Living In Beauty: A Case Against Free-Will

Free-will.  Choice.  The ability to freely decide, among the options we are aware of, what to do.  It provides direct meaning to our actions – a quality of virtuosity in the brush-strokes of the painting that is our life.  The colors being our relationships; shapes being experiences; the size of the canvas equivalent to the longevity of your life and the amount of choices you made; and the content representing our morality.  But is there a painter?

Through introspection it seems that our will is free.  However, our reflexivity is flawed.  Our conscious thoughts are only a portion of the totality of our brain’s workings.  The judgement of our thoughts through thought is an inaccurate sample, possibly based on activity that is unconscious.  How can we suggest that we have free-will from this perspective?  Do we take a single glance at a can of soup and suggest that it’s the shape of a circle (or rectangle)?

This is really a cylinder.

If contemplation can’t solve the problem, perhaps the character of our existence can.

The laws of nature provide us with a basic understanding of determinism within our universe.  This is a discordance with free-will; something can’t be free if it’s determined.  A likely response would be one of two objections:

First, “the laws of nature are not exact laws, but probabilistic with degrees of error/uncertainty, thus allowing space for free-will to exist.”  Is the lack of exactness of the laws of nature a product of science’s basis on induction, which comes with a price of inherent inaccuracy; or due to actual non-exactness of these laws?

Second, “the randomness of quantum mechanics suggests that the universe is not entirely deterministic, thus allowing room for free-will to exist.”  Is the quantum level applicable to free-will?  How does indeterminism open up room for free-will?

As beings that exist within reality, and the future is established by the characteristics of reality, our decisions are established by those same characteristics.  Therefore, if the future is deterministic, our choices are underlined by and included within determinism;  if the future isn’t determined by anything, it could not be determined by us.

Some thinkers still posit that, even without free-will, there is moral responsibility.  This is driven by an account against an old sophomoric definition of ‘responsibility.’

“The principle of alternate possibilities,” or PAP, states that a person is considered morally responsible for what they have done only if they were able to do otherwise.  The argument against it suggests that if a person would have decided on an action regardless of alternatives, and there were no alternatives when it had to be made, that the person is still morally responsible.  This a great argument against PAP as the basis of moral responsibility, but PAP is a horrible basis.

If the decision was a product of a deterministic nature of the agent, the cases and decisions leading to the final decision would be inherently established, thus the whole process becoming a whole system of no alternatives.  And if the decision was a product of an indeterministic nature of the agent, the events leading to the final decision would be random, non-conclusive swerving among all the possibilities along the way; the final decision would have to be the only decision that could be made, regardless of all previous decisions.

You can probably see the ludicrousness of PAP by now, and hence the argument against it: with alternate possibilities, randomness can be considered morally responsible.  This means one can be held responsible without control of one’s choices, as long as there are alternative choices along the way.  Lack of control isn’t responsibility, it’s more so innocence, or even imprisonment.

Repeat after me: “I am free.”

In order to be morally responsible, an agent must be the primary and solitary cause of the act; plurality in cause, withdrawal of responsibility on the agent.  A ‘self’ derived from the emergence of multiple prior causes cannot be considered responsible.

We are not ‘free.’  But we are beautiful.

Meaning in our lives does not come from how actions are made, but what the actions are.

We are merely playing secondary roles (currently) in the story of the universe.

We aren’t the hand holding the brush.  We are the paint on the canvas.

We live in beauty.

Why Organic?

Intake of Pesticides
Pesticides, which are poisonous to us, are used on the ‘industrial’ plants, then they’re eaten. While there is little to none in the food when we eat it, there is still pesticides found in our bodies either from what we eat or from exposure in our environment (and the same is for antibiotics from our meat, which is making the antibiotics we use on ourselves less effective, by the way).

Sustainable
Lack of pesticides and multiple crops in organic farming increases the biodiversity of the farms, making the plants better at defending against pests, which can lead to greater yields. All this biodiversity, coupled with crop rotation, makes far richer and healthier soil. This is just for the farm itself though, there is much more that pertains to sustainability. Greater sustainability would come from the use of green and natural methods, as well as focus on being/staying local (more on these in a later post).

Bees
Obviously, pesticides will kill bees directly, but it is killing them indirectly as well, and has been posited to be a factor in Colony Collapse Disorder. Bees are a huge factor in the ecology of plants, killing them directly or indirectly doesn’t help and only hurts our ability to keep feeding ourselves. Here’s a more expert view on bees: Marla Spivak – Why Bees Are Disappearing.

An Unneeded Division

Recently, I’ve come across science-oriented individuals who posit that philosophy and science are separate; that one – science – could flourish without the other – philosophy.  Do they not realize that science is what philosophers used to call “natural philosophy?”  Do they not realize that science forms its basis in the realms of empirical philosophy and mathematics (which itself forms its basis in logic)?

