Bill's Big Stuff

Introductory Comments
As I have explored in my first attempt at this discussion, determinism can be approached from various levels, and to varying degrees of absoluteness. I explored physical, psychological, and situational determinism. However, when the issue comes up in such discussions as this one, the issue really relates to choice—“Could I have done otherwise?”—to quote from Daniel Dennett. Thus we see the entanglement of free will with determinism and their potential antithetical characters.

Having shown in the preceding papers that the problem of a deterministic universe is insoluble, we now arrive at the question of free will. In the discussions I have seen, the argument is simplified to “if the universe is deterministic there is no free will and if it is not, there is.” What I shall try to do in this paper is show that free will exists regardless of the deterministic state of the universe.

So how should we approach this issue? Do we consider free will as existing when we could have done otherwise but did not know of the other choice(s)? Or does it exist only to the degree of our ability to see the choices? In the day to day world, this is probably the most common concept of free will, though we often will later do a Homer Simpson (Say, “Doh!” And smack our foreheads.). For this discussion to even attempt to be conclusive or effective, we will adopt the definition of having a choice whether we see the choice or not. In saying we have a choice, we are saying that at the point of choice, there is no influence on the choice but our own real or potential considerations. But there is a subtlety here. We could certainly say there is free will if the choice can be made randomly, but the choices that mean something are not random.

This is the importance of the whole discussion, our ethical decisions. It is having free will that makes us responsible agents. If we do not have a choice, then how can we be held responsible for the consequences? However, as important as our ethical choices are, the issue is more general and deals metaphysically with all our choices. In other words do we have any choice at all, or is it just an illusion? Here much as our emotions and intuitions motivate the investigation of the question, they are not a reliable guide, because we naturally want our choices, and believe we have them.

The definitions of determinism are frequently assumed in these discussions, at least in the more casual ones. Since we are dealing with human choice we need to look at what determinism means in that context. Implied in all discussions of this question is that ultimately the choice is connected to the physical world and the question is one of, “Is the physical world deterministic?” If we accept the concept of a separate, independent soul[2], then the question becomes moot, because such a soul is not influenced by the physical world and therefore has free will in this sense. One can postulate other non-physical influences, but then we are into speculation and not philosophy. This is the dualism problem. The difficulty with it is, how does the soul exist in a physical body? So whether we accept having a soul or not, for our discussion here, whatever is making the choices is dependent upon our brain for the means and methods.

Though we haven’t proven it, the connection to physical determinism, if that exits, is at least plausible or probable, if not true. But at what level do we take that determinism. In my earlier writing, and here as well, I show that the psychological processes as mediated by the nervous system were inherently non-deterministic, and independent of atomic determinism even if that existed. But even if atomic determinism does not apply, and that might still be an open issue, can we argue determinism from our experiences? In the sense that our experiences create the knowledge base from which our choices are made, we might argue that our choices are determined by experience. (But this is not the same exact meaning of determinism we are trying to deal with.) To the degree that our knowledge is deficient we might have our choices constrained. But above I explicitly stated that having unknown choices constitutes free will. It is analogous to the legal standard that ignorance of the law is not an excuse for wrong behavior.

Actually I think we have here an actual disconnect from the ethical free will question and the metaphysical question of determinism. The metaphysical question does not make assumptions concerning the connection of the physical world to the mental one. It assumes the connection exists. But I have never seen the connection explicitly stated. Is it via the influence of physics and chemistry on the nervous system or is it via our experiences? In my earlier discussions I assumed the former, and we will have to explicitly discuss this connection below, but the latter changes the basis for discussion. If determinism is via our experiences, then the question is either moot or subject purely to our definition of determinism and free will. However, in the preceding paper in this series, I showed we cannot determine if the physical universe is or is not deterministic. Thus any discussion of free will must be in the context of universal determinism as being a moot question.

The Nature of Choices
One of the things that is important here is what actually constitutes a choice? In saying that free will is the capability to make choices, what do we mean by making choices? A compulsive gambler or a drug addict is said to chose to do what they do, and yet they appear to be constantly doomed to make the same choice over and over. That they can be cured, if not in all cases, shows that these behaviors are indeed choices. If we simplify the nervous system involved and look at a rat in a maze that is subject to conditioning, we see that even there the concept of choice applies. Over time the rat will chose to go the preferred route, but if the reward is removed, eventually it will chose randomly or by some innate preference, e.g. preferentially the right or left branch. In the case of the rat, the choice is more primitive, but there still appears to be some process by which a selection is made.

We are still assuming that we know what a choice is. But if we look deeper at it, the issue is less obvious. Choices are alternatives that can be taken in an exclusive sense, i.e. A or B but not A and B, or rather, A then C or D, or B then E or F, where at some point we can no longer take the alternative. Having followed or chosen one path, the other becomes closed. So how do we go about selecting among alternatives? Often, and probably most of the time, the process is not a fully conscious, logical one.

One way of looking at the process is that there is a large, complex set of desires, criteria, and aversions that we compare events and alternatives to, and based on the overall “score” against this set, we make the choice. To make it even more complex there are weights or importance attached to various criteria, which can cause a high value of one criteria to outweigh all the others. This type of selection process could be semi-automatic when the primary criteria are sensory. It may be almost completely sub-conscious when the decisions have a strong emotional content, e.g., falling in love. Ask someone why they love someone, and there will be all sorts of specifics mentioned, but none of them sound like something that would be overwhelming on the surface. Sorting out these sorts of unconscious choices is the basis of psychotherapy when the choices lead to detrimental behavior.

There are also choices made consciously that are either due to logic or the application of an overriding principle, regardless of the emotional state associated with it. Here we can introduce a factor that I will come back to later, prediction. Emotional states and choices are here and now. They are based on an instant summation of our lives to date with respect to the choice. Consciousness, however, can look at a situation and consider what might happen in the future as a result of the choice, and do so for various alternatives. In so doing, it may find that what is momentarily desirable, is not so in the longer term, and lead to a choice counter to the emotional desire. At other times, the emotional state wins over rationality. Here we see what might be considered true choices or the expression of free will.

However, deciding the question based on outcomes is wrong. So far we have done nothing to rule out or rule in determinism in the choices. After all, one could argue that the emotions are determined in one way and the rationality in another. Even if we consider the times we make a mistake on something that we normally do correctly, the question is not resolvable, since one can argue either side, we were not sufficiently aware to catch the mistake or see our error as it was occurring and consider inattention a choice, or that some event occurred that made the mistake inevitable.

The Nature of the Nervous System
Since we are stating that choices are a function of the physical brain, the question becomes more complicated because the central nervous system really can be seen to have three levels, brain-stem and spinal cord, mid-brain and limbic system, and neo-cortex or the grey and white matter. All the discussions I have seen focus on the neo-cortex for that is where our rational thinking occurs. But our emotions come from the mid-brain and limbic system, and the automatic functions that control our body and maintain its constant internal environment come from the brain-stem and spinal cord. The brain-stem and spinal cord are also the first stages in sensory input and the final stages in output. For our choices to be determined, we have to demonstrate determinism at all levels of functioning. In this discussion we also must not confuse constraint or lack of options as the same as determinism. For example, in an ideal world in a dangerous situation we might have the choices of dealing with the danger in one of several ways or simply fleeing. If we are physically incapable of fleeing or cannot for some external reason, we still have choices as to how to deal with it.

In any given situation, all three levels of the brain are making some sort of decision. The closest to determinism is the brain-stem and spinal cord. There behaviors are reflexive, i.e. a given stimulus will elicit a standard response. The integrity of the spinal column and peripheral nerves is what a doctor tests with a reflex hammer. The expression of reflexes can be over-ridden from a higher level, such as not flinching or not drawing away from pain, but the nervous pathways still are activated. There are some reflexes that cannot be over-ridden, for example closing ones eyes while sneezing. I’ve tried, more than once. So at the level of the brain-stem and spinal cord, we may say that behavior is determined, that there are no choices expressed at this level. All responses to stimuli are hard-wired in. In this case the determinism is that of a machine, which unless it breaks does the same thing every time to a given external input.

When we move to the mid-brain and limbic system, the situation seems to be less obvious. To some degree emotions seem to be inate or hard-wired in. Even new-born babies seem to express emotion, sadness, anger, and happiness. But these emotions are related to survival in the new-borne. They are a crude form of communication with the mother for needs to be met. As humans mature however, emotions become far more complex and nuanced in their expression. After puberty a whole new set of emotional responses becomes available, based on sexual capability. Emotional responses can be trained or conditioned, depending on the sum of our life experiences. But there are variations on this, for example, one single extremely emotional event can cause a life-long response to similar situations regardless of whether the outcome is the same or not, or a response may be built up over years of similar experiences with similar outcomes.

I also think this area of the brain is part of the source of our intuitions and snap-judgments. There is what is called archecortex. This is analogous to the rat brain of Skinnerian fame. It is at this level that conditioning occurs in rats and other lower level vertebrates. However, when one looks at conditioning experiments, one sees that they never achieve 100% success. There is always a small chance that the rat will chose the “wrong” pathway. If we look at the apparent nature of conditioning, the reason for this becomes fairly obvious. When a rat starts to negotiate a maze, it chooses either randomly or always preferentially one direction or the other. Over time the successful passages (the ones obtaining a reward) increase until they overcome the “randomness” factor. The archecortex seems to be a statistical sum of experience. If portions of it are removed from a trained rat, the performance in a maze is reduced according to how much cortex is removed.. [3] There are two points to be made here, that there is a fundamental choice mechanism that is overridden by experience, and that performance is never perfect. The longer a rat is trained the better is does, but it is never perfect. That is in the nature of statistics. If I have 10 bad events out of 100 there is only a 90% probability that I can make a successful choice. If it becomes 10 of 990 the probability becomes %99.0, and if 10 of 1000, it becomes %99.90. Note that I have to do ten times more runs to get the next order of magnitude of improvement and that I NEVER reach perfection. This is our first hint that brains may not be deterministic.

Note that we haven’t reached free will yet, but we seem to have reached non-determinism, which is a necessary condition for the existence of free will. However, behavioral observation have the same weakness as any other measurement—it is not proof. Even if all we do is hypothesize a random neuron firing that sometimes throws the choice mechanism off course , we have created a situation that is non-deterministic. We have arrived at a very important finding. The issue is not determinism vs. free-will, but determinism vs. non-determinism as the first step in the discussion. However, just because we have non-determinism, it does not mean we have demonstrated, much less proved, free-will, but we have made an important first step. Having a demonstration that it might be possible to eliminate determinism from our discussion (We haven’t done this conclusively. We will have to return to the issue at a more fundamental level.), we have at least acquired grounds to argue for free-will.

Now let us explore the wonderful part of the brain that sets primates off from other vertebrates, and in particular humans, dolphins and other cetaceans. Other than to state that from my readings, it appears that the huge neocortex of cetaceans appears to be specialized to the analysis of sound and location, rather like a huge biological GPS and radar system combined, I will not discuss the neocortex in other than humans. Though it may be interesting speculation, ethical systems and right and wrong in cetaceans has no importance to the current discussion, which has implicitly to this point, and from now forward explicitly, concerns only human free-will and its relationship to determinism.

Though we will have to come back to the question from a more fundamental level later, at the moment we have laid grounds to consider that the human brain is non-deterministic. That from time to time a random event will cause a “wrong” answer at the archecortex level. Just for a moment let us consider the importance of this to survival. Nature changes over time. Climates change, Earth undergoes geologic change such as mountain building or continental drift. What is a “right” answer now may become a “wrong” answer later and vice versa. From an overall survival standpoint, it is necessary to waste energy on an occasional wrong answer, in case it may suddenly become a right answer.

The neocortex or what we normally refer to as the “grey matter” first becomes important in the primates, and it is at this phylogenic level that we start seeing the evidence of what we call intelligent behavior. Humans have the most highly developed form of neocortex, with various areas of the neocortex showing different microscopic structure. This structure is extremely complex with five or six layers, depending on the area, with connections both internal to a given region and external to the rest of the body.

At the cellular level, all neurons behave the same. They receive impulses from other neurons and when enough impulses arrive within a short time span, the nerve fires with a given intensity. Note that additional impulses beyond the firing threshold do not increase the intensity of the firing. Impulses arriving for a time after the firing are ignored, and, in fact, once the neuron has fired it is actually refractory to further impulses, requiring more than the normal threshold, even after it has recovered from the firing. It appears that the neocortex is created with many more connections than it eventually has in the adult. During the first two years of life, these connections diminish but apparently in a way that provides a tuning to the environment the child is being reared in. So there appears to be no pre-determined hard-wiring in the neocortex as in the spinal column and brain-stem.

One of the important features of the neocortex is that a single event can provide retrievable experience for making choices. Unlike the archecortex, the neocortex maintains single discrete events in memory, not the statistical sum of those events. Not only that, but the memory of the event is usually very rich in information, not just the essential information. The detailed mechanisms by which this occurs are still an active area of research. So in the functioning of the neocortex which seems to be where our consciousness is centered, we have a very complex, interconnected network that, in principle, can retrieve any single event or datum that is desired or needed. This is the part of the brain that engages in rational thought, where we create logical arguments for choices or determine choices by some defined algorithm , e.g. writing pros and cons down on paper.

The neocortex can override the archecortex in the expression of behavior, but it is actually subject to the emotions more than we realize. Strong emotion will alter our perception of events, filtering and discarding data that do not agree with our emotional state. Strong emotion can skew our thought processes as well, leading to rationalization of what was not a logical but an emotional decision. In these cases we make the decision at the archecortex level, and then create reasons why we do what we have decided to do.

Looking at how the neocortex works, with no inherent programs and the capability to learn, each choice and its outcome become conscious data for the next choice. We can make nuanced judgments on results, quantifying them vs. a simple good/bad type of classification. We also bring into play many factors, not just the few that have emotional significance, and can override the emotional factors. Because we can recall single events, we can make a choice based on the single event instead of the sum of all similar events. But in all this apparent flexibility, can there be determinism?

In the sense of neurological determinism, no. The neocortex is not hard-wired, everything is a function of our experience. But in addition, the structure of the underlying archecortex comes into play providing an emotional ground for our thinking. As we have shown earlier the emotional ground is empirically non-deterministic, and we can create a rationale for this. In the case of the neocortex with its ability to constantly learn, every moment of the day is creating changes in its structure and connections. The same response to a given situation is not guaranteed the next time, because the brain making the decision is not the same. But can we say that given a set of experiences the choice is determined for the next time? Only if we can say that the responses of the brain to that set of experiences is the same. This condition is essentially impossible. It would not be possible to control all the environmental variables to recreate the same responses. Ultimately the question would be, if we put a person through the same set of events multiple times, would they react the same every time? As I have tried to show above, putting them through the same set of events sequentially would not give the answer, as each time through, the brain and the knowledge would change. Plus, how could one completely recreate the same set of events. The amount of sensory information the brain processes is enormous. The only way to answer this question is to return in time to the same set of circumstances with the brain in the same state. This is meaningless because the decision has been made before and is fixed in history.

Then can we ask the question in a different form? Does a given set of events cause a particular structure change in the brain from which comes a determined choice? Starting with the set of events, how can we adequately define them? Only in a tightly controlled environment would there be a true definition of the events. In terms of their impact on the brain and its structure and knowledge content, the prediction can only be in very general terms, i.e. the knowledge appears to be stored in a given area, but because of the impact of various emotional states and the undetermined nature of the existing connections to date, it is not possible to say that a particular structure will occur. Since we cannot determine a structure, we cannot determine behavior from the structure. This is not a question that can be determined empirically, because our knowledge will never be sufficiently complete to answer the question.

Though one might argue that if we knew all the connections, we could then predict the subsequent changes, knowing all the connections or for that matter any specific connections when the organism is living is not possible. Any measuring technique that could detect a connection without destroying the organism would be overwhelmed by the sheer number of connections, which is on the order of ten to a very large power. Also once one had the connections, there is still the matter of the firing state of every neuron, because that impacts the next firing. We cannot answer the question from a prediction-by-humans standpoint, but can we answer it on principles alone?

Let us start with a brain in a given instant of time with a particular structure and a particular neuro-electrical state. A complex stimulus is generated and the brain reacts. The stimulus first passes through the senses to the spinal cord and brainstem. It is processed reflexively there, and continues at the same time upward to the archecortex and the neocortex. In the meantime, those two structures are continuing to process earlier data. There is a lag time between stimulus and conscious response on the order of two-tenths to half a second. During that time millions of neuronal firings have occurred and the state of the brain has changed extensively. If those firings can all be shown to be determined then the response to the stimulus might conceivably be determined.

The factors that go into determining a single neuronal response include, the excitatory and inhibitory inputs and their order, strength, timing, and number. The body environment in which the neuron is existing also has an impact, a fever changes the firing and metabolism of the neuron, and different neurons will respond differently. An electrolyte imbalance will also create neuronal problems. Adding to the mix is the fact that nerves have varying propagation times. Some nerves are myelinated (in effect, insulated) and others are not. The myelinated nerves propagate their impulse faster than non-myelinated nerves. In addition, the synapses or junctions between nerves are not direct physical connections, but rather microscopic gaps across which a chemical (neurotransmitter) diffuses. The gap is small enough that the diffusion time is in the millisecond range, but still that microscopic environment is subject to molecular influences, which on an empirical level are random in nature and predictable only statistically for the total volume. In a sense our question then becomes are all these items determined, or in principle determined? And if they are determined for a single neuron, does that imply they are determined for the brain en masse as the summation of all the neurons?

With all the possible influences on a single neuron multiplied by the number of neurons and then by the number of connections, it becomes very tempting to simply state non-determinism in the brain as a fundamental premise. However, convincing as the appearances are, it is necessary to try to determine if those influences are themselves determined. With respect to the neurons, if one neuron is subject to determinism, then all are, and the network connections are also then determined in principle. This leaves the macroscopic and microscopic environments to examine. Actually we can argue that the macroscopic physical environment as a grand summation of the microscopic and atomic environments via statistical mechanics is determined if the atomic environment is determined. By this reasoning we are back to the idea that if the universe is determined on an atomic level then it is determined absolutely.

As I tried to show in the first paper of this series, we cannot demonstrate absolute determinism. We inherently have imperfect measurements, and to actually demonstrate determinism we must have perfect measurements. In the second paper I established criteria for determinism or non-determinism. We can apply these criteria to the nervous system as an entity.

It is easy to show that the nervous system is both irreversible and discontinuous, and thereby non-deterministic. Every nerve impulse is generated by an irreversible procedure. The sum of the various impulses from other nerves finally causes the membrane of a given nerve cell to become permeable to sodium ions. At this point there is a rapid influx of sodium ions that generates a voltage which propagates along the nerve. Any further inputs from other nerves have no effect for a period of time, and also do not enhance the impulse in the discharging nerve. The sodium is then relatively slowly pumped out of the nerve cell by metabolic pumps using energy to force the ions out against a gradient. Reversing this process would be similar to trying to reverse the breaking of glass in its required effort.

