Dear Jane,
Thank you for the interesting letters. I'm not sure I digested it all, but before delving into specifics, I would like to give one more run at my original question.
I evidently confused things when I asked whether universalist morality was, according to your view, "one more oddity which evolution has thrown up" (like slugs or dinosaurs). I only meant to ask if it were just one more product of evolution. I wasn't thinking about it being random. I assume that from a from the traditional evolutionary viewpoint nothing could truly be random. Even tho evolution has given some very strange & remarkable things, they are all interlocked with previous events in a cause and effect chain. The "higher" can be explained in terms of the "lower."
After reading your letters, I am not sure you hold the traditional view of evolution. You speak about "choice," even in animals. Do you consider choice to be real or illusionary? Is your own struggle with calories an instance of true freedom?
Did you hear about the guy out here who became so frustrated with his computer that he got out a pistol and shot it? No doubt you and I can identify with the frustration, but I am sure we would both recognize his foolishness. This computer is after all just machine. Any error comes from what is fed into it. Are we ultimately like a finely programmed ("hard wired") machine? Would any guilt, therefore, be irrational?
Fr. Phil Bloom
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Subject:
Re: Evolution and Morality/Part 2
Date:
Wed, 3 Mar 1999 05:06:34 EST
From:
JaneHad@aol.com
To:
hfs@brigadoon.com
Hello--
Thank you for telling me where the correspondence was posted. Somebody who'd been to your site recently e-mailed me about a portion of it that was put up in the guest book, but I hadn't realized you'd put the rest of it up.
I'll try to be more careful with the typos this time--but it is 4:30 in the morning, and I'm just tucking into the tea.
Anyway, to the following:
>>>After reading your letters, I am not sure you hold the traditional view of evolution. You speak about "choice," even in animals. Do you consider choice to real or illusionary? Is your own struggle with calories an instance of true freedom?<<<
As far as I know, I accept the standard scientific findings on evolution. I don't see what else there is to accept. (And yes, I've read Philip Johnson and Michael Behe. If you want an extended critique of what's wrong with what they write, I can oblige.)
But if you go back and look at what I wrote, you'll notice that every time I used the words "choose" or "choice," I put them in quotation marks. Precisely because I do not think it's sensible to accept what so many people mean when they use such words.
If you're asking: do I think there's a part of the human being that is free of causation, the answer is no.
We are material creatures, and I think that our behavior/personality/etc is entirely the product of antecedent causes. But these causes include EVERYTHING, and it's important to stress that EVERYTHING.
Our brains, for instance, are machines for processing information. Information is therefore one of the causal factors in our behavior. So are brain structure, nutrition, hormonal balances and imbalances, genetic predispositions to traits, emotions, the behavior of our bodies on the subatomic level, etc, etc, etc. Everything means everything. Nothing--not a thing--left out.
Guilt is a form of information--it is, in fact, a very powerful form of information for most people. Guilt is essentially the idea that if I commit that action, I will be unworthy to live/survive/participate with other humans.
Since such information is a causal factor in behavior, guilt can be very useful in erecting a stable society that makes it possible for humans to pass on genes to future generations. Eliminate guilt as a causal factor in behavior, and you will necessarily have more of the behavior that guilt was meant to guard against.
The same is true of praise/approval. The knowledge that one becomes MORE worthy to live and participate with other humans when one commits a certain act is a causal factor in producing that behavior in human beings who have that information.
The confusion here comes, I think, from the unstated assumption of most people who engage in arguments about "determinism" and "free will" that there is something--the soul for religious people, the personality for nonreligious ones, I think--that exists independent of the body, and that is therefore "pushed around" by the body if determinism is true.
But I AM my body. There's no ghost in this machine to be pushed around by the blind forces of nature. When "my body" processes all the causal factors relevant to a certain behavior--eating chocolate cake for breakfast, for instance--and settles on a course of action, that action is both determined (by the causal factors) and my act (because it's my body that's doing the processing).
And remember, the causal factors include information--thoughts, ideas, facts, emotions, abstractions.
When I decide to eat chocolate cake for breakfast, I really am deciding--I am taking all the factors and processing them to a conclusion. My body is doing this, and the process is necessarily determined by the causal factors involved. If I lacked one of those factors, or had some I don't now have, my conclusion might be different. But the "I" that is deciding is a physical entity subject to the same laws of causation as everything else. It is not "free" of those laws of causation in any way.
As to this:
>>>Did you hear about the guy out here who became so frustrated with his computer that he got out a pistol and shot it? No doubt you and I can identify with the frustration, but I am sure we would both recognize his foolishness. This computer is after all just machine. Any error comes from what is fed into it. Are we ultimately like a finely programmed ("hard wired") machine? Would any guilt, therefore, be irrational?<<<
I don't think you and I would describe this man's foolishness in the same way.
To me, he is silly mostly because he attempted to change the behavior of the computer by means of a set of causal factors the computer is not equipped to process.
He is doing what I would do if I tried to convince my brother, for instance, to get his tires changed by giving him a brilliant argument in favor of such change--in French. Since he doesn't speak French, I'd be spinning my wheels. He'd be unable to process information in that form.
If you know enough about computers, there are in fact ways to change their behavior. And if you know enough about AI, you'll find that the big thing these days is to write 'self determining' programs--programs that make what look very much like "choices," and are probably at least as much "choice" as anything humans do.
But to get back to guilt--guilt is a form of information humans CAN handle, and it's often very useful as a causal factor in behavior. There's nothing the least bit irrational about it.
But we're still talking about causal factors, and not "free will."
Jane
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