The American South (Part II)

The 1860 election was an oddity, similar in key aspects to the 1912 election, but with far grimmer consequences. That year, the Republican Party ran its second presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was, for a Republican, moderate on the issue of slavery. He opposed it, but proposed no actions against it except a pledge that all new states created under his watch would be free states.

Despite this, his candidacy provoked fury in the South. He would probably have lost the election with a respectable showing, as John C. Frémont had in 1856, except that the Democratic Party split in two that year, with two nominating conventions presenting two candidates for the White House. This happened when Southern delegates walked out of the Democratic National Convention — twice — over a refusal to adopt a plank that would have forcibly extended slavery into territories where the inhabitants voted against it. Eventually, the pro-slavery Democrats held their own convention and nominated their own candidate.

It’s been suggested that the fissure in the party was deliberately intended to throw the election to Lincoln, in the hope of provoking secession. Certainly the demand that slavery be extended where it wasn’t wanted was a radical proposal and violated the concept of popular sovereignty, of democracy itself, and the ideals on which the United States was ostensibly founded, but then, so did slavery and so does the entire authoritarian culture of the South. Whether this conspiracy theory is correct or not, the outcome is clear enough. Lincoln won a majority of the Electoral College with a plurality but not a majority of the popular vote.

While the 1860 election resembled the 1912 election in this respect, it more closely resembles the 2008 election in its aftermath, but again, the consequences were far more dire. Between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, seven Southern states seceded from the United States. These states came together and formed the Confederate States of America, adopting a constitution almost identical to that of the United States, but with three significant changes, two of which showed the nature of Southern society. One of these changes was to protect slavery from interference by either the Confederate government or any state government. A second was a change to  Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution which enumerates the powers of Congress. In the U.S. Constitution, that clause reads in pertinent part:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States . . . To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

The Confederate Constitution altered this to read:

The Congress shall have power To lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises for revenue, necessary to pay the debts, provide for the common defense, and carry on the Government of the Confederate States; but no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry . . . To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes; but neither this, nor any other clause contained in the Constitution, shall ever be construed to delegate the power to Congress to appropriate money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce; except for the purpose of furnishing lights, beacons, and buoys, and other aids to navigation upon the coasts, and the improvement of harbors and the removing of obstructions in river navigation;

In this change we see reflected the fact that the South held to the paradigm of agrarian civilization (minus monarchy and hereditary nobility, but I would say only because the United States forbade both and the South had become used to that situation). All government efforts to spur industrialization were forbidden, except those that facilitated the moving of cash crops to market.

(The third significant difference between the two was that the Confederate Constitution limited the president to a single six-year term.)

The Civil War

While the secession of the South is understandable given the economic and political realities, a much greater mystery is presented by the attack on Fort Sumter. Lincoln would have faced popular opposition to using force to restore the Union otherwise. Why provoke a war that, given the realities of manpower and industrial capacity, the Confederacy was almost sure to lose? Again one is tempted to conspiracy hypotheses, but in fact the action may be adequately explained by hot-headed stupidity and that’s more likely what happened. Foreign countries have sometimes made this mistake about American character, misunderstanding the swiftness with which opposition to war can turn to fervent support after the nation is attacked. The South had no excuse, but made the same error — which once again points up how foreign that region of the country is to the rest of the United States.

After the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln summoned and federalized the militias of the loyal states and planned an invasion of the South to restore the Union. This action provoked the secession of four more states and began the most gruesome war in U.S. history. The final death toll from the war was more than 600,000 on both sides, meaning that America lost at least twice as many people in the Civil War as in World War II, from a much smaller population base. The Confederacy did surprisingly well, likely because the military tradition of the Southern quasi-aristocrats meant that the best military leadership of the United States was Southern and joined the rebellion, but in the end, inevitably, the Union won.

