Philosophy

"What is conserved, in modern physics, is not any particular substance or material but only much more abstract entities such as energy, momentum, and electric charge. The permanent aspects of reality are not particular materials or structures but rather the possible forms of structures and the rules for their transformation."

"A powerful case for that refurbished, secularized response to individual mortality was constructed and extensively argued by Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern sociology. He strove to insert and settle “society” in the place vacated by God and by Nature viewed as God’s creation or embodiment—and thereby to claim for the nascent nation-state that right to articulate, pronounce and enforce moral commandments and command the supreme loyalties of its subjects; the right previously reserved for the Lord of the Universe and His anointed earthly lieutenants."

"What is the nature of this problem? It arises from a fact and a theory. The fact is that our minds and consciousnesses are clearly very intimately connected with our bodies; the theory is that we know that all physical bodies are alien to mind. In other words, reflective thought has been pulled in two different directions at the same time and has been unable to work out a harmonious view. The physical sciences have assumed that they alone had the physical world for their object and they have naturally concluded that the physical world must be conceived only in terms of the information they have acquired. The consequence has been the existence of a dualism. Mind and consciousness are real, yet immaterial. The physical world is real, yet material. The mind-body problem has consisted in the attempt to relate two such antithetical realities. That they are actually related has always seemed undeniable—at least the denial of a relation has been the counsel of despair. But how to conceive the relationship has been the crucial point of metaphysics."

"No nation's security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations."

"René Descartes developed the idea that human beings have a dual nature: they have a body... of material substance, and a mind, which derives from the spiritual nature of the soul. ... It is remarkable to reflect that these seventeenth century ideas were still current in the 1980s. Karl Popper... and John Eccles... espoused dualism all their lives. They agreed with Aquinas that the soul is immortal and independent of the brain. Gilbert Ryle... referred to the notion of the soul as "the ghost in the machine." Today, most philosophers of mind agree that what we call consciousness derives from the physical brain, but some disagree with Crick as to whether it can ever be approached scientifically. A few, such as Colin McGinn, believe that consciousness cannot be studied... At the other extreme, philosophers such as Daniel Dennett deny that there is any problem at all. Dennett argues much as... John Hughlings Jackson did... that consciousness is not a distinct operation of the brain; rather it is a combined result of computational workings of higher-order areas of the brain... Philosophers such as John Searle and Thomas Nagel take a middle position, holding that consciousness is a discrete set of biological processes... very complex and... more than the sum of their parts."

"Prior to Brenda Milner's discoveries, many behaviorists and some cognitive psychologists had followed the lead of Freud and Skinner and abandoned biology as a useful guide to the study of learning and memory. They had done so not because they were dualists, like Descartes, but because they thought that biology was unlikely to play a significant role in studies of learning in the near future. Indeed, Lashley's influential work made it seem that the biology of learning was essentially incomprehensible. ...Milner's work changed all that. Her discoveries that certain regions of the brain are necessary for some forms of memory provided the first evidence of where different memories are processed and stored. But the question of how memory is stored remained unanswered, and it fascinated me."

"The Descartian notion of a mechanical body presided over by an independent entity called the soul is replaced, as the "matter" of theoretical physics becomes more attenuated, by the notion of the transformation within the organism of mind-states into body-states, and vice-versa. The dualism of the dead mechanical body, belonging to the world of matter, and the vital transcendental soul, belonging to the spiritual realm, disappears before the increasing insight, derived from physiology on one hand and the investigation of neuroses on the other, of a dynamic interpenetration and conversion within the boundaries of organic structures and functions. Now the physical and the psychal become different aspects of the organic process, in much the same way that heat and light are both aspects of energy, differentiated only by the situation to which they refer and by the particular set of receptors upon which they act."

"People often prefer to believe that there is a disembodied soul that, in some utterly mysterious way, does the actual seeing, helped by the elaborate apparatus of the brain. Some people are called "dualists"—they believe that matter is one thing and mind is something completely different. Our Astonishing Hypothesis says, on the contrary, that this is not the case, that it's all done by nerve cells. What we are considering is how to decide between these two views experimentally."

