Choice and Determinism

Spinoza was wrong.

There, I said it.

And he was also right.

In saying that God was the only entity with truly free will, Spinoza was lessening the importance of human life and individual choices. He was lessening the importance of our existence. Granted, he had a somewhat different idea about what “free will” actually was--one that was tied up in his hard determinism.

He said that the only being that was truly free was one unlimited and undetermined by outside forces. All of us puny humans are shaped, limited, and determined by everyone and everything around us. Therefore--according to Spinoza--we aren’t free. It’s not just that our decisions are shaped by our surroundings, they depend on them. (The fact that I can decide what to eat for lunch is determined by my biology: I have a stomach, not chlorophyll.)

Spinoza’s basic definition of God was that God was everything that existed. Since God can be acted upon by no “outside” forces (like biological evolution has acted on us), God’s decisions are truly free in a way ours can never be.

Although I disagree with his consignment of our freedom to choose, I don't disagree with him saying that we are constrained by, and part of, a deterministic universe. In fact, I think determinism is what makes choice possible at all.

First off, let’s just dispense with the idea of “free will.” Truly “free” will simply doesn’t exist, at least not for us (though maybe for Spinoza’s God it does). We cannot will ourselves to grow wings, jump off a building, and soar away into the sunset. But we can choose, based on who and what we are, and the type of world we live in--so when I fail to sprout wings and make a smear on the pavement below, I'm responsible for the poor judgment and that rather bad choice.

Spinoza, meet Fichte. (Don’t you wish sometimes that great historical figures actually could meet? Think about the party that would happen, if only we could get Socrates and Ben Franklin together!)

Recall that cool definition of self that Fichte liked: I am created, in a way, by everyone and everything around me. It’s a negative definition--not value-negative, but more like the negative space inside a cup, which defines the shape of the water inside.

Our choices depend on the world around us. They’re created by the world around us. (So far the hard determinist is still with me...) But if the world around us didn’t exist, we would have no choices to make. There would be no consequences. There would be nothing for us to style “free will.”

Spinoza was no fatalist, though. He left that to a guy named Leibniz.

Leibniz came up with this really weird brand of fatalism in which everything in the outer world was scripted to happen in thus and such a way, our internal reactions were also scripted to happen in thus and such a way, and the two completely separate realities were set in motion at exactly the same "time" (kind of like two chains of dominoes that fall at the same rate but never interact). Gravity and the banana peel were scripted to be there, and my experience of falling down was scripted to be there--but the reason the two seemed to interact was that the outer "cause" and the inner "experience" were pre-written to happen at the same moment.

And then, because that wasn’t enough, he essentially created an infinity of universes when he created what he called “monads.” This is one of the more confusing philosophical critters out there, but I’ll give it a shot.

A monad is kind of like a unit of experience. Not an “I went to the grocery store” unit of experience, but the “I” in the experience. Everything is full of monads--full of first-person (so to speak) experiences. The table really does experience being a table. There are an infinity of monads in the universe, with different forms of monads having more or less experience (what we might call intelligence). Each cell in our body is a monad, but all our body monads are ruled by a soul monad, which naturally experiences more than a single cell can.

The greatest monad on the hierarchy is God, which experiences all things at once.

On a “Wow!” note, Leibniz anticipated quantum physics and string theory when he invented an early version of the holographic principle. Each monad contains all the information that the entire universe does--but it can only access a little of it, because each monad is essentially a point of view. The holographic principle (which mainly has to do with black holes and information loss) says kind of the same thing--each quantum packet contains all the information in the universe, creating an effect kind of like that of a traditional hologram, in which a two-dimensional surface looks like a three-dimensional picture.

Leibniz’s fatalism (an even harder fatalism than traditional eschatology) comes about when he says that a monad’s experience coincides with what happens in the world--but that the two are completely unconnected. Where Paley’s God was a grand watchmaker, Leibniz’s God was a domino setter.

But both Leibniz and Spinoza shorted the importance of choice when they declared it essentially nonexistent (for humans, anyway).

Determinism allows for spontaneity--as weird as that sounds. A cause could have several possible effects, but not all of these effects necessarily happen. Take the utter weirdness of quantum physics, where either the particles are "deciding" (so to speak) which path to take, or they're just taking all possible paths and creating alternate universes along the way!

In a way, we're like those quantum particles. We decide which path we'll take. But there wouldn't be a path to take if that path (bear with my shoddy metaphors) wasn't stable enough to take us down it. If cause-and-effect didn't happen, choice would have no consequence. The freedom to choose has to have a framework to happen in, just like we have to have bodies in order to act, just like we have to have an outer environment in order to have an internal existence.

A deterministic universe makes choice possible. I’m not saying that such a universe was created specifically as a framework for human choice-ridden lives; I’m simply trying to say that choice and determinism aren’t opposed at all. We can choose to be better people, though we often fail--and because we can choose, we're responsible for our choices, and for the consequences that come out of them.