Unpredictable God, Unpredictable Me

I was discussing free-will and determinism with some friends. I have a lot to learn about what others have written on the subject. It has been suggested I look into Compatiblism, in particular, but I put down some thoughts while they are fresh.

We were viewing free-will and determinism in the context of our observable environment, and some interesting ideas were brought out. I'm inclined to believe that if everything we are is determined by completely predictable natural laws, then all we have is the illusion of free-will. A friend argued that if our actions are ultimately governed by random events (such as quantum events) then our choices are even less free, in that they are not really our choices at all. We just flipped a coin and did what it said. I still struggle to see true freedom in either case. If our choices can be predicted in every detail in any practical sense, then we are not choosing, but only following a predetermined course. This still seems an inevitable conclusion to me from total predictability. At the same time, I'm unwilling to claim that God exists outside of natural laws (even though I readily admit I don't come close to understanding all of those laws), so I don't like my previous proposal that free-will is some super-natural control over the interface between random events (quantum events?) and apparently deterministic, macroscale events.

Continued discussion brought out thoughts from another friend that have given me hope of finding a solution that satisfies me. I'll quote, without permission, some parts of the exchange:

CB: "That is (to put this in more prescriptive terms), if non-determinism can beget determinism [e.g. random behavior of individual photons resulting in predictable behavior of many photons], can determinism beget non-determinism?"

JLC: “We call that chaos theory, and the brain certainly qualifies. But it appears that determinism can't beget non-determinism, it can only beget EFFECTIVE non-determinism. Something that is effectively non-deterministic is deterministic, but its behavior is so complex, that the best way to figure out what it will do is often just to let it do it and see. So this is a type of non-determinism in the sense of 'predictability' but it is still deterministic in the sense of whether it would do the exact same thing if placed in the exact same situation.”

CB: “. . . would you agree that taking a descriptive rather than prescriptive position on (non-)determinism allows for non-determinism to emerge from determinism? And if so, what are the objections to a descriptive approach?”

JLC: “Yes, I do agree that you can create SEEMING non-determinism from determinism. Pseudo random number generators in most programming languages do exactly that.

“My only objection is that such seeming non-determinism doesn't provide the type of freedom that Jonathan and others like him seem to want. If I seed the number generator with the same seed, I get the same result every time I run it. It SEEMS non-deterministic, until I start playing with re-running the program and playing with the seed.

“This doesn't bother me for my definition of freedom, but it would bother a Libertarianist. Because ultimately there IS something fundamentally different between true non-determinism, and apparent non-determinism. Just because it is CURRENTLY undetectable, does not mean that it would remain undetectable. If I can create a simulation of your brain, that always does the same thing on the same input, given the same seed, then suddenly the determinism becomes apparent, and the apparent non-determinism vanishes, even for a radical empiricist.

“I guess you can summarize that last criticism by saying that apparent non-determinism can vanish when we learn more, even for a radical empiricist.”

JGC: “Does it change something if you can prove that, while possible in theory, it will never be possible in practice to learn enough to perfectly simulate a sufficiently complex system? In that case could apparent non-determinism become effective non-determinism? Would that allow us to live in a world that is fundamentally deterministic but effectively non-deterministic from the point of view of conscious will?”

JLC: “Perhaps, but I don't see how you prove that about the human brain. It appears to me that you will be able to effectively simulate the brain in the next 20 years or so.”

So I've given up, for the time, my view of free-will that requires supernatural influence. I don't like that view. I am left to ask if free will might be found in effective non-determinism? Can the human brain, or the human being, be simulated to the point that a person's every choice can be predetermined? I'm inclined to think not. Some years ago I gave up the idea that I am in control of every choice I feel I should be able to control. Most, almost all, of my motivations and subsequent actions are determined by emotions and habits that, in a given moment, are out of my control. What I like to think remains in my control is the ability to shape my habits and emotions over time. I can make small choices that result in a happier, more productive me a year, or 10 years from now. Experience forced me to give up the belief that I am capable of making any choice I want at any given moment in time. I'm highly predictable, but I cling to the notion that I am not totally predictable.

So what happens in 20 years when my brain can be mapped so that any input given it will show with 100% accuracy what outputs will result? Either I give up my illusion of will, or I conclude that my brain cannot be perfectly simulated. I may live in a deterministic reality, but my brain is effectively non-deterministic—the only way to know absolutely what it will do is to start it going and watch. How can this happen if I concede that my brain can be duplicated? If I allow that chemistry and engineering can advance to the point that my brain could be simulated down to the atom, and that every neural impulse that determines what I do can be copied perfectly to respond to every input in exactly the way I would? How can I maintain a belief in effective non-determinism? I want a cosmology that strictly obeys natural laws, but I want to be me. I don't want to be predetermined. I concede that I'm highly predictable, but I want to be at least effectively unpredictable—at least a little bit.

