Detecting Chance

Clark: You forgot to include the agent in the equation. The change is a result of a basic action by the agent so that the mapping of the data after the act of free will map onto the organizing structures provided by the of will. You give us randomness before an act and then fail to recognize the relation of the data to the act of will — the basic act of power to organize for teleological reasons of the agent. So there is also a change in the agent that both brings about the ordering of the data and a change that results in the agent from the choice that is made.

Moreover, why should I accept your assumptions? Process thought doesn’t even accept the existence of substances per se and you begin with that assumption. Moreover, you forget that there would also be a chance in the agent in relation to the resulting data before and at the time of the act that organizes the data.

What do you mean by randomness? Do you mean the complete lack of order? Do you mean order without some algorithm that makes sense of it ? The reason this is important is that there is order after an act of free will that relates directly to the causal order that organizes the data. Thus, (3) doesn’t follow from (1) if the result is an act of LFW. That is, there isn’t just a transition from one state to another that that is random if an agent is involved. The change has to be causally related to the organizing powers of the agent which is what is missing. You have just set up a random transition from state s1 to state c1 without any relation to an agent. Any states that result from being organized by the teleological reasons of an agent will differ from a random distribution.

Brandon has already pointed out that for (1) to contradict (2) you must have a single occurrence. I would add that for (1) to contradict (2) you cannot have the relation to the agent that I have pointed to and that is the sine qua non of agent causation.

Finally, God knows the random distribution of data before the agent causal act, the ordering power and reasons of the agent in exercise of agent causation, and the transition of the random distribution in s1 to c1 as a result of the ordering reasons and causes of the agent at t1. Further, there is, as Brandon points out, really a series of transitions in process thought in which the total of all past moments that have been concresced [the Whitheadian term for the synthetic result of the synthetic act of creation of organism] in the agent as an organism and that is then a new causal basis for the synthesis of the data as a causal act of creation in the organization of the data into a an act of choice.

The data that result thus bear the relation of the causal character of the agent at t0 … t1 and the agents reasons at t1. So we have data at t0 … t1 that are organized in the character and person of the agent, random data s1 that are then incorporated by the agent in the act of coalescence and choice at t2, and resulting organized data at t3 that bear the relation of a continuant of the data stream from t0 … t1 of the character and choice of the agent at t2. No other data in the history of the world could bear that relation or have that organization resulting from such a history of relation in the agent. Thus, it is easily detectable by God as non-random. So (4) is just false and doesn’t follow in the least from (3).

You forgot to include the agent in the equation. The change is a result of a basic action by the agent so that the mapping of the data after the act of free will map onto the organizing structures provided by the of will.

No I didn’t. All aspects of the agent that are in the universe and that change are included in S0 … Sn. Note that I’m not making an assumption about materialism here since I’m not specifying what the substances are merely that they interact with a knower such that they can know the state.

Moreover, why should I accept your assumptions?

I rather suspect you won’t. The point of the exercise is less to convince you than to get at what, exactly, premises you reject and why. Thus far your response has been the same (as in the quote above). However it’s just not clear to me exactly what you are rejecting beyond the conclusions nor why.

What do you mean by randomness?

I think I’ve specified this many times to you. I mean an indetermined change of state that is not LFW.

That is, there isn’t just a transition from one state to another that that is random if an agent is involved. The change has to be causally related to the organizing powers of the agent which is what is missing.

As I said above, if the agent exists (even if only as an ontologically emergent substance) then that is included in the list of substances. So this simply isn’t a move you can logically make.

Finally, God knows the random distribution of data before the act, the ordering power and reasons of the agent, and the transition of the random distribution in s1 to c1 as a result of the ordering reasons and causes of the agent at t1.

Except that the question at hand is whether he does know the “ordering power.” You can’t simply inject that into the argument without engaging in circular logic. The whole point of the argument is to simply show how he can’t know the ordering power. You can, of course, assert he simply does. Which is what I think you’re position ultimately boils down to - but you’d explicitly rejected this reading of you that I’d made earlier. Further the point of the argument is to get you to engage in why you think God can know this ordering power. i.e. bring out what your hidden premises are.

Blake, but that’s just circular logic, as I said. The point is whether we could epistemologically tell what ontology is in play. So the point is we can’t assume before hand what is or isn’t LFW or random.