During the war, with the Southern Senators and Representatives absent, Congress passed measures promoting industrialization that had been blocked by the South up to then. The building of the trans-continental railroad, the creation of a new national banking system, the Morrill Tariff, and the Homestead Act all emerged during this time. Again we see that the conflict between the South and the rest of the nation was one between an agrarian economy and an industrial capitalist economy, with slavery the fulcrum of the conflict and the moral flash point.

Reconstruction

After the war, the United States added three hugely important amendments to the Constitution. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment guaranteed equal protection under the law regardless of race, defined all persons born or naturalized here as U.S. citizens, and extended the protections of the Bill of Rights to cover actions by state governments. The 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race or “previous condition of servitude.” These amendments together with the government’s reconstruction policies sought nothing less than the eradication of the South as a separate culture and its assimilation to the rest of the United States.

It was an ambitious goal that could not succeed, or not within a reasonable time frame. In the end, the Southern elite adjusted to their loss of the war and implemented laws and economic structures that preserved the authoritarian, racially stratified culture of the South despite the end of slavery. The former slaves were kept bound to forced labor by economic arrangements amounting to a kind of serfdom. Their right to vote was curtailed by a mix of Byzantine restrictive laws and clandestine terror.

One thing needs to be clearly understood. The Civil War was fought over slavery, but if the North-South conflict had only been about slavery, it would have ended with the passage of the 13th Amendment outlawing the practice. Having lost the war and lost the slaves, the planter interests would have faded away and the South would have become just like the rest of America. That didn’t happen. Slavery was a large part of what created the authoritarian culture of the Confederacy, but it exists independently of that institution and encompasses much more.

Slavery as such was gone. The hold of the South on the federal government was also gone. The industrialization of the country outside the South proceeded at a rapid pace. By the end of the 19th century, the United States had become a first-tier economic power. The South, however, languished behind, as the entrenched planter interests maintained their grip on power and preserved, as best they could, the agrarian character of the South. While in the 20th century the United States for the most part entered the classic dispute between capitalist and socialist ideas and between owners and the working class, the South stayed stuck in a pre-capitalist condition and acted as a drag weight on the nation’s evolution.

The South and 20th Century Politics

The Democratic Party remained the party of the South after the Civil War, which cost it dearly in power over the national government. Between the presidential election of 1868, won by Republican Ulysses S. Grant, and that of 1928, won by Republican Herbert Hoover, Democrats won the White House exactly four times. Grover Cleveland, a Northern Democrat (from New York) who was indistinguishable from conservative Republicans apart from the party label, won a razor-thin victory in 1884 against a weak GOP candidate, lost his reelection bid in 1888, and barely won a second term in 1892. Woodrow Wilson was the beneficiary of the 1912 election anomaly mentioned above; that year, it was the Republicans who split, with former president Theodore Roosevelt running on a third-party ticket against both Wilson and the GOP nominee, President W.H. Taft. With Roosevelt and Taft splitting the Republican vote, Wilson was able to win an Electoral College majority on a popular vote plurality. He won reelection in 1916 on an implied promise to keep America out of World War I, a promise he did not keep.

Through all this time, the South used its limited influence over Congress to protect its culture and institutions from federal encroachment and prevent effective enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments in the South.

The Great Depression began a process that would change all of that. The Depression was capitalism’s great failure and fostered a move towards socialism. Because the Republicans at that time were committed to capitalism and unable to make the necessary changes, it fell to the Democrats to seize the political opportunity, which happened of course under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt put together a new political coalition capable of winning national elections, something Democrats had been denied for decades. That coalition included labor, women, and minorities — as well as the white South. As with many political alliances, this one featured strange bedfellows.

The alliance held together through the Depression and World War II, but began to come apart after the war. President Truman’s executive order desegregating the armed services in 1948 started the ungluing. The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 in a Democratic Congress and its signature by a Democratic president (from the South, no less) finalized it. The South was up for grabs after that. But in order to grab it, the Republican Party had to adopt positions that violated its founding principles and the stance for racial equality that had defined the party from inception.