The start of my hope is hidden in the very claim that we will be able to effectively simulate the brain. Simulating the brain itself is not really sufficient. My brain—a physically finite object that takes in measurable inputs and produces measurable outputs—isn't really the system we're interested in. We want to know how I will interact with the world. My brain is a open system that can assimilate a huge variety of inputs. To effectively simulate my brain and my future choices, you must be able to effectively simulate all of the future inputs to my brain. This very quickly becomes a computationally intractable system as you try to simulate more and more inputs, possibly requiring more computing power than could be harnessed by turning all matter in our universe to the function of computing the possible inputs and outcomes. Maybe the best way to see what my brain will do is to make my brain and let it run?

I can see one strong objection to my proposal. There are bound to be many irrelevant inputs to predicting my behavior. In fact, almost all inputs are irrelevant—most are too far away or otherwise undetectable to my brain, and many that my brain does detect it ignores. This leads me to conclude that almost every action I will take will be predictable by other humans in the not too distant future. What chance remains that it won't be every action? Is there some real hope that I am at least a tiny bit unpredictable? I invoke the web of human relations to maintain my unpredictability. Not only must my brain be simulated, but every other brain that is going to give me inputs, and every brain that is going to give them inputs that will influence the inputs they give me. The only practical approach might be to make our brains and see what they do. Or maybe we can posit a day where we can simulate using more power than is in our known universe? Maybe God can perfectly predict all my actions, and my free-will is limited to my finite perspective, and is predetermined in God's eyes?

I venture out into the realm of the unmeasurable. I believe God and spirit are physical. They are made of matter and energy like everything else that exists. For reasons given elsewhere, I believe that we are in a stage of development where we are unable to detect this type of matter or energy except by its consequences on some of our complex, subjective, measurement devices—our minds, hearts, and actions. Here is a set of inputs my brain simulators can only simulate by random guesses. They can trigger all of the religious inputs of my simulated brain and record every action that might result, but they have no way to predict what inputs God and the angels will send me. This still only pushes the predictability back a level. When we become gods and angels we will be able to measure and predict these inputs. 

I'm not convinced it is true in any practical sense that even God and the angels can predict all of the inputs. To predict the inputs into my human brain, you must predict the inputs into the brains of God and the angels that will influence me. To predict those inputs, you must predict an ever expanding web of relationships in an ever expanding web of universes. Does God know what I'm going to do? Pretty much. Does God know everything He will do in the future? I like to think He still has choices. If He might do something unpredictable, until He does it, He doesn't know with absolute certainty what I will do. Do I know what God will do? Sometimes. He's pretty predictable. But no more than I am.

What God Is Like . . . Possibly

I don't much like views that place religion at odds with measurable fact. I don't much like views that assert the irrelevance of everything that is not physically measurable, either. So I attempt to construct for myself the simplest view of existence that explains all the facts as experienced in my life. I don't think I can prove God's existence, or prove Latter-day Saint theology. I only intended to rationally support an expansive view of science, technology, and religion and to justify an honest seeker of truth (hopefully that is me) in attempting to integrate all three. I'm sure my Biophysical perspective will be apparent in the arguments. They draw heavily on thoughts inspired by the New God Argument (http://www.new-god-argument.com/) and discussions on Mormon Transhumanist Association forums. I prefer to think in terms of biology and experiments rather than technology and simulations. Effectively, there is no difference in the essential implications. I think the computational simulation perspective makes some people imagine a more rigid set of assumptions about physical laws than I suspect is correct. (Many Biologists are more deterministic in their conception of causation than Physicists, but the inherent error built into biological computation (genetics) seems normal to most people.) So I ask myself,

What is God like . . . probably?

(Here's my shortest summary. I'll post links to my longer arguments and tangential thoughts.)

1. There are different orders of infinity
2. Time, space, and matter are a large order of infinity
3. The possible universes with all of their possible laws that can exist are a larger infinity than the infinity of time, space, and matter (but possibly of the same order)
4. Genealogies of creators will have different orders of reproductive rates
   1. Random creation will have the lowest order reproductive rate
   2. Planned creation will have higher order reproductive rates
5. Ask the question, which group of creators probably created me?
   1. After a long time, the probability of having been created by the creators with the highest order reproductive rates approaches 1.
   2. Therefore, I was probably created by the creators with the highest order reproductive rates.
6. What characteristics will favor the highest order reproductive rates in this cosmos made of infinite space and matter?
   1. Long life
   2. Creative power
   3. Creative desire
   4. Desire for independent, creator-offspring
   5. Love, compassion, benevolence, and altruism
   6. Independent will and the ability to innovate
   7. Peacefulness and the wisdom to prevent destruction (on an eternal scale)
   8. Wisdom and desire to intervene personally in the most effective ways
7. I was probably created by a creator with all of these characteristics.
8. I can probably interact with this creator.
9. I can probably become a creator with all of these characteristics.
   