The structure of the nervous system is inherently discontinuous, being composed of discrete nerve cells, which do not actually physically merge into one another, but are connected by synapses which are microscopic gaps across which so-called neurotransmitters diffuse in a discharge. Nerve impulses can travel many different paths and are generated in many different combinations of nerves coming together at another nerve. Any nerve cell has hundreds of connections via synapses from other nerves and the total discharge of only a fraction of those are necessary for it to fire. When it does fire, it is a single impulse of the same intensity, regardless of how many stimuli led to the discharge. So not only is the nervous system physically discontinuous, but also electrically in it impulse propagation.

But having gotten to non-determinism does not automatically take us to free-will and responsibility. It lays some necessary ground-work, however.

From Non-determinism to Free Will
Undetermined responses are not the same as a choice. There may be multiple options for behavior at any point, but for them to simply be randomly followed does not constitute free will. Actually, it might be considered a form of determinism in that the individual is not accountable for the path chosen, it was chosen at random. Given what has been said above concerning the overall structure and working of the nervous system, we can proceed to a conclusion that individuals make choices and therefore have free will.

First, we can say that there is intentionality, in the sense that once a “choice” has been made, then action is taken to implement the choice. That can be as simple as wanting something within reach and reaching for it. It is the preceding events that we will deal with in discussing choice, but without the ability to act, whether or not constrained, choices are meaningless.

At the other end of the process are the inputs, and these are complex. Sensory inputs are fundamental, and the processing of sensory input goes through all the levels of the nervous system. Any of the five senses start with nerves at the outside of the nervous system, whose impulses first reach the spinal column or its cerebral equivalent the cranial nuclei. There the reflexive behaviors occur, if not suppressed. These in turn will produce some external events that are sense, and so on. Sensory events are also relayed to the mid-brain (the archecortex areas where the emotions are generated) and to the neocortex, both the conscious mind and unconscious mind.

Before we go any further with a discussion of what happens to the sensory inputs, we need to address and issue that causes a lot of discussion—where is the “I” in me, or where does the sense of self reside. Daniel Dennett in “Consciousness Explained” would have it as distributed throughout the brain and actually being the summation of all the brain activity. As he puts it, there is no Cartesian Theater, a place in the brain from where everything is observed and controlled. I argue from two standpoints that there is indeed a location at which the “self” effectively resides—the frontal lobes.

The first standpoint is that of physical structure. The cortex of the brain has specialized regions for each sense, the temporal area handles hearing and language processing, the back of the brain vision, the top center of the brain touch, the bottom front, smell. Taste is handled by the sensation area in close connection with the smell centers. The frontal lobes receive extensive connections from all of these areas, but no direct sensory information. This physically argues that it is some sort of coordination or correlation center. Also when the connections to this area are cut (the so-called pre-frontal lobotomy), the person typically loses most or all volition and becomes quite passive.

The other argument is from psychiatry. There is a disorder called dissociation, commonly known as multiple personalities. In this disorder, a person can assume a personality totally different from their normal or “host” personality. When the quest personality is active, the host has no awareness of anything. When they come back to control, it is as if there is a gap in experience, and they have no idea of what occurred during the gap. This indicates that there are definite foci at which a personality operates. There needs to be considerable research in brain activity of people afflicted with this disorder. It could be quite revealing in understanding how people are self-aware.

We need to also understand the input data to the ego or self that is used in making decisions or choices. There is of course the sensory data that is relayed from the grey matter areas that originally receive it. There is also the emotional data that is projected to the cortex from the more primitive areas of the brain, what has been termed the archecortex. The emotions amount to a summary to date of all experiences (weighted as to intensity) and the net reaction to them. However, they also tend to be a global, instantaneous average—how I feel right now about my existence, not just how I feel about the thing to be considered, unless it is of great importance. Unless we pay specific attention to them, they create a strong bias in the thinking.

Additionally there are some mental constructs that appear to be unique to humans, specific memories of events and abstract concepts. Specific memories include the sensory, emotional, and intellectual content of the event—what I thought, what I felt emotionally, what I heard, saw, touched, tasted, and/or smelled. We even seem able to focus on parts of the event in more detail, albeit with some effort. The vividness of the memory will depend to a great degree on the emotional involvement with the event. It is similar to the way archecortex operates on its summation of experience, weighting the impact of an experience more heavily, the more intense the emotion. In the case of the neocortex it is the amount of detail that is remembered.

Abstract concepts seem to be summaries based on experiences and/or other abstract concepts but without the sensory and emotional content. They may contain descriptions of the emotions or sensations, but not the memory of them. They are about events rather than being events or memories of events. Abstract concepts can also be rules or guides to behavior, and explanations of how the world works. It is part of the uniqueness of humans that they appear to respond not just habitually or from repeated training, but also on the basis of the application of concepts. It is this latter that leads to the idea of making choices, but we need to look at the processes a bit more closely.

There is a computing technique that has developed over the last thirty years called neural network processing. It is an implementation of a simplified model of a nervous system that is used to make decisions using data that is not necessarily well-defined. I have lost track of the details of its development over the last several years, but it is now a regularly used application, and apparently a lot of what was “art” when I learned about it is now more defined. Essentially it consists of inputting various bits of data relating to a problem and reading out from the output a solution. In between there are various “layers” of emulated neurons. Like a nervous system these emulated neurons have multiple inputs and multiple outputs. They also have a response that is all or none, just as real neurons do. Neural networks have to be trained by feeding them inputs and comparing the result to the expected output. This creates feedback to the network which then adjusts itself to get a closer answer the next time. The adjustment usually consist of changing the weighting that a neuron gives to its inputs in arriving at a threshold for “firing”. When I was playing with these, there was almost a magical quality about watching the adjustments. The same starting network would not create the same final network with the same training, even though the results were the same.

What is important about the above digression, is the concept of weighting of inputs—how much attention does a neural center pay to any given input. Apparently any input associated with an emotion carries a greater weight than either reason or a simple sensation. One of the strongest emotions is fear, and a perceived situation which has fear associated with it, leads to avoidance behavior, either conscious or unconscious. On the opposite pole, ecstatic feelings will lead to behavior which attempts to maximize the feeling, witness narcotic addiction. Despite these commonly occurring patterns, I would contend that there was a choice involved at every instance, and that the behavior becomes habitual only from a phenomenon similar to the training of neural networks.

In the discussion to follow, it is not possible to reduce the actions to the actual nervous impulses, though in principle it should be possible if we completely understood how the brain works. With millions of neurons continually discharging on other neurons and causing, in turn, those to discharge, the situation becomes extremely complex very quickly, especially since the number of connections in the brain has been estimated to be a pretty large exponent of ten. Nerve cells may connect with a few or with hundreds of other nerve cells. However, I still think the overall picture given below is correct in its outlines, given the current state of knowledge of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology.

Rather than try to deal with the extreme examples, let us look at more ordinary examples. Let us suppose we are standing in the kitchen, and it is time to fix a meal. The question is what to fix, and is it a reasoned choice, a random choice, or a conditioned choice [4]. Actually it could be any of the three, but still it is a choice. The situation is one is standing in the kitchen, it is time to fix dinner. To be decided is what to fix. Here one can take several approaches, open the pantry and/or refrigerator and see what is available to fix, remember what is available to fix, recall a desire for a particular food, look at a menu plan already created at a past date and time, look at the state of the kitchen and decide that regardless of what is cooked, it has to be cleaned up, ordered, or other non-cooking activity first. Even in this very preliminary step(s) choices are being made.

So let’s try to dig a little deeper into this. If one is standing in the kitchen one has sensory input that is continually being processed. One of the characteristics of the human brain is it is able to focus, in that it can filter from consciousness stimuli that don’t directly relate to the current interest(s). If we are in the kitchen to prepare a meal, we may ignore a curtain out of place, a book on a chair or table (at least until it is time to set the table or move the chair), or other such things that are at least theoretically sensible but not consciously registered. In effect there is an unconscious decision to ignore certain sensations or perceptions, but this is not choice of the type we are trying to demonstrate. However, we may pay attention to the fact that it is hot or cold outside, as that plays into preferences for food. In addition to the sensory data, there is also internal data, memories of food, associations with certain foods, either good or bad, emotions concerning eating both specific food-item directed and more general, self-concepts such as whether or not we are overweight, underweight, weight doesn’t matter, etc. Self-concepts such as “I can’t cook”, “I’m a great cook,” and self-awareness such as “I am exhausted”, “I am happy”, I am feeling sorry for myself.” There are also goal-oriented thoughts such as “I need to lose x pounds”, and evaluation thoughts such as “I can’t stand to eat pre-prepared frozen meals”. Even this kind of sketchy list of inputs is rich enough to show the complexity of the process to arrive at a decision on what to fix.

Based on the model of the brain I subscribe to, all of this is coming together at the frontal lobes. Interestingly enough, it is easy to see the same givens arriving at different decisions, simply depending on how priorities are assigned. Let us suppose that “I have to lose x pounds” has a strong support from emotion, possibly via a negative feeling about how one currently looks, or less support from an abstract notion that one’s current weight is too high. In most situations this leads to choices of what to fix that involve low-calorie, high-nutrient foods. However, supposed one’s emotional state is sad, or self-pitying. This may more than neutralize the emotional support from the negative feelings about one’s appearance. It is important to note that it does not negate the thought that one has a goal to lose weight.

Now let’s look at the materials available for preparing the meal. Assuming that one has had the goal of losing weight for a while, most of the food stuffs will be low calorie, high nutrient ingredients. However, it is possible the makings for so-called comfort food also are present. If we are feeling down in some way, then the comfort food avenue will be the preferred emotional choice. If in the past, that particular food was always associated with someone (usually a mother or grandmother) trying to comfort and make one feel better the choice may be to eat the comfort food. In which case one can argue this is a conditioned choice, as that is the nature of conditioning in the psychological sense—associating a given action with a desirable outcome emotionally or sensorially. In such a decision, the rational process may be subverted into creating rationalizations for the decision. In the event that despite the feelings, and the availability of the comfort food, one chooses the diet food, it could be called a rational decision. I however, there is no food that could act as a comfort food, and the emotions have no input to the choice, then it could well be a random choice. What one has is the first thing that one happened to see or grab.

Depending on upbringing, a person can control the amount of input emotion has to decisions. Though many times emotions control decisions, this does not have to be the case. One can see it in the “count to ten” type of situations, or the teeth-gritting situations, where the non-emotional part is in control. These would qualify as true choices, where the options were strongly opposed, and the weight is strongly on the emotional side. One could have done otherwise—beat the crap out of someone, or chewed them out.

At this point, it is not possible with current knowledge to chart the entire process by which thoughts occur or decisions are made or memories created and recalled. However, all these go into the process which interacts in the frontal lobes with sensations and emotions to produce the ultimate behaviors we see in people. It is possible to argue that even those instances where it appears that principle or reason is stronger than emotion is due to conditioning that came from the emotions giving negative results. However, it also can occur that a single exception to a pattern can permanently change behavior in humans to a different set of behaviors. If it were conditioning, a single exception would have little or no result.

In the last section of this essay I have tried to present the idea that the human brain makes true, conscious choices and therefore does, indeed, have free will. It does not negate the existence of free will if certain choices have extremely negative outcomes such as violent death. After all, early Christians knowingly refused to worship the emperor, and suffered death in the arenas as a result. One cannot argue that their belief system was rooted in conditioning, it was too new, and was strictly abstract. Though we often see choices as far different from those we would make ourselves, it does not negate their being choices.

Regardless of the state of the Universe, deterministic or non-deterministic, we as humans do have free will, and it behooves us to use it the best we can.



[2] Vallicella has looked at this question and wrestled with the problems of dualism extensively in his blog, (and elsewhere?)
[3] This has interesting implications with respect to the functioning of the archecortex. It says that the archecortex does not deal with individual events, but that experience is distributed over the entire cortex. This is in contrast to the neo-cortex, which we have not discussed yet, that deals with individual events.
[4] This is a potentially contentious category given all the history of Skinnerian conditioning. What is meant is a choice that has been weighted by either past history or by emotions.

Labels: determinism, free will, philosophy

Part 2: Metaphysical Reality

Introductory Comments
In working with reality from a metaphysical point of view, we are not as concerned with what we measure as in what we conceive as a result of these measurements. We deal with concepts and their implications as such. We are trying to work with their relationships and what they mean. In this case, we are dealing with absolutes or universals which science can corroborate but cannot prove or disprove. Only internal contradictions may disprove them, and they are proven only to the degree that we accept the truth of the original premises upon which they are based. Because of this we have to first of all decide what we are discussing when we discuss determinism and free will.

As I have explored in my first attempt at this discussion, determinism can be approached from various levels, and to varying degrees of absoluteness. I explored physical, psychological, and situational determinism. However, when the issue comes up in such discussions as this one, the issue really relates to choice—“Could I have done otherwise?”—to quote from Daniel Dennett. Thus we see the entanglement of free will with determinism. If everything is determined then we cannot be held responsible for our choices, but if it is not determined we are. Metaphysics impacts morality. In the third part of this discussion I will show that the two may become disentangled. I will show that whether the Universe is deterministic or not, has no bearing on Free Will.

For this part of the discussion however, I want to deal with the issue of universal determinism. To do this I will work with two concepts first presented in Part 1, reversibility and continuity. By developing the concepts of reversibility and continuity, we will be able to put some constraints on the problem. However, I conclude that the issue is actually moot, that we cannot determine the Determinism of the Universe. [Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one.]

What is meant by Determinism
Absolute physical determinism
Absolute physical determinism is synonymous with absolute cause and effect—there is a complete, necessary, and sufficient cause for any effect being observed, or conversely, in principle, one can make observations of causes and exactly predict the resultant effect. This has nothing to do with measurement limitations. It is saying that in principle, without specifying the method, that all events can be exactly predicted.

One of the implications of such a statement is that, if one knows all the positions of the billiard balls in a specific formation, and the exact force used on the cue ball, as well as the configuration of the playing surface and the bumpers and their resilience, one could predict exactly where every billiard ball will go until they all come to rest. Taking it a level lower, if one could in principle specify the exact positions and momenta of all the particles of a collection of atoms or molecules, one can predict its ensuing history. This idea can be expanded to encompass the entire universe, taking into account that the universe is simply a large collection of atoms and molecules.

However, one consequence of such a formulation is, that if a single atom or even a sub-atomic particle moved differently, then the entire history of the universe would be different. (A version of this idea has been used in time-machine science fiction, where someone goes back in time and accidentally kills a butterfly and changes the present he returns to.) In the ensuing discussions, this is what is meant by determinism. This is the only determinism that can possibly be argued to have any implications on free will, as will be shown later on.

Approximate physical determinism
What appears to be more commonly referred to as determinism, is the determinism of science and experience, that under most, if not all observed, circumstances, certain events or actions are followed by other certain, corresponding events or actions—in other words, the epistemological definition of determinism which was invalidated in the first part of this series. This form of determinism will be discussed further later in this paper.

Continuity
A fundamental property relating to the determinism of the universe is continuity. This was discussed in the first paper in comparing the descriptions of the universe according to the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Relativity assumes an infinitely continuous universe, and quantum mechanics assumes a discontinuous universe, or one can say its assumptions lead to a description of a discontinuous universe.

One way to understand the difference between continuous and discontinuous is in simple mathematical equations. The equation ax + by = c can be solved for any, in the absolute since of any, values of x and y. There are no values of a,b,c,x,or y other than the undefined value of infinity (∞), for which the equation has no solution. However, the equation, 1/y=a, cannot be solved for the exact value of y=0. As y becomes smaller and smaller, a becomes larger, without limit. Exactly at y=0, a has no defined value other than the abstract one of infinity.

Another way to approach the idea, a way more like what we will discuss below, is to think of a set of boxes in a row, each one labeled with a unitary value, e.g., 0,1,2,3,…n into which objects will be sorted by weight. The objects can have any weight, but by rule one must either truncate the fraction to select a box, round the fraction, or take the next highest unit value. One has created a discontinuous environment for the sorting. Now let us add a second dimension, say, length. Now we need a row of boxes for the weight brackets for each length bracket. The sorting rules are the same, only now instead of a line of boxes we have a large area of boxes.

The concept can be generalized to as many dimensions as desired. The mathematics of physics uses six, three of space location, and three of energy as measured by momentum in three dimensions. From this we can say that the universe is discontinuous, if, at some very small scale, values must be separated by some amount. That amount can be an extremely small fraction of a unit, something represented only by a number with many negative exponents, but it is still a separation between the values of position and energy a particle may have. As a consequence any value falling between contiguous six-dimensional boxes is forbidden, particles must be in one region or the other, and cannot assume those values. However, it is also important to understand that once in a “box”, the object may have any value between the upper and lower limits of the box.

In contrast, if space is continuous, then no matter how small a value we choose to separate the dimensions of two items there can be still a smaller separation. There are no forbidden values. Any particle may assume any value, the only restriction being that no two particles may have exactly the same values. All objects in the universe change state in a smooth manner assuming all possible values between the starting and ending states.

Reversibility
Reversibility is the other property we will use in this discussion. The first part of this series had an extensive discussion of reversibility in relation to the discussion of entropy. Though the discussion was confined to observable physical systems both ideas of absolute and local (cyclic) reversibility can be generalized for the discussion here.

Local or cyclic reversibility applies to some subset of the objects in the universe. The earlier example of the billiard balls can be considered here. If the billiard balls are first racked and then broken by the cue ball, they scatter in various directions. One can immediately, or after the conclusion of a game, re-rack them, place the cue ball at the original position, and, in effect complete a locally reversible process, in the sense that the configuration of the billiard table was returned to a previous state. However, in order for the billiard balls to be returned to their previous state, outside agents (players) had to perform various actions that in themselves are not reversible. Even if the players returned to their exact positions, one can find a level at which there was a non-cyclical process involved, for instance, in the internal biochemistry of their bodies. This local type of reversibility is not applicable to our discussion of determinism, because at some point one always finds a point of irreversibility.

Absolute reversibility is defined as motion or action back through exactly the path that was previously followed. In the first paper this was discussed as a theoretical concept, and it is possible to envision local systems that are exactly reversible, though they require irreversible actions external to them. If we were to generalize the concept of absolute reversibility to universe as a whole, then we would find phenomena entirely contrary to our actual experience, water flowing up hill, glass coming together from broken shards, people coming alive and growing younger, etc. Though it is possible to persuasively argue that the universe in not reversible, for the moment I would like to keep the concept for the following discussion.

Analysis of Reversibility, Continuity, and Determinism
If we consider the following pairs of ideas, reversible-irreversible, continuous-discontinuous, deterministic-non-deterministic, we can set up eight symbolic representations of the possible relations and discuss them. The value of this is that it will lead to some interesting constraints on the idea of a deterministic universe.

Representing reversible-irreversible by R r , continuous-discontinuous by C c, and deterministic-non-deterministic by D d, we can set up the following possibilities:

R + C = D
r + C = D
R + C = d
r + C = d

R + c = D
r + c = D
R + c = d
r + c = d

We can discuss these in turn.
The first generalization I would like to make is that R and c are incompatible, that it is not possible to have and absolutely reversible system with a discontinuous universe. Note, however that the inverse is not true—it is possible to have r and C. The idea can be fairly easily illustrated. If we have a set of objects moving from one “box” to another, when one reverses the direction, how does one “choose” which box the object should return to. It is not enough to simply state “the one it came from” because while in the newer location, it might be able to have values that are forbidden in older location, so when moving backwards it will have to move into a “box” that may not have been the original, because in a discontinuous universe, objects may have any allowable value in the range that defines the current location, or the newer location has at least one value that is forbidden in the older location.

