I can find no explanation for why determinism has gotten so bound up with free will, or for why that confusing term was chosen as its opponent, even for the 'official' definition. I have never believed in miracles or magic. That humans have no power to create something from nothing has always seemed obvious to me; I never attained to a notion that an entire philosophy had to be devised in support of that. Determinism makes a moot statement, to the best of my perceptions and for all I have tried to learn about it.  To say our natural brains work only in accordance with nature's principles would surely have been good enough to satisfy 'most everybody I know. The few exceptions are not among those I count as sensible at any rate.

We cannot make something from nothing. The closest thing I can think of as an example for explaining that is an electrical generator (called an "alternator" for AC electricity). It appears to do just that: Turning a pulley mounted on a shaft at a fairly high RPM's will charge a battery or light a lamp, and there's no obvious way to show us how that happens. It seems to be a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics, where matter nor energy are ever created or destroyed. So, what's happening here?

By looking into it, we see how the turning shaft has coils of wire on it that are wrapped around metal poles. Those poles are turning in close proximity inside some other wire-wrapped poles that are stationary. Some of those poles are magnetized (electromagnets, if an electrical source is connected into the system). We have discovered a way to use our knowledge that a wire passed over a magnet gets current induced into it. A basic process of mechanical evolution uses the electrical energy of a motor applied to the pulley to make the pulley turn, thus transferring the energy to the shaft on which it is mounted, after which it induces current flow into wires connected to the stationary coils.

This is how your car's battery stays charged, a kind of interactive process. This is how flowing water at hydroelectric plants generates electricity for your home. This is how the funny-looking radio you might take camping uses your sweat applied to a crank to recharge its batteries so you can listen to music and hear weather reports while out in the woods. No magic is involved, and nothing gets created out of nothing in this interactive process. Energy goes in, energy in a new form comes out.

I call it an interactive process because the materials available to the process are used to generate a result that appears to have been "created" as original new materials. It is the same as with anything found exterior to us. A new home gets built as a result of an interactive process that involves entire groups of people. Landscapers have knowledge pertinent to designing its setting. Architects and contractors have knowledge of how to lay it out according to your specifications, and also about what will and won't work. Real estate agents have knowledge of locations where it could be built. Bankers have knowledge of whether or not you can pay for it, and how so. Lawyers, councilmen, and others have knowledge about whether or not you will get permission to start the process going. If so, a whole interactive process of discussion goes on while you wait and wonder about all of the things they are trying to get you to agree to.

When each of them approaches you with their various proposals, you get to hear all kinds of arguments going on inside of your own brain. Various kinds of materials get dredged up from your own knowledge pool. Various preferences and offenses get dredged up from your genetic inheritance, any previous indoctrinations, and inhibitions about how things look or how they work. You make adjustments in all of that for the materials gleaned from your spouse's ideas, and make countering requests, refusals, or acceptances according to a very similar interactive process that occurs within yourself.

Sure, some of all those processes depend upon deterministic factors. You inherited a certain genetic makeup as a part of your family history, but that is you. That is your autonomous, sovereign self. Sure you know certain things, and have no awareness at all of others. That is the materials from which you build the ideas and activities of your life. That is you. That is the materials that you have gathered up for your own sovereign, autonomous self to have at your disposal. Outside forces are deterministic, yes. External events contribute to factors beyond your control, yes, and so they are deterministic.

Internal events also can be considered deterministic when they involve circumstances that extend to beyond your control. You may contract a virus and suffer a bout of flu. Your stomach, unable to stand up to the stress, may react with a violence that puts you out of action. You may suffer a heart attack, amnesia, or a stroke that results in memory impairment or immobility. Your marriage might unexpectedly end and render you incapable to go on for all your sorrow. You may have adopted a parasitic memeplex that usurps your own interests and displaces them with those inherent to it. Those would contribute to internalized determining factors. But, they are not you. They will prompt you, they will affect your choices, but they will not make them (with the likely exception of the memeplex). They will interact with you to reach a decision, unless they overwhelm you, something that is obvious.

Determinists say those factors will make that decision for you, and that you are no more than an illusion of a spectator. Common sense tells you that can't be true. Your headaches and the furrows forming on your forehead tell you that you worked too hard to not be a part of the process.