"Dualism is the view that you consist of a body plus a soul, and that your mental life goes on in your soul. Physicalism is the view that your mental life consists of physical processes in your brain. But another possibility is that your mental life goes on in your brain, yet that all those experiences, feelings, thoughts, and desires are not physical processes in your brain. This would mean that the grey mass of billions of nerve cells in your skull is not just a physical object. It has lots of physical properties -- great quantities of chemical and electrical activity go on in it -- but it has mental processes going on in it as well."

"Fellowship depends on appreciation while manipulation is the cause of alienation: objects and I apart, things stand dead, and I am alone. What is more decisive: a life of manipulation distorts the image of the world. Reality is equated with availability: What I can manipulate is, what I cannot manipulate is not. A life of manipulation is the death of transcendence."

"We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one."

"Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good. Non-co-operation is a protest against an unwitting and unwilling participation in evil... The duty of non-co-operation with unjust men and kings is as strictly enjoined by all the religions as is the duty of co-operation with just men and kings. At times non-cooperation becomes as much a duty as cooperation. No one is bound to co-operate in one's own undoing or slavery. I cooperate with all that is good. I desire to non-cooperate with all that is evil... My non-co-operation has its root not in hatred, but in love... My non-cooperation, though it is part of my creed, is a prelude to co-operation. My non-co-operation is with methods and systems, never with men."

"Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency."

"Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem."

"Whatever in any degree transcends the material impression, or sensuous experience, as well as all possible knowledge of, and faith therein, not merely in respect to … religion, but whatever is noble, beautiful and great, whatever can lead the mind to, or can be referred to something suprasensible and divine—all this, wherever it may be found, whether in life or thought, in history or in nature—aye, even in art itself, it was the ultimate object of this counterfeit philosophy to decry, to involve in doubt, to attack and to overthrow, and to bring down to the level of the common and material, or to plunge it into the skeptical abyss of unbelief. The first step in the process is a subordination of reason to sensation, as a derivative of it—a mere slough which it throws off in its transformations."

"But Caesar had his Brutus, Linus Pauling had Vitamin C, and Friedrich Hayek had “spontaneous order.” His experiences in Europe go far, no doubt, to explain his anti-rationalism, and maybe he wrote as he did in an effort to appeal to the moderate left. But whatever his reasons for advancing the arguments he did, they just don’t work as a normative critique of economic or legal planning. It’s true that order can emerge, unplanned, from dynamic processes — but this is practically useless in advising any political leader or any voter or any consumer about any course of action. Worse, it is all too likely to become a rationalization for passively shrugging at injustice."

"The theory of the spontaneous order is Hayek's finest achievement. It does away with the liberal fiction of the "social contract", by means of which a disorderly "state of nature" is made orderly by the cession of coercive power to a sovereign. It can enrich our understanding of actual historical orders, like the Middle Ages. But it raises worrying problems for libertarians, because Hayek's spontaneous orders turn out, on closer inspection, to be far from self-sustaining, and indeed require to be buttressed by large doses of what he himself calls "constructive rationalism". This is particularly evident in his proposals for constitutional reform in his late book, Law, Legislation and Liberty (1974). The crux of the matter is that not all evolutionary "survivals" are equally useful to the free society. Hayek seems torn between allowing dysfunctional forms of life to die a "natural" death, and intervening to cut them short."

"From Locke to Smith to Hayek, the lesson seems clear: Leave people alone, and a coherent civil order will spontaneously emerge and perpetuate itself. This is utter fiction. A fairy tale. A just-so story that has as much historical veracity as Locke's happy talk about a prepolitical state of nature filled with spontaneously formed families and settled plots of legitimately gotten farmland. […] The order we see at work in the United States and in other advanced democracies is anything but spontaneous. […] The libertarian prophets of "spontaneous order" get things exactly backward, sometimes with catastrophic real-world consequences. Which is why it's a particularly bad idea."