This simplifies our eight relations to six, as R + c = D and R + c = d are both false by the above discussion.

If we look at absolute reversibility and continuous as a combination, then the universe is deterministic. Whether moving backwards or forwards in time, any position is, in principle, determined by a prior position. There is nothing to disrupt the paths of the objects. This removes another relation as false, namely R + C = d, and says that one way the universe may be deterministic is if it is absolutely reversible and continuous. However, though logically true, I believe that we can dismiss this option in reality, because it can be argued that the universe is not absolutely reversible, as it leads to contradictions to reality, as stated earlier.

This leaves us with the four relations involving r or irreversibility, and these are definitely more interesting.
r + C = D
r + C = d
r + c = D
r + c = d

Let’s start with the idea that the universe is continuous (C), that is, every state change is gradual or potentially gradual and, in principle, every object can assume any value. Though we used this to show that combined with reversibility, the universe would be determined, without reversibility, that is not necessarily so. It is possible for an object to have an arbitrary interaction and divert from its projected course in a smooth manner. In a continuous universe, both time and space are absolutely smooth in the sense of continuous, and any change can happen to the ultimate degree of fineness in transitions. And we can argue that if the universe is continuous, then in principle all interactions can be defined and therefore predicted—thus determined. So if the universe is irreversible and continuous we can argue that it could be deterministic.

Can we argue that it could also be non-deterministic if it is continuous? This would be saying that as an object moves along its space-time trajectory, at any next infinitesimal point, that point could possibly be of more than one overall value. There is such a possibility when the trajectory encounters a natural split in the energy of the environment. We can conceive of it as similar to a ridge, one with a knife-edge. In one sense, this is a discontinuity and violates our assumptions, yet in another sense it is consistent in that there are differential equations that can describe such a circumstance. If the mathematical surface is a saddle, that is a smooth curve , then there is a continuous flow, and the object will follow one way or another, or possibly move along the top of the saddle for some time. However, if it is a knife-edge, an infinitely sharp edge, then it is a discontinuity, and the object cannot reside on it, it must fall one way or another.

This argues that if the universe is continuous then it is deterministic. It also argues that if the universe is discontinuous (c), it is non-deterministic, as the object has a value that suddenly is not allowed, and there is no way to predict which way it will go. What we have done with this discussion is to restate our problem to say that if the universe is continuous, then it is determined, and if it is discontinuous, then it is non-determined. The problem now becomes one of determining (!) if the universe is continuous or discontinuous. The first paper in this series showed that though quantum mechanics argued for a discontinuous universe observationally, relativity assumed a continuous universe, and both arrive at confirmable results. That paper also concluded that science cannot answer a metaphysical question in the first place.

Perceptible Reality
Because of the inherent nature of measurement, any state is discrete, plus or minus some error. This does not matter whether it is an instrumental or a direct sensory measurement. At the same time we perceive motion as continuous, not jumping from state to state. At any instant of time, if we measured the state of an object it would have an error, but overall, the process appears continuous. There are a couple of interesting consequences of this.

If the universe is continuous, then we can never measure it exactly, and we can never have perfect prediction of the next state of an object. As a result, we might conclude, incorrectly that it is discontinuous or non-deterministic. If the universe is discontinuous, then it is at a level that we cannot measure, or we would observe the discontinuity. Quantum Mechanics makes the claim of measuring this discontinuity, but that is only at level accessible to measurement by photon. By our first paragraph of this heading, and by arguments in the first paper in this series, it may only be measuring its own inherent error and not the discontinuity of the universe.

We as humans consider the universe to be generally predictable. If the universe is non-deterministic then how can this be? According to earlier discussion, determinism and predictability are tightly coupled. This can be explained if we do not observe the universe at the potential level of non-determinism. All of our observations, at least the common ones, are on very large-scale aggregates of objects—planets, trees, people, rocks, galaxies, etc., all of which consist of massive collections of atoms, which in turn are possible collections of objects described by Quantum Mechanics. Using the same kind of reasoning as Stephan Boltzmann, the state of our perceivable objects are the sum of all the states of lesser objects of which they are composed. In any collection of similar objects, extreme members balance themselves out in all dimensions, though not exactly pairing one-for-one. It is these slight differences that accounts for such things as a pure block of iron eventually rusting—some few iron atoms on the surface will be in a state to interact with the atmosphere, especially if there is a trace of moisture, and form iron oxide which then causes an imbalance in the object and catalyzes further oxidation.

We measure and observe the overall sum of the constituents in the behavior of objects, and it is this sum upon which we base our predictions. However, due to both the imprecision of our measurements and the potential state changes of the constituents, our predictions always have some error. As we make more and more observations and predictions, we take into account more and more components of the object and its environment, but nonetheless, we are never perfect in our predictions. Hence we often cite either a margin of error or a statistical percentage on the goodness of the measure. [Carl Popper has an excellent book on the implications of statistical measurement in science, The Logic of Science.]

Large scale aggregates tend to be overall very stable, so that our predictions are generally quite good. However, there are dynamic phenomena that are subject to changes that are of a finer grain than we can measure. This has been discussed under chaotic dynamics in the first paper of the series. In such cases, our predictions only hold for relatively short periods of time. Also, if our theories by which we create our predictions are incorrect, we will also see unpredictable behaviors.

Summary
There are several major points to be re-emphasized from this installment in the series. First, if the universe is continuous it is deterministic, and if it is discontinuous it is non-deterministic. Second, we cannot decide if it is continuous or discontinuous by measurement. Third, the scale of potential discontinuity is far below our level of perception, even with instrumental enhancement. This last point will be explored from a totally different standpoint in the next installment, which will look at the interaction, or the lack there of, between the universe and free will.

Though this paper concludes one cannot decide if the universe is deterministic or not, the problem has been constrained, to whether the universe is continuous or not. The analytical framework from this installment will be used in the next installment to discuss free-will and determinism the goal of this series.

Labels: determinism, free will, philsophy

PART 1: SCIENCE AND REALITY
Introduction
This will be a three-part set of essays discussing determinism, non-determinism, and free-will. Science, in particular theoretical physics, is often used to justify stating the universe is or is not deterministic and that free-will does or does not exist, based on whether the universe is deterministic or not. The first part of this discussion will show that such claims are beyond the boundaries of science. Science is epistemological, not metaphysical.

The second part will discuss determinism as a metaphysical concept. It will also put some constraints on the issue of whether the universe is or is not deterministic. In doing so, we will use two ideas that were developed in the first section, continuity and reversibility.

Finally we will turn to the question of free-will. As I shall try to show, free-will is actually not contingent on the determinism or non-determinism of the physical universe, and also that non-determinism is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for free-will. [This, in a sense, was the thrust of Daniel Dennett’s, Elbow Room] To do so, we will look at the nature of the brain and touch on the mind/body problem.

Scientific Reality
Science is one of the major sources of arguments for determinism or at least the desire that determinism is true. This is probably because the precision of the mathematical descriptions of natural processes and the discovery of natural laws can easily be extrapolated into a belief that if they are just good enough everything would be described and predicted—in other words, the universe is determined. The fundamental problem with science, however, is the failure to remember the following:

Measurements are noting some property or extension of reality not reality itself. They are limited by various theories of measurement and inherent limits in the techniques. Of necessity, they are a greater or lesser distortion of the actual value measured.

Somewhere along the way the indirectness is forgotten, the limitations become considered a part of the thing measured, and scientists start talking about their measurements as if they were the actual reality. Part of the examination in this section will discuss some of these misstatements.

There is also the tendency in the world of science to create an accurate mathematical model of some aspect of reality, and then, because of its success, start thinking that the model is an explanation rather than a description. I commented on this a year or so ago, with respect to an article on leaf growth in American Scientist, in which the author showed how leaf growth could be described by a certain mathematical relation, and the started discussing other patterns of leaf growth saying the relation controlled the growth. This kind of thinking is very prevalent and contributes to the problems being addressed in this essay series.

Predictability
The strength and success of the scientific method is that all theories make predictions that can be measured, and based on those measurements the theory is either falsified or supported. This is the general high-level statement that is made to explain the success of science. However, there is a lot hidden under the covers here and it needs to be looked at in detail.

Let’s start with a very important historic experiment, Galileo dropping two iron balls from the Tower of Pisa. There were two competing theories of gravity, one that said a heavier object would fall faster than a lighter one, and the other that said that all objects fall with the same speed. The smaller of the two balls was several times lighter than the heavier one, in order to find a strong difference in falling speed, if one existed. We know of course that the two balls hit the ground at the same time. But hidden in even this simple experiment is the idea of a measurement and its limits. Galileo was not using any sophisticated measuring tools, simply the eye of the ground-level observer. The human eye can perceive changes on the order of 10/second, so any difference of greater than 0.1 seconds should have been observable. Just to make certain, Galileo favored the theory to be disproven by creating a heavier weight that was multiples of the lighter one. The Tower of Pisa is about 80 ft high, so it would take about 2 1/4 seconds[1] for an object to fall the distance. If there were an effect due to mass difference, the heavier one would strike in about 2 seconds and the lighter one in about 10 seconds if the weight ratio were 5:1. Even if it were not directly linear but say some fractional factor, the factor would have to be smaller than 0.3 to not make a noticeable difference. Since the theory that proposed heavier objects falling faster also believed everything was in the nature of whole numbers or their ratios, such a fractional factor would not have been proposed.

The important point to be emphasized here is that the differences in the two theories were measurable and a decision could be made within the accuracy of the measuring system—the human eye. Thus either theory could be falsified within the experimental errors.

However, it is fairly easy to find problems in our simple experiment as soon as the measurements are refined. If we fast forward to the twentieth century, we can use photo-optic timing devices that would detect differences in a thousandth of a second or less. As soon as we do this, we will see a discrepancy in the timing of the landings of the two balls. Which one strikes first? If it is the heavier we may be tempted to say, “Ah Ha! There is a difference due to mass,” but if it were the lighter? Do we postulate a negative effect (anti-gravity) due to mass? Somebody suggests repeating the experiment. Maybe we get a different answer. We do this multiple times, and we start to think that there might be some problems in the experiment itself, as we are constantly seeing different arrival times. Over time we may make corrections to insure the two balls are released exactly (within our measurement error) at the same time, and perhaps eventually dropping them in a vacuum because of differential air resistance, or making them the same size but of different materials, etc. But then what happens when we get to the point that we are seeing effects due to variations in the measuring device? Usually what happens is that we say that two objects fall at the same rate, regardless of mass, towards the earth, and that variations we see are due to experimental error, especially if they vary about a value, sometimes greater sometimes less. After that we forget about the experimental error part, and simply state the theorem as an absolute. We generalize our measurements to a metaphysical statement that is greater in scope than the data supports.

Having looked at comparing two theories by their respective predictions and the actual results measured, let us now look at a situation where the theory may have over-defined our ability to measure the real world.

Chaotic attractors
Physicists usually describe objects, in particular moving objects, by differential equations. These are mathematical descriptions of the behavior of an object that describe its position and motion with respect to time. In principal, if one knows the starting values for an object, then by solving the equation for the time duration, one can predict where the object is at the next time and what its motion is at that time. An important example of this is the equations of motion for a naval artillery shell. These are usually solved for the distance to be fired so that the proper aiming can occur.

An important characteristic of differential equations is that they assume that space is infinitely divisible. In other words, no matter how small I take the distance between two points, there exists a still smaller distance. This is the essence of calculus, and a most powerful tool it is. In general, since most differential equations describe fairly simple motions, eg. one-way paths such as the ballistics example, or simple cycles, we solve them and if the observations agree within a measure of error, we consider the equation a correct description.

However, there is a class of differential equations that do not fit this model—the equations that describe chaotic attractors. There are quite a number of these equations, usually in three dimensions, that when solved give a different answer depending on the values substituted into the equation, and they are extremely sensitive to the values. Overall, it can be said that the solutions to the equations will fall within a three-dimensional volume called an attractor. For example a donut twisted into a figure eight and then given a ninety-degree twist encloses a volume of space that is an attractor of a particular differential equation—all possible solutions to the equation fall somewhere within the volume. However, predicting exactly where the solution will fall is essentially impossible. That is because the solution is not infinitely divisible. In other words, if I solve for a value of x=1.001, keeping the other variables constant, it is possibly a radically different path through the attractor than 1.0001 or even 1.000000000001. And there can be a great difference between 1.0000000001 and 1.00000000002. There are an infinite number of paths through the attractor, and we can only solve for a small subset of them that include the limit of our calculation precision. Any change in values smaller than the precision cannot be determined, so in effect we have the value that we calculate with an infinite string of zeros in the less significant decimal places that we cannot explicitly specify. If we try to compare our calculations with measured phenomena, we may find frequent agreement, but other than saying all observations fit within the attractor, we cannot predict any one path—there are an infinite number we cannot specify to predict them.

Here we have something that is completely determined, in principle, but in practice cannot be reliably predicted. But can we say that we have described a true property of any part of reality? The assumption of infinite divisibility is very crucial here. Just because the equation or model assumes it does not mean that it is truly the nature of reality. Einstein’s theory of relativity, both special and general formulations, assumes space is infinitely continuous or infinitely divisible. However, quantum mechanics leads to a space that has an ultimate granularity at an order of scale of Plank’s constant. In other words space, according to quantum mechanics, is not infinitely divisible. If this is so, then differential equations are not a correct model of reality. [Which may reflect an underlying incompatibility that prevents the development of a theory of quantum gravity, or any reconciliation of quantum mechanics and relativity.]

Modern physical measurements
Having mentioned both quantum mechanics and relativity, it is a good point at which to look at the limitations of their measurements. Both theories have at their base starting points that deal with the nature of light. In the case of relativity, the statement that light always has the same speed in a vacuum, regardless of the respective velocities of the emitting and receiving points, leads to a number of counter-intuitive ideas, including the inter-convertibility of mass and energy—the famous E=mc2 equation. There are quite a number of apparent paradoxical results, all of which have been experimentally verified, and some of which may not have been correctly analyzed [It is not the place here for the analysis, but I believe the so-called pole-barn paradox is not paradoxical because an implicit assumption in the conditions is in error.]. However, it is important to point out, that the theory predicts what we will measure if light moves at a constant speed in a vacuum. That we measure what the theory predicts means that is has done its job. However, that does not mean it has described reality, but only what we will see when we measure it. Part of the underlying effects are, that when working with relativity, we only consider events as perceived. A important part of the presentation of relativity is the difference in perceived space-time events between two observers moving at different velocities. This is used to argue that absolute simultaneity does not exist. With respect to measurements this is true, but with respect to metaphysics, it is not. One of the confusing things about relativity is that there is no absolute reference coordinates in space time, only one or another set as a point relative to which everything is measured.

Quantum mechanics has a different limitation, based on the energy of a photon of light. The relation is the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle which mathematically says, ΔpΔx=ћ/2π. This says the error in measuring the energy of a particle (its momentum, p) times the error of the measurement of the position is a constant. Or, the more accurately you measure position, the worse the accuracy of the energy and vice versa. In other words there is an inherent limit to measurements using photons. Since everything else is even more coarse-grained, this puts an ultimate limit on the precision of any measurement using photons. Once again, this has been very thoroughly verified experimentally. And again I want to point out that it is a measurement theory that is very good at predicting measurements. To put an earlier argument in the reverse direction, if quantum mechanics predicts granular space because of the inability to measure more precisely than a certain value, then how do we not know space isn’t infinitely continuous as assumed by the Theory of Relativity?

Limits of measures and what they tell us about predictability
One of the best illustrations of the limits of measures is the statement that ‘a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane.’ The problems with this statement are many, but let’s first focus on what the probable origin is. In weather prediction, there is a certain inherent error in both the measurements that form the basis of the predictions and in the calculations that use them. I have commented above on both kinds of problems. What is occurring is that if one starts with a particular point in time and a set of measurements for it, that using current theory and the best calculations, the propagation of errors, as one progresses through increasing time intervals, will eventually lead to a prediction of a hurricane, or [which is never stated because it doesn’t make as good a press] a total calm.

The reason is that the error in measurements is always in either direction. That is why one always sees a ± in front of an error number, if the error is unbiased, or a + some value and – some other value if the error has a bias. So if the errors propagate in the positive direction, the miniscule puff of air from the butterfly, or rather an error that is of that magnitude will amplify into a prediction of a hurricane through recursive calculation. But if one follows the negative error there will be eventually no effect at all, or one of suppression of weather. The truth is that at some point, usually between five and ten days, the prediction becomes meaningless because of the accumulated errors.

This type of situation occurs in all mathematical models. There are limits on the accuracy of the input data and in the precision of the calculations. It does not matter what scale is being used. In weather, we either use the small-scale data of local temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, etc., which then fails to predict beyond five to ten days, or we use the large scale patterns of El Niño and the like which will tell us what a season of the year will be like in general, but cannot predict day-to-day weather. But even data such as the large scale data has limitations. Such data do not provide valid predictions beyond a year or so. No model of the weather has accurately predicted the weather as little as five years in the future in any detail, much less twenty or more.

It is necessary to be very wary of predictions. They are only as good as the data going in and the methods used to process them. It is also necessary to be very careful when stating a prediction is validated. One accurate prediction is not enough. There is no way to distinguish the validity of the prediction from chance. Multiple correct predictions start creating validity. But then the whole issue of error comes up again. When we make a prediction we have to put boundaries around it, stating a margin of error. Poll results in the paper do this all the time, e.g., 45% ± 3%. So, if a result falls within the range 42-48% we can consider it a confirmation of the theory, right? Not quite. The measurement we use to validate has an error. Let us suppose a theory says that 40% ±2% of the population will have a mole. We take a sample of the population and find that 39% of the people in our sample have one or more moles. There is a missing piece here, the error in our sample—in this case lets say it is ± 3%. So anywhere from 38-42% are predicted to have moles but our sample predicts that if we measured the entire population 36-42% would be found to have one or more moles. So can we say our theory is good? It all depends. The discipline of statistics has rules for comparing numbers like this and stating whether they are really different or not depending on how sure we want to be. In this case our theory is probably (!) correct. This illustrates very nicely the problem of predictability. The result we compare a prediction to has its own limits, and may in itself be a prediction since it is a sample and not the entire set.

Apparent predictability
Are there situations where there appears to be predictability but actually there isn’t? Certainly, life is full of them or we wouldn’t be surprised. The causes are many, insufficient input data, incorrectly formed theories, improper calculation, improper measurement of results, and randomness. What will occur is a string of fulfilled expectations with sudden departures. It is the departures that provide new knowledge. Usually when a theory fails to predict, it is considered a failure of the theory, IF the failure is consistent. Remember that we discussed above that both the prediction and the measurement of the results have errors around them.

