A Port in a Storm in a Teacup

I doubted people could be quite so dumb as to start blogging in their numbers (well at least half a dozen) about how Superstorm Sandy will be good for the American economy because it will 'create jobs in construction'.  But apparently this claim is being made.  This idiocy was addressed as far back as the 19th century with Bastiat's 'Broken Window Fallacy' - which is basically the misjudged rhetorical question; what would happen to glaziers if nobody ever broke windows? 

Just to illustrate how daft the claim that Superstorm Sandy will be good for the American economy because it will 'create jobs in construction' is, let me give you a few similarly fatuous statements, and you see if the logic holds up any more compellingly:

1) A tree landing on your house is good for your household economy because it will keep you busy in the evenings when you get home from work.

2) A pandemic is good for the country because it keeps those in the medical services busy.

3) A mass rise in unemployment is good for the economy because it keeps the Job Centres fully staffed.

4) A rise in crime is good for the country because it keeps the police busy in work.

Answers on a postcard to "I'm-an-ignorant-and-insensitve-buffoon.com"

Mourdock's Direct Line to God

Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claims to know God’s mind on abortion - "I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God," Mourdock said. "And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."

On these grounds, Mourdock opposes abortion.  I presume, then, that he’ll be stating his opposition to any help from the medical services in the wake of Superstorm Sandy.  Presumably if pregnancy from rape is within Mourdock’s perceived sphere of God’s will, and Mourdock knows God thinks abortion is not the right kind of intervention after a disaster, then not intervening to help after Superstorm Sandy might be part of God’s will too.  Oh wait, I forgot, some disasters aren’t God’s will, but pregnancy is, so if a raped woman falls pregnant then the rape was not of God’s will but the pregnancy was, so no abortion can be permitted.

But I’m confused; if a lout sets fire to a house, can firefighters put it out, or must we leave it because fire is of God’s will?  What about fires in the living room that keep grandparents warm, or attempts to put the economy straight, or mobilisation of troops in war torn countries – and if so, in which countries does God want us to intervene, and which should we stay out of?

You see the absurdity; if, according to Mourdock, God wants the pregnancy but not the rape from which it occurred, then there must be a huge list of things in the world that occur, some of which God does want to occur and some He does not.  I presume the only way to know for sure on each case by case issue is to ask Mr. Mourdock.  What about if he’s unavailable when I want to know something important?  Maybe Pat Robertson will be free instead. 

The 'National Debt' Fallacy

The Government keeps telling us we are in financial crisis by alluding to our national debt.  When we are in recession the old issue of national debt seems to crop up every few days – most recently on BBC1's Question Time, and again by Obama and Romney in their Presidential debate.  All this carries over from last year when we had (from memory) a number of MPs and commentators using the national debt as a stick with which to claim their opponents do not understand the situation as well as they do (Dianne Abbott, Chris Huhne, Simon Hughes, Douglas Alexander, you know, the usual clan of economic illiterates).  The basic mess they make of the analysis is by asserting that the national debt drains the wealth of British people because of the accruing interest.  The second mistake they make is in thinking that money borrowed from Europe or China or America by the British Government makes us the taxpayer worse off than if we were borrowing it from the British Government.  It makes no difference – but I’ll come to that in a moment – let’s start with the first mistake; that the national debt drains the wealth of British people because of the accruing interest.  

The fact is that every single pound of interest British people pay on the national debt comes right back into the pockets of British taxpayers.  If a politician doesn’t understand that, he or she is not fit to commentate on the economy or obtain your vote.  Let’s make it simple; suppose the Government owes £100 and pays £3 a year in interest. The alternative to paying the specified interest is to raise current taxes by £100 and pay down the debt. If you do that, the taxpayers are going to have £100 less in assets, and will therefore, of course, earn less interest on their savings. That costs them (roughly) the same £3 a year.  That is to say, the damage was done back when the Government initially spent that £100 (point of note; if the £100 had been spent wisely, the damage might have been worth doing – but it might not have been).  Once that £100 has been spent, the taxpayers are out £3 a year forever, irrespective of whether the debt is ever paid off.

That’s why the Government’s interest payments come right back to the pockets of British taxpayers. The Government pays £3 a year as an alternative to taxing you £100 and paying down the debt. The choice to do that puts an extra £100 in your bank account, which earns you £3 a year. There’s the £3 a year coming right back in your pocket.  Another point of note for those worried about the debt accruing interest and the Government sending much of our money abroad: the money comes back to you regardless of whether the Government makes its interest payments to British people, Chinese or Indians.

Of course, you might choose not to save that £100 the national debt is saving you, which is fine, because presumably you’re spending it on something that you value more than an interest flow of £3 a year. Congratulations – you’re happy too.  Some might complain that they have no savings vehicle that will pay them the same rate as the Government’s paying on its debt. That’s where they’d be wrong – if they so wish they can save by buying Government bonds, which will acquire for them exactly the same rate the Government is paying on its debt.

I’m not saying national debt is good – it isn’t – it’s just not anything like the politicians tell you it is.  They do this to have power over the anxious taxpayer.  If the Government borrows an extra £10 billion pounds tomorrow in order to cut taxes by £10 billion pounds, it will have to make, say, an extra £300 million a year in interest payments (for which we the British taxpayer are collectively responsible) and at the same time, we’ll collectively earn an extra £300 million on our savings portfolios, so we break even.  This is economically neutral with regard to the taxpayer’s gains and losses, but the Government is dressing it up as a net loss, to convince you that this is a spectre for which the opposition party is responsible.  It’s only Government spending that leaves us worse off, not debt.

