Sometime in the 1970's I joined the Institute on Religion in the Age of Science (IRAS) and went to a conference out on Star Island on "Determinism versus Free Will." I've been following that centuries or millenia old discussion for the last 30 years, watching it evolve as science develops new tools and concepts.
One thing that is definitely true about this debate is that it can consume an unbounded amount of time with little visible progress or outcome, although headache may be common.
The motif has resurfaced again in many ways, from organizational theorists wondering how to change a culture to produce safer or more reliable or more predictable outcomes, to public health pondering where to intervene in poverty or depression -- how far upstream to go in the "Russian doll" type of nested contexts that carry "causality" upwards and out of sight.
Meanwhile, of course, social engineers and Madison Avenue ad executives and politicians work the other end, seeking where to alter context to produce a political outcome that they find desirable that the people in the middle perceive as having been freely decided. Tobacco, fast-food, and drug companies spend billions of dollars to change the outcome of the exercise of "free choice' on the part of consumers while claiming that a concern for constitutional protection of free will is their own driving force. This is, needless to say, a major concern of public health at this time,when trying to figure out how to get people to stop smoking who want to, but are caught up in a larger determining network.
The fact is that all local interactions take place on a larger contextual playing field, which can be tipped somewhat to favor one outcome over another in a way that is not instantly obvious to those on the field. It has been said that hypnotists can't make a person do something he wouldn't do in normal life, such as murder someone, but they can change the perceived context so the person does the desired activity because they perceive that, say, the person they are killing is really some sort of dangerous reptile.
Both context and content are always at work, but context is much harder to see, and the context of the context even harder, etc., even though it is just as real and perhaps even more determining of the outcome.
People make all observations in their own reference frames, but they are notoriously unaware of how biased and warped those reference frames can be, because, from within them, they look unbiased and flat.
The problem becomes even more extreme when a collection of people locally all remove diversity and take on the same warp, which now can't even be noticed by the fact that others are looking at one strangely when suggesting some bizarre idea. Groupthink rules. This is exactly the risk and danger that "safety cultures" and high-reliability organizations have to try to overcome.
And, of course, people in the middle of thousands of such contexts try to reverse engineer the equation and figure out why they do what they do, especially when it's not what they wanted to do in the first place. Over 2/3 of the USA's health care expense is due to "lifestyle choices" such as smoking, drinking, exercise, drugs, but we have to ask what, in turn "causes" those choices? It's increasingly obvious that the concept of "an individual" is a tricky one, as more and more of the causality moves upwards to peer-groups and context.
So, we're back to the nature versus nurture controversy again, genes versus upbringing. If there's one major lesson I'd say we can learn from "systems thinking" it's that the word "OR" should be eliminated when feedback loops are involved. Wages influence prices and prices influence wages in a spiral but the term "cause" is not applicable -- there are two intervention points and either works just fine, thank you. The math is very familiar to anyone who ever built analog electronic circuits, which is fewer and fewer of us today.
I highly recommend that a reader who hasn't checked out my earlier post on marvelous machines driven by context should do so. Picking from there a very simple example, to illustrate the problem of "OR", consider the water faucet and the idea that you can go and open the faucet and water will come out (hopefully.) So, we might ask, WHY (on a deep level) do the water molecules "decide" to come out of the faucet at that time? Is it due to local interactions? Or is it caused by some remote, alleged "water tower" that contains water and is alleged to transmit a desire, across huge distances, to the local water molecules that somehow forces them to move out of the faucet at that time?
The correct answers are more "yes" and "both", not one or the other. Again, I highly recommend tuning and calibrating one's mental concepts about "causality" on the examples I give there, which are extremely simple and totally visible, before venturing out into the wilds of human existence, free will, and determinism.
If your concepts don't work or help you with easy problems, why would you trust them on hard problems?
I don't plan to get sucked in, (against my will), to a length debate at this time on free will, but I did want to note the Times article, and at least one or two references for follow up.
Today's New York Times article is linked here:
Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don't
By Dennis Overbye
Jan 2, 2007
Excerpt:
“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Maryland. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.
“If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”
Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”
How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will.
For what it's worth, I personally am a big believer in free will and find their "plunge into nihilism and despair" to be totally unwarranted, but I will leave most of that discussion for another day.
Here's one alternate reference, selected from Google hits, a STARS conference on "downward causality" in emergent systems, a theme I touched on yesterday when talking about pixels forming images that then get a life of their own and turn around and start ordering the pixels around.