It did. And that brings us to the position we are in today, with the neo-Confederates having swallowed the Party of Lincoln in one of the most ironic hostile takeovers in history. The Confederacy is using that power in an attempt to demolish the United States government from within.

Next week: The American South (Part III), about the approaching demographic demise of the Confederacy as a separate subculture, and its desperate attempt to take the United States with it to oblivion.

The American South (Part I)

The United States has a reputation abroad for being a nation of ignorant, backwards loonies who advocate policies the rest of the advanced nations abandoned decades ago. We are, say foreigners, Christian fundamentalists who trust corporations much more than we should, are quick to resort to military force in answer to international conflicts where diplomacy, persuasion, and economic force would be more appropriate, and crass commercial absolutists who kow-tow at the altar of rich people.

There’s some truth to all of this, I must confess. But that truth is localized. It isn’t really true of Americans in general, but it is true — all of it — about one region of the country, roughly contiguous with the eleven states that seceded from the United States in 1861 and were forcibly reincorporated in it in 1865.

Few Americans understand just how different the South is culturally and politically from the rest of America. (Or used to be, and still is to some degree. There are signs that this is changing as the South becomes more urban and more racially diverse.) It doesn’t come down to any one simple characteristic, positive or negative. It’s not that the South is racist (although in large measure it is). It’s not that the South is religious (although it is). It’s not that the South is Republican (in fact, for most of its history, it wasn’t). It does go back to the institution of slavery as the cause of much of this, but it precedes that, and the lasting effects of slavery cover a lot more ground than race relations.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Those words were written by a Virginian and a slave-owning planter, but he was a very complicated man with a compartmentalized and conflicted mind. Jefferson believed many things intellectually that he did not live. In that passage, he captured the central ideology that defines most of America. But it does not define the American South. In the South (although again, this is changing), all men are not created equal. Rich men are better than poor men, white men are better than non-white men, and all men are better than women. Also, Christians are better than non-Christians and Protestants are better than Catholics. Since all are not created equal, certainly government doesn’t exist to protect their equal rights.

The next passage in the Declaration, however, meets full agreement in the South:

“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Oh, yes. Certainly the South agrees that when a government fails to deliver the goods, it’s the right of the people — or anyway, of the better people — to alter or abolish it, and that’s what they’ve been trying to do ever since they lost control over it in the mid 19th century. The aim of the neo-Confederate subculture, which exercises increasing control over the Republican Party today, is to destroy the United States.

A look at the history of the American South reveals how this peculiar culture-within-a-culture developed and evolved over the several centuries of its existence.

Colonial Founding

The United States, or what would become that, was founded as a group of English colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America, but that didn’t happen as a result of any coherent and consistent British policy and as a consequence the colonies were not all of a piece. Roughly speaking, the English colonies inside what is now the United States may be divided into three groups.

New England was settled mainly by Puritans in the early to middle 17th century. These people, in American historical mythos, left England in search of “religious freedom.” Actually, they left because England had too much religious freedom for their taste and they wanted to establish a theocracy, which proved impossible in the mother country. While their co-believers back home were chopping off a king’s head and briefly overthrowing the monarchy, the Puritans in America established colonies as religious experiments. Over time and generations, New England lost this Puritan character but retained a distrust of monarchical authority that would prove significant in the late 18th century.

The Mid-Atlantic region was originally settled not by the English but by the Dutch. It was a lucrative commercial settlement that was absorbed by the British in the mid-17th century and retained that commercial character into modern times. It’s no accident that Wall Street is in New York City.

The Southern colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia) were, unlike the other two sections, founded by the British crown as royal colonies. Four of them (all except Virginia) were founded under the name “province” rather than “colony.” Royal charters gave privileged status to particular English nobles, so that this region of the country felt more impact from the British ruling class than the other two.