   
   Here is a Long Version with more of my thoughts and reasons.
   
   
   Here are some of my thoughts on how this cosmology fits with various LDS teachings

Transhumanist Aesthetic

My friend, Lincoln Cannon, put out a challenge to create a Mormon Transhumanist aesthetic. One that matches the future we hope for and that we imagine can come as we apply technology to the benefit of humanity and as we become more than human. I don't know that my aesthetic matches anyone else's, because I'm not much of a transhumanist. I just like the community of people associated with the Mormon Transhumanist Association. I do have stories I tell myself about the kind of god I hope to become, and the kind of community of gods I hope to belong to. I only think about technology in these stories in the broadest sense--that is if you include as technology any application of knowledge to accomplish an end. I would like to share those stories, if I can figure out how to do it well. Any poems will start out as prose, and I think I'll write some thoughts here when my son lets me type unmolested.

Probability Zero

The first two decades of my career were spent trying to show how life began by extrapolating back to what the earth was like 3.6 billion years ago. You can imagine the countless days in the lab, weeks writing grants to convince people with money that my work was relevant, hours and hours lecturing to students who didn't want to be taking Biophysical Chemistry, meetings, talks, posters, awkward silences at parties when people asked what I did, and the occasional call to repentance from an ill-informed friend at church. Building on the work of a few dozen labs over the course of about a century, we had even managed to make simple cells that could grow and reproduce for a few days before the system was crashed by real bacteria or by a nutrient imbalance.

Then the physicists developed what I like to call the space-time sampler. They have some unpronounceable acronym for it that stands for what it really does and how it really works, but for me space-time sampler is a good approximation. It took another two decades and twelve tries through NASA, the NSF, and a collaborative international granting agency to get my last grant funded. The first year was spent bringing back (or rather, forward) samples of the Earth from 3.6-4 billion years ago. We learned all sorts of things about the conditions of the atmosphere, the state of the oceans, and innumerable other details, but we didn't bring back anything like life. Then we found our first sample rich in biological molecules.

It wasn't just rich, it was chock full. The physicists checked the dates to make sure they hadn't missed by a few million years while we made our first tests. Everything was as many before us had predicted. There were amino acids, nucleic acids, fatty acids, sugars, and all the other molecules you get when you put energy into the right chemical mixture. Those were the last tests that made any sense. The carbohydrates were far too complex. We identified cellulose and amylose as if there were already plants around. The fatty acids were distributed like modern eukaryotic cells. The nucleic acids were polymerized into large proteins that we identified as identical to many modern proteins, with surprising amounts of lignin and gluten. None of the modern laboratory simulations had ever produced licopene, but our sample looked like it had an entire tomato blended in it.

The space-time sampling methods were reviewed again and again, and another sample was brought forward by a group in China with the same results. We were down to our final vial stored in our -80 °C freezer, but we had run every test we could think of and knew every molecule in the mix.

I'm not sure what brought me to tonight's epiphany. A combination of depression—my wife had died three years before—tiredness from lack of sleep and old age—I had just turned 71 a month earlier—and terrible frustration that I had come so close to my life's dream but would soon be retiring without understanding the answers to my biggest questions. I was hungry and mad. I was ready to break something, which was surprising given my generally mild reaction to setbacks. I thought it might as well be me that got broken. I knew Chemists historically had the shortest life expectancy among research scientists for a reason, but I wasn't reasoning well at the moment. I found my bowl and spoon from the office, and took the last sample to the microwave. Yes, I was going to eat it. I thought of the irony of the prehistoric elixir of life becoming my last meal, but I couldn't really take it seriously. Everything in it was so modern, so tame, so well known, so innocuous, so incomprehensible.

I should have guessed something from the smell as I opened the microwave, but I was preoccupied with my own misery and self-destructive thoughts. That all changed when I took a bite. I sat back stunned. Then I started to laugh. I laughed so hard my stomach hurt. I started to cough, and tears came to my eyes. I had the answer, but no one would believe it. I would be dismissed as an obsessed crackpot who couldn't admit his own mistakes. They would call it a hoax, but I could retire happy. I knew the answer. The primordial soup was minestrone.

