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Determinism
The conviction that every occurrence is strictly bound by laws of nature that in some mysterious way are encoded in the Universe even before the Big Bang. The future is therefore closed and both time and all forms of will and choice are deeply illusory. Determinism dominates the Western history of ideas from Plato to Einstein but collapses at the same moment that there arises a single chance event anywhere or at any time in the Universe and, according to Niels Bohr, this occurs within quantum physics every time that potentialities are actualised. See, by way of comparison, the Bohrian opposite indeterminism.
Evolution is quite simply such a strong and captivating metaphor for many of the 19th century’s intellectuals that they very much want to make it the fundamental ethical principle, as if it were the task of the righteous in some bizarre way to speed up a history whose development is of course anyway preordained according to their own determinist conviction. For Marx, the Communist revolution of the proletariat, for example, is a deed that he must command his readers and disciples to carry out, in spite of the fact that, according to his own view, it will take place anyway because of the historical necessity that he himself and Friedrich Engels describe in their writings. In a similar manner, Comte regards his social evolutionism as so perfect that strangely enough he wants to turn it into a secular religion. Social evolutionary ideas continue to thrive in Europe up until the mass murders of Nazism and Stalinism around the mid-20th century. Then, if not before, the danger of arguing for a militant ethics based on a vulgar natural determinism and driven by alienation’s ressentiment rather than by religion’s search for benevolent dialogue with one’s fellow man, becomes manifest. In this way the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century are the dark flip side of the Enlightenment. Rationalism without consciousness of its own fundamental blind faith is, as Habermas’ gurus Horkheimer and Adorno show in Dialectic of Enlightenment, literally lethal for humanity.
Through Cantor’s revolution in mathematics and Niels Bohr’s in physics, the natural sciences land once and for all in the victory of indeterminism over determinism. But there has always been a cosmological logic that argues for indeterminism. And it is based on the ontically necessary presence of chance. In a determinist universe absolutely nothing can happen by chance, which every friend of order will realise is tautological; determinism means of course that everything is predestined in which case this of course applies without exception, otherwise the position would be untenable, including predestination itself too. Determinism thus argues that if we only know the historical conditions and the physical factors that exist and precede each course of events, we can calculate with absolute certainty how every course of events (and in principle the entire history of the world) will unfold.
This requires however that there be only one possible course of events for every set of given premises. And above all, this requires that the laws of the Universe precede the Universe itself. Including the necessary law of the law’s own existence, that is, the metalaw. If we are to take determinism seriously, we are thus mercilessly cast back into the arms of the pre-atheist god: the patriarchal creator, dualistically distinct from the rest of the Universe. And with him also follows his necessary creator, and this creator’s creator, backwards in a chain in all infinity. But no such pre-atheist god exists, as we know. The future is thereby not closed and illusory in the way that determinism both suggests and requires. Rather, it is the case that if the Universe were not open to the future, and thus indeterministic, it could never exist either. It is not just a matter of exactly the same premises in physics being able to yield more than one result, as Bohr points out. It is in fact the case that these very premises must be aleatoric in order to even be able to exist as premises at all.
The existence of the Universe per se is indeed no accident, but the fact that the Universe is constituted precisely as it is includes considerable and decisive amounts of chance. Determinism collapses at the same moment that we are confronted with the minutest unpredictability in the history of the Universe. But the history of the Universe is filled with chance, or rather filled with widely differing outcomes that are the results of defined probabilities. Even our specific universe per se represents such an accident. Not aleatorically like existence – that something rather than nothing exists is a necessity rather than an accident – but aleatorically as a detailed phenomenon, that is, as its own specific history. Or as the syntheist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux expresses the matter: “The only thing that is necessary in existence is contingency.” But contingency is then all the more necessary.
