The Crucibles at Terra
In my biography I declare, simply, that my penultimate ambition is illumination. But what does that mean? What’s the point of Illumination, eh? Does not a trumpeter trumpet, and a bombardier bombard? And does not a curious mind simply wander? Or is there supposed to be some greater meaning to illumination than enjoying it as it comes? I suppose that depends on one’s perspective.

~ The Story of Iron ~

My perspective begins with iron, one of the most integral substances in human civilization. It is iron that reds our blood, and iron that sheds it. It is iron that magnetizes the world, not just at the magnetic poles but at the geopolitical ones as well, for it is iron that begat all modern industry, and through iron that nations as we know them arose. Iron is the backbone of our railways and our fortifications, and through its marriage with carbon did iron produce an heir, steel, that rules our world to this day. Like an enchanted heirloom from the heavens, iron has become a symbol of great power in every society to wield it. Iron, for instance, is the fist of choice. Iron resolve is ascribed to we who stand firm in our beliefs. We who love muscles will pump iron, metaphorically drawing strength from this unquenchable fountain of power. We keep our prisoners locked not merely in shackles and fetters, but in irons, and when, against all odds, we never let go, our grip is said to be of iron.

A great deal of human history can be told from the viewpoint of iron. I imagine James Burke, of Connections fame, holding up a cast iron skillet in the middle of a grassy English knoll on a windy autumn day and ruminating about the Hundred Years War. Perhaps the telling is easier this way, from the point of view of something as tangible as iron, prince of the earthly, who has survived when most everything else has long perished. And I wonder what was lost, what perished as history turned to a new page, for while iron is a very good vantage point for espying a larger story, there really is more to life than iron. But what precisely is this history that came before us? Is it an evolving lesson that anyone fortunate enough to live in the present may draw upon? Is it a colorful tapestry that depicts the transient story of a transient world in a universe where absolute meaning does not exist? Or is it a book of woe, recounting treasures of unspeakable worth lost forever to the inexorable march of time, a tale of generation upon generation doomed through the sin of mortality to utter oblivion, swept into the past like Atlantis down to the bottom?

When we go the way of the dead, all that remains of us is the iron of our machinations. The lesson seems to be that life is fleeting, but material lasts. So it comes as poetically just that iron is the most stable element in the universe. Permit me a brief science lesson. You see, nuclear fusion of any element below iron will release energy, and, likewise, nuclear fission of any element above iron will also release energy. But iron itself, due to its tightly-bound nucleus, can be neither fused nor split to educe a release of energy, and, consequently, unless cast into the truly stupefying forges of supernovae, where all heavier elements are formed, iron will remain iron for as long as atoms exist. You might even say that the universe is slowly becoming iron; certainly this is true for the heavier elements. The gold rings on our fingers, the mercury alloy fillings in our teeth: they all came from supernovae, and they are all radioactive…all doomed to die. Given enough time they will all of them decay into iron, lighter elements, and excess energy. So…in the end not even material lasts. What then?

Yes, and what then? What happens when every generation has come and gone, unto the last of all living things, and the entire universe descends into its dark, cold doom by the abominable reality of the Entropy Effect, the second thermodynamic law whom I name the scientist’s Satan? Will all that iron have been worth it? Can we accept the coming eternity of darkness on the grounds that once upon a time there was light…the light of music, laughter, of glory, and love? Shall we rest easy knowing that, even though the future is to become an oblivion of forever, the past will be locked and immutable? I would not rest easy knowing such a thing. And therefore, with great seriousness and intention, my ultimate ambition—the one not idly spoken—is to avert or escape the doom of all existence.

But now let those uncomfortable thoughts pass, for really it is of my penultimate ambition that I wish to speak…illumination. I asked if there is a greater purpose to illumination than its own, rewarding enjoyment, and I have shown my perspective from the viewpoint of iron through the complete history of the universe to conclude that there is indeed such a purpose. Just as living for today only works when we have a tomorrow to come home to, so will illumination only guide the actions we have yet to commit. A friend of mine, Jeff Lewis, who lived in my residence hall for two years before leaving for New York City to study dance—a man whose presence is rare among all creatures and whose sheer luminance would enlighten anybody—told me the story of the rise of his admirable character. At first he had been a lesser man, but had then survived a gruesome car wreck. In the months that followed he was fearful, and quailed before his own mortality. He lived each day as though it were his last, trying to wring every bit of value as he could from his immediate life. But then he realized some wisdom that few people ever have. He realized that each day may well indeed be his last…but probably not. And then he started to prepare for the day to come, and all the days to come, and to this day he remains among those whom I would count on one hand as great among the great. And he studies dance.