That you disagree with the ontology I recognize. The point of the argument is an epistemological one. Can we know if there is LFW.

I had felt before like you were perhaps missing what I was saying and was trying to track down the premise. It seems though you’re just agreeing with me epistemologically but say that since there is LFW the epistemological question is irrelevant. But the whole point was whether we could know the ontology.

Clark:

Isn’t there just some sort of internalist/externalist dispute that just keeps recurring in this impasse? As far as I can make Blake out, he seems to be postulating some sort of immanent continuity between the intentional experience of an agent and God’s knowledge, which, lacking fore-knowledge, would intuit the novelty of the intentional act. Well, I think he’s not allowing for enough of a gap between the agent’s teleology and any teleology that might be attributable to an evolving universe, but then I don’t share his purpose of religious explication. But he’s just recurrently outraged or irritated that you would claim that an intentional act could be equated with a random, contingent event. (I don’t know if it would help to suggest that an intentional act can have several consequences, some not intended, though arguably involved in the identification of the act, and that the occasion of such an act is not entirely up to or at the disposal of the agent. But Blake seems to be appealing to a common sense intuition that obviously an intentional act and the teleological organization or disposition of the agent from which it issues is different from the herky-jerky movements of a robot or the external conditions that might produce an accidental fall or the face of Jesus “appearing” in a pizza). I take Clark to be suggesting that “ontological chance”, Peirce’s “Tychism”, indeterministic processes, might be involved in both the pre-conditions, at least, of the teleological organization of an agent and in the conditions in which or on which it acts. Hence a criterion of discernible difference is requested within the order of events, whether by the agent or by another outside the agent’s perspective, by which the specific causal contribution of the “free” intentional act can be distinguished from other causal conditions or processes. Otherwise, an ontological delimitation of LFW has not been achieved, in contrast to other possible metaphysical “pictures”, since indeterminism alone is not a sufficient condition for LFW, which itself contrasts best against a deterministic “picture”. It is not a matter of the teleological organization of an agent being obviously “identical” to “randomness”; it’s a matter of what, within the distributed order of events, would “count” as the specific contribution of the agent’s “free” intention, according to LFW, within those events, and what would be its marker. That externalist criterion doesn’t deny or refute LFW; rather it puts in doubt, unless answered, its knowability, since an agent, to be one, must “alienate” itself into an external world and its causal processes. But I suppose Blake must be asking: what is it that allows you to deny the internalist perspective, if not his account of it, since you too must be experiencing, operating from, and articulating it in your very criticisms.

Clark: Happy birthday to your daughter! How do I order chocolate from you? As long as it ain’t any of that universal chocolate that just happens to be whatever nature randomly to comes up with, I want to order some if it is a result of your free will and personality (I really do!) and not just some random concoction.

OK, sorry for the delay, but I didn’t want this too come off as flip.

A few preliminaries (here referring to Blake’s comments in #5).

First the main disagreement, as I read you, is that certain states simply can’t be arrived at by chance. So the move from S -> C is invalid. The reason I feel this is illegitimate (and ends up merely begging the question) is that for a move from S -> C to be impossible something must be blocking it. But you’ve not outlined what could block it. Thus it reduces to simply rejecting the conclusions because they aren’t the conclusions you like. In effect this is rejecting ontological randomness (or at least limiting it in an ad hoc fashion)

Now I understand why you’d want to do this. I just don’t think you’ve explained what limits randomness.

You say, for example, that you “would never accept as random behavior or data that is based on goal directed or teleological reasons.” But the whole argument is designed to elicit a response of both why and further how we could distinguish what really is teleological from what is apparently teleological. (I’d note, for example, that this is the basis of the Intelligent Design dispute)

You charge me of a false dichotomy when you say,

So you have a false dichotomy assumed in your universe — either random or determined. But there is a third category: data that are directed toward an end by creative reasoning not determined by natural laws.

But note that I explicitly did not do this. I fully allow the move of state from S -> C be available via LFW causality. I simply also allow it to be available via random means. The problem is that you want there to be something that blocks one cause without needing to express what it is.