Now onto the mistake that says money borrowed from Europe or China or America by the British Government makes us the taxpayer worse off than if we were borrowing it from the British Government.  To see how absurd this is, I’ll give you an illustration.  Suppose the Government wants to buy military equipment for the armed services for £100 million.  They could pay for the equipment by raising our taxes, or they could borrow the money from, say, China.  If they tax us we pay now, if they borrow from China we pay in future taxes. It’s exactly as if George Osborne and the Treasury had collected your taxes and then lent them back to you, with a promise that they’ll be knocking on your door in a few years to collect the debt.  When the British Government borrows from the Chinese, it’s exactly as if British taxpayers had borrowed from the British Government.  Since the assets of the British Government are, ultimately, the assets of the British taxpayers, it is exactly as if the British taxpayers had borrowed from themselves.

The moment George Osborne and the Treasury borrows from the Chinese, your taxes are being lowered relative to what they would have to have been in the absence of the borrowing.  Let me make it even clearer;

Scenario 1: The British Government taxes you a one pound to pay for a pilot’s helmet, which you remove from your £100 savings account, leaving you £99. A year from now, your bank account has grown (at 10% interest for simplicity’s sake) to £108.90.  That is £99 + £9.90.

Scenario 2: Instead of taxing you, the British Government borrows that pound for a pilot’s helmet from the Chinese. This leaves £100 in your savings account, which grows to £110 a year from now. At that point, the Government taxes you £1.10 to pay off the Chinese, leaving £108.90 in your bank account.

Scenario 3: The British Government taxes you a pound for a pilot’s helmet, reducing your bank account to £99. Then it lends you the pound back at 10% interest, raising your bank balance to £100, which grows to £110 a year from now. At that point the Government demands repayment of its loan (the pound and 10% interest), so you hand over £1.10, leaving £108.90 in your bank account.

So you see, all three scenarios are exactly equivalent from the taxpayer’s point of view.  As far as the taxpayer goes, borrowing from China makes us no worse off than scenarios 1 and 3.  The Government is either lying to you when it says differently, or its ministers are representatives who don’t know what they’re talking about.  I think it is a bit of both – but the Government definitely lies about this because it wants you to think that there is a burden related to interest on past debt.  As I’ve just shown, there isn’t – because under the same principle as my 3 scenarios, it is obvious that interest payments on our past debts are not a burden to the taxpayer.  What the Government adds to your debt burden by avoiding raising taxes it also adds to your savings account.  Moreover, this is also why borrowed money is not an expenditure, it is a dividend.  When the British Government spends a pound on a pilot’s helmet that is expenditure; when it lends the money to Bob it is not the same kind of expenditure, because borrowed money doesn’t disappear in the same way that a pilot’s helmet disappears.  The money used to buy the pilot’s helmet is ready to be borrowed again so Betty can buy a fridge magnet or Jack can buy shoelaces. 

Lastly, and on a slightly different issue, to those who complain that our future generations will be worse off paying off our debt – no they won’t – the same thing I’ve said above applies to them as it does to us.  Besides, if you really feel bad about your future grandchildren, you can put some of your money in a trust fund for them and not spend it yourself.  But if you do so because you believe in charitable giving, you should consider that that’s the opposite of charity, because your grandchildren will be wealthier than you are.  Many people assume that we should try hard to pay off the national debt for the sake of our grandchildren.  The opposite is true; a national debt holds down our taxes at our grandchildren’s expense.  If you care about them – forget the national debt and add tax savings to their trust fund.

A Few Thoughts On The Presidential Debate

I've just been watching the first two Presidential debates, and jotting down a few back of the envelope notes in a rather hurried way trying to keep up. A few thoughts, at quick pace:

1) Romney: "If gas prices are up, our energy policy isn’t working".  Erm no, gas prices are part of an economic nexus far beyond the ambit of energy policies.  I hope Obama will agree that it is not the energy department's job to lower gas (or as we'd say in Britain 'petrol') prices?

2) Obama: “Natural gas isn’t just appearing; we’re encouraging it”. This is like Dan Quayle inventing the traffic flow. The Government does not produce natural gas.

3) Obama says he wants to build manufacturing jobs in America. Nice sentiment, but that's all it is really. It is not the President’s job to decide which sectors should thrive in which countries. And doesn't he realise that importing cheaper manufactured items from China and South America makes America richer?

4) Romney: "I have a five point plan that will create 12 million jobs".  That's disingenuous - it is not possible to predict with such precision that 12 million additional jobs will emerge.  But it sounds good to the electorate.  It's either a foolish statement or a dishonest one. 

5) Obama again with “We’re going to produce x cars and y cars”. Heck, if you want to be a manager of a car company, go to the job centre and get a job at a car company. If you want to be President of the US, stop trying to be an auto executive.

6) When Obama says that reducing Government debt is the Government’s  moral obligation to the next generation , he shows he doesn't understand what national debt means, or how by itself national debt is morally neutral.  Point of note; Obama makes a similar error moments later when he calls a £5 trillion tax cut a £5 trillion “cost”.  Bah, no it isn't! I probably will blog about this soon

7) There's a real inconsistency if one reads between the lines; Obama doesn't want to enforce morality, and he repudiates top down economics, but he wants to keep talking about the Government's plan to direct industry and manufacturing by saying who should trade with who, and which products are more desirable for the American economy.