Based solely on its enormous usage in thousands and thousands of experiments, quantum mechanics is the most stable and reliable theoretical construct that has ever been tested and used in the history of the sciences. And the relationalist physics that follows in its wake emphatically invalidates Platonian and Newtonian determinism. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce predicts the coming kiss of death to determinism already a few decades before quantum physics becomes widely accepted when he launches the principle of tychism (from the Greek tyché = chance) in the 1890s. Peirce maintains that spontaneity is an inescapable fact of the Universe. After quantum physics becomes widely accepted, philosopher of science Karl Popper points out that Peirce paves the way philosophically for quantum physics’ indeterminism with his pragmatism. The militant indeterminist Daniel Dennett develops Peirce’s tychism in his book Freedom Evolves. Dennett, also inspired by Leibniz and Hume, argues that while the future is open and the world is indeterminist, everything can still have one necessary cause, since a necessary cause is not tied to just one possible effect. According to Dennett, the fact that all events have a cause is not per se a valid argument for determinism.
In Karen Barad’s radically universocentric onto-epistemology, we abandon the dividual identity and shift our focus to the Universe itself. Inspired by Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy and in particular with support from Bohr’s quantum physics, Barad completely pulverises transcendental correlationism which had dominated Western thinking since Kant. By pitting Bohr’s ontic principle of determinism against Heisenberg’s epistemic uncertainty principle, Barad opens the way for agential realism, a relationalist philosophy driven by a radical pathos for a completely new kind of potential objectivity. As for Bohr before her, the renowned waves and particles of quantum physics are only abstractions for Barad. The most important thing is not that the waves and particles are contradictory but that they are complementary. This is what is called Niels Bohr’s complementarity principle. Phenomenologically we express this by saying that the wave is a mobilist phenomenon, while the particle is an eternalist phenomenon.
But it is not just Foucault and his successors that inspire Barad. From another of her predecessors, Donna Haraway, she borrows the idea that the diffraction of wave motions is a better metaphor for thinking than reflection. Ontology, epistemology, phenomenology and ethics are all influenced radically and fundamentally by the new universocentric perspective. They all interact in the new onto-epistemology around agential realism. Quantum physics radically breaks away space–time from Newtonian determinism. With this shift it is also necessary to abandon the idea of geometry giving us an authentic picture of reality. It is with the aid of topology rather than through geometry that we can do syntheist metaphysics justice, Barad argues. Neither time nor space exist a priori as transcendental, determined givens, before or outside any phenomena, which is of course what Kant imagines. Time is not a thread of patiently lined-up and evenly dispersed intervals, and space is not an empty container in which matter can be gathered. The role of the engine of metaphysics is shouldered by non-linear network dynamics, which drives the equally non-linear event, rather than the old linear history, which is supposed to drive the equally linear progress. Entheist duration is thus also a dynamic, not a linear, phenomenon.
Cause and effect arise through intra-activity within the phenomena. According to Bohr, cause and effect are not deterministic, nor do they perform in any absolute freedom. Cause and effect operate with varying degrees of probability in openness to the future. Exclusions in every intra-acting movement close the possibility of all forms of determinism and keep the future open. Agential realism is thus radically indeterministic, but does not on that account permit any free will in the classical sense. Free will namely presumes that everything desirable is possible, but this is of course never the case since every individual process comprises an infinite number of exclusions and takes place in a situation which is defined precisely by its limitations. Thus all the fancy talk about free will is pointless. All the more since no Cartesian cogito exists that might be able to exercise this free will, if it were to exist in spite of everything. However, free choice is a credible and extremely interesting concept for syntheist ethics; however free choice is an entirely different concept to free will.
Kant is thus right about factiality, things might be completely different from how things stand for the moment. But Kant’s rationalism – his blind faith that everything that occurs is subordinate to a divine wisdom, and that his own human ratio is fully sufficient to embrace everything that happens given time – results in his never developing this factiality fully and not drawing the inevitable conclusion. It is thus Kant’s unfounded rationalism which forces him into determinism, not the other way around. Therefore the relationalists must also leave Kant behind and seek other allies in the history of philosophy. The syntheist Quentin Meillassoux finds such an allied thinker in the empiricist David Hume – one of Kant’s strongest rivals in the 18th century – not least for the reason that Hume provides support for the conviction that one and the same material and existential vantage point can give rise to an infinite number of different outcomes. Existence outside the correlation in question is neither stable nor fixed and therefore philosophy cannot in all honesty pretend that this is the case. Hume and Meillassoux are thereby joined in a strong factiality, from which Meillassoux constructs the philosophical school that goes under the name speculative materialism.
