A Glossary of Terms in the Free Will Debates

Hi Gardeners,

Happy New Year.

I am hoping some of you might help me correct my definitions for a few dozen critical terms in the recent debates on free will and moral responsibility.

A draft glossary is on the web at www.informationphilosopher.com/afterwords/glossary/.

Philosophy undergrad students and graduates working on dissertations are accessing the site and I hope to provide them with important resources on freedom, values, and epistemology.

I have written web pages on nearly 100 philosophers and a few dozen scientists with strong opinions on these problems. My goal is to describe their work briefly and include short excerpts of their work to demonstrate their philosophizing, hopefully encouraging visitors to read more.

That includes a number of you gardeners. Some of you have suggested concepts and philosophers that I should include. Several pages are in draft form awaiting approval by individual philosophers.

Over forty "core concepts" on freedom have their own web pages linked to from here:
www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/.

The home page has links to the philosophers.
www.informationphilosopher.com/

If you can refer me to other glossaries or references that I can use to strengthen my own understanding and definitions that would be most valuable.

The glossary takes advantage of the web to include recursive links to other terms in the glossary, to I-Phi web pages on specific concepts, and external links to Wikipedia or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy where available.

I do the same for philosopher pages, with an automatic search link for Noesis on each one.

Thanks in advance for criticisms and suggestions for additional concepts and philosophers.

Bob (bobdoyle@informationphilosopher.com)

Comments

[Michael Drake]

Bob, just want to say the glossary is a wonderful resource. Great work.

[Manuel Vargas]

Hi Bob-

This is a great idea, especially because there are surprisingly few glossaries of free will terminology out there. Here are two more:

You've probably already seen Ted Honderich's:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwTerminology.html

There is also Kevin Timpe's entry at the internet encyclopedia of philosophy.

Among print volumes, we've got one at the beginning of Four Views. And, some of the introductory texts out there might have a glossary in them, but I'm away from my office right now and can't check (maybe other Gardeners can think of some off hand).

One thing you might think about doing is to somehow distinguish between standard definitions of things and the Doyle gloss on the concept, its usage, or its significance. (So, for example, the last sentence in the "Basic Argument" definition is more Doyle than definition.) Alternately, you could make it clear that it is an "opinionated" glossary.

I wonder about the accusation of an "ethical fallacy" in the moral responsibility bit. There is, of course, some disagreement about the relationship of free will to moral responsibility, but it seems to me that most of the going accounts of free will that frame things in terms of moral responsibility permit the possibility that one has free will without having moral responsibility. Here are two ways for such a case to arise: (1) the relevant choice has no moral significance to it, or (2) the agent lacks the requisite knowledge but has the relevant ability to choose or act.

That a kind of power is the sort of thing required for moral responsibility does not mean that such a power cannot be had in cases where moral responsibility is not at stake. So, even if one dislikes framing the matter of free will in terms of moral responsibility, pointing out that there are cases of freedom that are not moralized does not yet seal the deal against such accounts. This is not to deny that there might be other reasons to be dissatisfied with the free will-as-a-power-required-for-moral-responsibility approach.

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Manuel,

Thanks for your suggestions and criticisms.

I have reread the Introduction to Four Views and added glosses for every term there except Free Will itself.

I provided a link to Honderich's online glossary, though we already had essentially everything there.

I have also reread Timpe's SEP article on Free Will and found some important recent terms there, like reasons-responsive, which I will add.

Timpe's book, Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives, is an excellent source for the latest terminology. I reviewed the book on the I-Phi blog.
http://blog.i-phi.org/?p=19

I added "actual sequence" and "alternative sequences" from that book.

Galen Strawson's article on Free Will in the Shorter Routledge is also very good. He describes "no-freedom theorists" as "pessimists," a term his father made famous. I think "illusion" or illusionism is more current, and am considering "impossibilism" (Kadri Vihvelin).