8) Romney doesn’t do much better - he wants to cut tax rates to spur small business.  I understand the moral sentiment behind this - but it's flawed.  The reason most extant small businesses are small is because equivalent bigger businesses are better.  It is better to promote tax breaks for new (as yet unformed) businesses, subject to stringent business analyses. Future big businesses are probably unformed, not extant small businesses.

9) Obama claims to have “saved jobs” by keeping cheap Chinese tyres out of the United States. The part he left out is that Americans are paying more for tyres because of this.  Plus, the flaw he doesn't realise is that this has only saved jobs in the car industry.  Mr Texas factory owner has had to let people go because the products he used to sell to China are now not being bought due to Mr Tyre producer in China losing his exports to the United States.  The moderator doesn't help with his “How do you convince companies to bring manufacturing back to the US from China?” - it seems few understand basic economics.  If most of the American public don't either, and have been plainly led to believe China is bad for the American economy (it isn’t), then Presidential candidates might just be pandering to win the approval of the consensus.

10) Silly cock up here; Romney propounds views on the advantages of legal immigration, then opposes illegal immigration for spurious reasons, most of which amount to the same net benefit as legal immigration for the United States.

My final thought is this.  Despite the good oratory skills it's clear that there are many cracks in both candidates’ reasoning, which I’m sure would be noticed more if rhetoric was turned into policy.  Put it this way, given some of the absurdly illogical statements, I wouldn't pick either of them for my think tank or policy brainstorming group, which is hardly the sort of thing one wants to say about someone in charge of a world superpower.

As for the preferred choice, I have several reasons for favouring Obama, but perhaps the biggest is the simplest; I don't want a President who has such a narrow perspective on reality and such a dearth of imagination that he cannot see that Mormonism is a man-made cult.  Such a man shouldn’t be in charge of a nation like America.  I would wish Obama luck for his second term.   

Let’s Stop Being So Tentative And Uncourageous When It Comes To Islam

I don't find it difficult to become dissonant at Islam - so when I read two things in a week that astound and anger me, blogs like this just roll off the tongue (or keyboard). 

The first thing I read was that craven officials at Norwich City Council have issued a trading ban against stallholder Alan Clifford because his display contained a booklet criticising Islam (I read it and it seemed to me to be not an inflammatory booklet, just one that cast aspersions over Islam*).

Now I don't think I would have much in common with Alan Clifford - from what I've been told (from trusted sources, and from reading his material) he is a fundie, which means his Islam booklet really amounts to fundie vs. fundie.  But that aside, let's be clear, Norwich City Council's cowardly interjection is part of a disgraceful wider picture, and represents everything that is so timorous and spineless about the emerging politics in this country, and the willingness to concede too much ground to Islam.  Two key bits of information are that it was after a single complaint that Norwich City Council has decided to ban the outreach on Hay Hill, but also that it was cited by Norwich City Council as being for “equality reasons.”

 

“Although the police advised that no criminal offence had been committed, we have a duty under the Equality Act 2010 to foster good relations between people of all backgrounds and religions. By allowing premises owned by the Council to be used by an organisation publishing such material, we would be failing in that duty.”

This is absurdly ignorant – even though, in fairness to the Council, it is not their fault that the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Offence Act is so grossly restrictive and imprudent. I think this equality act has got a lot to answer for, because one kind of equality it clearly isn't accounting for is one of the most important ones - the equality we all should have in our right to freedom of expression.  One thing that diminishes “good relations between people of all backgrounds and religions.” is when people are limited by law in their ability to speak openly and freely about things, and when different concessions are made for different groups (which is what has been tacitly happening with Islam in recent times, and is likely to get worse). 

 

As I've said repeatedly, I think radical Islam is an extreme, patriarchal, repressive, backward and morally stultifying stain on humanity.  It is perhaps the worst human invention of all time - and one that appears to be gaining more and more impetus against political parties and governmental figures with no backbone.   Of course, you’re going to say that many Muslims don’t fit this description, and you’re right.  But that misses the point – it is the ‘religion’ that is all those these things – and the Muslims who are kind, intelligent, liberal, tolerant and progressive can be, and often are, all of those things in spite of Islam not because of Islam.  I would ask for anyone to defend my right to express that critique, just as I would defend any Muslim's right to speak openly about what he or she believes (as long as it is devoid of hate speech).

Here is what opponents of this view do not seem to understand.  Whenever we hear a voice or read an opinion which is vastly different from our own, or the common opinion, not only should we give that person the right to express themselves, we actually deny ourselves the right to hear or read the expression if we choose to seek refuge in the false security of consensus.  There are, I would say, three works which stand up as regards this particular subject.  John Milton's Areopagitica, Thomas Paine's Introduction To The Age Of Reason, and John Stuart Mill's Essay On Liberty.  The summarising central point of all the authors (if I may be so bold) is the following.  It is not just the right of the person that speaks to be heard, it is the right of everyone else to listen; and every time you silence somebody you make yourself a prisoner of your own actions because you deny yourself the right to hear something.  In other words, your own right to hear is as involved as the other person's is to have his or her view.  The freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.  We may not agree with everything we hear, but we do ourselves an injustice if we fail to hear the dissenting voices. 