Hume and Meillassoux depart from Kant’s troublesome, incorrect determinism and opens up philosophy to the empirically established indeterminism in Bohrian quantum physics. It should be noted here that Leibniz presages relationalism even before Hume does so with his principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz was not only one of the most significant and most original predecessors among the philosophers, but also an innovative and brilliant mathematician. He built a Monadology, a kind of early variant of the dialectics between eternalism and mobilism, which precedes Kantian Platonism. Above all, with his credibility within the natural sciences, Leibniz created the most clearly defined mobilist alternative to the contemporaneously developed Newtonian totalism. The metaphysical antagonism between Leibniz and Newton presages the struggle within our own contemporary physics between on the one hand relationalism and its cosmological Darwinism, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more complex; and on the other hand relativism and its fixation with the second law of thermodynamics, with a universe that is constantly becoming more and more simplified as it expands and disperses.
Syntheologically, we express this as Einstein in practice doing everything he can to kill off Entheos, the divinity of process theology, and he must then in the name of consistency also try to kill off Atheos and Syntheos while he is at it. But Einstein never succeeds anywhere in proving any phenomenon in existence that moves backwards in time. However relativist time is, the arrow of time survives the block universe’s mythological attack and strengthens in fact its Zurvanite and Chronist magic. Time has still only one direction: forwards. Entheos keeps the syntheological pyramid in motion and is travelling with determination onwards to Syntheos. Physical eternalism and the Einsteinian block universe are, in fact, impossible to combine with quantum physics’ most basic axiom: Niels Bohr’s principle of indeterminacy. A block universe requires a compact determinism – without real time there is no real change – the future is by necessity as fixed in advance as the past is frozen in history. However, this is an absolute impossibility according to Bohr and his relationalist followers, since physics according to the principle of indeterminacy is incomplete, and that fact in itself is incompatible with a block universe where everything, without the least exception, invariably has already happened.
The consequence of this is that, if we try to avoid asha or anchibasie as an onto-epistemological foundation, it becomes necessary to deny all forms of motion at all. This means that all motion without exception must be regarded as illusory. Parmenides is the Greek philosopher who draws this logically necessary conclusion, and with Parmenides the revolt against Heraclitus’ pioneering, counter-intuitive, but nevertheless logical insights is born. Parmenides’ ambition is fulfilled by the physicists Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein when they create a world view where all motion is illusory in a Platonist block universe, where the various forms of laws and determinism in a frozen space–time precede everything else. The problem is however that mathematics does not precede physics. Existence is not primarily mathematical (ideal) and secondarily physical (actual), as Plato claims. It is merely physical. We quite simply do not live in some form of Einsteinian block universe, however tidy this might look on the drawing board; we live de facto in a considerably more complicated Bohrian network universe.
Reductionism quite simply assumes that the Universe and its history follow a preordained trajectory, which in some mysterious way is preprogrammed even in the Big Bang. Bizarrely enough, the actual creation of the Universe must therefore be both well-planned, immediate and long since concluded. Kauffman replies that this absurd idea – the reductionist illusion – arises because philosophers and scientists are fixated on only following the hierarchies from the top down, as if things cannot be anything other or more and greater than the sum of their constituent parts. But if one instead studies the hierarchies from the bottom up along the arrow of time – contrary to the masochistic fantasy of how spiritual power and thereby also physical existence must be structured from the top down – one discovers how suddenly arising emergences change the entire playing field once and for all through contingently introducing new phenomena into existence, which in turn contingently give rise to new paradigms in history. Emergences quite simply generate new laws and rules in at least their own region of the Universe, without these specific behavioural patterns having existed anywhere else previously. Thereby it is proven that the arrow of time is real – rather than illusory, as Plato, Newton and Einstein imagine it to be – and determinism is thus dead.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58