I have consulted a number of older philosophy dictionaries - Robert Audi's Cambridge Dictionary, Simon Blackburn's' Oxford Dictionary, Antony Flew's Dictionary, Ted Honderich's Oxford Companion, Dagobert Runes' Dictionary, and William Reese's Dictionary of Phil and Religion.

These are fine for the historical terms, and perhaps I should go back and include terms like contra-causal freedom, non-occurent causes, etc.?

But my main source is the current literature that I read to write web pages on the work of individual philosophers (you among others).

As to the ethical fallacy, it applies to some prominent philosophers, ancient and current, who make morality a criterion for freedom. Plato/Socrates said only good actions were free, bad actions due to ignorance - "virtue is knowledge, etc.

This is not to deny that moral responsibility is historically intimately connected with free will and for good reasons. But as you say, there are many choices with no moral significance.

As to the opinions expressed, I will work to make the arguments from information philosophy more clear.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Bob,

I think labeling the problem you are concerned with as a fallacy is too loaded. There is room for disagreement in the terms you use to support your categorization. For example, it seems logically possible that very few of our decisions are actually free (c.f. van Inwagen's view) and those that are are all moral in nature. If that scenario is logically possible, then the "ethical fallacy" cannot be a type of logical fallacy and thus would seem misnamed.

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Mark,

I seemed to me a bit like a logical fallacy or invalid syllogism?

Choices are free.

Moral decisions are choices.

All choices are moral decisions.

What would you suggest as a better name for the erroneous claim that choices must be moral in order to be free?

[Manuel Vargas]

Hi Bob-

Who in the contemporary literature is committed to the view that "choices must be moral in order to be free"? I can't think of anyone off hand, but I'm sure I'm missing someone.

If I follow you correctly, you seem to think there are a number of folks here, as you write in your reply to me that "my main source is the current literature that I read to write web pages on the work of individual philosophers" and go on to cite me as a culprit. But for the reasons I mentioned before, the error your attributing isn't being made (perhaps there is an error here of over-attribution?).

Consider: That rationality is the kind of thing required for a moral being doesn't mean that I must think that all reasoning is moral; similarly, that I think free will is the kind of power required for moral responsibility doesn't mean that I must think that all exercises of free will are moral decisions.

Again, there is ample space here for other reasons to complain about thinking about free will in a way that links it to moral responsibility. Nevertheless, I can't see that those of us that think of free will principally in terms of a power or capacity required for moral responsibility are committed to the erroneous claim that choices must be moral in order to be free.

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Manuel,

I completely agree with you that those of us thinking of free will as a capacity needed for moral responsibility are not committing the ethical fallacy.

But some influential thinkers still make morality a criterion for free will, rather than just freedom a criterion for morally responsible behavior.

Robert Kane argues that free actions, those for which we have "ultimate responsibility," must be difficult moral decisions.

And Susan Wolf argues that our freedom must be "within reason." For her free decisions are those made with full knowledge of "the True and the Good." Wolf thus combines a rational fallacy and the ethical fallacy.

The rational fallacy is that a free decision must be rational.

Freedom of thought, of choice, and freedom of action are necessary conditions for moral responsibility, but they are not sufficient conditions for moral or rational behavior.

I believe we agree that free will is a prerequisite for ethics, not the other way around.
__________

The ethical fallacy was a commonplace in ancient times, and I believe it trickles down into modern thought.

Socrates and Plato argued that "virtue is knowledge." This meant that a lack of virtue was simply a lack of knowledge. We could not be responsible for our bad actions, because we did them out of ignorance.

Aristotle disagreed. He said that our bad actions could also depend on us, even when we were doing them as a matter of habits formed long ago, as long as we are at least partially responsible for forming our habits and character.

The Scholastics thought that we are free when our decisions are rational. For them, good meant rational, so this was actually a variation of the ethical fallacy. We are unfree and slaves to our passions when our decisions are evil. But this is the rational fallacy.

There is of course an undeniable historical connection between free will, determinism, indeterminism, and moral responsibility.