The second thing I read was in James Delingpole's column in The Spectator, in which he talked of his niece's undisclosed "Middle-class state school in a pretty English cathedral city".  Apparently, despite being a school which is only 2% Muslim, the children are taught that whenever they say "Mohammed" they must suffix it with the "Peace Be Upon Him" phrase (PBUH).  Now I won't even get into to all the issues I have with the reverence of Mohammed, and what sort of character he strikes me as, but I will say how astounded I am that anybody outside of Islam would coerce or encourage British non-Muslims to utter words of reverence for a figure for whom they have not the slightest reverence.  This is just the case of more spineless cowardice - it must be, because, underneath, white middle class British non-Muslims do not have any such reverence for Mohammed or Islam, much less do they think he was a prophet. 

What on earth is wrong with so many people in Britain that they would succumb to the insidious dominance of Islamic thinking and give it a protective and exalted cultural niche that it does not merit?  Moreover, surely having people utter PBUH blithely is pretty meaningless - it only has meaning to those who utter it out of reverence; so even Muslims should wish that this kind of cultural ignorance and sycophancy is eradicated pretty quickly.   

Of course, it is important that we say all this with civility, consideration and good manners – and a lot of that seems to be absent in today’s society.  What we need is open and honest critiquing of things that have been given protection from analytical scrutiny for too long – but in a manner worthy of those aforementioned positive qualities that are so often scarce.  Instead what seems to be happening is that legislation is being put in place as an antidote to the pervading loss of respect and good manners. 

Remember, also, one of the best ways to show respect to a person is to be honest with them about what you think of their views and beliefs, and hope they would afford you the same in reciprocity.  The real spectre that needs to be faced is that instances like these almost certainly are the thin end of the wedge – there is worse to come as Governments slowly erode away freedom of expression and duck out of the challenge of facing up to a more open and diverse scrutiny of what people believe and how they came to believe these things.

* You can read Alan Clifford's Why Not Islam here? on his website.

A Shortcut to Moral Excellence



By and large, moral thinking can be summarised as the problem humans have in finding a system of thought that compresses all the multitude of possible scenarios into a more succinct rule of thumb that applies to everyone.  The best rule of thumb I know is the edict known as The Golden Rule.  When stripped of all the extraneous objections related to different tastes, and different levels of human ability, I think The Golden Rule remains the strongest moral principle we have considered.  "Do to others as you would want done to you" beautifully summarises the human heart, mind and emotions, and what it means to have consideration of others.  What’s so brilliant about it is that it is a succinctly compressed statement that acts as blueprint for just about every moral situation.

But although the Golden Rule is a great rule regarding how to treat others, the one thing it doesn’t do is tell us which of the many tastes, beliefs and practices are best.  Do to others as you would want done to you is a good rule of thumb, but it doesn’t tell us whether the abortion clinician has better views than the leader of the opposing anti-abortion group, or whether the man campaigning for heavier taxation of the rich is arguing more proficiently than the man who thinks the rich pay enough tax.  The Golden Rule only tells us that we should behave towards others as we want them to behave towards us.  



Thankfully, someone else has constructed a theory of what is better, by elaborating the Golden Rule to an economic principle.  The man’s name is John Harsanyi – a Hungarian Nobel prize winning economist who conceived the theory that ‘better’ means what is morally preferred when all self-interest is stripped away.  This means constructing moral principles based on a diverse society of people without your knowing how those principles will affect you.  If that sounds vaguely familiar to you, that’s probably because it is more widely known by what the philosopher John Rawls called a 'veil of ignorance' - meaning that the society we should choose optimally would be the one we'd choose for maximal fairness, equality and opportunity without knowing who we'd be in that society. This creates a template for moral propositions that avoid self-interest and work on the basis of probability. 

But it isn’t original to Rawls.  Rawls appropriated it for his theories of justice, but Harsanyi’s model is the original; it shows that most moral truths are true outside of the biases of the man who has stake in them.   He called his model ‘The Amnesia Principle’, and he wrote mathematical models to prove its efficacy*.  In practical everyday terms, it works like this; there may be a moral imperative to choose X over Y or Y over X, but the most lucid moral cogency comes from those who cannot remember whether they personally would benefit from X or Y. 

What Harsanyi’s ‘amnesia’ notion means is that moral optimisation is defined as the world you would hope to be born into without being able to remember which particular set of circumstances apply to you.  In other words, your basis for morality is constructed from conditions under which you have forgotten who you are in this society.  For example, under this principle, you would construct a fair immigration code without knowing whether you were an indigenous man or an immigrant; you would construct a fair 'abortion' maxim without knowing if you were an abortion clinician, a pregnant woman or a member of the anti-abortion group; and you would construct a fair tax rate without knowing if you were a high, medium or low earner. 

A moral precept or ethical rule about any situation has to be made with it bore in mind that those making the decisions could be affected by them negatively or positively once they find out where they fit into that society.  If you’re going to make moral systems, and you don’t know where you’ll fit into that society you are best making it as fair and proficient as you can.  It’s rather like the two hungry brothers who have a chocolate bar to share - their mother insists on ultimate fairness, so she lets the first boy cut the chocolate bar in half and then lets the second boy choose which piece he wants.  You can be sure as anything the first boy is going to try his hardest to cut it bang in the middle.  If he doesn’t, he feels the costs because his brother will leave him the smallest bit.

The idea behind the combination of the Golden Rule and Harsanyi’s Amnesia Principle is that those making the moral decisions without knowing how those decisions will affect them will try their hardest to get everything as good, accurate and fair as possible.  I think of moral reasoning as an application of our thinking used for fulfilling an overall purpose of progression. But what do we base the progression?  I think it is based on the something shared by all minds - the human conscience.  Even though we are flawed creatures, we still are able to conceive of a reality in which our failings are significantly lessened.  We do this because our minds are designed with a conscience that acts as an indicator of what is right and wrong, and how we can apply what is 'right' to an overall progression.