For so much more than its own mere enjoyment, thus do I seek out illumination, actively and insatiably curiously, calling the name of omniscience to come and beckoning its legions to me. Of course, this knowledge and awareness that I consolidate cannot simply be strewn about my psyche like so many factoids on the magazines of the teeming millions, and so from the fruits of my illumination I raise up the towers of philosophy that symbolize my intelligence. They are the enlightened city of my mind, the evolving capital of my being. Ever since my early teenage years I have developed advanced philosophical positions the likes of which have always eluded those teeming millions. And as my survey of existence grows, and my interpretations of reality refine, I do have to update these philosophies from time to time. Mostly these updates are small patches of applied fact and logical extrapolation, but sometimes the very towers themselves are scooped up from the plane of my intelligence by a great left hand, and rebuilt with more beauty and truth to them than ever before. This is such a moment.

~ Is Will Free? ~

Those who have spoken with me in the last four years will know that I have been struggling to create a new Theory of Will to which I would subscribe, because my first model had become sorely deficient and out of date. Developed in my middle school years beneath the influence of extraordinary cultural bias, that first Theory of Will was simplistic and elegant, and held that absolutely every point in the space-time of the universe is completely undetermined. By extension, human will was taken to be completely free and in all ways unfettered. For instance, I might have said “green,” but I could just as easily have said “blue,” or nothing at all. Such a theory is popular throughout the entire world anymore.

But in high school, I began to understand the implications of causality. In twelfth grade in particular, during a study of climatological modeling techniques, I made the critical realization that would eventually unsettle and dislodge my first Theory of Will. It’s very simple, really. The arguments I will make below are well-known already, but I will make them again out of academic obligation. Know first simply that nothing is random. Every event has a predetermining cause, a cause which in turn is itself predetermined, unto the moment of the formation of the universe.

With all other factors being equal, if I drop a ball from my hand, it will fall until it is obstructed from further descent. That is the force of gravity at work, and it is almost as close to a “law” in the absolute sense as science can come. (We equalize the factors because if they are not equal, then perhaps the ball would not fall—say, due to a large fan on the ground blowing the ball back into the air—and the truth of gravity would be obscured. But in the physical world, ignorance nullifies nothing, and so the factors are best left equalized.)

Similarly, if I break in a game of pool, the outcome of that break is not undetermined—not “free,” if you will—even though in the history of the game it is overwhelmingly unlikely that any two breaks have been absolutely identical. This is not because the event of breaking is undetermined, but because “all else” is not in fact equal. The force applied to the cue, the surface of the cue, the angle of impact with the ball, the texture of the table, the exact position of the fifteen balls, the atmospheric dynamics in the room…these are all non-isolated factors that imply a basic realization that all else is almost never equal. And so we have been distracted; the real observation to make is that, any time I break, there is absolutely no way that break will turn out other than the way it does. The forces and factors involved may be immeasurable by today’s standards, but that does not mean they are immeasurable by definition, and it most certainly does not mean they are unknowable. With enough time and money, and probably a relocation to interstellar space, it would be possible to create a machine capable of an identical break, down to the atomic level, every time.

And what about the Earth? Climatological modeling is the pursuit of this world’s most powerful computers; it is thoroughly complicated stuff and I say this with deadpanned astonishment, because the factors involved are so absolutely numerous that even today they remain innumerable. But they are not innumerable by definition, and, someday, we are going to have the perfect weather forecast.

So it is not complexity that prevents an event from being determined. All three of the above actions—dropping a ball, breaking in pool, and modeling the climate—can only ever turn out the way they do. The analogic holds for any event over any length of time, from the collision of a particle to the evolution of galaxies. That is determinism.

But does it affect free will? Is there a difference between the brain and the mind? Is our special humanness simply not corporeal? Late in twelfth grade I had an (academic) argument online with someone who held that free will does not exist. I knew my theory very well, but that did nothing to stop me from utterly and completely losing the argument. Presuming that my opponent’s assertions were valid, my Theory of Will was not. I was forced to conclude that our every thought and action is based upon the sum of our mental processes, physical condition, and all external energies of the moment, a sum which is predetermined by the sum immediately before it in time, back unto the dawn of time. No will is free. We are the product of our minds, and our minds are law-abiding citizens of the physical universe. But because I was not ready to rebuild such a major philosophical tower in the space of a day, I therefore came to college without a Theory of Will.

It took four years to put one together, but today I am content in unveiling my new Theory of Will:

The universe includes all physical existence,
Not least of which is the human mind,
And all physical existence is answerable to scientific analysis.
Because that which can be analyzed can also be quantified,
And that which can be quantified can be determined,
The entire universe is therefore determinable,
As is the human mind and the will that governs it.
This is not to say that the universe is predetermined
By some active force,
But rather that it is merely determinable
From the moment of its origin onward,
And can therefore only ever turn out exactly the way it does…
Not by restriction, but by definition.

Therefore, will is not free, but will is still will.