Inductive reasoning, the sacred cornerstone of all science, is a philosophical concept.  Theoretical science – the concept of connecting ideas from multiple understandings – is philosophizing.

Does this mean that science should bow down to philosophy as the superior form of obtaining wisdom?  No.  In fact, science can affect the understanding of both itself and philosophy.  However, it’s a limited methodology – bound by philosophical concepts that survive very well due to their accuracy and usefulness.  Science is a tool that was formed by philosophy to develop wisdom, just as math is a tool.

Philosophy is not a tool or method.  Philosophy is a journey.  A journey toward wisdom.

I use this analogy to better understand the claim that philosophy isn’t, inherently, a correct way to obtain wisdom, because it’s true that there is no starting point, path, or finish line innate in philosophy, but there are better and worse ways to do it.

If philosophy is a journey, then knowledge is the vehicle and rationality the path.  If knowledge is the vehicle, then science is the car ; if rationality is the path, then logic is the quality and direction of the road.

A scientist has to philosophize, but a philosopher doesn’t have to be scientific.
A logician has to philosophize, but a philosopher doesn’t have to be logical.
However, a good and correct philosopher is scientific and logical.

Great Claims and Greater Denials

Imagine having a meaningful and engrossing conversation with one of your friends about the benefits of scientific knowledge today.  Eventually physics comes up and your friend says, “I don’t believe in gravity.  I mean, it IS only a theory.”  Maybe your first reaction would be, “Did I hear you correctly?” or “We’re not friends anymore.”  Regardless of your response, you would think them to be wrong in their belief due to the massive amount of evidence supporting this theory (including the fact that we can’t jump off the ground and fly into space).

…or can we?

Yes, gravity IS a theory.  When a person claims that they don’t believe in gravity because it’s “just a theory,” it’s fairly easy to realize that this belief is ridiculous.  However, in popular culture, the same “logic” is applied to theories such as evolution and global climate change.  Why is this?  Perhaps it is because of an old and popular assumption of what ‘tolerance’ is.

The understanding goes that, in cases where claims can be made, all beliefs are equally legitimate.  That isn’t tolerance – it’s intellectual relativity.  This relativity leads to a picking and choosing of beliefs based on selfish wants instead of truth.  It leads to the belief in numerous theories in chemistry and biology that are the basis for disciplines such as meteorlogy and medicine (both important in modern society) while disregarding other theories from the same sciences (ie. global climate change and evolution).  This exploitation completely ignores the fact that all of these theories derive from the same foundation: the scientific method.

The scientific method uses the epistemological understanding that knowledge is derived from experience to create a foundation for science – and since knowledge is based from experience, evidence becomes science’s tool to further understanding.  Essentially, evidence is all we have to use to predicate understanding and, hence, (dis)belief (logic helps along the way, but itself is founded on evidence derived from simple mathematical concepts in the physical world and capabilities of our brain, ie. subitizing).

But relativism removes this foundation by making assumptions of correct and false based on wants and dislikes. All of this leads to the sporadic debasing of any knowledge we have.  A prime example of this is the most popular group of relativists in the world: religious moderates.  They hypocritically claim to be part of a certain religious system but believe and follow rules they base on what they want or like, then neglect what they dislike.  In this case, dogmatism is less dangerous since it puts itself on the same evidential playing-field as science (with its objective claims), allowing more factual claims to become the only relevant ones.  thus, the product of intellectual relativity is stagnation in understanding, the termination of innovation and invention, and the extinction of progress (Dark Ages anyone?).  If progress is valued, then relativity isn’t an idea worth sustaining.

“Just think, we could have been exploring the galaxy by now.”

True tolerance is temperance with one’s own beliefs when other claims, of equal or more evidential basis, are apparent (typically with the purpose of progressing one’s beliefs into more truthful ones).  Tolerance can’t be had if claims aren’t, at least, on equal evidential basis.  As the great and late Christopher Hitchens stated, “What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof” – and it follows that a claim with evidence can only be dismissed by a claim with more factual evidence of an equal or greater amount.

Then again, I could be wrong and people probably don’t believe in evolution and/or global climate change because they think it’s a set-up by the leftist, anti-American, communists who want to control the world (however, I would posit the importance of evidence in this case as well).  At any rate, if there wasn’t a heavy evidential basis for global climate change, the health and sustanance of ‘life as we know it’ being essential to the survival of our species should be enough proof of what actions we need to take when it comes to how we treat the environment.  Then again, the importance of this life could be completely waned by an everlasting afterlife, making the wellness of this life far less pertinent, but, once again, evidence is crucial.