To use an analogy, I see the situation as being rather like piecing together a jigsaw.  The picture on the box is our shared goal of creating a supreme set of moral maxims that benefits humanity, and our jigsaw pieces are the individual ideas and experiences that we attain along the way.  Naturally each generation benefits from the work of the previous generation, with each succession of adding to the jigsaw producing a more complete picture for the next generation to work with. 

One way to object might be to say that everyone's final picture would be different, or that there may not be one definitive final picture for morality.  But that's to miss the analogy; the picture that equates to the shared goal of creating a supreme set of moral maxims is, in fact, the conscience - because it is the conscience that acts as the map of the territory.  And humans have more or less the same inherent conscience because we all have brains built in more or less the same way by natural selection.

You may ask, if we all have the same sort of idea about the moral picture that we ought to be trying to attain, why has it taken us so long to progress?  And why do we fail so miserably so much of the time?  The answer goes back to the very thing Harsanyi was trying to eradicate from his equation - the burden of self-interest.  While we can all see the picture we are trying to build piece by piece, our individual interest (and interest related to family and friends) outweighs our interest in the collective.  Under Harsanyi's principle combined with the Golden Rule this problem is no longer there, because moral reasoning becomes a matter of maximising the overall good through the picture of a society in which we'd all like to live.

* For further elaboration of the amnesia principle check out the very interesting work of Nobel prize winning economists William Vickrey and James Mirrlees, who took Harsanyi's principle and applied it to situations in which economic information is asymmetrical (like the moral hazard theory), and used the mathematics to determine the extent to which they should affect the optimal rate of policy making (which can be applied to a broad range of issues including moral situations, the economy, incentives, and various issues of prudent political practices).

 

On Determinism

After my last blog on free will, I said I’d write one on Determinism – which may be quite prudent, as I think Determinism is a word that people mostly misuse.  Determinism, in the sense implied by some kind of universal destiny, means information regarding the laws of physics suffices to determine the entirety of the universe from start to finish. Given the laws the universe has - it seems its entire story from start to finish followed (and will continue to follow) a path that would be entirely predictable and mappable to a series of deterministic computations if we had complete knowledge of it.  This is Steven Wolfram's conjecture. What Stephen Wolfram is basically saying, is that if given enough execution time the majority of relatively small algorithms can compute everything that can be computed.

If Wolfram is correct in his assumption (and I believe he is) then this means that any given (finite) physical pattern or structure can be described by a physical theory - and by 'theory' we mean it is defined as an algorithm or function.  Admittedly Wolfram’s ideas are conjectural at present, but if they are right it means that there aren't any finite objects out there that cannot be described using a theory. With enough computation time a theory has the scope to reach a point at which it will describe any stated physical system.

In theory, determinism is an even trickier subject than free will, because to most people ‘determinism’ means something like ‘The way things will be is a result of how things are and the work of natural laws’. In other words, if we know exactly how things are at the present moment and the laws that govern how the universe works, then we can derive how things will be at some future time.  This kind of definition is something you would do well to forget about when you’re considering free will and determinism, because you’re left with a determinism contingent on human knowledge.  That is, you can know X+1 only if X contrives to fit a mental pattern.  I’m going to show you how I think this topic is best dealt with, but before I do, it is worth bringing up an important distinction regarding how our minds work. 

The way we describe the universe is through the construction of terms and ideas based on our physical perceptions of the world (the macroscopic world).  What we don't have is an adequate way to describe the universe in terms that would give a proper definition to determinism.  We don't even have a proper method of describing the quantum world - even then we resort to using terms implicitly related to the macroscopic world (particles, waves, position, locality, state, spin, collision, energy, etc). 

Imagine the problem in trying to define a universe in terms other than our spatio-temporal terms used.  We find all we have is a reality that’s apprehended from the first person perspective of the physical world.  That's why I think determinism is opaque – words limit us to terms related to the physical.  The best way I've found to circumvent this is to describe the universe in a completely different way.  Every physical system can in principle be described in terms of computation - so what we have to do is imagine the entire universe in terms of pattern, not physical structure.  This is no problem, because it requires a hypothetical description of the universe in terms of pattern storage* (a very large pattern - but small compared with the whole system of mathematics).  So what we can do is define the pattern of the entire universe in binary 1s and 0s.  No doubt this is a far too complex task for any human – it would require execution times that beggar belief - so the easiest thing to do is imagine you are a being who can traverse the entire pattern from outside of the universe (let's call the entire pattern P).  Now determinism becomes clearer, because with the required execution time (it's not literally time, of course) to search the pattern we can observe its determinism. 

Absolute and Relative Determinism

I’ve said that determinism is hard to define.  One of the reasons is that we only get to grips with what absolute determinism is (as per my above definition of an overall determinism) if we can conceive of relative determinism too.  This, as you’ll see, is the key to understanding the universe in terms of an overall determinism – and it is an understanding that is desperately needed, because many believe that modern knowledge of quantum randomness, the Aspect experiments or any of Bell's theorems has led to the conclusion that determinism has been given its redundancy notice, because of the random agitations.  But as we’ll see, this is a misunderstanding.  I will also show why both freedom and determinism are not single qualities that can be put up against each other – they are, in fact, both scaled in a spectrum. 

