Stephen Hawking, "Is Everything Determined?," in Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (New York: Bantam, 1994), p. 127.
Late on a Friday I am sitting at home popping a movie into the DVD player. Everybody's out for the evening. My child is at her grandmother's place. Her mother is at a "baby shower." This "baby shower" event does not involve bathing an infant, but is an opportunity for women to get together and give each other gifts on the occasion of a pregnancy. I am looking forward to an evening of uninterrupted male bliss. Arnold will shoot many bad guys for the next two hours. I will have a big bowl of Paul Newman's butter free popcorn and just "chill."
The phone rings and a client is at the other end begging me to help get his friend out of jail.
"Can you get bail?"
"Can you get money?"
"How much?"
"$1,500 to $2,000 to make the phone call and speak to the duty judge -- that's if bail hasn't been set and I have to argue for it. I will go with you to pick him up, just to make sure they don't give you any shit to let the guy out, that's after bail is set."
"That's it?"
"No, if he wants me to represent him, I'll need five bills just to say: 'Hello.' ..."
Return call fifteen minutes later says, "we have a date."
About two hours later I have met an interesting character. I will call him "Elvis." Elvis is about my age. He is portly, mild, quiet, pleasant and polite. I came to know many criminals during my years of law practice -- some were and still are in politics and others are in the New Jersey judiciary -- a few are street people. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Young men looking at a shortage of gainful employment opportunities tend to opt for minor criminal work in order to make a living: collection work for the various mobs as independent contractors, numbers calls for college students paying tuition (no, not me), drug dealing on a small, or not-so-small level, trading in stolen goods, or even selling insurance have been common practices among the criminal element. The lowest of the low go into politics. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?" and "Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks.")
These small to middle level criminals are people pretty much like your neighbors whose choices were limited early in life given the challenge of survival. They are "business people" who are "making a living."
Lawyers and criminals on more than one occasion uttered the same wisdom: "Don't begrudge a man a living." In other words, you don't criticize how a guy gets his cash. After all, "it's all relative, ethically speaking." ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
There are also a few people -- usually women -- who are not criminals at all, but who have no other option early in their lives. Such people are miserable committing their crimes because they do not know anything else and cannot get out. These "offenders" are almost always greater victims than anyone they have hurt and are often deserving of society's apology.
Elvis is a different breed. He is not low- or middle-level. Elvis is piercingly intelligent, probably ruthless. Not very well educated, but respectful of learning. Perhaps Elvis is a little envious of something he saw in me. However, this is not in a bad way. We like each other. Elvis listens.
The worst fault among average criminals is an unwillingness to listen to legal advice. I am struck by the life-choices of my new "friend."
Why did this man become a criminal? How much of a criminal is he? I suspect that he is a big-time criminal.
Elvis is probably unusual in that, in different circumstances, I am sure that he would have gone into finance, law, medicine, science and done very nicely in any of these areas. Elvis was pretty high up in an international organization, I suspect, that was involved in illegal transactions of many kinds. Probably, he still is. There was a coldness and calculation about him, as I say, that made it clear to me that there was no possibility of a genuine human connection with this man. There was at least one woman in his life and a child.
I doubt that Elvis would have killed anyone. He would have arranged for such a thing to take place, only as a cost of doing business, without a second's hesitation or any qualms. Elvis was all about the money. This is true of most criminals and many Republicans. Overlapping categories? It can't be, Senator Bob is a Democrat. ("Is Senator Menendez a Suspect in Mafia-Political Murder in New Jersey?" and "Is Senator Bob 'For' Human Rights?")
Elvis was a great believer in "connections." Elvis was in a position to get a driver's license in the state of New Jersey with the name of your choice on it. Elvis could provide women, if they were needed. Merchandise of all sorts was obtainable, instantly, t.v. sets, DVD players, sound equipment at astonishingly cheap rates. Never accept an invitation of hospitality or a favor from a criminal. As an illegal alien, Elvis could leave and return to the country at will, without too many difficulties, and liked to spend vacations elsewhere than the Garden State. Who can blame him?
I advised Elvis to purchase his clothes at K-Mart until his legal adventure ended. It is not wise to dress better than the judge and lawyers at court appearances. This is usually not difficult to achieve in New Jersey. Leave the Armani suits at home. Our goal was for Elvis to dress like an asshole. I insisted on a sort-of "Potsy on Happy Days look." Ideally, you should appear utterly unthreatening and well-meaning, also not too bright to judges -- who will take you for an imbecile who stepped in shit (Marco Rubio?) -- rather than an evil criminal.
I will not go into the details of the little problem Elvis got into. I was struck by the paradox that Elvis had "chosen" a criminal life whereas I did not. Why? How free were our choices? Were they choices? Were we "determined" to make these choices?
Incidentally, I am sure that Elvis is smarter than the legal eagles in most government agencies in Trenton and Washington, D.C., also sharper than every cop I ever met. This should worry you. (Yes, "government" is spelled with that middle "n.")
