Physics, Free Will, Nobel Prizes

Check out this article for physicists, free will, and fun for everyone. It starts in an extremely promising fashion- you will have to excuse me while wait by my phone for the big news, though maybe Jack Smart already got the call- but then it deteriorates from that splendid beginning.

Comments

[Neil]

Slightly less depressing science and free will here:
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55593?&print=yes

This records responses from a survey of evolutionary biologists on the relationship between evolution and (a) religion and (b) free will. Most of the biologists are compatibilists (!) The authors of the article react oddly, arguing that though compatibilism may well be true, the fact that scientists say it might be true shows they haven't thought deeply about the question.

[Jon]

This doesn't seem to make sense--it seems to me that we perform actions without "calculating the effects" (whatever that means) ahead of time. I'll go read the full article...

Congratulations on your prize, Prof. Vargas. ;)

[Cihan Baran]

Another quirky point in the article Neil points to is this:
"B, religion is a social phenomenon that has developed with the biological evolution of Homo sapiens—therefore religion should be considered as a part of our biological heritage, and its tenets should be seen as a labile social adaptation"

The authors claim that this is a view that's compatible with religion. How? I mean if religion is merely "a social phenomenon" and "a part of our biological heritage", does this not entail that religious claims are false - that they are caused by biological mechanisms other than revelation or what not? Dan Dennett also claims that religion is some sort of a evolutionary spin-off (I haven't studied his view in great detail - pardon me if I am wrong about that) but he intends it as an incompatible claim about religion.

[Neil]

Well it seems to me that the claim that religion is an adaptation is evidence against its truth, but hardly knock down. God might have designed the world so that religious beliefs were true and adaptive (after all, he wouldn't be so perverse as to design a world in which faith was adaptively a bad strategy). Since believers generally think that belief is not only true, but good for the believer and for society (witness the response to claims that religion is responsible for immorality) they might be expected to respond to adaptiveness claims in the same way. Think, too, of the response to claims that stimulation of the temporal lobe causes religious feelings. Some have argued that since we can give a naturalistic explanation of religious feelings, we have evidence against their truth. But believers have responded that the temporal lobe is like a sense, allowing us to perceive the divine.

[charles Edwards]

Religion should be defined as what one does when one doesn't know what to do.
One of the religious beliefs held by many scientists is that the current moment cannot be a causal moment, and that cause can only exist in the past. The past is then defined as any moment for which one has evidence of experience. Their beliefs help cause these strange places where they can deny they are causing things to happen. They seek a proof they they are not a cause. It's a kind of "holy grail" or "philosopher's stone" for scientists. They want something else to be the cause of them seeking the proof. Just when they think they've found it, poof, another "unexplained" cause appears as if from nowhere. As long as they ignore themselves, they can ignore one of the primary causes in the universe, which is our presence.

[charles Edwards]

Religion should be defined as what one does when one doesn't know what to do.
One of the religious beliefs held by many scientists is that the current moment cannot be a causal moment, and that cause can only exist in the past. The past is then defined as any moment for which one has evidence of experience. Their beliefs help cause these strange places where they can deny they are causing things to happen. They seek a proof they they are not a cause. It's a kind of "holy grail" or "philosopher's stone" for scientists. They want something else to be the cause of them seeking the proof. Just when they think they've found it, poof, another "unexplained" cause appears as if from nowhere. As long as they ignore themselves, they can ignore one of the primary causes in the universe, which is our presence.

[Cihan Baran]

Neil,

I think your attempt to reconcile "B" with the truth of religious claims is a bit of a stretch - but maybe that's just me, someone who is not religious at all.

I remember that a discussion started when Daniel Dennett had published his book titled "Breaking the Spell". Critics of the book alleged that giving a causal explanation of a claim hardly falsifies it. Someone in NYT(?) opinions section rushed to Dennett's, saying something like "If somebody says that there is intelligent life on Mars and the cause of his saying this is the fact in his dream he saw intelligent life on Mars, the cause wouldn't falsify his claim but would give us hardly any reason to take his view seriously."

Similarly, if the cause of somebody's religious claims was "the excitation of the temporal lobe" or "evolutionary adaptation" (after all many psychological studies indicate that many 'illusions' are useful, see here), I wouldn't take those claims seriously.

[Neil]

Cihan, no one is less religious than me. I'm playing - what's the right term here - angel's advocate. There is a difference between citing the dream as evidence for life on mars, and the response to the adaptiveness claim. I'm imagining the religious person responding to the claim that evidence of adaptiveness is evidence against religion, not citing adaptiveness as evidence for religion. I take it that believers think there are multiple grounds for belief, not just a feeling; given their priors the response I suggested doesn't seem irrational.

[Alan]

I'd suggest disputants here consult John Hick. I think he'd say that evolutionary evidence of the formation of human consciousness entails a neutral-truth epistemological account of the awareness of deity--and has to be given his "soul-building" argument based on incompatibilist free will. So Dennett-style arguments turn out to be consistent with Hick's outlook, but that's because Hick's religious epistemology is marginally different from an atheist's. (Aside: I do not call myself an atheist, which now is very much an N-word. I am a non-theist or naturalist.)