On first showing, whatever the mind is, it seems to bring about a mechanism that belies its real deterministic nature.   The first way to correct the mistakes is to frame the word ‘determinism’ in its proper context – as a spectrum, not as a fixed quality.  To do this we have to identity the fact that determinism can be thought of in terms of the relative and the absolute.  At the human level indeterminism-determinism is a spectrum related to knowledge.  Here’s a simple way to look at it; if I drop an apple the algorithm that calculates the motion is deterministic because we know what will happen - the apple will head towards the centre of the earth.  If I attempt to track a particle in fluid subjected to Brownian motion then the algorithm that calculates the motion is indeterministic because it cannot predict the pattern it will take.  That is what I mean by relative determinism.  If you know a pattern it can be said to be relatively deterministic, if you do not it can be said to be relatively indeterministic.  This, of course, changes over time (or it can do).  If one day we work out the random patterns in Brownian motion (I doubt we will) then we could call it relatively deterministic because its patterns could then be mapped to a deterministic algorithm.

That was relative determinism.  Absolute determinism is different.  For quick shorthand, the truth about absolute determinism can be summarised thus: “The universe will do what the universe will do” – meaning, there is an inevitability about nature’s laws that shows it will run its course.  Everything within the universe, every thought, every dream, every stone rolling down the hill, every burst of wind, every formation of a planet, every nucleosythesis, every galaxy, every cosmic expansion is all nature running its course, and that course is entirely deterministic.  There is no way to affect change on nature’s plan - she is our sister, and everything we do to believe we have changed the course of nature was really only part of the deterministic inevitability.  In other words, nature has a script already written – and your conceptions of randomness, unpredictability, surprise, and cause and effect alterations are not in any way an alteration of that script – they are simply pages of that script being revealed to us.  That is what I mean by absolute determinism.  Nature’s story is being turned page by page – and this story is underpinned by forces beyond our control.  To say we could affect nature’s overall determinism is about as silly as saying that a drop of water in a waterfall could stop the power of gravity. 

The difference between our normal conceptions of nature and this conception of determinism is that now, instead of viewing those things in terms of the spatio-temporal, we are now considering the script in terms of a pattern of 1s and 0s.  We think we are uncertain about determinism because we deal with nature in terms of its smaller constituent parts, not as a whole.  With mathematics and computation nature tells us something very relevant here; providing that the search space is linked together in a nexus, with indefinite amounts of execution time, we can map anything into a descriptive algorithm or function, giving us a pattern.  We could do this with nature if we had access to it from outside, and could observe the entire pattern.  

But here’s what the objectors are missing; it is because we have incomplete knowledge from inside that we have radically unpredictable events, and it is because we have radically unpredictable events that the indeterminism and determinism spectrum comes in from the inside.  If we had complete knowledge of the universe then its absolute deterministic path would be deterministic to us in the second (the relative) sense too, as well as in the absolute sense described above.  If we define indeterminism as a physical system that cannot be described with an algorithm or function, then there are no (finite) systems that are indeterminate – because all systems can potentially be calculated from a basic equation if we have access to the search space and allow the necessary execution time.  This is where the practical and the theoretical cross swords.  In terms of being a large mathematical object, the universe is a closed system, and as such there is no theoretical reason why anything in the universe cannot be mapped into a descriptive algorithm or function. 

But once we get into the realms of practicability, things change, for we know that systems within nature are too intractable for us human beings to map.  As well as Brownian motion, a good example is the randomness of quantum mechanics – it is almost certain that the randomness of quantum mechanics will always be indeterministic to us.  In wave mechanics, quantum physics suggests that because the wave packet of a particular particle has non-zero amplitude the position of that particle is uncertain to us.  Increasing the number of sine waves gives a ‘compression’ effect which enables us to detect the position of a particle, because the momentum of the particle requires wave number probability.  But increasing waves inhibits the ability to measure momentum.  A wave with a precise position has an indefinite momentum, and a wave with a definite wavelength has no precise position, so for humans uncertainty looms large because we cannot know both the precise position and precise momentum of a particle.

Couple that with the fact that wave packets (like clouds) don’t have single velocities and positions and we soon know that we are observers of limited cognitive and experimental resource, where a kernel of uncertainty must loom large.  Quantum mechanics doesn’t undermine determinism, it merely offers formal tokens that explain why in a universe of overall determinism we are stuck somewhere in the spectrum of relative indeterminism and relative determinism.  That is why quantum randomness, the Aspect experiments or any of Bell's theorems do not impinge on whether the universe is deterministic. 

Some objectors ask; How can we be sure the universe is deterministic?  Here’s what the objectors are not understanding. We know the universe is absolutely deterministic because what we theorise about determinism at an absolute level is based on our practical perceptions of determinism and indeterminism at a relative level.  We generate and map deterministic paths all the time, just at a much smaller scale, and with observations of uniformity at the classical level.  Once we think of nature in terms of mathematical patterns, all we need to do is inductively stretch out the conceptual logic trail to the furthest contingency barrier and we would eventually arrive at a final point of determinism - just as in smaller terms we can generate more simplistic forms in a relatively short computation time.  You see, to reiterate, in the determinism/indeterminism spectrum, the description is subjective because it is a model that recognises that some systems are less humanly manageable than others.  That is why we are always on the pursuit of more knowledge – it is this indicator that tells us we haven’t yet arrived at a full understanding of nature*. 

