Essays in Philosophy

Sorry, there's no intro page for Philosophy yet; I haven't had time. Coming soon, I hope.

Predestination - A Personal View

I'm hungry. I'm going to the store. I get up, get my wallet and keys, and head for the car. I'm in a hurry; my face hits the top corner of the car door, cutting my cheek and dislodging my glasses. They fall the the ground and break. I turn the air blue with a torrent of well chosen words, and head back into the house; the remnants of my glasses in my hands and my stomach still empty.

So, was all this predestined? Was it all determined from the time of the creation of the universe? Was it, on the other hand, planned in some way and the result of my conscious decisions? Or was it all just random, with little else to say for it?

I'll argue three points in this article:

  1. Predestination is not consistent with what we know about the operation of the universe,

  2. Randomness plays a huge role in events,

  3. We couldn't tell the difference anyway.

Points 1 and 2 are really much the same thing, and I'll talk about them together.

Deterministic Systems

During the development of physics over the past 400 years, it first seemed evident that the laws that were found argued in favor of a deterministic universe. For example, if you rolled one ball towards another at a given speed and in a given direction, you could predict quite accurately what would happen after the collision (ask any good pool player if this is true or not). Although the calculations were more complex, it was also possible to predict the future interaction of three, four or more moving objects.

A universe in which a future state of affairs can be completely predicted if you know everything about the current state of affairs is said to be deterministic.

When the interactions weren't by means of actual physical contact, but by means of gravity (such as the case with planets and stars) the calculations became more complex. Indeed, when you have four or more such inteacting bodies the calculations become so complex they are virtually impossible to do. However, that is only a limitation in our understanding, not in the interaction itself. There was still no reason to doubt that the reactions were deterministic.

Extending this to extremes, one might say that if you knew everything about the state of the entire universe (indeed, assuming that you, or any form of being could know) then you could predict its state, to the finest microscopic detail, at any future time. By implication, this includes live creatures, so you should be able to predict, therefore, that such and such a person will be intelligent, and will stub his toe on the morning of September 7, 2018, etc.

But it seems a bit odd when you consider ephemeral things. Could you predict, for example, that my name would be Martin, when that name is really only a concept and not a physical entity? Hmmm... seems a bit odd, doesn't it? And what about thought? Well, as I'll discuss, that depends.

Randomness

All of the beautiful deterministic system built up by almost 400 years of physics was shattered in the early part of the 20th century when atoms and subatomic particles were studied in greater detail. The results were so shocking to scientists that they took decades to be accepted, and even today they seem so out of tune with sensory experience that students have a hell of a job understanding them.

See, the problem is, that little tiny things like electrons and photons don't behave deterministically at all. In fact, in a way, they don't even behave like little tiny particles. More like waves, sort of... or particles, sometimes; depending on how you look at them, and... well, it's damned confusing.

This leads to some really unintuitive results. For example, let's look at light (yeah, I know, since you see with light, light is the only thing you really can look at). There is a really simple experiment that almost every physics student will eventually do. It's called a two-slit interference experiment. You shine a beam of light at a panel with two very tiny parallel slits, very close together, so that the light passes through the slits and strikes a screen some distance away. What you see is a bunch of parallel lines formed on the screen; alternately light and dark. Now all of this is very easy to predict if you accept that light is made up of waves; the high spots and the low spots on the waves from the two slits interfere to produce the pattern. With one slit, no pattern; the simultaneous passage of light through both slits is absolutely required.

The problem is, that there are some very compelling reasons to believe that light is made up, not of waves, but of tiny particles called photons. This dilemma haunted scientists for about 5 decades until they finally agreed that light was made up of particles that behaved like waves. Or of waves that behaved like particles. Or... well, it depended on how you looked at it.