You raise an attempt to distinguish random from ‘directed’ by appeal to history:

The resulting data are not random because they uniquely reflect this history of the agent and also the creative input of the agent to organize the data of experience in a new way that has never before existed.

But this works if and only if for any step in the history we can distinguish random from directed. Without this then this is exactly the classic case of circular reasoning. The history isn’t random because we know the steps aren’t random. And we know the steps aren’t random because the history isn’t random. Surely you see this?

Further, your assertion that God may not be able to know the very ordering power in the way that it is exercised is just vacuous to me. It is a part of the universe. It is an act of the agent that consists in the way the agent acts on the data to organize it and to exclude and include data of experience.

Note though that I blocked explicitly this line of defense. That is I said that the argument works only if God’s knowledge is mediated. That is he knows X only indirectly by X’s effects on Y. So, to make an analogy, I know there is a keyboard in front of me not by simply direct knowledge of the keyboard but via a series of indirect actions.

If you simply assert God knows in an absolute mysterious sense everything independent of any particular way of knowing then that’s fine. It’s odd you keep bringing this up since I’ve offered this as an out to you several times. i.e. God knows the way the God of creation ex nihilo knows. Put an other way it is impossible to talk about an epistemology for God since there is no justification for God’s beliefs. He simply has absolute knowledge.

Now if you take this route I won’t accept it. But I’d certainly have turned to quite different approaches to arguing against it quite some time ago.

As I said, (3) doesn’t logically follow either (1) or (1) & (2), nor does (4) logically follow (3).

(3) follows from (1) simply by the definition of random change. If some substance S has allowable states s0, s1,…,sn and there are no physical limitations on a state change (say a conservation law) then from (1) it follows that C is equivalent to substance S in simply a different state.

So I’m quite surprised you’d say that doesn’t logically follow. If it doesn’t logically follow then all physical is wrong. (grin)

Of course you add a requirement:

From the fact that randomness it possible, it doesn’t follow that randomness obtains.

Certainly true. But irrelevant to the argument since the argument deals only with a state change and how we know it is random or not. So the argument deals only when a random change did obtain.

Getting back to your logical objections (4) follows from (3) for the same reasons. i.e. something is allowable if it isn’t restricted by some physical means.

Now of course that’s what you reject. i.e. you think there can be a limit on what is allowable randomnly. That is a state is open to randomness (i.e. a possible physical state) but not available randomnly. Which gets us back to the starting point. Why do you say this?

John, thanks for your comments. I don’t think this really ties to the internalist/externalist debate. Although I do think that the typical move of (1) above for God’s knowledge tends to be tied to an internalist conception of knowledge. That is I have induibtbale access to my own mental states. Traditionally this move is made with the creation ex nihilo version of God by saying he foreknows all reality in his mind. That is all actual states of the universe are actually internal mental states for God.

That’s why I find Blake’s apparent move so odd. This is a very unusual thing for a Mormon to assert, as I see it. Blake’s going to have to show how this is possible for God while simultaneously rejecting creation ex nihilo. This is possible in a more limited form for process thinkers simply because their God is the spirit of the universe. God’s body is the universe and the universe then generates in an emergent way God’s mind. In a limited sense they have recreated the old Stoic God in new clothing.

However this move also isn’t possible for Blake simply because God for Mormons is essentially embodied in a much more limited form. It seems to me that he’s trying to keep the benefits of Hartshorne’s view of God without allowing for the rather significant ontological differences between Mormon views of God and most process theological views of God. Maybe he can resolve this but I’d be very surprised if he could.

Regarding Peirce, he allows for three moves. One is basically determinism (coming out of the Newtonian traditions), the second is chance (coming out of the Darwinianist tradition, albeit given an ontological flair coming from the Epicurians), and the third is love which Peirce calls agapism. This latter view of change is wrapped up with what he calls teleology. However unlike with Blake it’s not an emergent phenomena but is a possibility with every sign.

I talked about habits as key to Peirce’s cosmology. However the only way a sign can grow and by develop is by previous signs having an effect on it. This is basically something akin to Lamarkian evolution and is talked about it a certain way by modern cognitive science discussions of memes. (Although like the word “framing” I hate to talk about “memes” since they are so regularly misused and misapplied) Anyway because in unlimited semiosis there is always that influence from earlier generations things aren’t purely random.