From the very beginning of physical determinism (c. 5th century BCE), one of its proponents, Democritus, recognized that it was a threat to moral responsibility. And moral responsibility was very important to him. Nevertheless, the view of atoms and a void working by natural laws was such a gain over the traditional view of arbitrary fate and capricious gods determining our actions, that Democritus simply insisted that determinism provided humans more control for moral responsibility.

The first indeterminist was Aristotle. In his Physics and Metaphysics he said there were "accidents" caused by "chance (τυχῆ)." In his Physics, he clearly reckoned chance among the causes. Aristotle might have added chance as a fifth cause - an uncaused or self-caused cause - one that happens when two causal chains come together by accident (συμβεβεκός). He noted that the early physicists found no place for chance among the causes.

But we know that Aristotle's goal in the Nichomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics was to establish moral responsibility, not any free will per se. So free will and morality were tightly connected. He probably assumed that the human mind is somehow exempt from the materialist laws of nature, so that our actions depend on us (ἐφ ἡμῖν). In this respect, we can call Aristotle the first agent-causal free-will libertarian.

One generation after Aristotle, Epicurus (c. 4th century BCE), proposed a physical explanation for free choice as a better basis for moral responsibility. His solution was a random "swerve" of the atoms to break the causal chain of determinism, giving us more control than was possible in Democritus' strict determinism.

Epicurus wanted a purely materialist solution, one we call today event-causal libertarianism. He proposed that his random swerve could happen at any time and place. As long as there were some uncaused events in the past, there would no longer be a chain of causes back before our births. Epicurus was anticipating van Inwagen's Consequence Argument.

Note that Epicurus did not want a swerve to happen at the moment of decision. That would make our actions random. But he could not explain when and where randomness could occur in his idea of free will to explain moral responsibility.

Although Epicurus' physical model for chance is ingenious and anticipated twentieth-century quantum mechanics, it provides little of deep significance for free will and moral responsibility that is not already implicit in Aristotle.

The first compatibilist, the Stoic Chryssipus (c. 3rd century BCE), strongly objected to Epicurus' suggestion of randomness, arguing that it would only undermine moral responsibility. He assumed that chance was the direct cause of action. He was also aware of the charge that physical determinism had been equated with a necessitarianism that denied any human freedom. Chryssipus sought a solution to both these objections to free will and moral responsibility.

The pattern of freedom coupled tightly to morality has been around for a long time.

[Bob Doyle]

Hi again Manuel,

I did not mean to cite you as a culprit on the ethical fallacy.

I was only citing you as one of the many Gardeners for whom I have drafted web pages on their work as it relates to I-Phi problems of freedom, value, and knowledge.

www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/vargas/

Please excuse my run-on thoughts.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Bob,

Consider these claims:

• Some choices are free.
• Some choices are moral choices.
• All free choices are moral choices.

I fail to see any logical contradiction going on here. So, surely there is room for a philsopher to defend the claim that all free choices are moral choices without committing a serious logical error.

The way you set it up is surely invalid reasoning, but I don't see a unique logical fallacy at work (surely not every case of invalid reasoning counts as a separate fallacy?).

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Mark,

I guess I agree there are no logical errors in the sense of things that are true in some possible world.

So consider these claims:

• Some choices have no alternative possibilities
  (e.g, Frankfurt interveners at work or a "Locked Room.")
• Frankfurt examples are free choices.
• All choices have no alternative possibilities.
• Alternative possibilities do not exist

Does this seem logical? It is certainly possible. And it seems to be popular among semicompatibilists.

But arguments from what is possible seem of little practical value.

Even cases like "all swans are white" are not proved by induction.

So how can your conclusion that "all free choices are moral choices" be right in any real sense.

Maybe I am just misusing fallacy to mean faulty reasoning?

