X-Message-Number: 6787
From: 
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 18:42:07 -0400
Subject: SCI. CRYONICS determinism

                           DETERMINISM

Although most readers are not novices, I'll try to make this reasonably
self-contained, within constraints of boredom. This "philosophical" question
has important practical and personal implications.

Determinism is the doctrine that the universe is ruled--in large and in
fine--by strict laws of cause and effect, like a finely machined classical
mechanism. In Laplacian terms, a sufficient intellect, with sufficient
information about the present, could infer the entire past and future of the
universe and all its parts (including you and me), with no margin for error.
(All right, that's a little like Archimedes looking for a place to stand when
he moves the earth with his lever; there might be a problem with the observer
taking himself into account. But that's not important.) 

In a sense, this can be restated as Gell-Mann's Totalitarian Principle:
Whatever is not forbidden is compulsory. "Possibility" and "probability" are
always subjective; objectively there are no probabilities or possibilities,
but only certainties on the one hand and impossibilities on the other. The
only things that are possible are those that actually occur (which means that
almost everything conceptually possible is actually or physically
impossible).

This view might also (or might not) be considered related to the
4-dimensional picture of universal events. Each event is located at a
particular point of spacetime, and some hypothetical super-dimensisonal being
could look down and see all of space and history laid out in a single
completed pattern, past and future coexisting. Of course, this notion has
several problems, not the least of which is our sense of time "flowing" and
of a subjective present. Another possible problem is the current notion, in
string theory, that the number of "dimensions" is at least ten. 

The deterministic view had its greatest vogue during the flowering of
classical physics--especially Newtonian astronomy. Using Newton's laws of
motion and gravitation, the positions and movements of the planets apparently
could be calculated and predicted with a precision equal to that of the
original observations. It was assumed that similar statements would be found
to apply to microscopic particles, and this seemed to be the case.

ATTRACTIONS OF DETERMINISM

The appeal of determinism is largely in its orderliness and its rejection of
the supernatural and the unknowable and uncontrollable. We might never know
why or how the universe and its rules originated, and might never have
control over our own origins, but with enough study and effort we could
perhaps learn all there was to know, and along the way we could apply our
knowledge to manipulate the universe for our own benefit. Science and
rationality could get us everything attainable. 

In particular, there seemed no barrier to our learning all the details of our
own natures, our construction and operation, our anatomy and physiology,
including all the subtleties of mental processes. 

The implications are profound and extremely hopeful. If we are mechanisms,
then if something goes wrong we can fix it. If we don't like our design, we
can even change it. We can be repaired, overhauled, even retrofitted. It's
peachy keen to be a machine.

DIFFICULTIES WITH DETERMINISM

1. A prominent but essentially superficial psychological problem is that old
straw man, free will. Even many eminent philosophers seem to be baffled here,
but it is not a real problem. Briefly, "free will" is just a misleading term,
a language problem. 

As Spinoza said, we think we have "free will" because we are conscious of our
thoughts and desires, but we are not conscious of the processes through which
we come to have those thoughts and desires. Or as Schopenhauer said, "We can
do what we will, but we cannot will what we will."

Of course, there are degrees of freedom of the will, in the sense that
someone drugged or coerced has reduced freedom. In that sense, having free
will means just being allowed to function in a "normal" environment. But free
will in an absolute sense, as opposed to mechanism, is meaningless.

To see this, it is only necessary to ask yourself--if not mechanism, then
what? The only alternative to mechanism that has ever even been proposed, as
far as I know, is "chance"--whatever that means. But that is a loser, not a
winner. If your impulses and decisions are not entirely the result of
physical law, but partly "random," then how do you gain in comfort or
dignity? You do not control chance any more than you control law. With law,
at least you can in principle predict the consequences of your actions; with
chance, you may not even reap the fruits of your decisions, and the decisions
themselves could be random! 

To put it another way, with determinism you are a machine. Introduce some
randomness and you become a machine with loose nuts. This is an improvement?

It is also slightly interesting to note that those who abhor mechanism as
applied to mind, because it removes elements of "choice," do not make similar
complaints about the other imposed conditions of life. After all, you did not
choose your parents or the circumstances of your birth, or the era into which
you were born, or your genome, etc. etc., and these are the major
determinants of your fate. If you can make peace with all these highly
visible constraints, then why not with the invisible constraints of the
internal mechanisms of your mind?

Bottom line: We have free will in a subjective sense, and that is all we
need, and all that is possible.  

2. The era of quantum physics seemed to cast doubt on determinism because
(according to dominant interpretations) it is not only impossible to predict
future events with certainty or complete accuracy, but conditions in the
present do not even possess fully well defined attributes in the sense of
classical physics. For example, an atom does not have perfectly defined
values of location and momentum at the same time; each is blurred, and one
can be sharpened only at the expense of further blurring of the other.

