Free Will, Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Reality 1/2

Charles St. Pierre

Free Will, Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Reality

For over 2000 years philosophers have grappled with the question: Is the universe
governed by free will, where man is master of his destiny, able to make choices which
alter his future, or is the universe deterministic, where destiny is the master of man; that
his choices, and his future have been set, ‘determined’ from his past, and present, going
back to some indefinite past?

Confronted with the conflict between free will and determinism, appeals to evidence have
been inconclusive. And, since free will and determinism are contradictory conclusions,
they might appear to derive from incompatible assumptions, assuming the conclusions
are, or at least as they seem to be, each developed by internally consistent argument. Or,
it is possible that could both be developed from a single internally inconsistent
assumption, (plus other perhaps consistent ones,) as for instance: “This is not a true
statement.” But this statement clues us in to what we are dealing with: Representations
of reality, and not the reality itself.

Statements, and any constructs of language, are necessarily representations of reality, and
not the reality itself. The mind, however, tends to ‘represent’ reality in terms of
representations, and philosophical issues are necessarily couched in the construct of
language.

But from these different representations, the mind reconstructs reality. This may be
difficult, where these different representations seem incompatible with each other. Then
the mind will tend to accept one representation, and reject the other.

Of course, all the mind has is representations of reality.

Now representations of reality are not hopelessly incongruent to reality. In fact, they are
simplifications of reality. They are an image of reality. They are presentations in a
reduced dimension of reality. And because they are a reduction of dimensions, they
suffer degeneracies: A single term, or factor in the representation, has to make service for
two, or many factors in the reality. But which of these two, or many factors, is the reality,
is destroyed in the reduction of dimensions done to form the representation.

For instance, consider the “Necker Cube,” an image, a representation, in two dimensions,
of the edges of a cube, a three dimensional object. The third dimension is destroyed in
the reduction to a two dimensional image. So when the mind looks at it, it doesn’t know
which way to reconstruct it. So it chooses one, yet often vacillates between choices.

It appears one of two ways, and its appearance has completely to do with the mental state
of the observer: The mind decides how to reconstruct the third dimension. But the fact
that two possible reconstructions of reality are possible results from the destruction of the
information in the third dimension in the first place.
Free Will, Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Reality 2/2
Charles St. Pierre

Now consider that the representation, in the mind, of all of reality is like a Necker Cube.
Its image, its representations in the mind a result of the necessary destruction of many of
its dimensions, a necessary and unavoidable action of the senses. The mind then tries to
reconstruct that reality, even though essential information has been destroyed. Thus, in
any situation, the mind deals with a simplified image of that situation, and tries to
reconstruct the reality of that situation from the image. In isolation, this reconstruction
has completely to do with the mental state of the observer.

So the mind cannot accurately reconstruct the reality, from an image, without recourse to
information outside of that image. Thus it seeks alternate viewpoints, different
perspectives on the reality, with which to reconstruct the information destroyed in the
reduction of reality to the original image. It seeks multiple images, from different
perspectives, from which to reconstruct the reality. Of course, where the mind fails to do
this, where it seeks to reconstruct reality from a single image, or even just a narrow
perspective, it is almost certainly wrong, especially where the dimensions destroyed are
complicated, with many possible states. (One can argue, philosophically, that ultimately
the mind has only one perspective, it own, no matter how many places it ‘stands,’ and
thus is doomed to be almost certainly wrong, but that’s another issue.)

So what about matters on which we have only one such perspective, such as
philosophical questions? The situation is not hopeless. Often the issues are only two
sided, and reality need not be one or the other. The image, after all, need not be the image
of a concrete object. Since we are dealing with ideas, representations, simplifications of
reality, they could be, and probably are, both one and the other. (It could just be a
drawing, and neither, but here we do seem to have a definite dilemma.)

So free will is one way of seeing the Necker Cube, determinism the other. The mind
cannot easily do both. Indeed, given the discomfort of vacillation between the two states,
and the difficulty of the attaining of and maintaining of a transcendent state of mind, the
mind usually settles on one, or the other. That, of course, makes for lengthy, though
ultimately flawed, philosophical discussion. It is rather like two people on opposite sides
of a street, arguing whether a passing car went to the left or to the right. Only by rising
above their immediate circumstance, by asking the meta-questions, may they agree on a
truth.

So the meta-question here is: How does the mind reconstruct reality from the
representations it is forced to work with. And the answer is: Not always comfortably.
Were we to compare the topography of the mind to energy, we might say that free will
and determinism are each one of two low energy states, valleys, while the ’higher’ truth
is on the saddle between them. The mind will thus tend to settle into one of these states,
because the saddle is unstable, and thus, in the mind, a source of cognitive dissonance.

Charles Gregory St. Pierre

08-18-10
Free Will, Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Reality 3/3
Charles St. Pierre