There are also situations that are so complex that we cannot form meaningful theories in detail about them, and resort to simplifications. Simulations are of that nature, where not every element in a simulated environment can be simulated due to the excessive complexity, but rather assumptions or estimates are made about the less significant features to allow the calculations to proceed. The most well-known (in the sense of notoriety) simulations are those associated with the global-warming controversy. Here the simplifications are so extensive and the constraints so severe to even allow calculating them at all, that it is a good question as to whether they even represent any part of reality. None of the models can predict or even properly use sea temperature or cloud data, nor can they predict the weather data used to create the models.

Does non-predictability equal non-determined?
At this point we can say by the definition of determined that something that is determined is predictable in principle. From the discussion above I have shown that, though something might be determined in principle, it may not necessarily be predicted accurately in practice. Somewhere an inherent limit is reached in the process of predicting, whether it is the precision of the input data, or a theoretical limit such as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. In saying this, we in essence answer the question, that non-predictability does not mean something is not determined. It merely means that it cannot be shown to be determined within our ability to measure and predict.

Another question that arises at this point then is what are we going to mean by determined? Do we mean that there is an absolute answer that we measure or predict imperfectly, or do we mean that, because we approximate a prediction that comes true most of the time, something is therefore determined. This latter definition is generally the working definition for practicing scientists, but when the results are discussed outside the context of their experimental acquisition, the former definition is inappropriately assumed. There is often unjustified generalization on the grounds that if the measurements become refined enough we will get the answer we are assuming. Given the discussion above on measurements and predictability, this is definitely incorrect reasoning.

Reversibility
Another view of scientific reality and determinism is found in the concept of reversibility and why it cannot be observed in an absolute sense in the real world. It also serves as an explanation of why time moves in only one direction.

One of the classic illustrations of reversibility is billiard balls caroming around on a table, then running the picture backwards to show that supposedly the process can be reversed in principle because the equations that govern the motions can have either plus or minus signs and still be valid. Taken to the ultimate conclusion, it means that the universe could run backwards (to us) instead of forwards. Yet the minute we consider this in any detail, it seems totally ridiculous. Here we have a case of oversimplification. As long as the concept of reversibility is applied to the mathematics, it is correct. Applying it to a real system it fails to take into account all the variables. Reversibility implies that one can completely return to a given state. In effect, genuine reversibility would imply absolute determinism, since a return to a state implies all changes from the state and back to it are exactly determined.

However, even if there were no uncontrolled changes in the billiard balls, the environment, which forms part of the system, does change. It has to do with the direction of energy flow. The queue stick imparts a sudden burst of energy into the group of billiard balls which is then dissipated by rolling on the table top and bouncing against the cushion. We have a very hard time imagining the accumulation of energy from the table top and the cushions back into the billiard balls, to the queue ball, which then hits the stick and shoves it back. In fact it will take more energy to put the billiard balls back together than was expended in dispersing them. The difference in energy is what is meant by the concept of entropy, often loosely referred to as the amount of disorder. When the origin of the movement is considered, the movement of the billiard balls is actually an irreversible process.

The concept of entropy is the explanation from thermodynamics for irreversibility. [When one first looks at thermodynamics, it appears to be making metaphysical claims. However, these are kept explict by always referring to a hypothetical “ideal gas” in generating theory and formulas. When dealing with actual measurements, they are carefully isolated to the system under discussion.] Entropy was first defined as the result of studying the efficiency of heat engines and heat pumps. For a system that was cyclical, the change in entropy for the complete cycle was zero. Entropy was found to change with the energy content of a system and therefore with temperature, the higher the temperature the greater the entropy. According to the ideal gas laws, this meant that entropy also increased if the volume increased at constant temperature and pressure, and the inverse for pressure.

Working with the thermodynamic laws (rules) and equations, two classes of changes were established, reversible and irreversible. In the case of reversible change the process was done so smoothly that it was, in theory at least, possible to get back as much heat as was put in, or the work done by the system or to the system equaled the change in heat content. This was the ideal. It was also found that the change in entropy for a reversible process was zero. When looking at system where the process was irreversible or “permitted”, the useful work obtained was less than the change in energy content, or more work was expended than the energy extracted. In both irreversible cases, the entropy increased.

In cyclical systems the change in entropy is zero, but it is actually at the expense of an increase in entropy of the surroundings, because cyclical systems are not reversible in the thermodynamic sense. Spontaneous reversal of systems is never seen, and therefore a negative change in entropy is accompanied only by local work input that increases the entropy of the surroundings. Since reversible systems are an ideal, not a reality, entropy became associated with the irreversibility of processes. Thus by generalization, it was concluded that the net entropy of the universe is increasing and by extrapolation over time, the universe would die an “entropy death” when spontaneous change was no longer possible.

Entropy was simply the result of balancing thermodynamic equations until Ludwig Boltzmann created statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics is a mathematical tool that relates the quantum description of atoms and molecules to their large-scale, thermodynamic properties.

It is useful to at the concepts of statistical mechanics. Quantum mechanics says that all energy changes in steps or quanta, and that an atom or molecule would have a state defined by the number of quanta of each type of energy (electronic, vibration, two kinds of rotation, and translation or motion in space). In a collection of molecules there will be a proportion of the molecules in one state, a proportion in another, etc. What we measured is the average of all the molecules in all the states. The theory is very successful. It predicts the values of entropy and other thermodynamic values from which all thermodynamic functions can be calculated, in very good agreement with values measured by other means. For our discussion the importance is that a theory created at the atomic scale can be related to large-scale measurements.

The implications for our discussion are that for a system to reverse, energy had to come from outside the system. Since the concept could expand to include the universe, which is a closed system, it implies that as a whole the universe is irreversible. However, we must be careful, because Boltzmann is assuming one of our issues under discussion, discontinuity. So at best, his work implies that if the universe is discontinuous, it is irreversible. Be aware though, that such a generalization is far outside the bounds of statistical mechanics, since statistical mechanics stope at a container of fluid or gas. Actually all that is valid to say is that a hot object will not spontaneously become cold and release its energy in a form to be utilized for work, or a broken object reform itself into a whole again. Such things would require energy to move from a lower to a higher state spontaneously, both intuitively and theoretically impossible.

Experimental Science, Theory, and Reality
As a summing up, let’s look at the interactions between experimental science, theoretical science, and what it does or does not tell us about reality. Theoretical and Experimental science were always deeply inter-twined until the late twentieth century when theory outran the ability of experimental science to verify.

Humans have been making measurements as far back as we can determine. Primitive cultures counted seasons, years, and possessions. They made measurements of distance and area. As mankind became more civilized these measurements became more critical and means were created to make them more accurate. While mankind measured his daily life, he also invented explanations for its existence. All human cultures have some myth of where-it-all-started. Myth does not mean something totally unreal or fictional, and certainly does not mean something meaningless. Myths have to have some allegorical or actual truth, or both, or they do not survive. The modern myths are the Big Bang and Evolution. [I am not negating these or putting them down, I am simply pointing out a function that is often ignored.] It is important to understand that the myths come from what humans already know about their environment and express a desire to explain it.

It also seems to be a human characteristic to test what one is told against what one knows. This is the core of the scientific method. Useful theories make quantitative predictions that are then verified or falsified by experiments and measurements. These are of course subject to the experimental errors discussed earlier. There are two approaches to this testing. One is to take the myth or theory and say, “If this is so, then I should see…..” The other is to look at results and realize they cannot be explained by current theories. From these comparisons arise new theories, which are then tested and retested, both against current knowledge and against new knowledge as it is acquired. They are also analyzed to create new predictions which are then verified or not.

Often theories become a part of a larger more comprehensive theory. The history of astronomy and physics provides an excellent illustration. The original myth said that the universe revolved around the Earth in concentric spheres for the stars and orbits for the planets As time went on measurements of planetary motion became more and more troubling. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus would sometimes move backwards in the sky. A simple orbit around the Earth would not explain the motion. So, epicycles were postulated to explain it. This only sufficed for a while, and finally Copernicus put forth the idea that it would be easier to calculate if one assumed the Sun was the center not the Earth. At the time this was an heretical idea, and Galileo was tried for heresy for claiming that it was the reality. Once the idea was accepted, it still used circular orbits. But measurements soon showed that was wrong, that actually the planets moved in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one of the foci, and that the planets motions followed a specific law that said their movement along the orbit swept out equal areas of the orbit for equal times. It was all of the careful measurements that helped establish the credibility of Newton’s laws of motion. His laws were able to correctly calculate the orbits of the planets as measured.

The interesting part of this is that myths and theories are metaphysical and the experiments are epistemological. Myths tend to be very broad in scope such as the various Creation myths of all cultures. These are often easily shown to be imaginative and unsupported by further discovery as the culture advances. However, theory is a different type of statement. Most theories arise in response to measurements that cannot be explained, either as to their character or their exact quantity.

Both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics fit in this group. Relativity arose from failures to find the predicted ether that was supposed to vibrate as light passed through it. It is based on the fundamental statement that light always travels at the same speed in a vacuum, regardless of the velocity of the source. It first took the mathematics from Lorentz to predict what we would measure, based on this fundamental idea, and then later used Reimann geometry to formulate the predictions in more general terms. Relativity does an excellent job of predicting what we will see based on measurements using light, [electrical fields, magnetic fields are all related to light] but it does not tell us anything about the nature of a reality that has such a limit. It also says nothing can travel at the speed of light [except light]. It is necessary to be careful here. It doesn’t say that it is impossible to travel faster than light, but we can’t measure it, if it occurs. It runs into a metaphysical problem with light only traveling at the speed of light, because it states that light has no mass otherwise it cannot travel at the speed of light, but yet light has energy and mass and energy are inter-convertible in relativity. Quantum mechanics calculates a mass-equivalent of light, but does not state that light has mass. As a description of what we measure, relativity is excellent, especially for very large distances.

A point at which the Theory of Relativity fails to describe events is inside a black hole. Black holes were predicted by the work of Chandrasakur that extended relativity to the environment of very massive stars. A star that is about 20 times the size of our sun can collapse upon itself as its fuel finally burns out. Its gravity becomes so strong as it collapses that it destroys all known forms of matter and creates what is called a singularity. The gravity around the singularity is strong enough that not even light can escape, hence the name. Although quantum mechanics has been applied to black holes and would indicate that they can evaporate after a sufficiently long period of time, there are no current theories to describe the singularity. Relativity fails here because it depends on the continuity of space-time and a singularity by definition is a discontinuity.

Quantum theory arose from observations relating to measurements of atoms at the turn of the twentieth century. It gets its name from the fact that measurements of radiation seem to fall into discrete levels. An example would be the spectrum of hydrogen when excited by a spark. When the light from excited hydrogen is passed through a prism, it is found to be a series of lines, not a rainbow, or part of a rainbow. What’s more the series of lines can be mathematically predicted if one states certain amounts of energy as a starting point. Then the lines form series where each line in a series is the same amount of energy or quantum away from the next line. Also the various series are separated from each other by specific amounts of energy. Einstein even discussed this quantum effect in his paper on the photoelectric effect, though his work was not related to quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics turned out to be an excellent description of what we measure at the scale of atoms and molecules and smaller. It is an extremely precise predictor of the values of molecular, atomic, and sub-atomic phenomena.

One of the major problems with quantum mechanics is that when it is attempted to relate it to the world as we know it, many contradictions and paradoxes occur. Part of it is due to the way it is formulated. In quantum mechanics, light can be handled either as a wave or a particle. In fact, both formulations are in the same equation, and one chooses which way one calculates depending on the problem. Here is a major illustration of the difference between science and metaphysics. Science simply says it can be either depending on the circumstances, and goes about its business of calculating the results of measurements and predictions. There is no attempt to explain why light can be both a particle and a wave. Similarly Relativity cannot explain either why light can only move at one speed in a vacuum, or why light can have energy without mass.

From the start, quantum theory was devised based on observation. Because light can behave as a particle under some circumstances and a wave under others, the formulas have elements of both in them. The wave parts are used when light behaves like a wave and the particle portions when it behaves like a particle. When applied to atomic and molecular chemistry—very successfully in fact—it becomes a system of statements of probability of location for electrons and energy levels fro various motions.

Extensions of quantum mechanics to sub-atomic phenomena have been successful in their predictions, but very non-intuitive and difficultly comprehensible when related to the world as we know it. It could be said that it describes the number of ways collections of energy in the form of “particles” can be broken up. Because there are a finite number of ways observed, the break-up patterns are extrapolated backwards to hypothesize entities that are never seen outside the nucleus. From this author’s perspective, the entire system is beginning to be analogous to astronomy just prior to Copernicus. The proliferation of cycles and epicycles to attempt to explain the motions of the planets in the sky using earth-centric notions, seems similar to the proliferation of particles to explain the observations of other particles.

Because of the success of quantum mechanics at predicting sub-atomic, high-energy events, it was applied to cosmological questions. Astronomical observations seem to indicate that every object is receding from every other object in the universe, i.e. the universe is expanding. Extrapolating backwards, current estimates say that universe began as a point or singularity approximately fourteen billion years ago. Quantum mechanics comes into play, because it can be used to describe possible changes in the very early universe as the energy levels cooled to where first forces separated then particles were formed and finally atoms, as the universe expanded. Though much can be explained and compared to observation the theories are incomplete. One major problem is the failure to explain the distribution of galaxies, or in some cases why they formed.

The discussion in this essay is not complete without looking at the theory of evolution. In its complete form it says that all living things have come about through gradual change over time starting from simple atoms and molecules of gases, e.g. hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon, and their combinations, water, carbon monoxide, cyanide, ammonia, and methane. Experiments have repeatedly shown that these gases in greatly varying proportions can easily give rise to the simple molecular building blocks of life, sugars, amino acids and nucleotides. All that is required is provide energy in the form of heat and/or electric sparks. These simple molecules have been detected in spectra of planets and stars as well. Here on earth the mechanisms of mutation and evolution from gene recombination have clearly been demonstrated. However, the gap between molecules and life has not been experimentally bridged, though it is continually narrowing.

The entire theory of evolution remains hypothetical, in that, the mechanisms are demonstrable, but their actual concatenation from start to finish is not. Evolution is plausible, and to trained scientists, more plausible than competing explanations. Evolutionary paths are determined by physical measurements and comparison of fossils and living organisms. Based on similarity of patterns in records over time, evolutionary trees of speciation have been built. The newest techniques use comparison of DNA between species. As this technique is refined, it is changing some of the accepted evolutionary paths, confirming others, and now is having its own problems. It turns out that DNA can be exchanged between species, which causes confusion in some evolutionary lines.

Science and Determinism
In the next part of this essay series, determinism will have to be more carefully defined and discussed in and of itself. For the moment, however, a reasonable working definition says the universe is deterministic, if at some point in time, it is completely defined, and then can in principle be predicted forever after. Against this definition scientists often place quantum mechanics as proof the universe is non-deterministic.

As I have tried to show, all sciences fail immediately on the issue of predictability. They can only predict to a limit and verify to a limit. Quantum mechanics is based on the inherent limit of measurement. To use it as a “proof” of non-determinism is to beg the question.

Relativity is explicitly a measurement theory. The most striking evidence of this is the issue of simultaneity. In relativity, events are simultaneous relative to when and where measured, whereas metaphysically they can be absolutely simultaneous. Though relativity assumes a continuous space, which we will show in the next essay is necessary for determinism, like all other sciences it is subject to the errors of its measurements and the limits of its predictions.

Finally, evolution is the least able to be used to argue for determinism. Demonstrating the existence of the mechanisms and processes does not prove inevitability of any result; much less a particular result.

Though science cannot be validly applied to the metaphysical question of whether the universe is deterministic or not, it does provide two key concepts that will be useful in the next essay, Reversibility and Continuity. The first was discussed primarily in the context of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The second underlies much of the discussion of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. When we use reversibility in the next section, it will be in an absolute sense, that one can exactly retrace events in a reverse flow from their occurrence. When we use the term continuous, we will mean absolutely, infinitely continuous as vs. there being discontinuous states with abrupt change between them. Or in terms of this section Relativistic vs. Quantum in nature. These concepts will provide constraints on the question of a deterministic universe.

[1] s=1/2(gt2) ; 80=1/2(32 t2) ; 80 = 16 t2 ; t2 = 80/16 = 5 ; t = √5 = 2.24

Labels: determinism, free will, philosophy

I have posted on this topic before, but think it is time to revisit it with a different emphasis. In some ways the topic of homosexual marriage is a perfect storm. There is the constant pressure to not only tolerate homosexuality but also to accept it and consider it equivalent in every way to a heterosexual relationship. There are the biblical literalists who state that homosexuality is a sin, and that there is only one definition of marriage, a man and a woman joining together, and finally there is the problem of the interaction of religion and government.

Before we get started let’s make things clear for the ad hominum crowd: I am heterosexual. I have and have had in the past homosexual friends. I have had homosexual strangers try to flirt or hit on me and didn’t freak out over it. Actually I found it funny for me, sad for them. I am married and I attend an Evangelical Lutheran Church. However, I have unorthodox religious views, and you have to see my religious archives to know them. I think homosexuality is both innate in some cases and acquired in others. I do not see homosexuals as victims. Honi soi qui mal y pense.

Note that my comments are moderated. If you post a comment that is an attempt to make a point however clumsily, and it is obviously your own thought, not something parroted, I will let it be posted regardless if it agrees or disagrees with me. I may or may not post my own rebuttal or extension. You must deal with my arguments and observations, not attack me. ANY name-calling or denigration of me or another commentor in response to this post will go into the bit bucket. I will also reject any comment, regardless of value, that has R-rated language. I encourage discussion and expansion of knowledge, not emotional bashing—that is reserved for theatres of war.

Cultural Aspects of the Issue

One of the most powerful forces in this whole issue is the combined cultural attitudes towards homosexuality. Let’s start with a simple fact, homosexuals are a minority. This alone creates a set of attitudes; those who are out to protect the underdog immediately want to find some way to protect them or become their champions. Those who hate difference, abhor them simply for their being different. This leads to calling them deviant or perverted. And in the middle are the great mass of people that are anywhere from uncomfortable to fearful with known homosexuals and the idea of homosexuality.

Simply being different is not sufficient explanation for attitudes, however. The attitudes towards homosexuals are every bit or more vicious than those towards different races or religions. Inter-racial and inter-religious relationships have always existed though often hidden and are now quite common. But one rarely, if at all finds relationships between homo- and heterosexual people. This is because we are dealing with THE fundamental drive in all humanity – the drive to reproduce. If there is any purpose to life outside the meanings that God or our own egos give it, it is to “be fruitful and multiply.” It is arguably the fundamental life force. Animals including humans are known to endanger their lives in order to attempt to reproduce.

Given that sex and reproduction are so fundamental to life, it is little wonder that homosexuality, which is sterile biologically, can evoke such strong emotional responses and antipathy. Before I am accused of justifying “homophobia”, let me state that reasons and explanations are not excuses for behavior. Because as humans we have the power to observe and judge ourselves, we can control our behavior and in some cases re-educate our emotional responses. Let me also state that outside of questions of sex and reproduction, whether a person is or is not homosexual should be meaningless.