[Tamler Sommers]

Hi Bob,

One minor note: I believe "moral luck" is not an argument as you describe it, but rather the phenonomenon of being judged or morally evaluated according to factors beyond your control. (At least, this is how Nagel defines it..) Nagel then goes on to argue that moral luck subsumes all of our actions, since they all trace back to factors beyond our control. But 'moral luck' is not the argument itself.

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Tamler,

Thanks for the correction to the Moral Luck gloss. Since I have an I-Phi page on Thomas Nagel, I revised the entry and added a link into the Nagel page where Moral Luck is mentioned.

Here is a link to the improved gloss.
www.informationphilosopher.com/afterwords/glossary/#Moral_Luck

It has links to related glosses, to Wikipedia and SEP entries on Moral Luck, and a "Search I-Phi" link, which returns all the occurences of Moral Luck on the I-Phi website.

This is a good example of how the interactive glossary should work. Thanks for helping me make it more useful.

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Manuel,

Following up on those who say free decisions must be moral decisions, you will see that the Ethical Fallacy entry says this is a form of Restrictivism.

www.informationphilosopher.com/afterwords/glossary/#Ethical_Fallacy

If you click through to the Restrictivism gloss, it mentions Kane, van Inwagen, and Susan Wolf as proposing three different variations on restrictivism.

www.informationphilosopher.com/afterwords/glossary/#Restrictivism

Does this sound OK?

[Mark Smeltzer]

Bob,

You asked, "So how can your conclusion that 'all free choices are moral choices' be right in any real sense[?]"

The three premises I set forth weren't meant to be an argument. They were provided together as a means of demonstrating that they are logically coherent.

If a philosopher wanted to motivate the conclusion that all free choices are moral choices, then a fair amount of argumentation would be required.

However, I believe it is *possible* for a philosopher to make that set of arguments without committing a formal logic error. The argument may contain premises that we would not accept, but the argument itself could be formally valid. Since fallacies are faulty strategies in the presentation of an argument, the worry you have cannot be properly labeled as a fallacy.

So, assuming the label "ethical fallacy" is ruled out, I would also recommend staying away from other forms of biased terminology. It may be that you disagree with a set of positions, but it would be presumptuous to label things you disagree with as products of faulty reasoning.

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Mark,

Fair enough.

Suppose we call it Ethical Restrictivism, or perhaps Moral Restrictivism?

Then what Susan Wolf does might be called Rational Restrictivism.

What do you think?

I will also need a better term to describe the idea that purely logical (and linguistic) analysis can yield "truths" about the world.

The hundreds of papers published on Harry Frankfurt's attacks on the idea of alternative possibilities are an example.

I find it hard to believe that they tell us anything about the real world.

Nothing is logically true of the physical world. Anything that is not internally contradictory can be postulated of some possible world.

How do you think we should indicate this problem? I have called it a logical fallacy, but am probably quite wrong to use that term here as well?

[Mark Smeltzer]

Bob,

Either Moral/Ethical Restrictivism seems fine... the one thing I would check is whether they are already in use for some other purpose.

Next, you said, "I will also need a better term to describe the idea that purely logical (and linguistic) analysis can yield "truths" about the world."

There are two basic distinctions that apply to any statement containing a predicate. That is whether the predication in the claim is analytic or synthetic, and whether the claim's predication is knowable a priori or a posteriori.

Philosophers generally agree that there is nothing controversial about analytic a priori claims (e.g. a bachelor is an unmarried man) nor about synthetic a posterori claims (e.g. the ball before me is blue). Philosophers generally have little to say about analytic a posteriori claims, but they have a LOT to say about synthetic a priori claims. The debate formally emerged when Kant reacted violently to defend the synthetic a priori against Hume's extreme skepticism about the possibility of inductive knowledge. More recently Kripke made a big stink about whether we could know truth about pain that would stand unassailed in possible worlds where pain might achieved in mechanistically different ways (his goal may have been to defend something like property dualism, but the underlying problems are directly relevant to the concept of the synthetic a priori).