Note: Often elementary texts--and even some big names in physics--will say
the problem is that we cannot measure these quantities simultaneously with
complete accuracy, because the act of measurement creates a disturbance which
cannot be completely taken into account. This is not correct. The
authoritative (prevailing) interpretation is that the particle does not
POSSESS simultaneously well defined values of such variables. The particle
not only looks blurred; it IS blurred.

Quantum physics is governed in part by calculations of probability.
"Randomness" or "chance" enters the picture at a fundamental level. In
classical physics, "randomness" is just an expression of the observer's
incomplete information; in quantum physics randomness is supposed to be an
actual physical attribute of the universe. But this is essentially
meaningless.

If you think "randomness" is meaningful, try to explain what it means, in
language that is not circular. As far as I can see, the very best you could
come up with is the following:

"Quantum events are partly random in the same sense that the universe and its
laws are random--i.e., they occur in ways or for "reasons" beyond the
possibility of investigation."

Bondi, Gold and Hoyle once espoused a "steady state" cosmology in which
hydrogen atoms were constantly being created, popping into existence all over
at random, but at a steady average rate. This would be a similar kind of
"randomness"--objectively meaningful, but requiring that we postulate
something forever behind the scenes, in an inaccessible part of the universe,
pulling our strings. 

What makes these notions so absurd is NOT that we might be in a secluded part
of the omniverse, partly out of touch and out of control. One can imagine
parallel scenarios. The problem is that the postulated "randomness" is not
fully random! It follows PATTERNS. It "knows" what has happened before, in
the sense that it does not allow "unlikely" things to happen more often than
the assigned probability permits! It "knows" how to trace out a Gaussian
curve!

Bottom line: Objective "randomness" is basically a meaningless concept.  

As for the place of randomness in quantum theory, we will have to await
further developments in the still unsettled foundations of quantum theory.
The conventional interpretation is far from secure, and under active
challenge.

Conclusion: There do not appear to be any valid objections either to
determinism or to its desirability.

CONSERVATION OF INFORMATION

A critical question in cryonics is whether we can preserve enough information
(internally and externally) to allow restoration of the patient. If vital
information is truly, irretrievably lost, then full and verifiable
restoration of the patient may be forever impossible, regardless of how much
technology advances. In quantum theory, and in some circumstances in
classical theory, it is indeed possible to lose information, most people
believe.

In quantum theory, in fact, the conventional interpretation is that complete
information (complete and fully accurate in the classical sense) does not
even exist in principle. The present is blurred, and the distant past and
future even more so. (This could be interpreted to mean that the past is not
fixed!) But I suggest that this appearance arises from the tendency to look
at and think about only small, narrow experiments such as measuring the
location and energy of a photon. 

We know from recent experiments that there can be quantum links between
objects separated by vast distances in spacetime. We also know that
"observations" of many kinds are occurring in humongous numbers all the time,
everywhere, because of the countless interactions between various particles
(and probably regions of empty space itself), including gravitational
interactions. We also know that many past events provide "anchors" of
stability, because they are large enough to be essentially
ineradicable--including such obvious things as records in history books.

Bottom line: A single quantum experiment may leave uncertainty about a
microscopic event, but  the totality of "observations" (results of
interactions) may leave no uncertainty. A single human observer may not know
the full and exact story, but the universe knows. 

Classical theory also seems at first to allow for loss of information, in two
ways. First, an effect may stem from more than one cause, so looking backward
there might be branches in the causal chain. Again, this can only happen if
you look at too narrow a field. If you look at ALL the interactions, the
possibilities reduce to one.

Second, the accuracy of observation required for accurate predictions mounts
incredibly fast as you go to many bodies and to greater time intervals. Thus,
it is said, you would need observations accurate to zillions of decimal
places to predict the behavior of any complex system at any substantial
displacement in time. Therefore, if not in principle, at least in effect one
cannot make fully accurate predictions at arbitrary removes.

The answer to this is the same as to the first objection. We do not have to
rely just on tracing back individual trajectories. There are many
anchors--known conditions at known points in spacetime. In a loosely phrased
sense, we can be guided in the large by large landmarks, and in fine by other
kinds of calculations and inferences.

Bottom line: Information is (probably) conserved.

BOTTOM BOTTOM LINE: The universe is not only (probably) deterministic, but
usefully so, in the sense that information is conserved; and therefore
reconstruction of a patient is never (in principle) impossible.

BOTTOM BOTTOM BOTTOM LINE: Yield to neither temptation--to abandon hope in
any
circumstances, nor to place more burden on the future than is necessary.

Robert Ettinger
Cryonics Institute
Immortalist Society


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