"Regarding social order, Fukuyama writes, "The systematic study of how order, and thus social capital, can emerge in spontaneous and decentralized fashion is one of the most important intellectual developments of the late twentieth century." He correctly attributes the modern origins of this argument to F.A. Hayek, whose pioneering contributions to cognitive science, the study of cultural evolution, and the dynamics of social change put him in the forefront of the most creative scholars of the 20th century. But Hayek's views about the "spontaneity" of social order remain controversial. In their extreme form, they imply that all deliberate efforts to manipulate social order — social engineering — are doomed to failure because the complex nature of our cultural heritage makes a complete understanding of the human condition impossible. Hayek was certainly correct that we have, at best, a very imperfect understanding of the human landscape, but "spontaneous" it is not. What distinguishes human evolution from the Darwinian model is the intentionality of the players. The mechanism of variation in evolutionary theory (mutation) is not informed by beliefs about eventual consequences. In contrast, human evolution is guided by the perceptions of the players; their choices (decisions) are made in the light of the theories the actors have, which provide expectations about outcomes."

"The processes peculiar to economic life in a free society make evident the fundamental superiority of the spontaneous order over the commanded order."

"Hayek started from an evolutionary perspective in the natural sciences. He ended his career with an evolutionary account of the development of human civilization, wherein the societies with the most materially productive rules, laws, morals, customs, and traditions will reproduce most in the end. Societal selection operates both within and among societies, and is driven not by the selection of genetically influenced attributes but by the selection of the societal practices most conducive to economic productivity, prosperity, and peace. Hayek saw life as a competition to extend itself most, whether in the biological or the social realm."

"It would be no exaggeration to say that social theory begins with—and has an object only because of—the discovery that there exist orderly structures which are the product of the action of many men but are not the result of human design."

"Since such an order has not been created by an outside agency, the order as such also can have no purpose, although its existence may be very serviceable to the individuals which move within such order. But in a different sense it may well be said that the order rests on purposive action of its elements, when ‘purpose’ would, of course, mean nothing more than that their actions tend to secure the preservation or restoration of that order."

"In his discussions of spontaneous orders, sometimes Hayek was simply trying to make the point that they exist; that is, he was trying to counter the claim that any beneficent social order needed to be constructed. This view was widespread when he first was writing; the mania for planning was then ubiquitous, so it was a point worth making. In later writings, Hayek sometimes did say, let’s trust to evolved orders rather than constructed ones, but then allowed that sometimes we needed to make piece-meal changes, and he gave no criteria for deciding."

"Indeed, what he now proposed was nothing less than a dismantling of every known legislature into two novel bodies with different competences and disparate electorates, to correspond to the two ontological kinds of order — the more powerful chamber, guardian of the rule of law as such, striking anyone under the age of forty-five off the voting-roll. This, as even sympathizers could not fail to notice, was a violent attack of the very constructivism his theory had set out to purge. Hayek was unmoved, Such was the price of preserving nomos, or the law of liberty, from the logic of popular sovereignty."

"The simplest way of expressing the major thesis of the theory of spontaneous order is to say that it is concerned with those regularities in society, or orders of events, which are neither (1) the product of deliberate human contrivance (such as a statutory code of law or a dirigiste economic plan) nor (2) akin to purely natural phenomena (such as the weather, which exists quite independently of human intervention). While the words conventional and natural refer, respectively, to these two regularities, the ‘third realm,’ that of social regularities, consists of those institutions and practices which are the result of human action but not the result of some specific human intention."

"If the factual assumption of socialism were correct, it would be a moral duty to aim at the just distribution. But you have to recognize you cannot do it. In fact, you can produce enough to sustain the present population of the world, only because of a spontaneous process or mechanism which enables you to make use of infinitely more information than any central authority possesses."

"To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be 'fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it' (Genesis 1:28). This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution."

"The main point of my argument is, then, that the conflict between, on one hand, advocates of the spontaneous extended human order created by a competitive market, and on the other hand those who demand a deliberate arrangement of human interaction by central authority based on collective command over available resources is due to a factual error by the latter about how knowledge of these resources is and can be generated and utilised."