For the record Blake and my positions are remarkably similar. The only place we differ is that I don’t allow what Searle terms “radically emergent” phenomena. If Blake would allow events rather than only consciously reasoning minds to be free then our positions would be nearly identical. I see a free mind as emergent out of free events whereas he rejects this and only allows an emergent mind to be free and then mysteriously allow ‘downward’ content. (Note, I recognize you differ from O’Conner’s view Blake and thus this doesn’t capture the nuances of your view. But it’ll do as a first approximation.)

Well, just as an aside, I see Whitehead as claiming the particular reals as being of the order of or having the “nature” of events. “Actual entities” become “actual occasions” when considered in their temporalizing aspect, (which is, of course, a considerable part of the point of considering “things” in terms of processes, and hence as both changing in and of themselves and inheriting from their causal pasts). But to be particulars, in his analysis, they must be also and already “composite” or comprised of relations, which entails some minimal involvement with other such particular events, but, insofar as they must be self-related, would comprise their “mental” pole. I don’t see Whitehead as thereby proposing a “panpsychist” account, (which he never claimed and which others have only imputed to him), but rather, starting from a highly generalized analysis of experience, (which, after all, for him would be how we have any contact with, let alone knowledge of, the world or ourselves in it), he extends the account, heuristically and fallibilistically, to what the “monads” comprising the world must be “like”. Hence, even microphysical wave/particles would have a “mental” pole, as “internally” relational, and not just what in standard language we would attribute as organisms and “minds”. An inert, causally determined macrophysical object, such as a brick, would have a “mental” pole, insofar as it maintains the sort of cohesions and reactivities that “identify” it as such, for so long as it exists. So, though Whitehead was proposing an account of emergent evolution in the natural universe, which would include or allow for, mental experience, I don’t know that it would be an account of “radical emergence”, in the sense of recurring to the “autonomy” of the mental, which might actually be self-defeating for what that account is attempting to suggest. (And again, I’m not aware that he ever addressed specifically the issue of “free agency”, though he may have indeterminately aimed at allowing “room” for the discussion of such issues).

(By the way, I did check out the Wikipedia article on Peirce, just to try and see what his publication history was, which turned out to be as misfortunate as I suspected, with his Nachlass amounting to some 100,000 pages, which would be 20 volumes?. At any rate, the article contained the following line: “A. N. Whitehead, while reading some of Peirce’s unpublished manuscripts soon after arriving at Harvard in 1924, was struck by how Peirce had anticipated his own “process” thinking.”)

As I’ve said before, I think mental properties and capacities emerged bit-by-bit or stepwise in natural evolution, insofar as they endowed organisms with the capacity to respond behaviorally to contingent, unexpected, unforeseeable environmental events. But organisms themselves are negentropic organizations, (which could only arise in a world of quasi-permanent thermo-dynamic disequilibrium, which itself is “fed” recurrently with additional energy), and hence “informational”, qua self-regulating and self-replicating causal structures, which “adapt” by matching recurrent features with the statistical regularities of environmental events. If the behavioral and informational are already involved with organism “prior” to the emergence of the mental, I don’t see how there would be a problem of “downward causation” rather than just interaction. But perhaps also it would be best to consider the mental as itself event-like, which our talk of states and dispositions might obscure, since they perhaps concern less what the mental “is” or might be, than how we identify it and its successions, and how such episodes are integrated with the overall life-process of the organism. (Though, again, much of the mental is bound up with various kinds of memory systems, which themselves are largely unconscious, almost by definition, and perhaps not primarily “mental” in nature).