Determinism arises from the view that everything previous to any point in time resulted according to the nature of all that occurred previous to it; that whatever happened then happened in just the way it did because it had to, and that all to occur in the future will be subject to that. As time went on, all the concatenation of events that led to that certain occasion took on a nature determined by all the previous events, and so the nature of everything to occur at that point in time had to answer to that.

That seems to appeal to common sense, and so most people will see that it may be true. We know that, if we slap at a mosquito and hit it, the mosquito will flatten onto our skin and we will also sting wherever we struck ourselves. She will die, and we will try to shake the pain away. We know all kinds of things like that.

We also know that events are composed of three interlocking stages: Cause (a prior event); state (the condition of the event over its duration); effect (the result brought about by the event). We also know that a concatenation of events is a process, especially when their effects branch into parallel as well as serial concatenating sequences. We'll say, "She's in the process of getting a divorce (State in a straight line of time). I don't know who will be getting the house, or what will happen to the kids, or who will take over watching after his ailing mother (branches into parallel events). It all happened because she found out he'd begun seeing prostitutes after she took a night shift job to help pay his gambling debts (cause)." What effects will come of this? Stay tuned, and maybe we can find out as it unfolds.

Or, maybe not. Does it not make sense that scenarios such as that are said to answer to the Law of Cause and Effect? Does it not also make sense to say that every event to occur is an effect wrought by a previous event known to be its cause?– and that it will act as a cause for some subsequent event? Determinism depends upon the correctness of that sensible sequence of statements for its own correctness.

Life provides another example: Are you alive? Do you think? Do you only think you are alive? If you can interact with your environment in much of any purposeful manner, then you are alive and can think about it. Still: David Hume asserted that just because we can observe an event (such as the sunrise) occurring on a daily basis does not mean that it always will, but that it is impossible to go through life without making such assumptions ( David Hume ). When life ends, and we each die, we return to the status of mere objects because the "something extra" no longer emerges.

That "something extra" is not a demon nor a ghost that lives in our bodies and run things, like determinists claim we are saying. No one would make that claim about a light bulb or a computer; no one can honestly make that claim by putting words in our mouths. Apply energy (shovel in food, bask in sunlight and keep warm without overheating) and the "something extra" transforms a material body into a sensual, active, accomplishment-oriented human being. Apply energy in the form of electricity, and the light bulb yields "something extra" with which we are very familiar. The computer does the same, for so long as we enable it by providing it with a power source and programs. Remove the energy and the "something extra" goes dead in all three cases (and any others we can think of).

To denigrate the computer as "only able to perform because it is programmed" is to take the wrongheaded, unproductive negative view. Programming enables the computer and lifts it out of its machine-object status. Contrary to the attitude of defeat that determinism elicits, this is a statement about existence that can be put to constructive use. Rather than determinism's past oriented, this is all we get ethos, emergence looks to the future with "we can make this machine do whatever we want, and take a load off from our own backs, and maybe we could figure out how it could someday program itself and that would make it more like us!"

Not future oriented, Determinism relies on causality for its support. In the words of a famous philosopher:

"The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm." (Russell, 1913, "On the Notion of Cause",p. 1). Modern philosophers tell us that Cause and Effect appeals to us because we see things and relationships in a linear fashion, which leads us to think that those which occurred earlier are responsible for later occurrences.

We see emergence easily, but associate it with reified beings and cannot get past it as only a natural process. We fail to see the interactiveness inherent to everything that goes on around us, and those things with which we get involved; we see them, instead, as parallel straight-line occurrences. We somehow perceive ourselves to be a part of the overall process, but our linear view of it all makes it hard for us to come up with a simple, but adequate, description. We try to describe a four-dimensional process in two-dimensional terminology.

Interactivity between causes and effects takes note of the way that causes are often modified by the events that result from them, and also of the way our perceptions of causes change as we interact with events with which we get involved. The act of striking a match to cause an explosion gets obliterated in the explosion, offers a simple example in which it can be seen that separating it all out into its parts causes us to miss important features that seemingly "add up to more than the whole". A more complex relationship will be found in the acts of a teacher attempting to impart knowledge to her student, which often ends up with the teacher gaining as much from the exchanges as her protégé, due to the interactivity involved.

Copyright ©2005 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.