"Such an order, although far from perfect and often inefficient, can extend farther than any order men could create by deliberately putting countless elements into selected `appropriate' places. Most defects and inefficiencies of such spontaneous orders result from attempting to interfere with or to prevent their mechanisms from operating, or to improve the details of their results. Such attempts to intervene in spontaneous order rarely result in anything closely corresponding to men's wishes, since these orders are determined by more particular facts than any such intervening agency can know."

"Everything is inanimate, if by that you mean things that operate according to cause and effect. Free will is an epiphenomenon, a misjudgment impressed upon us and sustained by the actions of brain molecules in motion."

"I want to wean people off the knee-jerk reaction to the notion that without free will, we will run amok because we can’t be held responsible for things. That we have no societal mechanisms for having dangerous people not be dangerous, or for having gifted people do the things society needs to function. It’s not the case that in a deterministic world, nothing can change."

"It is misleading to say that somebody "chose" a dysfunctional relationship or any other negative situation in his or her life. Choice implies consciousness - a high degree of consciousness. Without it, you have no choice. Choice begins the moment you disidentify from the mind and its conditioned patterns, the moment you become present. Until you reach that point, you are unconscious, spiritually speaking. This means that you are compelled to think, feel, and act in certain ways according to the conditioning of your mind. That is why Jesus said: "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." This is not related to intelligence in the conventional sense of the word. I have met many highly intelligent and educated people who were also completely unconscious, which is to say completely identified with their mind. In fact, if mental development and increased knowledge are not counterbalanced by a corresponding growth in consciousness, the potential for unhappiness and disaster is very great. p. 142"

"“You think shuffling a deck of cards gives it free will?” Kai shakes his head. “Nobody’s believed that shit for a hundred years. Until someone comes up with a neuron that fires without being poked, we’re all just—reacting.”"

"You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill; I will choose a path that's clear- I will choose Free Will."

"I have free will, but not of my own choice. I have never freely chosen to have free will. I have to have free will, whether I like it or not!"

"If man were not free, then he could not conceive of causality at all, and could not form any concept of it. Insight into lawfulness is already freedom from it."

"All the free decisions you have made and will make are determined by the mathematical nature of reality. Art and unconditional love are the only ways to turn your back on determinism, at least for a while."

"All the passages in the Holy Scriptures that mention assistance are they that do away with "free-will", and these are countless...For grace is needed, and the help of grace is given, because "free-will" can do nothing."

"Martin Luther On the Bondage of the Will (1525) Pg. 270"

"I frankly confess that, for myself, even if it could be, I should not want "free-will" to be given me, nor anything to be left in my own hands to enable me to endeavour after salvation; not merely because in face of so many dangers, and adversities and assaults of devils, I could not stand my ground ; but because even were there no dangers. I should still be forced to labour with no guarantee of success. But now that God has taken my salvation out of the control of my own will, and put it under the control of His, and promised to save me, not according to my working or running, but according to His own grace and mercy, I have the comfortable certainty that He is faithful and will not lie to me, and that He is also great and powerful, so that no devils or opposition can break Him or pluck me from Him. Furthermore, I have the comfortable certainty that I please God, not by reason of the merit of my works, but by reason of His merciful favour promised to me; so that, if I work too little, or badly, He does not impute it to me, but with fatherly compassion pardons me and makes me better. This is the glorying of all the saints in their God."

"Martin Luther On the Bondage of the Will (1525) Pg. 217"

"Dieser yrthum von freyen willen ist eyn eygen Artickel des Endchrist."

