergent agency — agency arises at the personal level
• Agent-causal agency — agents as primitive causes
• IV. Accounts of Control (what makes action mine?)
• Reasons-responsive control — sensitivity to reasons
• Guidance control — ownership of the mechanism producing action
• Hierarchical control — higher-order endorsement
• Identification/ownership — identification with motives
• V. Accounts of Sourcehood (where does action ultimately come from?)
• Historical sourcehood — dependence on past self-shaping
• Structural sourcehood — present-time ownership of springs of action
• Ultimacy-based sourcehood — agent as ultimate origin
• VI. Phenomenological / Narrative
• Phenomenological agency — lived experience of choosing
• Narrative identity — agency embedded in a self-narrative