If the terrorists meaning to harm Americans are at all like Elvis, and if the people seeking to stop them from doing so are like the government functionaries and state torturers I encountered in the Garden State, then (I hate to say it), but the odds are in favor of the bad guys doing some major harm to us at some point.
I am afraid that continuing sanctioned cybercrime and censorship may result in the insertion of "errors" in this text at any time. Envy? See what I mean about corruption and incompetence in America?
I will do my best to make corrections as they are needed.
Professor Stephen Hawking seeks to answer these questions concerning "free will" in an essay that I will now discuss. I am sure that Professor Hawking is mistaken in some of his contentions, while being right about others. Come to think of it, this may be said of most of us. I am also certain that the paradoxes and mysteries of human motivation are more elusive than even Professor Hawking realizes. (For some reason, hackers are making it difficult for me to write this essay.)
No doubt there is a limited range of persons to know at Oxford and Cambridge where the better sort of international criminal is rare -- except perhaps, among tenured faculty and tutors -- whereas wine lovers and grandmasters at chess are common.
"In recent times the argument for determinism has been based on science. It seems that there are well-defined laws that govern how the universe and everything in it develops in time."
Do these laws dictate that Elvis will, inevitably, choose a life of crime whereas I, out of stupidity perhaps, will not? Professor Hawking happily reasons that:
"... there should exist a set of laws that completely determines the evolution of the universe from its initial state. These laws may have been ordained by God. But it seems that He (or She) does not intervene in the universe to break the laws."
There are two problems with this form of determinism that Professor Hawking believes to be "highly probable." To begin with, uncertainty is a distinct feature of the laws of physics:
"The key to this is the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which states that one cannot measure both the position and speed of a particle to great accuracy; the more accurately you measure the position, the less accurately you can measure the speed, and vice versa. This uncertainty is not so important at the present time, when things are far apart, so that a small uncertainty in position does not make much difference. But in the very early universe, everything was very close together, so there was quite a lot of uncertainty, and there were a number of possible states for the universe."
Uncertainty in the early stages of the universe (or in our lives?) gave rise to the complexity of the empirical reality around us and its details. This complexity gives rise, in turn, to fragmentation and probability theories suggesting that there are multiple universes, options, in which each of the various possibilities of universal development play themselves out:
"This gives a whole family of possible histories for the universe. There would be a history in which the Nazis won the Second World War, though the probability is low. But [we] just happen to live in a history in which the Allies won the war and Madonna was on the cover of Cosmopolitan."
There is a problem not seen or discussed by Professor Hawking concerning Madonna and Cosmolitan magazine. The choices concerning cultural options and even these linguistic-ideational-aesthetic realities themselves (together with their curious logic) may not be amenable to explanation or determination in terms of the operations of empirical causality, or events in what Carl Sagan calls "the Cosmos."
Women, alas, are even more difficult to understand and predict or "determine" in their operations or conduct than meteors or planets. ("He's insensitive to women's issues!")
The "life-world" of human MEANINGS is an "alternative dimension." Perhaps the rituals of courtship and falling in love are resistant practices when it comes to mathematical descriptions. How curious?
I recently enjoyed the AMC t.v. series, "The Prisoner." The romance between Number 6 and two women, all of whom seem to mirror each other, dramatizes many of these issues in quantum theory. See the discussion of "Bell's Theorem" in relation to "Alice and Bob" in Amir D. Azcel, Entanglement (New York & London: Plume, 2001), pp. 146-147.
Yet another problem arises. Human intelligence is the joker in the deck of cards, both creating and limiting our possibilities of understanding the universe and "controlling" (psychobabblers who see you as a laboratory rat love the word "controlling") persons' behavior and events.
This leads to difficulties in evolutionary theory along with new problems of free will and responsibility in light of "random selection of maximal survival traits." A fondness for "snookers" together with some wit and charm may help at Cambridge University whereas beating someone's brains in will be vastly more useful in other settings in order to survive -- at Harvard, perhaps. Professor Hawking suggests:
"What we need is an objective test that we can apply from the outside to distinguish whether an organism has free will. For example, suppose we were visited by a 'little green person' from another star. [New Jersey?] How could we decide whether it had free will or was just a robot, programmed to respond as if it were like us?"
How will such a Turing-like test help with the realities of people's inner lives? Professor Hawking concludes that the test is: "Can we predict the behavior of the organism?" He then decides that, while everything is indeed subject to very complex cosmological laws, given the nature of human brain chemistry, the mathematical subtleties and incalculable variables involved in cogitation, it may not be possible to know with certainty what persons will do. In practice we are free, even if in theory it may be possible, someday, to calculate what people will or must do based on the development of an ultimate or total field theory.
I doubt that such a total set of predictions will ever be possible in any meaningful sense. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")
"The human brain contains about ... a hundred million billion billion particles. This is far too many for us ever to be able to solve the equations and predict how the brain would behave, given its initial state and the nerve data coming in to it. In fact, of course, we cannot even measure what the initial state was, because to do so we would have to take the brain apart."