If the truth value of synthetic a priori claims is fundamanetally unknownable, then science's goal of learning truths about the physical world through experimentation is hopelessly impossible. This is because synthetic a priori claims are not just about possible worlds other than our own, but are also about potentially existant (past, present, or future) states of our own world.

One of the most well known claims in this debate is that "all ravens are black." No one has ever encountered the set "all ravens" and been able to observe that "they are all black", and yet most of us (at least most laymen) would want to defend the assertion that all ravens are black. The problem of course is that, logically speaking, there could be a few specimens of white ravens living in the Amazon just waiting to be discovered. This same kind of problem applies to every synthetic a priori claim. Consider mathematical claims like this one for instance, "For every x greater than 0, x is necessarily x less than 2x." It seems difficult to defend the idea that this statement contains an analytic truth and no one could possibly ever derive this claim from experience.

If we can make sense out of synthetic a priori claims in general, then we plant mathematical claims on strong grounds, and moreover we secure a foundation for a defense for emperically derived inductive claims about the natural order (viz., Hume's "cause and effect") -- everything from knowing that all ravens are black, to knowing that the sun will rise tomorrow, to claims about the way that the will works.

If you try to selectively disregard the synthetic a priori as a valid source of truth since "[you] find it hard to believe that they tell us anything about the real world," you are at risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your review of Hume's attack on induction as a source of logical necessary truth and Kant's synthetic a priori defense of necessary knowledge.

Science's goal of learning necessary "truths" about the world is indeed hopelessly impossible.

In the history of the free will problem, necessity was abandoned by Chrysippus when he invented compatibilism. He held on to a nomological physical determinism and fate, of course.

www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/history/

For science, the application of logic and mathematics to the world is simply as a tool to aid deductive reasoning.

Deduction is just one part of the hypothetico-deductive-experimental method of science.

It seems to me that the foundation of mathematical claims and logical claims is two-fold, internal consistency (analytic) or real-world applicability (synthetic).

Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism pointed out that in the end, even analytic truths depend on empirical verification.

The idea of synthetic a priori was a failed effort to get around this important distinction.

Logical positivist philosophers of science, from the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Schlick and their verification ideas, to Popper's falsification (a negative version of verification that fails as well), all hoped to restore meta-scientific foundations that are not to be found.

Science today is a pragmatic mix of freely invented theories that can come from anywhere (the anything-goes for hypotheses approach of Feyerabend) and critical observational testing by adequately determined experiments.

This two-stage process of science is very like that of "free will" which I parse into "free" (random thoughts) and "will" (adequate determination).

www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/free_will.html

The standard argument against free will is attacks the two horns of the dilemma - neither determinism or indeterminism provides freedom and moral responsibility.

But perhaps a pragmatic mix of both is the answer?

We need to limit determinism but not eliminate it.

And we need to admit indeterminism in the generation of alternative possibilities, but not permit it to deny the control of the adequately determinate wills needed for moral responsibility.

We must admit indeterminism
but not permit it to produce random actions
as Determinists mistakenly fear.

We must also limit determinism
but not eliminate it
as Libertarians mistakenly think necessary.

www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html

[Mark Smeltzer]

Bob,

I guess I am curious whether you are looking to use the glossary to push an agenda or to provide unbiased introductions.

For instance, not everyone identifies with Quine's (failed) attempt to naturalize epistemology and thus might be interested in learning about defenses of inductively grounded knowledge, defenses of the synthetic a priori, etc. If your goal is to push an agenda, I would suggest that you make that clear somewhere on the site.

[Cihan]

Mark,

"Push[ing] an agenda" very likely is the right term. For instance, there is a section within a section called "Conclusions" that says:

"As of summer 2008, we have reached out to professors of philosophy around the world
who are active in the free will debates and have modest signs of a consensus that the Randomness Objection in the Standard Argument against Free Will is flawed."

But wait! The best comes at the end:

"Removal of the Randomness Objection, together with widespread acceptance that quantum indeterminism removes the Determinist Objection, means we are making progress toward intersubjective agreement in the philosophical community that the problem of free will has, after more than two millenia, been solved."