So physics took a breather, and everyone relaxed. Yeah, they didn't all understand it, but the smarter guy in the next lab said he did, and that was good enough for most of them. Then some yahoo decided to test this to the limits. What if, he said, you arranged the experiment so that only one particle of light travelled at any time in the beam? This would be a very dim beam, of course, but it could be arranged. And, of course, since there was only one particle, it couldn't possibly pass through both slits at the same time, so the pattern of parallel lines couldn't possibly form. But it did. Absolutely. No question about it; this single particle was passing through both slits at once. Which it couldn't possibly do. Humph.

Today there are several views concerning all this, and it can be summarized in two very simple statements.

  1. It is impossible to completely know or even define both the position and velocity of any particle. In practice, this means that the more accurately you know the position of something, the less accurately you can know how fast it is going, and vice versa. This is called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. It has virtually no effect on large things, like billiard balls, but it is the major factor in the motion of small particles like electrons and photons.

  2. It is impossible to predict the behavior of any small particle except in statistical terms. For example, if you heat water until it boils, water molecules will break free from the liquid and escape into the air in the form of steam. While it is perfectly possible to predict, with great accuracy, how many molecules per second will do so, it is absolutely impossible to predict which particles will do so.

The Effect on Physical Things

 We can predict large scale things quite well. The pool player can, with a skilful shot, put many balls in many pockets reliably and predictably. We can't predict very complex things, like the motion of the stars and planets over millions of years, except in very general terms, but that seems to be a limitation of our ability to calculate rather than a fundamental limitation of the universe itself. Even though we can't predict which atoms in a planet will take part in a particular reaction, we can predict how many of them will, and we can certainly say that the reaction will, or will not, take place.

So, on a large scale, it almost seems as if the universe is deterministic, and therefore predestined from the time of creation.

Yeah, but...

The Effect on Thought

Thought is a process of the brain. Thought determines just what a creature will do. Thought determines, to a huge degree, what will happen to the world on a large scale. So predestination must depend largely on whether or not thought is deterministic.

Let's see. What does that mean? If thought is deterministic, it means that what you are thinking right now (which in turn affects what you will be doing in the next few milliseconds) must depend on

If the world is predestined, everything you think and feel must derive from these three things. Your actions will be guided by these three things alone (the actions of others affect the second and third of these so that's how they affect you). There is no room for independent thought; what you think is independent thought is only your way of interpreting things.

Does that mean there is no room for improvement? Sure there is, but it doesn't come from independent thought; it comes instead as a natural result of the effects of these three things and you only think it is independent thought.

So does this work? Well, I can't be sure ('cuz I can't think independently, right?) but if it does it is completely at odds with the uncertainty principle and randomness. Remember that your brain works on the basis of the movement of electrons, and their movements have an inherent randomness and are not predictable. This argues very strongly against predestination, and I think I would say that, from a scientific point of view, this argument is quite conclusive.

Ahhh... the problem is (you see, there is always a problem) that the very randomness that prevents predestination would seem to prevent independent thought itself. I mean, if the motion of electrons is determined by the position and movement of other electrons, where does that leave room for conscious determination of thought? I mean, how the hell do you move an electron by thinking about it, for heaven's sake?

The Conclusion

The processes of thought, that have such a profound effect on the future of the individual, the world, and the universe, seem to be inexplicable at this time in scientific terms. That may turn out to be the case forever. It may be that we, as humans, are incapable of ever understanding thought; and a higher order of being is required to do so. As an example, we can understand virtually all the processes that go on in, say, a computer or even an insect, but neither the computer nor the insect can understand themselves.

Perhaps it is true, then, that a higher order being is required to understand human thought, and to predict how it works and what it will do. Of course, that doesn't solve the problem. Why? Well, presumably this higher order being is capable of thought on a scale orders of magnitude beyond ours. But, can HE understand HIS thought? Hmmm... I guess we need a still higher order being to do that.

So is the universe predestined? Science now says, very clearly, NO. But science also has a long way to go before understanding thought, and may never be able to do so. All I can say is that if the universe is predestined or not, I am absolutely sure that we will never be able to tell whether it is.

This page last updated March 14, 2009