In summary, unfortunately the problem with this debate has been that many people are quick to change the definition of determinism to apply overly simplistic theories of cause and effect or as a rival theory to the perennially fuzzily defined ‘free will’.  The indeterminism-determinism spectrum comes into play because with our limited capacity some systems are “more deterministic” than others - and that is why ‘fully indeterministic’ and ‘fully deterministic’ are expressions of extreme ends of a vast cosmological and mathematical spectrum, and why, with complete knowledge of the universe it would be, by definition, mappable to a complete deterministic algorithm.

* Footnote: Make sure you're clear of one thing though - this concept of pattern storage is only one way (of many) to describe nature - but it's the best way to describe it to show it is deterministic.  We needed to find this way because nature cannot be described deterministically in those macroscopic terms.  With the above terms, it can. 

On Free Will

Free will debates seem to come up every five minutes somewhere on the Internet, and seemingly always with no resolution or agreement.  If the issue had been resolved unambiguously then we wouldn’t still be debating it quite so rigorously centuries later.  Ask yourself why a subject never reaches agreement and you'll usually find one of two reasons; either the question is unanswerable, due to some kind of limited human capacity or an inability to frame the question in the right sense; or else category mistakes are being made in the terms and definitions being applied in discourse.  Free will may be one of those philosophical issues about which both reasons apply.  Even if we accept a limitation on how far we can get with the question, it seems to me that the ambiguity of definition kills the debate every time - particularly as virtually nobody seems to insist on rectifying this before the debate ensues properly.  Clearly free will means different things for different people, so the extent to which we can be said to have free will may be similar to the extent to which we say animals have self-awareness – it’s a spectrum, not a definitive ‘Yes we do have it’ or ‘No we don’t’. 

Regarding debates about free will, my first piece of advice is, don’t believe anyone who says we have ‘free will’ until they have first told you what they mean by free will, and what being ‘free’ means in a universe that drives organisms thermodynamically without the slightest reliance on any human thought to do so.  I find the people who declare confidently that we do have free will are usually the ones who’ve given the least consideration to what they mean by free will.  In order to understand why the free will issue is so contentious, we need to see why so many people misunderstand free will, and why their definitions are so fuzzy.  When those who believe we have free will make claims about free will, they usually mean that what we have is something like ‘The capacity to direct one's actions’.  The trouble is, that leads to a further meta question about what it means to direct one’s actions – and then one could take that explanation and ask a further meta question about the explanation behind the explanation, and so on.  This is one of the theoretical problems with this kind of debate; it always engenders layer upon layer of accretive questioning – it’s like peeling the skins of an onion, where each layer of skin represents a fresh way of interfacing with reality.  That’s why free will is a spectrum, not a binary ‘black or white’ problem, and why one can’t logically just say ‘We do have free will’.  . 

Ironically, the grounds on which people claim we don’t have free will are often based on the same kind of faulty reasoning.  Like most issues under debate, free will, irreducible complexity, the existence of a soul, Intelligent Design, or topics of a similar nature, people arbitrarily pick a lens through which to describe a conceptual object, without subjecting their description to proper examination.  Let’s take free will and give it a less ambiguous definition than ‘The capacity to direct one's actions’.  Let’s just call it free choice, by which we mean simply the ability for the human mind to make choices.  Some philosophers say we don’t really have free choice, and the reason they give is that the brain isn’t really making choices, it is only biochemistry at work behind the scenes (i.e. neurons and trillions of connections). 

That’s the big mistake I referred to above; one cannot just choose a particular conceptual layer like the level of biochemistry at which to deny the integrity of a process like free choice.  When told "it's all just biochemistry", why not just deny the integrity of biochemistry by asserting there is no such thing as biochemistry because it's all just quantum physics?  Similarly, why not just deny the integrity of quantum physics by asserting there is no such thing as quantum physics because it's all just mathematics and probability?  No, it just won’t do us any good to think this way; despite the many layers of reality, there clearly is such a thing as choice; I mean, I assume no one forced you to read this blog.  Your choosing to click on the link is a perfect indication that choice exists in nature.  My mind conceives it as a choice in the same way that your mind conceives it as a choice, just as it conceives a riot as ‘violence’ or a cruel remark as ‘upsetting’ or an innocent man going to jail as ‘unjust’ or the weather as ‘inclement’.  At some level these things clearly do exist.

So, we humans do seem to make choices - just as we do seem to observe the weather.  If you want to say we don’t make choices because the brain is reducible to constituent parts, you could equally say that there is no such thing as violence or upset or the weather because everything is reducible to quantum physics.  Clearly, then, through this lens, choice, violence, upset and the weather are all ‘existent’ within nature.  To show this, let’s just consider further two of those things – the weather and choice.  If the weather and our choices are both happening in nature then on what grounds can we say the weather exists and free choice doesn't?  Take a hurricane as an example. The causal factors in a hurricane are connected to everything else in the universe's seamless whole.  A hurricane lies in cycle of evaporation, which lies in complex interactions amongst trillions of molecules, which lies in complex interactions in the quantum world, which lies in complex interactions that extend right the way back to the governing laws in nature's blueprint (however that came about).  So we have no trouble agreeing that a hurricane is part of nature, just like all other physical events and laws are part of nature. 

It must be observed that we feel the same about choices as we do hurricanes – you won’t find many people who think that hurricanes don’t exist, and you won’t find many people who think that choices don’t exist.  Here’s why.  A choice is made by a brain, which is made up of neurons and trillions of connections, which, just like the hurricane, is reducible to complex interactions in the quantum world, which lies in complex interactions that extend right the way back to the governing laws in nature's blueprint.  So, similar to the hurricane, we have no trouble agreeing that choice is part of nature, just like all other physical events and laws are part of nature.  There is no logical reason to accept that a hurricane exists yet deny choices exist.