Yes, the problem of free will has been solved! On the very pages of this webpage! Upon hearing these news, I personally threw away all my relevant anthologies and deleted all my free will related pdfs. I expect nothing less from other Gardeners.

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Cihan,

Thanks for poking a hole in my hubris - I backed the claim off to "may be soluble."

But I do in fact feel we are making progress toward intersubjective agreement, at least in a few of the conversations I have started with other philosophers.

And intersubjective agreement among an open community of inquirers is my sole criterion for success.

As to throwing away your books, that is quite the opposite of the intentions of the Information Philosopher. To me, intellectual information is the highest form of human production.

With my web pages for over 90 philosophers and a few dozen scientists, I am trying to sample their opinions, and with brief excerpts give visitors an introduction to their philosophizing.

I hope I am encouraging others to read all those works. So please hold onto your anthologies, Gardeners.

For my part, I know that selection is always bias in history, so I am seriously trying to read every important work.

I am hoping Gardeners will tell me more things I should be reading.

Do I have an agenda? Don't we all? Mine is to learn as much as I can and share the experience on the world wide web.

But it is also to judge what seems to me to be the best arguments out there, and more importantly, the best evidence to support various theories.

The free will model that I feel we are converging on is the result of work by many great thinkers who have anticipated a two-stage solution to the classical problem, among them William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, A.O. Gomes, Karl Popper, Henry Margenau, Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane, and Alfred Mele.

I try to explain how their work all fits together in my History of the Free Will Problem, which is still a work in progress, of course.

www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/history/

[Mark Smeltzer]

Bob,

Now I'm more confused. You say that, "To me, intellectual information is the highest form of human production." Yet, just one post prior you said that all seemingly a priori claims actually reduce to a posteriori claims and that non-trivial a posteriori knowledge of the world is impossible (e.g. we only have knowledge of nominal events, if even that)...

So, where does this "intellectual information" come from?

[Bob Doyle]

Hi Mark,

The question of the source of intellectual information (the sum of human knowledge) and of all other physical and biological information has been my interest for a long time.

I am a Harvard astrophysicist who has been contemplating the origin of information in the universe for fifty years. Because information creation involves an irreducible (quantum mechanical) indeterminism, the creation of new structures, whether cosmic, biological, or human, always involves some uncertainty.

This uncertainty is statistical and averages out in all large structures, but it can have significant effects. These include the genetic variations in biological evolution, and information processing functions of all kinds, including the human mind.

The mind/brain is too large for quantum indeterminism to matter in most of its processes. It is adequately determined to act on its decisions, for example. But when deliberating about its options, when it is forming intentions and pondering reasons for acting, it uses information sensing and information retrieval of past experiences. These are susceptible to errors (the noise we find in all communications systems) that show up as random alternative possibilities.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/possibilities.html

Our thought processes are very likely randomly generating such possibilities, perhaps visible to us when we are semi-conscious and dreaming.

I like to say our thoughts are free, our actions are adequately determined.
__________________

But coming back to synthetic a priori. I apologize for any impression I gave you that non-trivial a posteriori knowledge of the world is impossible. Science is that knowledge of the world, arrived at through an open process to achieve consensus among a community of inquirers (like the GFP).

The third goal of information philosophy is a ground for epistemology stronger than the foundation logic and language have been able to provide. (The second goal is to propose information as a ground for objective value. The first is to investigate the idea of freedom, which brings me to GFP.)

It is not so much that the synthetic a priori is wrong as it is an unproductive idea.

Kant hoped to recover the certainty devastated by Hume's skepticism about induction as a means of knowing. Kant failed. But we do have knowledge (in the form of information). We have knowledge of the "things themselves" in the form of an approximate but isomorphic ("one-to-one") mapping of information in the things and in our minds.

Inductive generalizatons, "economic summaries of the facts" as Ernst Mach called them, can include all those facts - your "all ravens are black," "all swans white," "all bachelors unmarried men," etc.