My own arguements in prior posts are that this phenomenon is widespread and scale-invariant, meaning it is a basic physical property of nested regulatory feedback loops and we should expect to find it manifesting itself at every scale, from sub-atomic to trans-galactic. We can therefore, if that is true, use the powerful principle of "symmetry" to compare results and insight across disparate fields of research.
So, for example, we might go to the level of a corporation and see how a founder of a company could make a company to serve him, but shortly end up being thrown out by the company which has now decided to go off on its own in some other direction.
The impact of culture on the bottom line, or success on the battlefield, is another important area of research that needs the insights from this hierarchical causality mathematics. See my post "Virtue drives the bottom line" on hard-headed corporations and the US Army and their use of these principles.
Or, in the delightful book "Systemantics", John Gall talks about how academic faculty members had once hired staff to fetch writing supplies, and, in some sort of turnabout, the staff became administrators and started telling the faculty what to do.
technorati tags:freewill, determinism, context, feedback, systems, hierarchy, IRAS, Gall, virtue, society, will, freedom, advertising, ads, MadisonAve, control, command, politics, hypnosis, mesmerism
4 comments:
I really should note that Einstein, one of the most misquoted researchers of all time, has a great deal to say about the interplay of context and content and how to describe this in solid mathematics. It's called "The General Theory of Relativity" and was a major portion of his life's work. The whole point of that work, and I've passed a graduate level course in Relativity, is that in the physical world at cosmological levels content and context become indistinguishable, and are really different ends of the same spectrum; and that we have to understand how context changes content to be able to describe the basic physcial world we see around us, such as "gravitation", and the "fields" we are immersed in that alter our very observations and shrink our yardsticks or metersticks invisibly to even perfectly reliable observers.
If you can't deal with that level math for blobs of passive mass that mostly just sit there, I wouldn't trust that math to do a good job describing people. If your math doesn't look at a beak of air and see a tornado or hurricane as a possible outcome, it's not very good math yet, and should be handled warily.
Oh, and the most important thing - the theory of relativity doesn't say two observers can never agree so forget basic truth - it says that, if we CORRECT FOR the context effects, ALL observers should agree on a single truth.
Einstein, in that vein at least, did not advocate despair of finding truth, but advocated a way to counteract the distortions of accidental context and to reveal the splendid universal truth underneath all the chaotic differign and apparently "irreconcilable" differences.
On the subject of New Year's resolutions and weight loss, the Times article starts with the temptation to eat dessert.
Another artcle on the same topic is in the Washington Post, in Sally Squire's "lean plate club" today "Resolved to be a Loser? You'll need more than luck."
at (reassembled) this URL:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/
2007/01/01/AR2007010100604.html
Ms. Squires still misses the point that yours truly added in comments:
===========================
One thing shown by research to make a difference is to have social support and peer pressure working in your favor. This is a case where "self regulation" of health behavior is assisted by others, leaving a funny definition of self.
Nevertheless, studies show effects such as these: women had more success losing weight if their CHILDREN were paid $10 per pound they lost, than if THEY were paid the $10.
Needless to say, your mileage may vary.
Another key related point is that the larger self, the meta-self, the self that is caught up interactively and perhaps "causally" in a larger context may be the right thing to study "why" it is that social disconnection and loss of such relationships is so destructive and damaging to "physiological" health, in a very demonstrable and repeatable way.
In fact, the damaging impact of loss of social connectivity is one of the most "robust" findings of social epidemiology, showing up in morbidity, mortality across the board - heart attacks, strokes, obesity, depression, etc.
IN fact, why exactly is it that "solitary confinement" is such a punishment, and why loss of a loved one produces such apparently dysfunctional (to a Darwinian) results as months or years of bereavement and depression? Or why does post-partum depression occur at all.
ONe suspects that, mathematically, it's is more than "like losing a part of oneself" in all these cases, it's that one's "self" has actually expanded and was literally cut off.
In that mathematical sense, the "self" is not confined to the physiological body that it travels with, most of the time, so far as the mathematics of causal chains and entrainment and phase-lock-loops goes.
The question of whether this is "Real" or not is a waste of time, it seems to me. All models are wrong but some models are useful. The question is whether this meta-body and meta-self model helps give us insight into intervention points for life-style behaviors or depression or stress or work-group productivity that turn out to work in practice and lead to interventions that succeed. That's "real" enough for me.
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