Where problems arise culturally, it is due to the fear and ignorance of homosexuality, because it is different and unknown to heterosexuals. That fear often leads to the idea that homosexuals are constantly looking to prey upon heterosexuals or children to bring them into their way of life. With extremely rare exceptions, nothing could be more wrong. In cases where this occurs, it is probably more due to the same kinds of forces that lead to heterosexual molestation rather than something specific to homosexuality. It has more impact on perception due to the emotional attitude around homosexuality in the first place.

There needs to be a side note on homosexuals in the military. The military is a sub-culture that has its own mores and perceptions. It also has to have much more stringent behavioral requirements due to the life and death nature of its work. There can be no emotional impediments to its functioning. Further contributing to this particular question is the fact that military duty in its primary function is the ultimate in male behavior – the destruction of threats. Coincident with that is the very strong categorization of what is acceptable and not acceptable, with no questioning. These things are essential to the military as no time can be spent on reasoning when instant reaction is necessary to protect life. To the military mind, the risk that a homosexual will not respond in the accepted way in a combat situation is too great to be risked. The survival of a unit depends on every one of its members.

To a civilian, this way of thinking is not comprehensible, and leads to the constant criticism of military policy on homosexuals. To a civilian, it doesn’t make any difference in most cases what a person’s sexual orientation is. To the military, it does. Just as the military does not allow heterosexual couples to belong to the same unit, so they cannot allow two homosexuals to belong to the same unit. The primary loyalty is to the partner, not the unit. There is a further difficulty in that the hyper-heterosexuality of the other members of the unit will exclude any known homosexuals. This is where the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy fails. A covert homosexual member of a group cannot be protected from reprisal until it is too late. As long a homosexual member of a unit is unknown and can act completely as a member of a unit, he/she can survive. Once they are found out, it will completely disrupt a unit. The military takes the stance that such disruption cannot be tolerated, especially if it occurs during hostilities, and would prefer to prevent homosexuals from being part of the military. This is a utilitarian issue. Regardless of what would feel good to civilians or seem right, the military is a separate culture with a far different function from the rest of society. This is not an issue subject to reason. It operates at a more primitive level. That is hard for non-military people to understand, especially intellectuals, who think reason can control everything.

Another side note: the most asinine use of the English language I can think of is to call a male homosexual gay. It is demeaning because it emphasizes the stereotypical feminine behavior that many heterosexuals ascribe to homosexual males. (It also is meaningless in the normal sense of the word, gay.) For that matter it is equally wrong to refer to heterosexuals as straight. This carries an implied value judgment of heterosexual right, homosexual wrong (bent).

All asides aside, let’s get back to the original discussion. (OK, I simply couldn’t resist that bit.) One of the unfortunate consequences of our federal system, that was built mainly by Protestant Christians, is an outlawing of any sexual behavior in many states not considered oriented towards having children. This has nothing to do with homosexuality, it just gets swept up with the rest. States have outlawed oral and anal sex, and, consistent with this, have also outlawed homosexuality. I think it is important to realize that the outlawing of homosexuality is part of a general attitude and NOT just specifically for homosexuals. That this has led to a persecution of homosexuals is a very unfortunate consequence.

Since we are at the persecution of homosexuals, lets visit the persecution of Senator Craig. This is almost a mini-perfect storm in itself. We have the press howling about a Republican who has been accused of homosexual behavior. There is no examination of the issue as to how the accusation occurred, nor is there any attempt to have sympathy if he is a homosexual. This is in direct opposition to the general stated view of most media that homosexuality is to not only be tolerated but to be all but extolled, being considered the equivalent of heterosexual behavior in any normative judgments. The law in Minnesota outlaws homosexual behavior, and so we have cops that patrol for it. There is something very sickening about a cop that spends his time trolling for homosexuals in the public restrooms. First of all, the behavior he is looking for is so arcane that only another homosexual or he would recognize it. In such a circumstance, where is the crime, other than on the law books? If another homosexual is the only person to read and respond to such signals, then it is definitely a case of mutual consent. So where is the defense of personal and private behavior? It disappeared in the name of politics. A man who may, or may not, have been an excellent Senator has been destroyed over something that has nothing to do with his political accomplishments or lack thereof.

As a result of this persecution of homosexuals and others who are on the margins of sexual behavior, we see the rise of the RESCUER. This is a person or group of people who for various reasons make loud and public displays of defending homosexual behavior, even to the point of demanding special privilege for it, similar to affirmative action. I think the rescuers fall into two major groups, those who are using the homosexuals as a way to advance their own search for power and those who buy into the drama triangle, the most compelling psychological trap I know of, and a minor group, the constant sympathizer who oozes feel-sorry emotion over everything, rather impotently. The first group is the most easily discussed, they are the ones that always are wanting to pass a law. Notice that the law always takes away freedom somewhere by either restricting behavior or by restricting the expression of thought. The most notable example is hate crimes. These are simply various crimes that have been singled out for extra punishment if one can project onto them a state of mind of hatred for an oppressed group and a desire to hurt members of the group just because they belong to the group. The behavior is already illegal as behavior. The imposition of additional punishment is brought about by what amounts to mind-reading in some cases. Of course there are obvious cases where slogans are sprayed onto walls, stones, etc., but there are also other cases where the argument is made that the crime occurred simply because the victim was a member of a protected class. This becomes a perverted form of entitlement—victims are avenged more forcefully if they belong to a particular group, not because of the heinousness of the crime. The net result is a restriction in both behavior and thought, as evidenced in Canada where biblical verse has been deemed hate speech when it is the biblical condemnation of homosexuality. The net result of the imposition of hate crime is a loss of freedom of both speech and behavior, because the intent is what is perceived in the mind of the enforcer not the mind of the actor, and intent is the means to establish hate crime. This is the most dangerous of the three groups because they can easily co-opt the other two to accomplish their ends.

To discuss the second group, we must first briefly describe a drama triangle. The drama triangle consists of a victim, a persecutor, and a rescuer. From the names the roles and their overall behavior are obvious. What is not so obvious is that the roles are fluid and a rescuer can become a persecutor, persecutors become victims, and victims become rescuers or persecutors. Those are the most common switches, but any role can become one of the other two—not always in the same triangle. A rescuer needs a victim, and if there is one ready-made will fasten on it, and if there is not one at hand, create one. I think homosexuals fall into a mixture of the two, in earlier times they were actually victims, but now are really placed in the victim role by those wanting to be rescuers. The problem with rescuers is they don’t want to right wrong, they want to avenge it, self-righteously of course. They make demands in the name of the victims that more than correct the persecution. In effect they want to set the victim higher than the persecutor. Often the victim joins in the retribution, and the persecutor becomes a victim of the combined persecution of the victim and rescuer. The deadliness of the triangle is that every one gets a clandestine emotional payoff. The victim wears the victimhood and milks it until such time as he/she can become vengeful. Then there is the payoff of having made the persecutor PAY. The rescuer has the heady satisfaction of RIGHTING A WRONG, and the illicit pleasure of justifiably (in their own mind) really taking it out on the persecutor. The persecutor has of course the feeling of power from being the persecutor, but when he/she becomes a victim can save up the resentment of being persecuted for when she/he is once again a rescued victim and persecutor.

In the context of this discussion, the rescuers want to create homosexual marriage. It serves a dual purpose, it slaps the face of the perceived heterosexual “persecutors” who don’t want the idea of marriage to change, and it elevates homosexual partnerships to legal parity with a heterosexual family. The rescuers also readily go along with the idea of so-called hate speech being punished. In effect we are left with a double standard in which heterosexuals can be criticized about their sexual and cultural practices, but homosexuals cannot. The problem is that in their zeal to tear down what to them is a symbol of oppression, they are ignoring the internal conflicts in the symbol and the unintended consequences that will ensue.

The third group of people are best exemplified by the quote from the Mayor of San Diego, Jerry Sanders, that was posted by one of my good blogging friends:

“As I reflected on the choices that I had before me last night, I just could not bring myself to tell an entire group of people in our community that they were less important, less worthy and less deserving of the rights and responsibilities of marriage”…” In the end, I could not look any of them in the face and tell them that their relationships -- their very lives -- were any less meaningful than the marriage that I share with my wife Rana.” [emphasis in source of quote, bk]

To some degree we see a bit of the rescuer in perceiving homosexuals as victims—less important, less worthy, less deserving—but the emphasis is more on the feel-good, the empathy. There is also the muzzy-headed thinking that somehow relationships get their meaning from what they are called—form is more important than substance. I think what is more important to understand, is that he is totally unaware of the conflicted nature of the word marriage as it is used in our society.

One other cultural issue occurs. Until recent times it was acceptable for 14-years old men and women to marry. When life was simpler and the knowledge needed to survive was learned by age 14, this was a reasonable situation, especially if two 14-years olds were involved. But it also led to situations not tolerated today. Older men would out-live several wives and continually remarry young women, often encouraged and accepted because of the burden of raising children beyond 14 years. In cases where a bride-price or dowry was involved, a young girl could represent a major economic asset to a father, if she were essentially sold to an older successful man, who could pay well to have a young wife. This has definitely changed with modern society, due to the desire to keep children out of the labor force, the longer education requirements, and in the last century birth control. States will now allow marriage before 18, age 16, with parental consent, but in some cases a court approval is still required. Only two states allow marriage before the age of 16, both with court approval.

The Nature of Marriage

In thinking about the nature of marriage, it is useful to consider some of the things it is not. It is not simply living together. Many couples live together, but they do not qualify as married. It is not having children. Unmarried parents have children. Especially in this day of easy and effective contraception, marriage is not a necessity for sex. Yet all of these things are part of marriage. Biblical approaches to marriage will be discussed below, so for now we will confine the discussion to the human and secular aspects of it.

First of all, at its ideal, marriage is a lifetime union. Even in societies with multiple wives, the unions are for life. To my knowledge, separation and divorce are not part of primitive societies. It seems to be something that comes with civilization. One of the primary benefits of this union is survival. It allows the division and specialization of labor so that less energy is expended for two together than for two individuals. Or alternatively, it allows for a better life for two when they expend the same energy as they would singly.

A benefit to the male is the saving of the energy that goes into courtship. In almost all mammals and birds, there are courtship rituals. These can require the expenditure of considerable energy, and in fact become a survival selection factor—those with the most energy win the mates and pass on their genes. It also provides security for the passing on of genes—life unions mean that offspring are given the chance to grow to maturity. In contrast, look at lions. When a new male takes over a pride, the first thing he does is kill all offspring that are not his. Besides humans, there are other species that mate for life. I have heard geese and wolves, and there are others. Interestingly, not primates; they seem to form extended clans ruled by a few males.

For females there are the advantages of protection and no longer the need to select a new mate every season. In humans it also allows for being able to work at home and still have the nutrition that hunting brings in. It also assures assistance or at least protection and food while children are young and unable to assist with the tasks of survival. [Modern society has changed much of this, and we will discuss that a bit later.]

So, one of the attributes of marriage is commitment to the union. The motivations for that commitment were simple at one time but become more complex with civilization. Reproduction is the primary purpose of species (Regardless of our wonderful intellectual powers as humans, we have to reproduce.), and a permanent union is the way to maximize that in humans. Part of this is the length of time it takes to raise a human to independence, about 12-14 years. If the average lifespan before civilization was about 50-55, then a menopause at 40 or so made sense. The last baby would have parenting to independence.

In addition to commitment then, we can add reproduction. In fact in the days of high infant and childhood mortality, women had to basically be baby factories in order for families to flourish. The changes that civilization has made on this grim scenario are far-reaching in their consequences.

As a first approach then, marriage is a formalizing of this committed union. Because marriage evolved in the days when survival of families via their offspring was paramount, the formalization created security for the children. First through religion then through law, marriage became a binding commitment of the two adults to each other and a commitment to the offspring of the union. Rules and laws were generated that said the property was owned in common, or not, who acquired what property in the event of death of a partner, and what children inherited what property (e.g. primogeniture in Great Britain).

This is a good place at which to bring up the romantic side of marriage. First and foremost is sexual attraction. It is the driver in male-female attractions that do not develop from long-standing friendships. It can be an overwhelming lust, an overwhelming non-specific attraction, a mild attraction that grows with interaction, a sudden idea that another person may be “fun” to know. How the attraction is expressed is a function of the person expressing it and the receiver. The variations are as great as there are couples. At some point the attraction becomes strong enough that the couple wants to have sex together. There are several ways this occurs [socially, OK?]. They may simply find a secluded location and mate. This is common in teenagers. They may go to one or another apartment or a hotel room. This is more common in the employed twenties. They may decide to live together, unmarried. Also common among the twenty-years olds, and older couples. They may decide to wait until they are married, which is less common now than earlier. At this point, with the sexual pressure off, they may become closer, stuck in a rut, or break up.

Of these options, all may lead to marriage. However, the success of the marriage may depend on the nature of the interactions before the marriage. Avoiding the inclusion of the casual, one-night stand or casual once-in-a-while relations, the longer the couple is together with or without having sexual relations, the more likely they are to become married, unless they break up in the meantime. At some point they decide to become married and the relationship should change. They need to become serious about how they will solve problems together, how they approach money, kids, etc. This is in addition to maintaining the “fun” of courtship. Regardless of the form it takes this is a courtship phase. Because the commitment is lifelong, the courtship is longer and more grueling on both participants. However, they do eventually get married.

Marriage generally invokes a ceremony. It may be simple or it may be elaborate. Generally it is designed to announce to the world the commitment of the couple to each other and to advertise their social standing. As a side note, from my experience, the size of the ceremony bears no relation to the durability of the marriage. The ceremony is a social event designed to show off and to celebrate. If the commitment and the adjustments during the engagement are good, the marriage will survive regardless of the ceremony or lack thereof. But it is important to note that despite the implied cynicism about the purpose of the ceremony, there really is an element of the bride being her most beautiful, the groom his handsomest, and the wedding the high point in their lives. As much or more as any ceremony marking the change from childhood to adulthood, the marriage is a life-event. It is supposed to happen only once in one’s life, and it is to be as wonderful as possible.


Legal Aspects of the Issue

Marriage law was applied to both the formal religious ceremony, and also in many states of the US to couples that had been together for long periods of time—common-law marriage. I would suspect that common-law marriage grew out of a desire to protect the wife in the event of the death or disappearance of her spouse. By having shared their lives together, she was considered to have earned a part of the assets. Marriage law has many aspects of contract law in spelling out the rules of ownership of property and custody of children. Because marriage became a legal entity, when it fell apart then there had to be laws to deal with that as well so came about divorce law, describing when and on what grounds divorces could occur and how the material goods of the marriage were to be divided.

So another attribute of marriage is a sanction, in this case from the governmental side of the society, and, as we all know and will discuss below, from the religious side as well. These sanctions and rules run counter to the loud politically correct statements of militant feminism, and it is useful to look at them a bit. One of the things that seems to occur in the process of civilizing humans is that at some point males become overly-dominant. A modern extreme is Islam in the Middle East, where the woman is no better than a slave. I think this occurs because as survival becomes less difficult, the role of the woman in the partnership becomes less critical. The man still goes out from the home, but the woman becomes more and more dependent on him for sustenance as her role in providing shrinks from agricultural husbandry, cooking, food preservation, and manufacture of clothing, to simply caring for children and housekeeping. She no longer has a bargaining chip of survival skills. The male can purchase everything he needs.

Conversely, in our modern society, a women is no longer dependent on a man to raise her children, in the survival sense. She can earn an adequate living while hiring others to watch over her child(ren). She can hire housekeepers to maintain her home environment. What is lost is the emotional support of a male which is actually needed for the proper upbringing of a child.

But society has not caught up with feminism, if, indeed, it has too. Let us look at current marriage and divorce law, from a very high level. The approach is one that the male is the earner of the money, and the woman the home-based care-giver, and that marriages should be discouraged from breaking up. From this comes the concepts that the mother is the better custodian for the child, that the father should pay child support and/or alimony, and the concept of fault or reason for a divorce, establishing blame. Though it may have meant that in many cases the husband could buy his way out of a marriage and the wife might have to find a cause to divorce her husband and obtain support, the general intent was to support marriage, even when unpleasant (yes, more so for the woman than the man), and prevent the total loss of home for the woman and the children if the marriage broke up.

But note that most of the function of marriage law is analogous to, and can be provided by, contract law. This is something I want to return to later.

In regard to protecting those unable to protect themselves, the law also forbid unions between humans and animals, and adults and children. In both cases it can be seen as not between two entities capable of informed or knowledgeable consent. But the problem is that these laws come from a generally common concept of what is and is not a marriage and not from an express desire to protect the defenseless. As a consequence unions between persons of the same sex are forbidden.

The Religious Approach to Marriage

Most of what we think about when we consider marriage comes from religion. The ceremonies, the statement of sanction, the formalizing of the union with admonishments to be faithful all come from religion. Missing from the religious approach is any explicit statements concerning property or children. This is because religious marriages are assumed to be lifelong, and such issues should not arise.

Religion wants to secure its believers to itself and binds them with rules and regulations on how to conduct their lives. Hopefully these rules and regulations are actually good guides to living, though sometimes their interpretation in years after they are made can make them detrimental. The members of a religion come to believe they have the only right answer, and often wish to enforce their rules, not just on themselves, but also on the rest of their society. Sometimes the motivation is not one of self-righteousness but one of defensiveness—remove temptation by outlawing it civilly. One is less tempted when no one can do something and is more motivated to abstain if it is also illegal.

Religious rules are designed to promote the stability of the family. They are also designed to maximize the creation of more children—“be fruitful and multiply” as a divine command. To this end, any form of sex other than that which can create children is considered sinful. This includes masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, and homosexual sex. It also encourages or demands virginity at the time of marriage. After all, if the first time one has sex is in a marriage, then it will be a powerful force for validating the marriage, because it then is through marriage that one of the most powerful sensations humans have is experienced. In addition, divorce is forbidden or at the least discouraged for obvious reasons. There is also a public health factor in marital virginity, virgins will not have contracted an STD. Other issue arises around virginity. When daughters were considered property, and a man seduced a virgin daughter, the economic value of the daughter was greatly diminished. The father was then entitled to money equal to the economic loss.

It is from religion that the whole concept of marriage derives. From religion we get the sanctioning of the union and the public proclamation that puts the weight of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple behind it. Like everything else in religion, laws and rituals developed to solemnize the promises made, and the promises were worded to be as binding as possible.

One can argue with the apparent unreality of religious proscriptions on marriage. However, as long as we had a predominantly agrarian society, they generally worked. First of all, survival was sufficiently challenging, that there was little energy for other than the basics. Husbands and wives were grateful to survive another day and if one had annoying manners, strange behaviors, a bad temper, or any other bad trait, it was small compared to the survival of the family unit.

In many cases, love never entered into it after the courtship. I am always reminded at this point of the song from “Fiddler on the Roof”, “Do You Love Me?”. The dialogue in the song is done humorously, but there is a definite underlying reality—“Do you love me?” “Do I WHAT?” “Do you love me?” Do I love him? For 25 years I cooked for him, …..for 25 years I milked the cow, after 25 years, why talk about love now?” etc. They never met each other until their wedding day, and then were joined for life. The marriage was arranged by a match-maker. “Fiddler” has a lot of poignancy simply because it was culturally true, and there are close parallels in all early cultures, not just Russian Judaism.