"In the Middle Ages, people were born and baptized into the Church. But the Church was the corpus mysticum and it depended upon one's own free will whether one wanted to be a living or a dead member of the Mystical Body of Christ. The cry "traitor" was only raised against those who broke the solemn oath of allegiance, not those who chose to go ways different from their status of birth. The Connêtable Charles de Bourbon who served with Charles V, or Marshal Moritz of Saxony, the great general under Louis XV were hardly considered to be traitors. Soldiers picked out the countries they wanted to serve. Prospective monks chose their orders. There were no "traitors to the proletariat" or "traitors to democracy." Today we live in an age of increased predestination and decreased free will, where Calvin, Freud, Marx, Luther, Darwin, Dewey, and the host of racial biologists have laid down the inexorable laws of anthropological, religious, psychological, environmental, and sociological determinism with no hope for escape. We are merely exhorted to make a virtue out of necessity and to be loyal to our prison and prisoners. Every attempt from our side to escape the artificial shell or to use our dormant remainders of free will to destroy the chains is branded as treason and punished accordingly by State or Society or even by both."

"Let all the 'free-will' in the world do all it can with all its strength; it will never give rise to a single instance of ability to avoid being hardened if God does not give the Spirit, or of meriting mercy if it is left to its own strength."

"Man is a masterpiece of creation if for no other reason than that, all the weight of evidence for determinism notwithstanding, he believes he has free will."

"I said: “Then in reality I had little choice.” “Let us say that your character has already determined your choice.”"

"The illusion of free will...is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. Thoughts and intentions simply arise. What else could they do? Now, some of you might think this sounds depressing, but it's actually incredibly freeing to see life this way. It does take something away from life: what it takes away from life is an egocentric view of life. We're not truly separate: we are linked to one another, we are linked to the world, we are linked to our past, and to history. And what we do actually matters because of that linkage, because of the permeability, because of the fact that we can't be the true locus of responsibility. That's what makes it all matter. So you can't take credit for your talents, but it really matters if you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses and your failings, but it matters if you correct them. Pride and shame don't make a lot of sense in the final analyses. But they were no fun anyway. These are isolating emotions. What does make sense are things like compassion and love: caring about well-being makes sense; trying to maximize your well-being and the well-being of others makes sense. There is still a difference between suffering and happiness, and love consists in wanting those we love to be happy. All of that still makes sense without free will. And, of course, nothing that I've said makes social and political freedom any less valuable: having a gun to your head is still a problem worth rectifying, wherever intentions come from. So the freedom to do what one wants is still precious. But the idea that we as conscious beings are deeply responsible for what we want I think needs to be revised: it just can't be mapped onto reality, neither objective nor subjective. And if we're going to be guided by reality, rather than by the fantasy lives of our antecessors, I think our view of ourselves needs to change."

"The ultimate objective test of free will would seem to be: Can one predict the behavior of the organism? If one can, then it clearly doesn't have free will but is predetermined. On the other hand, if one cannot predict the behavior, one could take that as an operational definition that the organism has free will … The real reason why we cannot predict human behavior is that it is just too difficult. We already know the basic physical laws that govern the activity of the brain, and they are comparatively simple. But it is just too hard to solve the equations when there are more than a few particles involved … So although we know the fundamental equations that govern the brain, we are quite unable to use them to predict human behavior. This situation arises in science whenever we deal with the macroscopic system, because the number of particles is always too large for there to be any chance of solving the fundamental equations. What we do instead is use effective theories. These are approximations in which the very large number of particles are replaced by a few quantities. An example is fluid mechanics … I want to suggest that the concept of free will and moral responsibility for our actions are really an effective theory in the sense of fluid mechanics. It may be that everything we do is determined by some grand unified theory. If that theory has determined that we shall die by hanging, then we shall not drown. But you would have to be awfully sure that you were destined for the gallows to put to sea in a small boat during a storm. I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road. … One cannot base one's conduct on the idea that everything is determined, because one does not know what has been determined. Instead, one has to adopt the effective theory that one has free will and that one is responsible for one's actions. This theory is not very good at predicting human behavior, but we adopt it because there is no chance of solving the equations arising from the fundamental laws. There is also a Darwinian reason that we believe in free will: A society in which the individual feels responsible for his or her actions is more likely to work together and survive to spread its values."

"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."