My People and Watching

I read a beautiful children's book with photographs illustrating the Langston Hughes poem, "My People."

My People

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

Langston Hughes

I don't know the best way to post information on it, but here is a link: My People
It's worth looking for in a local library or bookstore.


Here's another of mine.


Watching
1998

I’m watching my life, backwards and forwards,
To see where you’ve fit—where you fit—where you’ll fit.
Why am I watching? You didn’t ask?
So I won’t tell you—there’s no way I could.

Yet I watch every move, every word, every thought,
Like I sometimes watch swallows, or seagulls, or flowers,
Or sunsets, to see what might surprise me
And make me stop, and say, “Oh."

Two impressions of religion in Italy

I wouldn't have chosen this next poem, but I visited this area of Italy where the massacre occurred. In this place is where John Taylor, and later Ezra Taft Benson, dedicated Italy for missionary work, as well. I must say that my lifetime's experience with the Pope (and several lifetimes before mine) has been nothing like this "triple Tyrant" that Milton describes. Some things have certainly changed for the better.

On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered Saints, whose bones
  Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
  Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
  Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
  Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
  To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O’er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
  The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way,
  Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

        John Milton 1608-1674





I wrote this next poem as I was leaving Italy, or shortly after I left. I may now question the accuracy of a couple of lines, but it is true to how I felt, and I like the sounds and pictures.

No One Will Ever Know
1998

I lost my mind.
Or more truly, the world did.
How I loved, how I hoped,
How I prayed, how I groped for truth
in a foreign world.
How I lived the strangeness of every day.
How the clock ticked,
My heart beat,
My friends breathed,
And the city moved around us.
How in a place most will never hear of,
I did a work most will never know.
How I loved people that will never
make the news.
How our names will only be remembered
to our children,
But we don’t care because,
For one moment,
We knew we had a friend,
And knew that life was good and God was love.
But no one will ever know
Because the world has lost our minds
That died with us,
Still inside our heads.

Jonathan Edwards and another poem

I just read a nice, short book about Jonathan Edwards. I still think some beliefs he considered very important are crazy, but I'm convinced he was a very good, thoughtful man who sought to do God's will and help others do the same. This is a short quote from him:

We make a distinction between the things that we know by reason, and things we know by revelation. But alas we scarce know what we say: we know not what we should have known . . . had it not been for revelation. . . . Many of the principles of morality and religion that we have always been brought up in the knowledge of, appear so rational that we are ready to think we could have found ‘em out by our own natural reason. . . .

Jonathan Edwards, The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God, in The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen, WJE, vol. 4 (1972), p. 240, in Jonathan Edwards and the Ministry of the Word, Douglas A. Sweeney, InterVarsity Press (2009), p. 92.


I suppose a mission poem is appropriate with the above quote, since Jonathan Edwards was perhaps the most influential theologian in creating the culture among Evangelical Christians (and some other major groups) of preaching the Word to the whole world. I wrote this for a woman I worked with in Italy for several months. We were a few months from going home, and she was feeling down about her accomplishments. I'm sure the Italian translation isn't perfect, but it was the best I could do, and I'm not better at it now.

Sorella Mia
1997

A friendly life comes to a sprawling town—
A town that’s made of metal, rock, and glass,
Where crumbling streets and walls can be replaced,
And no one ever misses just a stone.
A lovely friend comes to a living heart—
A soul that’s made of feeling, blood, and flesh,
Which makes of all an undivided mesh—
Imperfect if without its smallest part.
The life may leave the city, and her mind
May think, for all she’s tried, that she bereaves
The town of nothing from her soft effect,
And when the friend will leave the heart behind,
She’ll think her touch, as with the town, she leaves
Unfelt, but truly years will not forget.

Una vita simpatica viene a una crescente citta’—
Una citta’ fatta di metalo, pietre, e vetri
Dove strade e muri crollanti possono essere rifatti
Ed a nessuno manchera’ un solo sasso.
Una bella amica viene a un vivo cuore—
Una anima fatta di sentimento, sangue, e carne,
La cui fa di tutto una rete indivisa—
Imperfetta se e’ senza la minima parte.
La vita potrebbe lasciare la citta’, e sua mente
Potrebbe pensare, malgrado tutto cio’ che lei avesse fatto, che spoglia
La citta’ di niente dal suo gentile effetto,
E quando l’amica lasciera’ in dietro il cuore
Pensera’, cosi’ come con la citta’, di avere lasciato il suo tocco
Inosservato, ma in verita’ gli anni non potranno dimenticarlo.