Religious marriage became the model for secular marriage, and as long as we were predominantly a Judeo-Christian society there was little conflict. The forms of Protestant Christian marriage became the forms of secular marriage. The pastor, priest, or rabbi was replaced with a judge or magistrate.

Conflicts and Possible Resolution

The current conflict lies in the overlap of the religious and legal aspects of marriage. The legal portion is the registration of the marriage to validate the rights of the participants and their offspring. After all, in a dispute it is important to show that there are grounds for the dispute – namely a valid marriage, whether ceremonial or common-law. In the case there is not a valid marriage, e.g. palimony suits, then different law must be applied. The law that is applied has as its purpose the best outcome for all parties, though often this is not achieved, simply due to the inability or refusal of lawmakers to craft good law.

From a legal perspective marriage is actually a contract. The problem stems from the fact that the conditions of the contract are being created piecemeal as necessity appears to dictate. With the original model for marriage being religious, with its attendant lack of legal detail, it left to lawmakers to spell out such detail. Generally such efforts, rather than starting from scratch, simply apply more law to existing law, and leave it to the courts to sort it out.

The religious aspects are the ceremony and the sanctions. There is also the specific requirement that a marriage be between a man and a woman. It is not contractual, it is the fulfillment of a divine command, and the command is very specific in its requirements. As noted above, the purpose is less to provide a wonderful life for the bride and groom as to provide a stable environment for the offspring. Superimposed on this was also the early cultural requirement for many offspring. AS mentioned abov this created specific rules as to what was a suitable partner and what was acceptable sexual behavior.

[I just realized there is a whole class of marriages I have not touched – political marriage, e.g. Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. These fall under the legal contract rubric, and the sanctioning of the church to these unions was not one of its finest hours. ]

What has occurred as a result is that priests, pastors, and rabbis have become ex-officio officers of the state, filling out and validating the legal documents of marriage. Conversely, the state enforces law that mostly stems from religious doctrine. What must occur is the separation of the legal and religious aspects. The state must get out of the marriage business, and the church must quit legally validating unions.

The emotional impact of the word, marriage, carries all the religious sanctions and constraints in the mids of most people. As witness to this, is the number of state constitutional amendments that specifically state marriage is to be between a man and a woman. That is not a problem – the problem is when civil unions are forbidden. Then we have a case of religious doctrine dictating to the state – something I discussed at length before. If the state did not recognize marriage as a legal term, the problem would be moot.

The state laws need to have a definition of civil union that applies to ALL couples, male-female, male-male, female-female. It is important that it disallow child-adult, animal-adult, or any oter contracdt that involves on party not being legally competent. I also think that states should dis-allow both polygamy and polyandry, simply because the enforcement of such contracts would be a nightmare. [Note: business should be free to recognize such unions as the owners or stockholders see fit. Business is private property and not subject to the same restrictions as government. For those who think EEO is good, remember that forcing employment will lead to resentment from the employees and inefficiency. Those companies that are able to see past the stereotypes will harvest a wealth of talent. My own impression is that some very creative people can belong to single-sex unions, and the companies that also see it will compete by offering partner benefits vs. married couple benefits. ]

Churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques would then perform a ceremony called marriage, or in the case of atheists, they would create their own ceremonies as they see fit. If a church chose to solemnize a homosexual union, it is their choice and not a legal requirement, keeping church and state separate. If it chooses not to, the couple is still a legal couple.

Given the emotion surrounding the concept and term “marriage”, I don’t have much hope of an easy resolution. However, I think two things would help considerably. First, keep the legal issues at the state level; do not amend the US Constitution with a definition. Second, and this has been recommended before, create an exception for the legal definitions of marriage and civil union to the full faith and credit clause of the US Constitution, allowing each state, in the best tradition of Federalism, to determine their solution to this issue. One solution will never fit all in the foreseeable future, but with fifty possible solutions, some good solutions may evolve.

Homosexual relationships can be as fully committed as heterosexual ones. They should be allowed their chance to flourish. At the same time, trying to expand the term marriage beyond its common meaning is the wrong approach. Make it an issue of equal rights and privilege under a common term of civil union, and there will be a greater chance for equality.

Some Comments on Transportation and Its History in the US

This essay has as its primary purpose to record my thinking about transportation in this country. I think it is a mess compared to what it ought to be, and we are going to get bitten by its contradictions sooner or later. Since this is quite long, the longest essay I have posted to date, I recommend that anyone wanting to read it, print if off and do so from hard copy. (It runs to about 15 pages of 10 point type in MS Word.) I invite any an all discussion. If you have facts to counter anything I have said, please pass them on. If you have further amplification or clarifications, those are also welcomed. If you wish to make an opposing argument, keep it civil and reasonable, and I will be glad to entertain it. That does not guarantee agreement with it. Any ad hominum attacks will be deleted. Transportation is critical to our country whether we pay attention to it or not. Right now it is in the hands of politicians, and that rarely leads to anything but ultimate disaster. With this essay, I am hoping to both present my thinking to date and to encourage further discussion.

Transportation is where the desire for entitlements meets capitalism, and with the government on the side of entitlements, capitalism loses, and when capitalism loses, so does economic freedom, efficiency, and diversity. Since I am a rail fan, I have a perspective that sees the railroads as having suffered the most from all this, and ultimately the public, despite Vanderbilt’s famous quote, “The Public be damned.” This is not to say the railroads are victims. To a great degree they made their own beds and now have to lie in them, just as automakers and airlines did vis-à-vis their unions.

So let’s start on this journey (pun intended) with a broad-brush view of the history of transportation.

When the US was first settled, transportation was by foot, or by horse-drawn vehicles on streets. Long-distance travel was by ship, boats on rivers, or over wilderness trails by foot or horseback. As the US and its cities grew, trails widened to wagon roads, and streets became paved with more horse-drawn vehicles. With the exception of the streets the thoroughfares, paths and roads, were unmaintained except by the travelers themselves and were in the commons. They were considered a part of the given environment and everyone used them for “free” in the sense of no payment of fees for use. I think that to some degree this became an embedded model in our culture for all of transportation, that somehow it should always be free of usage fees. That we should simply walk or ride out our door to where-ever we wanted to go.

At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, canal projects were advanced, along with the development of horse-drawn carriages on rails and toll roads. Most of the projects were private, but underlying all of them was government permission. A piece of paper called a Charter had to be issued to enable a private entity to create a means of transportation. They had to have the permission of some government agency to try to make money by creating a service. [The problem of regulation has always been with us, it has just gotten worse over the years.] This becomes more important as railroads were developed, where charters had the potential to be political shakedown tools. This is still true today with Amtrak, but more on that later.

In the early 19th century, canals and riverboats had their heyday, while the railroads were developing strong enough locomotives to haul economic loads. Once steam had been harnessed to work as motive power, the railroads took off. Despite the costs of creating roadbed, laying crossties and rail, building steam engines and cars to ride on the rails, railroads were so economical for the amount of work they did, that they rapidly displaced all long distance canal projects. Part of it was that railroad right-of-way was cheaper to build and maintain than a canal. Most canals required a right-of-way that was several tens of feet wide, but a railroad could push a right-of-way through in as little as ten feet wide. But part of it was the traffic density that could be maintained. A single locomotive could pull a train of as few as two or three passenger cars and carry more passengers at less cost than one canal boat pulled by a horse team. And it could do it faster and to more places.

The northeast rapidly became criss-crossed by many small railroads, that might connect only a few settlements together, as well as by larger roads that often grew by purchasing other lines. As railroads became longer and connected more remote markets, the economy grew. Farmers found that there were markets more removed than their local markets that would pay more for their products. They too wanted to ship by rail, but for some reason, farmers played the victim card from the very first, supported by journalists. Railroads were presented as necessary to their survival, and that the rates being charged were hurting them. Since much of the US was rural in those days, farmers carried tremendous political clout [the vestiges of which still remain today, despite farmers being a tiny portion of our economy and population.] Part of it was sheer numbers, and part of it was their being presented as providing part of our general survival—food. Part of it was the romantic notion of the family farmer—how could we hurt them? It would be too awful.

Some of the problem was the desire for something for nothing. After all it would be so much easier to go to a distant town by train than by walking or riding a buggy or a wagon. (But why should I have to pay so much for the privilege? I think the rate is too high.) So the farmers organized and pushed for regulation of railroad rates. Once that became politically viable, of course manufacturers jumped on, seeing a potential reduction in costs that could go to the bottom line. At the same time they, the manufacturers, forgot that regulation of one industry, namely railroads would lead to their own regulation in the future. [Just like the old quote, “First they came for …then they came for … finally they came for me.] Railroads were profitable enough, and their management naïve enough, that they put up only token resistance, because it took away profit, but didn’t create a loss. [Just like gradually heating a frog, by the 20th century it was too late, and regulation almost killed the railroads.]

Somewhere around the 1830’s and 1840’s the expansion west beyond the Mississippi river took off, with a tremendous impetus by the gold rush of ’49. The only way to get to the west coast was either by ship, around Cape Horn, a long and dangerous journey, or overland by wagon, another not quite as long and but just as dangerous journey. Once there were enough people in San Francisco, communication became paramount. First there was the Pony Express, an institution that was so politically incorrect that it employed 14 years-old boys to risk their lives as riders. It cost $25 to send a sheet of tissue paper from St Louis to San Francisco, with no guarantee it would get there. But it took days instead of months as would be by ship. The riders rode day and night as fast as a horse could travel under the various conditions. As far as I know this was a private operation, and never fell under the auspices of government regulation. However, at the same time, the telegraph was being built, and once it spanned the nation, the Pony Express folded.

The expansion and the Civil War created a perception in government, that to strengthen the Union, the West coast had to be joined by rail so that people, goods (especially gold and silver from California and Nevada respectively), and mail could travel coast to coast in a few days, instead of months. To implement this policy, the government needed to encourage the railroads to build in what was obviously uneconomic territory. To provide the necessary encouragement, the Federal government created a land-grant program. Railroads were to be given title to one square-mile of territory on alternating sides of their right-of-way for each mile of rail they built. Eventually this land would have value, it was assumed, and could be used as collateral for the loans necessary to purchase the materials and equipment for the construction, as well as eventually generate enough income to pay off the loans. The Central Pacific, starting from California, and the Union Pacific starting from Kansas City began construction and finally met at Promentory Point, Utah, in 1864.

There were other railroads that also took advantage of this program, eg. the Santa Fe to Los Angelos. All railroads that participated in the land-grant program eventually declared bankruptcy at least once, and some several times. This can be traced to the fact that the value of the land grants was not realized either in time to pay for the construction loans, nor did the settlements behind the railroad provide enough business to pay for them either. For a contrast, Jim Hill built both the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific railroads from Chicago to Seattle and Portland. He took no government offers, building the railroads on the business he generated as they were built. Neither railroad ever went into receivership.

Government policy did indeed bring the West and East coasts closer together in time of travel, but at the price not of those who set the policy, but at the cost of the owners and users of the railroads. One can argue that the policy was good in its goals, but its means left much to be desired. It was certainly a case similar to today, where the Federal government dictates a policy then forces its payment not from those who benefit but from those who have the deepest pockets. This does not absolve the management of the western railroads from having made some choices that had bad consequences twenty or thirty years in the future, but typical of today, even back then politics created unrealistic and unprincipled, large-scale programs.

During the second half of the 19th Century after the Civil War, the United States went through the most amazing economic growth the world has ever seen. Business was relatively unregulated, and the boldest of the business thinkers created phenomenal wealth, wealth as measured in capital resources, not dollars in banks or prices of shares. At the same time the railroads prospered and competed in a most cut-throat way. Owners of one road would try to take over other roads, not by purchase of the capital infra-structure directly, but by purchasing control of the outstanding stock, similar to the hostile take-overs of today. However, it was much more exciting, with some of the fights being quite open and spectacular. One way to fight was to water the stock, that is issue so much stock, as fast as possible, so that it becomes impossible to purchase enough shares to gain control.

These were not the only financial shenanigans occurring; the stock market was wide-open and there were many speculators. The railroad owners were some of the more obvious, and they came to the attention of the Yellow Journalists. There have always been the equivalent of the left/liberal media, those who have the desire to destroy or control that which they cannot create themselves and of which they have a monstrous envy. In order to survive, the railroads and other companies had to provide a product or service that was affordable, even if it seemed high. If it were too high no one would purchase it, and if it were priced too low, the demand would outstrip supply, leading to shortages and service problems. This is, of course, standard supply and demand economics. Over and above the provision of such services, the owners fought their high-finance wars publicly, and the Yellow Journalists decided to make hay of it.

They termed the railroad and company owners, Robber Barons, and the term stuck. Simply by creating such a name for them, they automatically positioned them as evil in the public eye. There was no need for someone to think. “Cornelius Vanderbilt? He’s a Robber Baron, a bad guy.” [Does this sound familiar?] Never was there a clear case of from whom they stole. They did nothing criminal, but because they had daring, vision, and a willingness to fight for what they wanted, they obtained wealth and appeared to be more free than the rest of the people. They had no more legal freedom than anyone else, save when politicians were willing to sell political favors, and often were held up to legal extortion on charters, and regulations. Their apparent greater economic freedom was earned by their willingness to take risks. It was not stolen from anyone. They were wealthy because they created wealth with the increasing efficiency by which goods were created and delivered. But a lack of understanding of the difference between creating wealth and taking money led to their castigation. [The heirs of Yellow Journalism today make the same mistakes, but are more widespread in the MSM.]

As a consequence, one of the worst governmental regulatory agencies was created during this time, the Interstate Commerce Commission. Believe it or not, two of the most powerful railroads actually went along with the deal. The New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad were intensely competitive, servicing much of the same territory in parallel. As a consequence they were often involved in rate wars which caused major cash flow problems. They actually wanted the ICC to restrict their competition to save them from the rate wars.

Never mind that other solutions were available. One example: There were three passes over the Allegheny Mountains, the northern along the great lakes which the New York Central (NYC) used as the main route to Chicago, the central pass which the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) used for the same purpose (the pass is the site of the famous Horseshoe Curve), and a southern pass, over which the Pennsylvania Turnpike was built. The southern route was the shortest route to central Ohio and Indiana, but it was the worst in terms of grades and tunneling, requiring at least six tunnels and grades of over 2% (rising 2 ft for every 100 ft of distance) in places, which in railroading is extremely steep. As part of an attempt to compete, the PRR was trying to establish a northern route because of the low gradients, and in reply the NYC started building over the southern route. Both attempts would have exhausted the two railroads and probably ruined them. In addition the extra capacity was not needed. So J. P. Morgan the financier, had the owners of the two railroads in for a weekend get together and apparently put some sense into their heads, because the NYC and PRR abandoned their efforts. Notice there was no government intervention, no regulation, just some level-headed financial advice from one of the great bankers of his day. [American Heritage magazine, many years ago published an article on how J. P. Morgan averted a stock-market crash single-handedly in the 1890’s.]

At the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century, the US was an economic giant and still growing. There was no income tax; custom duties were so great that the government had a surplus which led to its own excesses, which are outside this discussion. Industry was highly profitable, and the overall standard of living was increasing, more so in cities than in the rural areas. The automobile was already starting to be developed, and the Wright Brothers were working on flight. These two are very important in a few years, but I want to look at city transit for a moment.

One of the kinds of examples that are continually ignored in looking at the effects of politics on transportation are the fare regulations of urban transportation. When the New York subway system was first created, the fare was a nickel. As it grew and aged, the owners wanted to raise the fare to provide capital for improvements and extensions. The hue and cry that was raised led the city fathers to forbid the fare raise. Again, this is something they should not have had the power to do in the first place. As a consequence the New York subway system eventually was unable to operate efficiently and was taken over by the city, with the results we have today. There are people that never seem to understand how markets work, or if they do, they don’t want to have to pay what something is worth. They are the natural supporters of all the politicians that want to control everything. In general, urban transit has become a great cause for collectivists who like people to be treated as masses. It is not profitable for a number of reasons, some of which are caused by the governments that try to promote them, and for historical reasons. By now, they all run either under government ownership or control and are subsidized by taxpayers in one way or another.

Returning to automobiles, they were first a novelty. Driving an automobile was both relatively expensive and an adventure if one left the city. On the paved streets of the city
Automobiles became useful transportation, but for any long distance travel, the train was still the mode of choice. It was not until the 1920’s and 1930’s that any attempts at developing a national highway system were begun. Once Henry Ford made a car for “everyman”, the pressure was on to provide highways. However, it was still an adventure to go any long distance, and even when I was a kid in the 1950’s to travel 500 miles in a day by car was a major accomplishment. The automobile provided freedom in a way that nothing had before. It allowed people to live away from the crowded cities, yet still work in them. It allowed them to go where they wanted to, when they wanted to, not where a train or streetcar went or to when it was available. It still remained a mostly local form of transportation, highly flexible for short distances but still challenging for long ones.

The airplane continued to develop, being at first, as was the car, a novelty. Lindberg showed its feasibility for long distances, and as planes became larger and capable of greater distances, more people rode them. However, they were expensive to fly, and only those with a great desire and the money did so. A cross country trip often took almost as long as a train ride, and it was not nearly as convenient, there not being food in the air except box lunches or restrooms. Planes usually had to make several hops to cover long distances.

During this same time the railroads kept innovating better and better service for both passengers and freight. The late 1930’s were the beginnings of the big name trains, and the first commercial diesels on railroads. Diesels led to the streamliner concept, and the image was so powerful, that several railroads put streamlined sheathing on their top passenger steam engines. Southern Pacific, B & O, NYC, and Norfolk Western come to mind as outstanding examples. It was a great image, being art deco in flavor at a time when art deco was big.

World War II saw the airplane develop rapidly for military purposes, and after the war those developments became part of the civilian air fleet, the Boeing Stratocruiser, the DC-7, and the development of the Boeing 707, the first jet passenger plane, an offshoot of the B-47/B-52 development. It was followed quickly by the DC-8 and the Convair 880. The distances planes could travel were now long enough that coast-to-coast non-stop flights were possible, and the planes were big enough to offer restrooms and food on board. It was now possible to go across the ocean by air instead of by ship. [Jet lag existed even then.] However, planes were still the province of the well-to-do and rich. People who could afford to pay the premium for the speed. Already air transportation was heavily regulated by both the FAA and the CAB. The former dealt in safety and maintenance standards, and the latter set the rates the airlines could charge. The CAB caused a major distortion in the airlines structure and competition, actually restricting it so that the airlines did not compete with their rates.

After WW II, cars were very common, as were urban transportation systems. Long distance busses were making money with the lowest prices, though slowest times, to destinations all over the US. There were paved national highways and some were four lanes wide in places. People used cars to get around their local area far more than streetcars, trolleys, and busses, and as a result the old interurban systems became extinct. Only in the largest metropolitan areas did urban transit remain a successful business, and in many of those locations there were heavy subsidies to keep it running.