The other aspect of Blake’s view, as far as I’ve been able to make it out, that strikes me as involving “internalism” is his appeals to intuition, which would apparently come up as well on the explicitly moral side, with “error and elimination theories” the only alternatives. What I’d have to say is that appeals to “intuition” are more like evidential claims, similar to perceptual claims, which are entry/exit points of discursive inferences, than argumentative claims. Such evidentiary claims, as with perceptions, are not quite corrigible or argumentatively defeasable, (though one can, of course, re-check perceptions or examine their contexts in terms of their fit with inferential relations to other perceptions), but there is also a question as to whether such evidential claims “fully” match up to the conceptual or experiential aggregation that they are meant to sustain, which is their “warranting”. In those terms, the question of just what conception of direct, immediate intuition Blake is using was raised by me, since I find it puzzlingly “internalist”. And, though I understand that the future is open and unknowable, (aside from the physicists’ understanding of time, in terms of positive entropy), and that a “process” account of the universe entails a certain openness of the universe with respect to its future (or its succeeding “possible worlds”), I also don’t understand and am puzzled by his account of LFW entailing any compete causal openness to the universe, which would effect God’s own knowledge precisely insofar as he could know the free act, in terms of all its causal antecedents and consequences, as being “free”, without quite knowing the act itself. God, then, must follow after and circumscribe the act, without having any fore-knowledge of the possible states of the world in which the act is conceived and to which it is directed, which, of course, must involve some element of fore-knowledge, whether “correct” or not, on the part of the agent, and yet God’s intuitions and those of the agent must, in some sense, be “identical”. It’s that identity-in-difference in his conception of “intuition” that I can’t make out, but that seems to involve some sort of assumption of an internalist immanence between God and the agent, in order to be “direct”, immediate. (Of course, there might be some theological subtleties that I’m missing, but it’s the account of the universe and not God’s transcendence to it that is mainly bothering me).

But we still haven’t gotten to the next leg of the argument, which concerns a “revisionist” account of responsibility.

Clark:

I just want to check out your comment on General Relativity and it’s possible “ontological” implication or purport here, (from my, pardon me, relatively weak layman’s understanding of such physics). My point was that I think that a process philosophy account does allow for a certain futural openness with regard to the co-evolving universe with novel emergent phenomena, but it doesn’t allow of any completely “open” future to the universe, but rather any such account must involve the heritage and carry-over of a causal,- (or, if you’d prefer, informational),- past, and the ways in which that would condition any changes that would occur. Two points then about GR, if I’ve got it anywhere near right: a) events are registered and “integrated” within a space-time system or frame, such that far distant events, spatially and temporally, are “integrated” into our space-time frame with present events, which, obversely, would mean that our present events would be registered in that alternative space-time frame as equally temporally-spatially distant in a futural “direction”, and hence past and futural events can not be cleanly separated in terms of any singular temporal “line”, but would require “carry-over” with respect to each other, in their “integration” into any space-time frame; and b) since every “thing” or event, except c, is only measurable with respect to a space-time frame,- (and such space-time frames do not occur in any common frame, so as to be simultaneously comparable and thus contradictory, relativity not implying any relativism),- any overall account of the universe,- (and a forteriori, any God that would be transcendent to it),- must take account of the different frames in which events are registered and integrated or understood, which would involve something like, say, translation-rules between the pasts and futures involved in a).

Does that get at the “ontological” difficulties involved with Blake’s account? I myself think that any adequate attempt at physical theory, at least in intention or explanatory aim, concerns the objective “truth” about the world, i.e. as mind independent or transcendent, and, at least, regarding the relevant domain that it addresses, regardless of whether it could capture it “completely”. So I don’t think “instrumentalistic” accounts or interpretations would quite do,- (though that usually comes up in terms of the “Copenhagen” interpretation of QM, and, of course, I wouldn’t have any realistic idea of current efforts to reconcile QM with GR),- even if I think cross-applicability would “count”, in contrast to mere technological utility. (Whitehead was trying to make just such a case. He even tried to rewrite Einstein’s account of GR, objecting not to the notions of GR, which he enthusiastically supported, but to the operationalist-instrumentalist form, in which Einstein had cast his theory. Unfortunately, there were some slight quantitative discrepancies, so the effort fell by the wayside). But, then again, I’ve belabored at tedious length to try and make the point that any general account of causality in the universe does not suffice to resolve these issues, but rather the right “topographical” level in the causally emergent universe must be brought into view before any specific issue of the causal basis of mind, of whatever sort, can addressed, let alone “decided”. The notion of stochastic/indeterministic processes alone is not sufficient to account for the relevant levels, on which they might occur. GR and QM are not directly relevant to the issues of biological evolution and brain processes, by which some explanatory account, however constitutively incomplete, might be offered. And, of course, such an explanatory account would not be equivalent to the lived experience, which would call it forth.