The future is not written

In several posts in this blog, I've discussed determinism, always from a critical perspective. For example, in a post entitled The debacle of determinism, I mentioned the three devastating attacks suffered by determinism during the 20th century: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (although it would be better to use the name Heisenberg originally proposed: the indeterminacy principle); chaos theory; and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Chapter 7 of Kevin Mitchell's book Free Agents, titled, like this post, The future is not written, analyzes and refutes determinism. However, it doesn't discuss just one type of determinism, but three, refuting them one after another in successive chapters. What are these three types of determinism?

1.      Physical predeterminism: the idea that only one possible timeline exists. In other words, that the future is entirely determined by the past; that the entire history of the universe is predetermined from the beginning; that nothing that happens could have happened otherwise.

2.      Causal determinism: The idea that every event has a cause and is caused by preceding events. It is subtly different and less demanding than the previous case.

3.      Biological determinism: the idea that the decisions made by living beings are determined by their biochemical state or by the configuration of their nervous system. That we are just puppets at the mercy of our biology.

Physical predeterminism is associated to reductionism, and almost always with the philosophical theory called Time B, which asserts that time is just another dimension of the universe that, the same as space, exists simultaneously in its entirety (past, present, and future). Furthermore, it states that there is no direction of time (from the past to the future passing through the present), since all physical equations are reversible (they remain valid if we substitute t with -t). This last statement is false, since one of the fundamental physical theories (the second law of thermodynamics) is not reversible, and its influence on the existence of many irreversible processes is evident.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

Einstein (like Laplace one century earlier) was a firm believer in physical predeterminism, which led him to adopt the philosophical theory of Time B and assert that the passage of time is an illusion. He also believed in the reversibility of physics, because his equations of general relativity appear reversible at first glance, even though they involve irreversible solutions such as the Big Bang and black holes. For this reason, he vehemently opposed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which broke with determinism, and tried by all means to refute it, without succeeding. In doing so, Einstein allowed his philosophical presuppositions to interfere with his scientific work, although it must be acknowledged that his attempts to overturn the Copenhagen interpretation were scientifically productive, since their failure served to affirm it and, therefore, contributed to the progress of physics.

Regarding causal determinism (every effect requires a cause) and its possible incompatibility with free will, quantum mechanics tells us that there are events (quantum collapses) not completely determined by the previous situation.

Western science only considers the Aristotle’s efficient causes, disregarding final causes, which are compatible with free will. Mitchell points out that the study of efficient causes can only answer questions beginning with the adverb "how," while the study of final causes answers questions of the "why" type. He adds that the distrust of many scientists toward final causes stems from their fear that, if they admit that purpose plays a role, they risk introducing God into the system. To this, Mitchell argues that although the universe itself may not have purpose, living organisms certainly do. That is, in fact, their defining characteristic.

Finally, Mitchell also rejects biological determinism and emphasizes the role of information and, above all, meaning, which gives agents causal power in the world: Thoughts are not just patterns of neural activity: they are patterns that mean something. The growth of available information over time is a result of evolution and natural selection, as I have also pointed out in my book The Fifth Level of Evolution and in these two blog posts: Evolution and Progress and The Origin of Eukaryotes.

Regarding consciousness, there are two types of reductionism: strict reductionism, which states that everything is determined by the properties of elementary particles; and neuronal reductionism, according to which the functioning of neurons explains everything. In chapter 6 of his book, Mitchell opposes neuronal reductionism in the following words:

In a holistic sense, the organism’s neural circuits are not deciding—the organism is deciding. It’s not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It’s an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it’s not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms. What the system is doing should not be identified with how the system is doing it. Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it’s the self that decides.

Mitchell's philosophy is emergentist monism, with which I disagree, although I concur with his well-documented attack on reductionist monism. I do, however, agree more with his conception of time, a form of Time A that defines the present as the interval during which the indefiniteness of the future is fixed, becomes definite, and is transformed into the past, as he asserts that an isolated instant in time cannot exist. Consequently, if the future is not written, the past is.

And I would add: this view of time, with a non-written future, aligns with the Christian idea of ​​the efficacy of prayer, and with the second message of Fatima: If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. Since it wasn't done, we had the Second World War.

In the next post, I'll explain how Mitchell applies his ideas to the field of artificial intelligence.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca