Muse Droppings
By:
C.C. Youngren

Random Thoughts

I was just thinking about Free Will.  Maybe I had to, or possibly it was a choice exercised with intention—I really don’t know.  I had started to slice an apple when motor activities became suspended while the neural ones arranged themselves in patterns I recognized as thinking about thinking.  Time enough had elapsed to allow a new NPR host to slip in behind the microphone of the background radio noise when I again noticed the apple & knife.

As an engineer, I have experience using both deterministic and probabilistic models in examining physical phenomena.  Deterministic ones are most pleasing—even Einstein thought so, balking at the uncertainties of quantum mechanics however useful. 

One such method is called “state-space analysis.”  A collection of things you want to track—positions, velocities, etc.—are, in the simplest case, arranged in a table so that the rate of change of each is set equal to a weighted linear sum of all.  Starting with a set of initial conditions for each, the initial rate of change for each is determined.  Then, over a (very short) interval of time the next value for each is projected based the last value and how fast it was changing then.  This collection is the new “state” and the process is repeated to predict future states.  These trajectories are influenced by external inputs, of course, but these are just “state variables” of an adjacent environment.

Nature is not linear, however, and it is not practical, possible even, to identify all the variables at play within a given boundary, let alone accurately quantify those pesky initial conditions.  Just one slightly altered initial condition can lead to a wildly divergent trajectory of states eventually (the Butterfly Effect).

Probabilistic analysis allows us to hedge.  We can accurately predict in aggregate the results of a large number of rolls of fair dice, but not any individual roll—which we think of as a “random event.”  Yet each roll is uniquely determined by the initial position, orientation, launching velocity and rotation of the die together with air properties, table surface geometry and resiliency, etc., etc., etc.  The individual result, however incalculable, is deterministic, not random. 

I keep reading how “random mutations” are the fuel behind the engine of evolution and am continually haunted by the ghosts of determinism. Isn’t it likely that the imperfect replication of DNA molecules is a result of the surrounding chemistry, charge, energy, et. al.?  Randomness is not a force of nature—a cause; it is a perception of the too complicated in detail to track.  Or is it?

I have this notion that Free Will is inextricably connected to the concept of randomness.  The sufficient & necessary requirement for Free Will is the existence of truly random events in my thesis.  If the universe is entirely causal, then the brain-state at time t, is the inevitable result of the immediate preceding t-1 state, including any embedded tensions for change, and of course, external environmental stimuli which are all causal as well.  A truly random event would be the creation of a new state where at least one variable was totally independent of the previous environment—a suspension of cause and effect.

Was that “choice” of a BLT over the Quiche Lorraine I made in the diner the other day an actual exercise of Free Will?  Or was the brain state coincident with my order a very complicated, pre-determined response to the train of all previous states combined with the immediate external stimuli of sights, sounds, smells and menu architecture?  There is a good “chance” it was the latter.  Maybe all of my thoughts and decisions are that way.

If that is so, my life is a journey down a fixed trench.  Its twists and turns prohibit me from seeing what’s fixed even immediately ahead, and it fills in behind me; I can’t go back.  There are virtual passages painted on the walls, false paths I am convinced I could have chosen, but since I can’t go back and try the perceived alternative, that conviction, however comfortable, is moot.

My Senses tell me causality rules.  While the code is so often too complex for me to predict the next 0 or 1 from the surrounding patterns, and the outcome often surprises me—appearing random—each wiggle of these 10-dimensional strings in their dance is choreographed by a set of rules which operate on the domain of data from previous states to produce the outcome we call the present.  What remains outside the process is (1) the initial condition(s) and (2) making the rules.

But what if there is one real fork in the road indistinguishable from all the illusionary others? There may be many more, but just one is enough to completely overhaul the paradigm.  One real choice, one action completely independent from the momentum of history is all that is required. 

Suppose there is a non-causal resetting of some addresses in the human brain to a set of 0’s & 1’s not predicated by the previous state—a local set of new “initial conditions” at the head of a canyon branch.   While confined by causality to that branch until the next fork, we can now contemplate the road not taken.  We can contemplate the concept of choice itself.  We have “created” the present (& future) and can contemplate ”creation” (the act and the product), and we can contemplate a creator whose image resides within us as miniature samples of a local “first cause.”

Perhaps we are simply the sum of the choices we make. 

Should have ordered that quiche.

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