Have you ever gone to the grocery store with a woman? She will examine and squeeze fruit and vegetables, then she will purchase the one item that she has not touched at all. Romantic decisions may be based on similar methods for many women. I always have the feeling with a woman I love that I am roughly equal to an avocado that she is purchasing, reluctantly, because it is on sale. (A single letter was removed from a word in the foregoing sentence since my previous review of this work. Perhaps the culprit cannot help herself as she is "determined" to commit these crimes.)
To infuriate the Femi-Nazi thought-police, I will quote from a literary classic:
"I've been around and I've known a lot of women in my time. They've given me a lot of fun and a lot of grief. Now women are funny animals. You never know where they are with themselves. It's no good trying to find out what makes them tick. It just can't be done. They have more moods than a cat has lives, and all you can hope for is to spot the mood you're after when it turns up and step in quick. Hesitate, and you're a dead duck, unless you're one of those guys who likes a slow approach that might get you somewhere in a week or a month or even a year. But that's not the way I like it. I like it quick and sudden: like a shot in the back."
James Hadley Chase, You Never Know With Women (New York: Harlequin, 1949), pp. 39-40. ("Metaphor is Mystery.") http://www.feministpress.org/ (Might as well get in trouble.)
A formal statement of the point at issue would draw upon the work of thinkers like R.C. Lewontin and Jerry Fodor whose doubts about Darwinian theory fit developments in genetic theory and neurological research indicating the ambiguities inherent to all living "development" for organisms. Scientists hesitate to use the word "freedom." I do not hesitate to deploy that useful word, especially in the linguistic realm of interpretations, cultures, languages. John Searle, Noam Chomsky, Colin McGinn and many others will come in handy in developing these ideas. What follows is a quote from the writings of an evolutionary biologist, not a phenomenologist or hermeneutic philosopher:
"Unfortunately, we do not know how the cell decides among the possible interpretations. In working out the interpretive rules, it would certainly help to have very large numbers of different gene sequences, and I sometimes suspect that the claimed significance of the genome sequencing project for human health is an elaborate cover story for an interest in the hermeneutics of biological scripture." (emphasis added)
R.C. Lewontin, "The Dream of the Human Genome," in Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 67. (The author is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.)
Numerous scientists were asked by Professor Hawking to submit to an experimental dismantling of their brains. However, all of them refused the invitation. I would also refuse.
I am afraid the challenge is even greater than Professor Hawking realizes for it would be necessary to dismantle the subject's mind as well as his or her brain. A person's language and culture would also need to be taken apart. Get it? Professor Hawking is a "dead duck." ("The Return of Metaphysics.")
Language and culture are "leaping things" with a bizarre logic of their own -- a logic that transcends empirical realities, even as it decides whose picture will be on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, or why one woman's picture on that cover makes your knees wobble while another does not. Elvis would eat Professor Hawking's lunch at recess. Hawking would never know it.
Professor Hawking is under the impression that he is a determinist. This is not so. Professor Hawking is a "compatibilist," who believes that the human experience of freedom is compatible with scientific determinism in the empirical realm, that is, with what is known at Oxford and Cambridge as the tiny world beyond the universities.
Professor Hawking agrees with the oracle in the Matrix to the extent that he says not knowing what option you will take means that you are free, de facto, even if there are (in theory) rationally comprehensible schemes and mathematical descriptions of reality in which your choice is not only determined, but also necessary and comprehensible. What is more -- this is indeed shocking! -- Professor Hawking displays a worrisome tendency to indulge in American pragmatist styles of argumentation that simply will not do at Cambridge University:
"So as we cannot predict human behavior, we may as well adopt the effective theory that humans are free agents who can choose what to do. It seems that there are definite survival advantages to believing in free will and responsibility for one's actions. This means that belief should be reinforced by natural selection."
How comforting. Professor Hawking concludes:
"In summary, the title of this essay was a question: Is everything determined? The answer is yes, it is. But it might as well not be, because we can never know what is determined."
A slight difficulty occurs to me.
If we can not know what is determined then in what sense is it determined for us? How would we know that much? If it it is not determined for us then for whom, or in what meaningful sense, can we speak of an order that explains such determinations or all events? God? What might we call such a (rationally) totally comprehensive order? Spinoza, anyone? How is such a realm that is beyond human knowing different from the Kantian noumenal realm? Has Professor Hawking, unknowingly, provided us only with the Kantian picture of noumenal and phenomenal realms in a new scientific language as well as with a defense of freedom that comes down merely to a novel form of Kantianism? In America this is called: "Reinventing the wheel." ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
I asked Elvis why he had chosen his life. He spoke of early poverty which I suspect was bullshit. I was probably poorer in childhood than he was. Then Elvis mentioned the first money that he made ... uh, "creatively," a smile hovered on his lips for a split second. I realized that Elvis enjoyed the game of getting over on people. Elvis is a kind of chess player. This is the rarest sort of criminal. I could never be Elvis, even if I am a better chess player than he is, because at some point in my life -- probably during what I thought of as wasted afternoons in my high school classes in religion -- I realized, at some deep level, my connection and love for, say, Professor Hawking as well as my family, also my vast and continuing pity for Elvis and others like him.