Railroads were at the peak of their impact. The war had been good to the railroads in the sense that the working plant had priority on steel and other rationed materials to keep rails and equipment repaired. The railroads were recognized as vital to the war effort and so did not suffer a degradation of their infrastructure. After the war, the railroads used the lessons learned from having to stretch their plant so thin to work fast and effectively. Freight traffic was high and growing as the country started to rebound from the scarcities of the war, and passenger traffic became a major competition. The heavy-weight cars of the thirties and forties were being converted to a streamlined look, and the newest cars were made of lighter weight stainless steel using designs that derived from the stressed-skin designs for aircraft. Railroads were investing in passenger traffic and competing for business. Passenger service was paid attention to by management, because the image of a railroad was its passenger service. Dinners were always high-class restaurants with full linens and table service. Some trains had table cutlery and dishes that could only be used on those particular trains. Always it advertised the railroad, with logos and often scenes from the right-of-way. For the railroads, life was good, as it was for automotive manufacturers and for airlines.

So in the fifties, one rode around locally in one’s car or if one didn’t have a car in some form of urban transportation. If one wanted to go a long distance there was the bus if you weren’t in a hurry and didn’t have much money, the train which was faster and more comfortable and cost more. One could even have a bed on a train. And for those in a great hurry and/or the money to pay for there were airplanes. Now fifty years later, there are almost no long-distance passenger trains and the ones that exist run on infrequent schedules that are often fiction. The airlines are having trouble finding enough places to land planes, and people drive their cars on long trips on interstate highways and sit in traffic jams during city rush-hours, while much of the nation’s freight moves across country by truck rather than train. What happened?

A discussion of what happened will necessarily be very sketchy. The events of the 1960’s through the turn of the century into 2000 are quite complicated, and I don’t have all of them in hand. I have ideas and views on them from having lived through the times and having done a lot of casual reading related to transportation, and those views are what will be developed. Let’s start by looking at some of the economics of the various modes of transportation along with some further history past the fifties.

Automobiles were very common by the fifties and well-paved streets and highways had been built and were continuing to be built. City streets were financed by city tax revenue, and the highways by the taxes on gasoline. The concept was that the gas taxes only affected the users of highways, and the more people drove the more they paid—a seemingly fair preposition. The only problem is that it was administered by the government, and that eventually led to the complete decoupling of gasoline taxes from highway usage.

One of the first pressures to decouple highways from gas taxes occurred in the fifties, the beginnings of the Interstate Highway System (IHS). Much as we all now benefit from the existence of the HIS, it not only led to the politicizing of highways, but also created a major distortion in the transportation world. The IHS began under the administration of President Eisenhower, and it was one of the major programs of his presidency. When Eisenhower was an officer after WW I, he had to take a convoy across the country, from somewhere in the East to the West Coast. It took him 68 days, over mostly unpaved highways. From that experience, he determined that there should be a national highway system so that one could drive coast to coast without a stoplight or any other hindrance. [I can’t resist a snarkey comment, why didn’t he load the convoy up on a train and have it transported across the country in a few days? That is what later occurred during WW II. It is a good thing he had a decent staff during the planning for D Day or had learned by then, else we would have seen GI’s swimming across the Channel to invade.] The cost of the IHS required more funds than could be provided by gasoline taxes. Thus began the appropriations for Federal Highways. Today, we see the results of this in allocations for “The Bridge to Nowhere,” and other pork-barrel projects.

Parts of the IHS require paying tolls, but the greatest part has no fees-for-use. It is the development of such highway systems, that encouraged people to travel further in their automobiles, and for trucking companies to start up. It is during these fifty years that trucks ceased to be merely local delivery systems and became long distance haulers. Both the owners of private cars and the owners of trucks came to receive a major subsidy in the form of “free” highways. Though truckers pay high user fees to various state and federal agencies for use of the highways, I have been assured by a civil engineer that those fees nowhere near pay the total bill for wear and tear on highways caused by trucks.

Starting as a means of domestic travel for the well-to-do or those in a hurry, airplanes were protected from competition by the CAB as mentioned above. Airports were still small but were generally administered by local governments. Airports still are under government control today, under the auspices of airport authorities. These are government bodies with the power to issue bonds and act much as a business without the risks of a business, since they have the backing of the local government to honor their debts and decisions. Airlines are charged fees for landing, and terminal use, but I have never seen a comparison of the income from the charges to the actual costs of providing the facilities. Since airports are non-profit entities, I wonder at whether or not they constitute a subsidy to the airlines. There is another subsidy that occurred in airline history—mail, but that is to be discussed later on since it has a major impact on all transportation.

Airlines have always had high maintenance costs, and today fuel costs and personnel are the two major expense items. One saving grace for airlines may be that they do not have the costs of right-of-way. They fly through the air which has no maintainable structure associated with it. Since the physical routes are shared by all airlines between any two cities and controlled by the FAA, is there actually a hidden cost of right-of-way that is not normally seen and not charged for? Or even if there is no direct cost, should the air routes have charges applied due to their economic value? Certainly the landing slots have been mentioned in this regard. Because airports are governmentally run, there is the usual egalitarian attitude that all slots are the same to all users. Thus the landing fee during rush hour is the same as during slack time, and the cost to land a fifty passenger regional jet is the same as landing a 747 jumbo or an Airbus. Since the economic value is not the same for all slots, airlines have tried to utilize every available minute of landing time at certain prime times, 8-10 in the morning and 4-7 in the evening. As a consequence there is no room in the schedules for any sort of delay, so any time the weather forces spacing-out landings, there are ripples all over the US as flights are delayed, or even cancelled.

In effect, airlines have been partially isolated from economic pressures and realities for fifty years, and we now are reaping the harvest in the bankruptcies of the major carriers. With the demise of the CAB in the eighties, airlines had to start price competition. Until that time the major carriers were still able to pretty much set prices and grant union demands almost unchallenged. All major carriers were fully unionized, with pilots’, flight attendants’, and mechanics’ unions. The demands of the union at one airline were acceded to, since it could be assumed that the other major carriers would also grant the same concessions, and the CAB would rubber-stamp it. With the closing of the CAB came fare competition, and the less efficient airlines started failing or were bought up for their routes or gate access. Eastern airlines fell early on as did Republic, and Pan Am began a downhill slide. About the same time as this was occurring, there were also major changes in the handling of mail. Again that is for later in this discussion. With the advent of airlines such as Southwest with a totally different operating philosophy, the real competition began. The large carriers were forced to cut fares further and further, and finally with the massive rise in fuel prices they became uncompetitive and fell into bankruptcy, one after the other. The stronger merged with or purchased the weaker, and then went bankrupt themselves. We are still seeing the shake-out.

There is a major irony in this. Just as the airlines were handed the mail contracts from the railroads, the truckers were then handed the mail contracts from the airlines. The saving grace for the airlines was Express and Priority mail. Those were in competition with UPS and FEDEX, and provided a continuing source of revenue from the Post Office. And now we pay record rates for first class mail with slower service than in the 1950’s. The USPS is a classic example of a monopoly. It is maintained by law, as it is illegal to compete directly against the Post Office for first class mail delivery, as several entrepreneurs have found out.

Now we will turn to railroads. In the fifties when railroads ran their own passenger service that had their name on it, passenger trains ruled the schedules. All freight was secondary to a passenger train. This was not because the carrying of passengers was that profitable. Considering that it required a car 80 feet long to carry 54 passengers in a comfortable chair car or about a fourth that number in a Pullman sleeper, plus a diner and baggage car, the economics of carrying people alone were not compelling. However, the fact that those people judged the railroad by how they were treated, and they were all potential freight shippers or receivers, it really did matter that passenger trains were fast, comfortable, and generally enjoyable. The main costs of maintaining the infrastructure were covered by freight. The amount of freight the railroads carried was continually growing.

Passenger trains were not loss-leaders, however. By adding Rail Express Agency cars and mail cars to the front-end of passenger trains, enough revenue was obtained in addition to the passenger fares to make passenger trains cost-effective if not profitable. In addition, the local passenger trains carried local small merchandise shipments in the baggage car(s). When I was a child, I remember riding a passenger train at night from St. Louis to Mitchell, Indiana. It stopped at every station, and was referred to as a milk train. This came from the earlier practice of picking up milk from dairy farmers at every stop and carrying it to processors further on down the line. These local trains served the same function as cars, busses, and delivery trucks do today.

During the late 1950’s the Post Office decided to put all long-distance mail on airplanes. This supposedly was to provide better service on long distance first-class mail. Instead of five or six days to go coast-to-coast, it would now take 2-3. This was the beginning of the end for passenger trains, and a major subsidy to the economics of passenger flight. The passenger trains no longer were able to even break even financially, and the railroads wanted to drop the service, understandably so. Meanwhile the airlines were able to lower fares and still make a profit due to the money from carrying mail. This began a period of intense airline competition with many new entries into the regional and local airline market. They made their fixed expenses, all or in part by carrying mail, and then used passengers to put them over the top into profitability. At the same time the IHS was growing rapidly causing a net drop in passenger traffic on trains as well.

Railroads also suffered at that time from over-regulation. It became impossible to set rates that brought in sufficient income to maintain infrastructure, much less improve the infrastructure. During the 1960’s the two great eastern rivals, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania started looking at merging since the traffic was falling to the point that they did not see they would have enough business to support two railroads. Part of the cause was the increased use of trucks for shipping freight over the four-lane IHS. As profits diminished, the railroads began decreasing service, especially to the smaller shippers of less-than-carload lots, or only one or two carloads a week. They would prefer to use two or three semi-tractor-trailer rigs to one box car. The service was better and actually amounted to cheaper, since the highways were paid for by gross tax revenue instead of the direct users.

As the small, local shipping diminished, railroads started shedding track as fast as they were allowed, as well a dumping passenger service where possible. The large railroads worked to keep the long-distance freight since it was the only service that had a hope of being profitable with large trains to spread the overhead on. Maintenance became more and more deferred. The state of many roadbeds was such that it was impossible to run trains at a decent speed for long distances. Slow orders abounded. Rates were regulated and not allowed to rise as necessary to provide the needed money for infrastructure repair. Everyone still considered themselves entitled to rail service at the price they wanted to pay, not the value of the service. It was as if the image of the Robber Baron was still operating. As we shall see, it is still operating in our current President.

Finally the disaster that was the Penn-Central occurred in the late 1960’s. Despite considering the merger for several years, neither railroad prepared for it out of pride and stubbornness. They had incompatible computer systems, and operating philosophies, as well as rules. It finally failed at the end of the decade, and provided the motivation for the creation of another monstrosity—ConRail. [In my mind the emphasis should be on the “Con”. ] At the same time its smaller twin—Amtrak was also spawned. There was a happy ending for ConRail. It would appear that is not to be for Amtrak. Both organizations were created as corporations with government subsidies to meet expenses that were not covered by revenue. At that point the similarity ends. ConRail was pretty much left alone to operate, but Amtrak has been torn one way and another by conflicting dictates from politicians.

Conrail was created with the idea that six wrongs can make a right. Six bankrupt railroads, the PennCentral being the greatest part, were combined into a so-called corporation, backed by the government, to provide freight service in the North East, at politically advantageous prices, in other words, not what the service might be worth or cost, but what would make a good deal for the shippers and create their gratitude. Ostensibly, the corporation was to eventually be profitable. Under ConRail, a number of desirable things did occur. A lot of unused, or almost unused right of way had the rails salvaged and was then abandoned. Much of it was immediately acquired by municipalities and counties and turned into bike trails. In other cases, the bridges, overpasses, and underpasses these routes required were removed or filled in. Now that the government was in control, there were no obstacles to doing what needed doing years before. In some cases, regional railroads were either formed or expanded, to use the surrendered track, being able with a much leaner staff and more flexible business policies to make a profit where a class I railroad couldn’t. In my opinion, ConRail was more of a shaking out and maintenance of the status quo than a viable railroad.

The problem with ConRail, was that it controlled the heart of the rail infrastructure in the Northeast, and both CSX (Chessie System, the former C & O) and Norfolk Southern (a merger of the Norfolk and Western and the Southern) both wanted into its markets. Somewhere around 1997 or so, CSX made a bid for the entire ConRail System. NS got wind of it and made counter proposals and was able to halt the progress of the CSX bid. The outcome was that in 1999, ConRail was split between CSX and NS, with CSX getting what was primarily the old New York Central plant, and NS getting the former Pennsylvania. Looking at the resulting route maps for the two railroads, we see the resurrection of the old NYC/Pennsy competition, only this time strictly in freight where price and reliability of service count. The days of the contests between the Broadway Limited and the Twentieth Century Limited are not to be revived.

All the Class I railroads have struggled for years with the competition from trucks, even in goods that might move in car-load size lots. Two of the ways they have competed are Road-Railers (trailers that have re-enforced under carriages and can be converted to run on rails, directly connected to each other as a train) and contracts with long-distance trucking companies to carry cross-country loads as trailer-on-flat. With the growth of container service, railroads are increasingly carrying intermodal freight. In some cases, multiple container trains carry entire shiploads of goods from the West Coast to the Gulf Coast. The goods are in bond the entire time. The purpose is to bypass using the Panama Canal. The time is much faster for delivery to Europe that way. With the imposition of new rules on truckers and the reduction in hours a day allowed to drive, there is even more interest in trailer-on-flat, or container service within the US.

Though the outlook for freight looks fairly good at the moment, the history and outlook for Amtrak is more akin to a horror show. Amtrak had the same initial conditions as ConRail, a corporation formed to run passenger trains throughout the US, with government support until it was profitable. The goal of profitability was held much higher for Amtrak than for ConRail. Throughout its history, Amtrak management has been criticized for not showing a profit. Looking under the surface, however, we see that politicians in both houses have continually made various conditions mandatory on Amtrak. Senator Byrd of West Virginia is one of the more notorious, requiring Amtrak to run a train through WV if they expect to get their government money, but having almost no traffic in terms of ridership. From the beginning Amtrak was given far less than sufficient funds to maintain their equipment, much less purchase new. Over the years the inventory of equipment needing or under repair has increased as the demands for service have stretched the resources thinner.

Amtrak has a further handicap in that they own only the track they run on in the Northeast Corridor. Elsewhere, they have track rights from the Class I railroads. Despite the lip service to passenger service being given priority, from the first, passenger trains have been frequently delayed waiting on freight. This was especially bad in CSX territory, as CSX has often had operating issues with considerable congestion for their own freight, much less trying to accommodate passenger traffic. Regional routes survive on Amtrak because of state subsidies. The State of Pennsylvania subsidizes the Pennsylvanian which runs from Philadelphia to Pittsburg, via Harrisburg on the old Pennsylvania route. The cross-country trains from New York to Chicago and St Louis, and from those to locations to the West Coast are under constant pressure to be disbanded by politicians and those who dislike Amtrak, for whatever reason.

Amtrak has never been the equal of the passenger services it replaced. It reduced schedules and over time reduced on-board services. Even when it was first started, I can remember riding on Amtrak and finding a drop in service compared to when passenger service was run by the railroad owning the tracks. Funding is the major hurdle for Amtrak. They are continually given mandates then not given the money. Congress seems to take great pleasure in shrinking a budget that is smaller than the cost of many earmarks, as an act of virtue. The continual whine is that they are subsidizing something that still isn’t showing a profit. The truth is, under the conditions of its existence, it will never show a profit, the exception being the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak’s Board of Directors seems geared to cause the enterprise to fail. They just fired the most effective president that Amtrak has had in my memory. My cynicism says they did it because he might have succeeded.

The long term outlook for Amtrak is that it will probably be ended. What will happen to the pieces that are still useful? That is anybodies guess. Amtrak runs a lot of high speed rail for other owners, especially in California. It also has a successful high-speed Northeast Corridor. There will probably be a purchaser for it. The regional lines are a big question. Many operate only by virtue of state government support.

To summarize, we have automobiles carrying one to four people at a time over highways that cost far more than the gasoline taxes collected to provide them. At the same time, the maintenance of the highways is become a major problem, especially bridges. I have seen articles saying that bridges are degrading faster than they can be maintained, repaired or replaced. At rush hour in major cities, the movement of people becomes almost non-existent at times, with average speeds on highways designed for 70 mph, being less than 30 mph. Building highways to relieve congestion often has the opposite effect, because the new highway attracts more traffic than it was designed for, if not immediately, in the near future as the areas near the highway become developed. Long distance travel by car is almost as expensive as flying. Top legal speed in most places is 70 mph which means a cross-country trip will require 40-plus hours of driving time, plus rests, plus motels, plus meals. People do it for the flexibility of being able to stop when they want, take detours along the way, or for privacy.

The airlines are carrying most of the long distance passengers now, into airports they do not own or have to keep up, but they are having problems with the economics left from earlier non-competitive conditions and also finding landing slots. Planes are becoming larger, but larger planes require bigger runways and new passenger facilities at airports. Airports are running out of room to expand in many areas. A single wide-body may carry as many people as three or four streamlined passenger cars on the railroad. However, there is a physical limit on how many wide-bodied aircraft can be landed in a given time at a given airport. Also, the bigger the plane, the longer it takes to load and unload. Three cars is nothing on a passenger train that could be as long as 20-plus cars. When it reaches the station, each car of 50-60 people can unload independently. Increasing the size of a train does not increase the turnaround time for the passengers, and does not increase the turnaround for the train itself in proportion to the size increase. a

Unless one can fly first class or business class, airplanes are miserable to ride on. Everyone is required to remain seated for the first 15-20 minutes and the last 15-20 minutes of the flight, and sometimes much longer if there is turbulence. The seats are as small and as close together as can be done and still get 90+% of the people in them. My term for it is cattle-car territory. There is one large open cabin and any miserable baby is required to remain in that area. There is no lounge for the mother or father to retire to in order to comfort the child. Airline food has always been the subject of derision, but in all fairness, under the circumstances, the airlines have done pretty good. It just can’t compare to a meal cooked to order. It is, however, generally better than TV dinners, which it is a version of. Thanks to the jihadist fanatics, security now is a major consideration in air travel, and we pay for the privilege by foregoing some of our civil rights concerning search and seizure, and presumption of innocence.

In its own way, rail travel via Amtrak has also become a bad dream. I don’t think it has reached the nightmare stage. With the exception of local high-speed rail, the frequency of trains is very low, often only one or a few a day, to one every other day or less. This cannot be considered as convenient. Despite the low fares (e.g. Indianapolis to Chicago, round trip is $34 by train, and over $200 by plane), the lack of convenience and scheduling argues against it. Yet, despite the decrease in service, riding a train can be enjoyable. When one gets a good car, the seats are wide; there is ample leg-room; one can carry-on bigger and more bags than on an airplane. From the minute one steps on the car, one can walk around, though it is best to be in ones seat while tickets are collected. Food service is an iffy proposition according to my reading.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that railroads receive no subsidies and not only have to maintain their own physical plant but pay taxes on it besides, they are beginning to see some genuine profitability. Part of that is the growth of the economy creating demand for the products that move in car-load quantities, as well as a huge growth in intermodal traffic, both trailer-on-flat and container. There are major expansions and upgrades of infrastructure occurring all over the US, especially the West. The major problem now, is Chicago, where plans to ease congestion and the interactions between rail and street traffic are on stall due to promised government money now being diverted. This, by the way, might be cautionary tale for the Norfolk Southern. The State of Virginia has considered subsidizing a third rail for the mainline of the NS because it would be ten times cheaper to do that than add another lane each way on I-81. It may be that the NS should finance the expansion themselves, considering the fickleness of governments. Having the increased capacity will allow them to draw more traffic.