But a scientific theory is based on a triplex of
1) hypotheses (including wild random guesses, hunches,intuitions, etc.),
2) logical/analytic deductions (predictions),
and 3) experiments and observations to test those predictions.

A great theory surprises us, it explains more than the facts that suggested it in the first place. It may even lead to phenomena we had no idea existed!

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, for example, while it continues to explain, with as good or better accuracy, all the physics of Newton's classical dynamics, goes on to predict the bending of light as it passes the sun (space bending), the slowing of clocks in a gravitation field (time contracting), the advance of the perihelion of Mercury, and - most astonishing - the expansion of the universe, which, we will see, drives the creation of information even in the face of the second law of thermodynamics that demands increasing disorder at the same time.

In a similar fashion, the theory of quantum mechanics explains, and contains as a special case in the limit of macroscopic objects, all the classical mechanics which led us to the flawed but very valuable and productive hypothesis of causal determinism.

To get back to my work in information philosophy (I-Phi), I am postulating a single "cosmic creation process," the source of our intuitions that there is a cosmic Providence. This process, which I call "ergodic," explains the creation of order (information) out of chaos. (By the way, this chaos is not the recently popular "chaos theory" or related "complexity theory," both of which are mathematical formalisms, computer models, and fundamentally deterministic. And both of which have been suggested as important in philosophy of mind!)

The chaos we have in the real universe is not epistemic. The randomness, the unpredictability, the chance is not due to human ignorance, it is ontological. And this chaos is everywhere. The real challenge is to explain the emergence of stable structures, stable information structures, like DNA, parts of which are identical to earlier versions 2.8 billion years ago.

Life is a constant battle of imposing its apparently deterministic and teleological character on the thermal and quantum chaos of the atoms and molecules in our material bodies. Maintaining the organization and information content of our bodies (and minds) is the essence of life and a continuous challenge.

Information theory is needed to explain the creation (and evolution) of galaxies, stars, and planets. And it is now becoming prominent in explaining biology. Indeed, information is what the Scholastics called the principuum individuum. It's what makes you and me individuals. It's why we have a history. No atom has a history.

In traditional philosophy, the total amount of information in the conceptually closed universe is static, a physical constant of nature. Deterministic laws of nature allow no exceptions. They are perfectly causal. Chance and change - in a deep philosophical sense - are thought to be illusions.

Information philosophy, by contrast, is a story about invention, about novelty, about emergence and new beginnings unseen and unseeable beforehand, a past that is fixed but an ambiguous future that can be shaped by changes in the present.

Applying information theory to the mind gives us, I believe, insight into the process of deliberation and decision which emphasizes the need for some randomness in the early stages to break the causal chain, but then adequate determinism in the decision, as compatibilists and determinists have always insisted is necessary.

First chance, then choice, as the physicist Arthur Holly Compton put it.

And, like any good scientific theory, it surprises us because it explains something else - creativity.

Beyond issues of control and rationality, there are questions of our authentic selves, what it means to feel not only that our actions are "up to us," but that we are the authors of our lives, and thus co-creators of the world. I will argue that we feel this way because the one cosmic creative process is at work in our minds. This may be the source of our intuition that reason is a cosmic gift.

Cihan asked me to make my "agenda" plain on the I-Phi website. It is really all there, starting on the home page.
www.informationphilosopher.com

I would be very happy to talk further about these ideas with you or other gardeners. I would like to get your original ideas, information that should be a part of the I-Phi website.

Send me an email with your phone number and I will give you a call.

Cheers,

Bob
bobdoyle@informationphilosopher.com

[Mark Smeltzer]

Bob,

Thanks of the response... some of it was off topic from my question, but still interesting nonetheless. I would be happy to further discuss some of these ideas at a later time once I am over the flu I've come down with...

Until then, I'll leave you with a couple of questions:

• Are all instances of information factually true?
• How do we obtain knowledge of these facts?