Re: Fatalism
1,204 views · Published 31 March 2008 · 6:21 · Indexed 25 October 2026
Channel: Footnotes2Plato · 2008 · People & Blogs
The short answer is that both free will and determinism apply only to the fictitious "I" or ego that we have already labeled as too metaphysical to be taken seriously. So there is no free "I" or fated "I." There just isn't an "I" and so these concepts no longer apply! The longer answer: Humans most certainly do have a tendency to stand back and observe nature and declare, "ah yes, it all works like a machine." But ongoing observations have shown the scientists that actually, at least at the quantum level, reality is not mechanical at all (ie, it is not determined or Newtonian). At the smallest level, particles pop in and out of existence randomly and behave in a way which can only be measured probabilistically, even in principle (meaning it is not because we just aren't quick enough to catch their exact position and velocity that they are probabilistic, but because the act of measurement itself interferes with what we would like to find out). So the physical universe is non-deterministic, at least as far as we know. When we get to the level of molecules and biological organisms, even if the level of particles were determined, we would still not be able to explain biological activity in a deterministic way. This is due to something biologists call "emergence," which is used to refer to systems that have a global property not reducible to any of its component parts. Organisms do not break physical law, but they do exhibit behavior which is not reducible to particle collisions. Before the first group of molecules "emerged" into a living organism (a self-producing or auto-catalytic system which forms a permeable membrane around itself), there was no way to predict, based solely on a determined interpretation of physical law, that they would have or could have done so.