One of the incidental lessons from all this is that genuine monopolies exist only when the government enforces their existence. Amtrak is an example, the US Postal Service is another, as was ConRail. One of the main lessons is that where ever the government has put its stamp, something became broken. The arbitrary moving of mail contracts from rail to air to truck is an example. The arbitrary rules of the ICC and the Transportation Board are others. The government bailouts of the airlines, yet not railroads or truckers, is also egregious. As a nation, we now have most of our eggs in one basket—airlines. We have no backup, if for any reason there was a major, long-term (over two weeks) disruption of air service. The impact on traffic, gasoline supplies, and productivity would be massive if everyone had to drive. There is no equipment available for the railroads or Amtrak specifically to increase traffic to carry such a load, and there are no longer terminal facilities to handle that many people. The great Union Station in St Louis is now a shopping facility where once it had 40 tracks into its platform area. Union station in Cincinnati is a museum, and the one in Indianapolis is an entertainment and shopping area.

The mistakes we have made in the past are easy to see. The first and most damaging was the enforcement of the monopoly of first class mail by the USPS. The second was the ICC. The third was the CAB. After that there are a host of mistakes to chose from. One of my favorites is regulating the railroads then arbitrarily shifting mail from rail to air without economic justification. This whole history is filled with examples of the damage politicians do in the name of good intentions, or more accurately, with the motive of vote buying. It was a symbiotic relationship developed over the entire history of the railroads when passenger and freight moved on the same rails in the fifties. Actually railroads started by hauling people then switched to goods. Now they only haul goods, and it would be nigh impossible to go back to their handling people again. They have abandoned the physical facilities to do it, and don’t have the room in their freight schedules to allow for the kind of passenger traffic that used to occur.

Railroads and truckers are beginning to reach a working arrangement. The strength of trucks is the smaller quantities they can haul economically and the flexibility of pick-up and delivery. The strength of railroads is bulk goods and the economics of long-distance service. The major truck fleets are entering into arrangements with the railroads to take advantage of the respective strengths to improve service. This is a bright note in this whole story.

In urban areas, rail provides essential transportation needs. That it does not do so at a profit may be partly due to the distortions of the economics of commuting by the highway subsidies. To get commuters onto the trains and off the highways requires pricing that is less than actual cost. Governments subsidize this, because they can’t afford the cost of dealing with more cars on the local streets and highways.

Airlines strength is speed. They can cover distances much faster than any other form of travel or shipping. The problem is that the price of the service may not be as high as its value, or conversely, the cost of the service may be higher than can be charged to maintain the current demand. In either case the airlines are in a situation where the demand for services is greater than they can economically provide, because the cost to the purchaser is less than the total economic cost of the service. Somewhere, someone is making up that difference, either in losses to the airline, taxes from the tax payer to subsidize the airline directly or to pay for the terminals they use.

The automobile is pretty much at the top of its usefulness. It is being subsidized by the massive highway systems that are built at a cost to the public at large and not just those driving on them. Probably the only reason that there is not more outcry on this, is that almost everyone does use them at one time or another.

If I were writing fairy tales for grown-ups like one of my favorite authors does, I would create a world in which the railroads still owned their passenger service and as many or more people rode railroads long distances as flew. Flying was primarily for those in a hurry especially going coast to coast, or Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans to the west coast. The small regional planes that are now so common would not have had an empty market to move into with the demise of the passenger train. People would own cars, but if they worked in a large city they took rail transportation, and if they wanted to take a trip generally took the train, unless it was a leisurely vacation with many detours and stops. In time of stress, any one of the three modes of transportation would be able to undergo some expansion to accommodate increased demand.

But that is a fairy tale. The reality is that for moving goods our transportation systems are working quite well. But for moving people, our politicians and the unreasoning demands of the public have destroyed one of the potential backup modes of travel. I think that domestic air travel will become worse over the years as will traveling by highway. Having destroyed the passenger train, Congress and the President (any Congress or any President, not just the current versions) are not about to put it back together. States will continue, one way or another to keep most regional rail travel, but cross country travel by rail will not exist in a few years. I think that the chances are good, that there will be some event that causes air travel to shut down for a long period of time. When that occurs all the chickens will come home to roost, but the blame will fall everywhere but where it belongs. In the space of a short period of time we will cobble up some patches and perhaps start fixing the problem properly. It will take a large-scale national emergency to provide the motivation, and even then we may forget within a couple of years what we are doing and why.

Normally, I consider myself an optimist, but having put together what I know about this into a cohesive document, I don’t have much optimism about this issue. Somewhere down the road we are going to have a massive shock. Our goods will get anywhere but we won’t be able to without major effort. The best I can hope for is that we will realize why and do something about it.

This post by the Maverick Philosopher appeared a couple of weeks ago. At the time, I commented that it was a very different type of argument for ID, and was worth studying. I affirm my original statement, having studied it. This is definitely a new, at least to me, type of argument for an intelligent designer. It has the virtue of not depending on distortions or abuse of data. In a way it reminds me of St Anselm’s Ontological Proof of the Existence of God.

You are out hiking and the trail becomes faint and hard to follow. You peer into the distance and see what appear to be three stacked rocks. Looking a bit farther, you see another such stack. Now you are confident which way the trail goes.

Your confidence is based on your taking the rock piles as more than merely natural formations. You take them as providing information about the trail's direction, which is to say that you to take them as trail markers, as meaning something, as about something distinct from themselves, as exhibiting intentionality, to use a philosopher's term of art. The intentionality, of course, is derivative rather than intrinsic. It is not part of your presupposition that the cairns of themselves mean anything. Obviously they don't. But it is part of the presupposition that the cairns are physical embodiments of the intrinsic intentionality of a trail-blazer or trail-maintainer. Thus the presupposition is that an intelligent being designed the objects in question with a definite purpose, namely, to indicate the trail's direction.

Why do we take the rock piles as more than natural formations? Because we are taught over the years that nature is not perfectly regular. Nature is not grouped, does not display rigid patterns, does not have true straight lines or smooth arcs. Nature is fractal. Subdivide and then expand a subdivision to the original scale, and it will appear similar to the original whole. We are taught to consider anything regular as being man-created. In addition for the cairns to have meaning, we have to have all the knowledge of trails and the concept of trail markers. Without that we might consider them man-made but not know the purpose.

Of course, the two rock piles might have come into existence via purely natural causes: a rainstorm might have dislodged some rocks with gravity plus other purely material factors accounting for their placement. Highly unlikely, but possible. This possibility shows that the appearance of design does not entail design.

This particular example is so unlikely as to be considered impossible. In a vague, abstract sense it might be considered possible that two piles of three rocks could be formed some distance apart. But that possibility is so unlikely based on what we are taught that we are automatically led to think they were purposefully built. But the purpose is not necessarily as certain. Suppose the piles were merely the result of child’s play? Then as trail markers they have no value to the hiker though they were purposefully built. A converse would be if the observer had no concept of cairns as possible trail markers. He would perceive the regularity but not the purpose. However, it is quite likely that a purpose, though unknown, would be assumed, simply because of the properties of the object.

So what constitutes design? Already we have two parts to it, the object and the purpose. Generally we consider the object to have been created to meet the purpose for which it is to be used. So whenever we talk about design there is always the concept of purpose contained within it. As we shall see below, we often include function as a proxy for purpose when discussing design. If something functions in some way, we often accept the idea that it was designed to function that way. Yet, as I will show there are cases where there is no purposeful design in the function, or else we are led to consider everything is designed. So yes, the appearance of design does not entail design.

There is one other problem with using the word design. It often brings up an image of metadata controlling the assembly of parts, i.e. some super blueprint that states precisely the location of each component in the assembled organism. Even scientists use this analogy when explaining to laymen how DNA is the master code for the body. Actually it is not an analogue of a blueprint.

All genes do is code for the creation of proteins. These proteins in turn are either enzymes that create other biochemicals, or form part of the structure of the organism. What is also needed is a timing mechanism, that turns the genes on and off. Nature is very parsimonious. There is a constant reuse of some protein or structure on larger scales for new purposes in new species. The various mutational and gene replication and mixing processes create the opportunity for totally new processes and proteins and constantly new combinations. Survival is then the means by which these are weeded out. As noted above those things or combinations that create a slight advantage will, over time, become fixed and dominant in a population.

It has now been shown that 90+% of human DNA is common to chimpanzee DNA, yet there are vast differences in capability, behavior, and appearance. I would submit the major differences between humans and chimpanzees are the timings of gene expression, especially during development. If this is so, then rather than a blueprint, DNA is a program which has subroutines that are keyed in response to external events.

Nevertheless, your taking of the rock piles as trail markers presupposes (entails) that they are designed. It would clearly be irrational to take the piles as evidence of the trail's direction while at the same time maintaining that their formation was purely accidental. And if you found out that they had come into being by chance due to an earthquake, say, you would cease interpreting them as meaning anything, as providing information about the trail. One must either take the cairns as meaningful and thus designed or as undesigned and hence meaningless. One cannot take them as both undesigned and meaningful. For their meaning -- 'the trail goes that-a-way' -- derives from a designer.

The concept of “meaning” is introduced here and is the only place in the post that it is mentioned. Here the use of meaning is very clear, it is what the two piles of rocks are to communicate to anyone seeing them. At this point we are talking about inanimate objects, objects that do not change except from an outside influence. In this case it is very clear that any meaning must be from that put into the objects by their creator and perceived by the observer. To anticipate what is coming, how do we attach meaning to our senses and cognitive facilities? Is meaning necessary to being designed? If so what is the meaning of a motor, or a table, or a house? Meaning is a complex process of mental effort on an individual being represented in the exterior to be perceived, comprehended, and interpreted by another individual. If there is meaning, there must be design, but design does not necessarily convey meaning.

Meaning is something our cognitive facilities extract from external and internal perceptions. The coming argument is going to imply that extracting meaning cannot be trusted unless the object doing the perception and extraction is designed. But extraction of meaning is not the same as representing meaning, and the analogies to the rock piles fail on this account. The two are not the same type of phenomena. The extraction of meaning may be a process that is the culmination of millennia of winnowing of both physiological and mental processes that started with simple stimulus response, and as the responding organism became more complex so did the responses, with various refinements along the way to make them more selective or useful in a survival sense. Our pets have simple forms of comprehending meaning. If we get angry, they sense it and act in a subordinate or “whipped puppy” way. To them the meaning of our anger is “I am in trouble” though not in those words. Accepting that idea means that it is plausible that our concepts of meaning have evolved over time to something much more abstract.

Now consider our incredibly complex sense organs. We rely on them to provide information about the physical world. I rely on eyesight, for example, both to know that there is a trail and to discern some of its properties. I rely on hearing to inform me of the presence of a rattlesnake. I rely on my brain to draw inferences from what I see and hear, inferences that purport to be true of states of affairs external to my body. The visual apparatus (eye, optic nerves, visual cortex and all the rest) exhibits apparent design. It is as if the eyes were designed for the purpose of seeing. But the appearance of design is no proof of real design. And indeed, human beings with their sensory apparatus are supposed to have evolved by a process of natural selection operating upon random mutations. If so, eye and brain are cosmic accidents.

Here the apparent design derives from the function. I would take the phrase cosmic accident as connoting something different from evolutionary theory. In a technical sense the phrase can be considered correct in that anything that occurs without an accompanying purpose could be considered accidental. However, the phrase cosmic accident tends to bring up an image of a rare occurrence and a totally fortuitous settling of random processes. Actually I would argue that the processes though not directed by some outside intelligence, are actually more ordered than random, in the sense that competition for survival in the overall organism provides a direction. If some complex form is more suited to a given set of environmental conditions, then the closer an organism comes to that form, the more successful it will be. Given thousands or even millions of generations, the smallest incremental improvement will eventually become the dominant form. Note that the probability of that particular current form occurring from the random combination of all its separate components is vanishingly small, but that is not how it occurs now or how it occurred in the first place. Because it now occurs from the control of a DNA program it is highly likely to be in the form it is.

But if this is the case, how can we rely on our senses to inform us about the physical world? If eye and brain are cosmic accidents, then we can no more rely on them to inform us about the physical world than we can rely on an accidental collocation of rocks to inform us about the direction of a trail.

Here is where I see the argument as being flawed. The connotations of cosmic accident are taken into a normative context, when they were defined in a factual context. Here there is an equating of an accidental collocation with an evolutionary process. The two are not the same at all. A collocation of rocks is a truly random process. Nothing selected for the collocation, it just happened. An evolved organism has been subjected to constant pressure to survive. That it is the sum of events that occurred randomly once and now are conserved and controlled by the internal environment of the organism places it in a different category altogether.

To use the idea of relying on our senses as if there were a choice takes us to very difficult territory. First of all there is an implied circular contradiction. After spending our lives relying on these senses we then look back and say we had a choice? But did we? If we did not rely on our senses what other option was there?

As a matter of fact, we do rely on our senses. Our reliance may be mistaken in particular cases as when a bent stick appears as a snake. But in general our reliance on our senses for information about the world is justified. Our senses are thus reliable: they tend to produce true beliefs more often than not when functioning properly in their appropriate environments. We rely on our senses in mundane matters but also when we do science, and in particular when we do evolutionary biology. The problem is: How is our reliance on our sense organs justified if they are the accidental and undesigned products of natural selection operating upon random mutations? [emphasis in the original, bk]

How is justification necessary here, and why is it invalidated by the source of the senses if they are not designed? Let’s take an example of a highly reliable phenomenon that actually is more reliable than many human characteristics, Old Faithful Geyser at Yellowstone National Park. This geyser has been erupting at approximately one-hour intervals for hundreds of years. Within a given precision, we could rely on it to mark the passage of time. The cyclical nature of its behavior is due to an intricate plumbing network underground over a plume of hot magma. The magma plume underlies all of Yellowstone and is the source of the heat for its spectacular features. Ground water trickles into the plumbing and is heated. The pressure of the depth of the plumbing and the stillness of the water lead to superheating of the water, a metastable state. At some point, a small amount of the water finally boils over the lip of the geyser, presaging the eruption. This relieves pressure on the next lower amount which rapidly turns to steam and starts the eruption in rapid succession deeper and deeper layers of water flash into steam hurling the remaining water out the top of the geyser. When all the water is expelled the eruption dies and the cycle starts anew.

So was this designed? Since it is a particular instance of a general pattern for geysers, one can say it occurred as the result of the operation of geological processes which ultimately derive from physics. But it does function, in the sense that it does something dynamic at regular intervals. It is also quite complex. But is it purposive? The National Park Service relies on Old Faithful as a central part of its programs at Yellowstone. How are they justified in such reliance? The quick answer is that it has always done as expected. The deeper answer is that the processes that produce Old Faithful are understood, and can be seen to extend to the foreseeable future.

So the next question is, “Why is the source of an object a problem for justifying relying on it?” Implied is that anything accidental or unplanned is not to be relied on. Yet we rely on many things that might be considered accidental, tides, seasons, geysers, etc. As is noted, we rely on our senses. Yet they can occasionally mislead us, as the example of a stick being mistaken for a snake shows. In our reliance we do not concern ourselves with whether they were created by random processes being incorporated into organized larger processes, or by intention. They work and have always worked, with the exception of the congenitally sensorially deprived. We do not have a choice as to whether we rely on them or not, and starting in infancy we learn to rely and use their inputs to comprehend and subdue our world.

To put it in terms of rationality: How could it be rational to rely on our sense organs (and our cognitive apparatus generally) if evolutionary biology in its naturalistic (Dawkins, Dennett, et al.) guise provides a complete account of this cognitive apparatus? How could it be rational to affirm both that our cognitive faculties are reliable, AND that they are accidental products of blind evolutuionary processes? I agree with Richard Taylor who writes:

. . . it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, nonpurposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. (Metaphysics, 3rd ed. p. 104)

I would reply to this, how is it not rational to rely on something that for every individual for millions of years has provided reliable input to the organism? How does its origin in random processes that have been selected, combined, and contained in a program that provides replicative fidelity, so that it no longer is a random accident in its occurrence, automatically make it unreliable or make its reliability unjustifiable?

This suggests the following design argument:
1. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties to provide access to truths external to them.

Actually, I would say it is impossible not to rely on our cognitive and sensory facilities to provide access to truths external to them. There is no other way to access them.

2. It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties only if they embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.

Or conversely, if an object is not designed it is inherently unreliable. I have tried to show that we rely on many things that may not embody the purposes of an intelligent designer. Unless we place our cognitive facilities in a special class of objects, then we rely on them regardless of their origins as well. I do not see a valid argument that places moral strictures on the origins of something vs. its actual behavior and existence. In human terms it is similar to punishing the sins of the father unto the seventh generation, or condemning a person for where he came from not for who he is.
I would say, “It is rational to rely on our cognitive faculties because they work.”

Therefore
3. Our cognitive faculties embody the purposes of an intelligent designer.
To resist this argument, the naturalist must deny (2). But to deny (2) is to accept the rationality of believing both that our cognitive faculties arose by accident and that they produce reliable beliefs. It is to accept the rationality of something that, on the face of it, is irrational.

To make reliability a normative issue, is to take something that functions at a less than perfect level and state it must have absolute moral value in its reliability, and that only by being designed can it have that. I have tried to show that whether it appears at first irrational, on deeper inspection, it is not irrational, that our cognitive facilities may have arisen over time from the accumulation of processes that occurred at random, but once having occurred became fixed and controlled, and therefore not random. We are therefore justified in relying on them.

To place this at a very simplified abstract level, in order to invoke a designer, there is an attempt to place reliability on senses and thinking in a normative context, when to rely on them is a necessary given to live. It is placing a normative value on something about which there is no choice.

A friend of mine sent me this essay which had been forwarded to him. In light of the questions concerning the rebuilding of New Orleans this is well worth reading. I don't have the complete citation information. If anyone does, please send it to me so I may update this.

UPDATE: The reference is here. Thanks to my friend Peg for finding the link.

New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize
By George Friedman

The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.

But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn't have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers - which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.

During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.

Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina's geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson's days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.

The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products -- corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port -- including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.

A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn't come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don't get to the markets.

The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.

The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.

There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage - though not trivial -- is manageable.

The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.

What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.

The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it -- and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.

It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite -- and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then -- whatever emotional connections they may have to their home -- their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.

A city is a complex and ongoing process - one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don't simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone -- and they are not coming back anytime soon.

It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside -- and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.

The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city's population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.

Let's go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can't be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.

Katrina has taken out the port -- not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system -- the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.

It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.

New Orleans is not optional for the United States' commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.

Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city's resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.