Under those conditions, I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that the mind has the faculty to make choices.  What muddies the water is that the free will proponents seem to be arguing for more – they seem to be saying not just that we have the ability to make choices, but that we are free in a deeper sense, by which they mean we have some kind of overall freedom that permits us to create our own destiny within nature.  Because of this, the perception I have of people’s interpretations of free will is of two kinds – a soft version (as per my definition of choices) and a hard version (as per our overall freedom that permits us to create our own destiny within nature).

The soft version of free will; We have a mind that has the ability to make choices

The hard version of free will: We have a mind with overall freedom that permits us to create our own destiny within nature, irrespective of nature’s overall trajectory.  

I think the soft version of free will does exist, and I think the hard version doesn’t.  Later I’ll explain how I think the ability to make choices is relevant to our psychology, but first I’ll just say this; you might be wondering how we can make choices yet not create our own destiny within nature.  I think the answer is the same as the hurricane; both our choices and the hurricane exist in nature, but both do not alter the overall destiny of nature, because they are part of that very same destiny. 

The hard version of free will doesn’t exist, and it is for the same reason that the soft version does exist; an overall freedom that permits us to create our own destiny within nature is directly contradictory to nature having its own destiny.  In other words, nature can have a destiny that includes hurricanes and human choices, but it cannot have a destiny that includes an alternative human destiny, because then it would be a nature that doesn’t exist.  We cannot depart from nature’s cosmic plan in the way that a boy can disobey his mother – our destiny is the same as nature’s destiny – we cannot opt out of it or change it or cease from being a part of it anymore than the wetness of the ocean can cease from being part of that ocean.

It is because a hurricane is part of nature that I think the hard version of free will is an illusion.  The universe is a complex nexus of physical interactions that will run an inevitable course irrespective of human will – and this includes the physical agitations that make up the human mind, including our choices.  With the soft version of free will we can observe that choices do seem to be a genuinely true aspect of human cognition in that we make them, and our making those choices turns out to be part of nature’s overall destiny.  Perhaps for clarity's sake we could say that choices appear to exist in conjunction with perception and experience, and that they are an evolutionary utility that places nature's cosmological inevitability in the background of experience. To use an analogy, it is rather like actors on a stage playing out improvisations while all the time being aware that the overall performance and plot pertains to a script that they are not free to change ultimately.

The hard version of free will is a different animal altogether – but to see this I am going to have to explain what it means for the universe to create its own destiny and how it does it.  The thing that undermines the idea of humans creating their own destiny is that the universe has a destiny that engulfs any sense of individual or collective human destiny.  It wasn’t too hard to accept that both soft free will and a hurricane exist in as useful a sense as anything at all in the physical universe can be said to exist.  But the cul-de-sac remains in front of us, because the grounds on which I would say hard free will is not a fact and soft free will or a hurricane is a fact is that the latter is not inconsistent with nature's inevitable trajectory and the former is.  In other words, a cycle of evaporation, choices, a hurricane, violence, upset, justice, and inclemency can be part of the inevitable destiny nature is playing out, whereas hard free will cannot, because one is never 'free' from that cosmic trajectory to create a destiny other than the one nature has already been deterministically blueprinted to create.

Here’s the contradiction with hard free will; it either is part of the trajectory of nature’s destiny - in which case, it is not really acting in any kind of freedom separate from the trajectory, making it not hard free will but soft free will.  Or it is not part of the cosmic trajectory - in which case it is claimed to be no longer part of nature, where, at that point it falls down by not being definable (as per my initial request for a definition).  Either way, the idea of hard free will gets us in philosophical trouble. If nature has an inevitable destiny then choices and a hurricane can logically be part of that universal story without any contradiction. However, if hard free will is part of the universal story then we have a contradiction because it is not really acting in any kind of freedom separate from the trajectory of nature – so it is wrong to call it ‘free’, because by ‘free’ the free will proponent means that nature permits us an implicit ability to act outside any inevitable destiny that nature may hold over us.  

Just to be clear, by “nature has an inevitable story”, I mean that if hypothetically we could step outside of her and watch the story unfold we would see her take an absolutely deterministic path.  Everything within the universe, every thought, every dream, every stone rolling down the hill, every burst of wind, every formation of a planet, every nucleosynthesis, every galaxy, and moreover, the entire cosmic expansion is all nature running its course, and that course is entirely deterministic (deterministic in the absolute sense). If you knew every fact about the universe it would be a story from start to finish that couldn't have been any other way because its laws facilitate this particular path and destiny it has taken.  I don't mean this with regard to any fundamental laws of logic, I mean only that it is nonsense to state the universe we happen to be in could (given all its laws) take another path other than the one it is on. Hence we have the ability to make choices, but not create our own destiny, because nature’s destiny subsumes our own. 

As an overall summary, nature is deterministic, and that determinism brings about human brains that make choices. The universe has an overall cosmic destiny that pays no regard to the human feelings that are part of that destiny. We simply are required to assent to a definition of free will that does define the mind's mental precipitations - something like "Alignment between the self, the desires, and the actions through the ability of the human mind to make choices” would do, I think. That's how the universe can be ultimately deterministic yet bring about creatures that make choices and have emotional will.

In my next Blog I will cover the topic of Determinism