For those who are religious and will not buy into the idea that a human mind (i.e., the human soul) must exist physically, Michael Chui has a far simpler but not entirely dissimilar theory that explains how people can have free will but that God can also have designed the universe, and would therefore know what people are going to choose to do with their free will. Of course the religious buffering strikes me as unnecessary trappings that serve only to obfuscate the eventual Theory of Everything, but perhaps those who simply must have a religious component can still accept my new Theory of Will by adding in this holy patch.

And that is my newest, shining, philosophical tower. I can accept will that is not free. I can, and do, accept that if I said “green,” I could not have said “blue” after all. At last I am comfortable with this likely truth, because over four years I have rationalized it to be comforting…without compromising its logic.

The temptation to mistake determinability for predetermination may lead some to despair, but I offer the interpretation that our responsibility to seek out illumination remains unchanged. As we are elements of the universe, our very lives represent our share of the power to effect the entire universe to its ultimate conclusion. Therefore, perhaps most of all I am comforted in knowing that, because of the determinability of the universe, all the most confounding problems in existence will either be solved, or they will not be…for determinability is another way of saying that, rather than entrusting the future to some dark power of randomness, the very same that wills stars collide and effects the latest popular trends, or to some indefinable God, whose will we could never hope to accurately interpret short of invoking divine powers that defy all our wisdom, the future is instead entrusted to Sagan’s cosmic fugue, the sum of the universe, colorful and glorious and wonderful. If you would ever trust in anything at all, trust in the entire universe as a whole. It is the difference of optimism.

~ The Emergence of Systems ~

I read a wonderful idea not two days ago on Michael Dayah’s public Essays journal, in a post about emergent systems. I offer no opinion on the larger article there, but I am agog to speak briefly about functional complexity.

The components of evolution theory that still attract the most scientifically reasonable criticism center around functional complexity. The standard form of this criticism holds that a complicated anatomical system, such as the human eye, could not have evolved naturally, because the biologically critical functions of the system would not have been possible under a simpler design. Therefore, the earlier forms of the given anatomical system, e.g., a hypothetical “proto-eye,” would have been unable to perform any beneficial functions, and would therefore have had no reason to evolve in the first place. This is of course an easy criticism to refute; for example, in the case of the human eye my choice rebuttal is that the eye began as just a few light-sensitive cells that happened to catch on. But the eye is a specific example; the generalized rebuttal is far more intriguing.

And that is exactly what I read at Essays. The verbatim line Michael wrote is “Emergent systems is a very real field that attempts to explain how an ant colony or an economy can be made of simple pieces with simple goals and achieve an incredible level of complexity.”

That’s it; simple pieces with simple goals, to achieve an incredible level of complexity. Before sentient life existed on Earth, no one was looking to evolve eyes! But photosensitivity was simplistically beneficial in the short term, and it only grew from there. This is a particular instance of the general principle that a complicated system can come to exist not only through design but through emergence as well. Emergence is therefore a perfectly legitimate and plausible alternative to design; now it needs only to be rigorously tested. I’m excited about those tests.

But I will stop short of any arbitrary declarations that the idea of emergent systems is a truth. It must first undergo the crucible of scientific examination. That is an important point, because there is a lot of ignorance in this world that leads people from all walks of life to treat the scientific method as an object, rather than a process. We’ve seen it before; people, almost always with an agenda of some kind, attempt to use “science” to prove their points and invalidate any opposition. This unfortunate tactic corrupts other people’s perception of what science really is. Science is not fodder for an argument. Science is a medium through which the argument may be presented. It might help to think of science as being synonymous with technique. Therefore, instead of saying that science proves the theory of evolution—a fallacious statement by any number of criteria—the realization strikes that the comparative statement “technique proves the theory of evolution” makes no sense. The proper statement to make, then, is “There is a technique to prove the theory of evolution.” Replace the words and get “There is a science to prove the theory of evolution.” That’s much better. The statement is still false, because evolution is not yet a proven theory and may never be, but the logic behind the statement is sound, and it will make perfect sense upon the condition that such a science should come to exist.

As a skeptic, I cannot stress how important it is to view science as a process and not an object. Science is not about proving things right, but about becoming progressively less ignorant through empirical methodology and theoretical analysis. Recall the four basic steps of the scientific method, taught to every schoolchild by first grade: 1) Observe the environment and propose a question; 2) Hypothesize an answer based on available data; 3) Test that hypothesis rigorously; 4) Draw a conclusion. There’s nothing among these steps to suggest that science is anything but a process. The conclusions that result from scientific methodology may themselves be fact, but the science itself is procedural, not factual.

There is an interesting aside in all of this, being that truth and falseness can only be assigned to objects. They cannot be assigned to verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, interjections, conjunctions, prepositions, and some types of nouns. Just how is “to run” true or false without an object? And just how is “science” true or false without an object? I shall only say that it is neither true nor false, quod erat demonstrandum.

And now we are at the end of it. I’m no James Baker, at least not this afternoon, and so I shall spare myself the effort of tying everything together. This post was written over the course of two full weeks, and I am happy enough to conclude it at last.