The South was established deliberately to compete with other European powers for land and wealth. Its climate and soil proved suitable for growing cash crops (tobacco, sugar, and, later on, cotton) and the entire rationale for establishing the colonies was to grow valuable commodities and enrich the English nobility and the British government. In short, it was an exploitative enterprise from the beginning, unlike New England or the Mid-Atlantic.

Growing cash crops requires a lot of labor, which in the old agrarian paradigm meant forced labor. The growers tried enslaving Native Americans for the purpose, but that proved difficult as escape was too easy. White indentured servants (temporary slaves) proved a workable approach for a while, but eventually the expedient of enslaving Africans was adopted. This was ideal from the planters’ perspective, if less so for the unfortunate Africans. These were proto-civilized people who knew how to grow crops, and they were far from their homelands or any sympathetic society, and visibly different from the local population, which made escape difficult.

Even before African slavery began, the South acquired one of its distinctive characteristics as a result of its founding enterprise. It was authoritarian, as a culture founded on forced labor must be. The idea of freedom as most Americans think of it, and indeed as the plain meaning of the word suggests, is foreign to the original culture of the South, for which freedom meant failure of the entire reason the colonies existed.

Religion was one method used to enforce order. Of course, the South was not (and is not) uniquely religious or especially more so than the rest of America. But the type of religious belief prevailing in the South was different from what was found elsewhere, and still is. As a tool for the enforcement of order and social stratification, Southern Christianity was and is more authoritarian and less inclined to challenge the wealthy elite than forms of the religion found in other parts of the country. One finds in some cases, such as the Baptists, distinctive denominations, one for the South and the other for outside it. The Evangelical denominations are almost all Southern in origin.

The culture of the South, then, was from the beginning authoritarian, and as African slavery became entrenched, that authoritarianism took racial form. It was never entirely racial, however. Class and gender distinctions have also been and remain very important in Southern culture. Reform that addresses racism itself, while important, does not go to the heart of the matter, which is the authoritarian character of the culture.

The South in the Early United States

During the War of Independence, British strategy recognized the distinctive (and more loyal) character of the South and employed it in an attempt to retain power in the colonies. The strategy ultimately failed, but in fact the South was more fiercely divided between loyalists and rebels than other parts of the country.

After the war, the failure of the original U.S. government led to the drafting of the Constitution. We can see the economic and political disputes between the South and the rest of the country in passages of that document, from the infamous “three-fifths of a person” clause to the prohibition on ending the slave trade before 1808 to the structure of Congress itself, for which the conflict between the relatively populous Southern states and relatively underpopulated New England led to the two-chamber compromise that exists today.

Because of that population difference, the South dominated the United States government during the period after the Constitution’s founding. The political conflict ran along classic Marxist lines between the feudal/agrarian South and the industrial capitalist North, as it increasingly became. A capitalist economy produces more wealth than an agrarian one, and supports a larger population despite the superiority of Southern climate and soil (particularly when the Northern capitalist culture absorbed the splendid wheat lands of the Midwest as the nation expanded westward). The political balance in Congress began to tip against the South as the first half of the 19th century ran its course. Moral opposition to slavery as an institution arose. The South attempted to expand slavery, and authoritarian Southern culture with it, westward, and succeeded to a degree, but on balance the mainstream American culture was winning that race. The Mexican-American War, which incorporated California as a free state and opened the way to a continental empire, accelerated that process.

The development of most of the Western territories as non-Southern states would eventually mean that Southern dominance of Congress would break. While Congress lacked the authority to outlaw slavery as such, it could have used its power to tax and to regulate commerce to make the institution unprofitable. Eventually, the magic proportion of three-quarters of the states might come to oppose slavery as new free states were added, and that would allow a Constitutional amendment outlawing slavery.

The dominant political party in these years was the Democratic Party, which primarily served the slave-owning Southern constituency. The capitalist interests were represented by first the Federalist Party and then the Whig Party. In the 1850s, former Whigs came together joining their commercial and industrial interests with an opposition to slavery and founded the new Republican Party. For the first time, a major party in American politics made the abolition of slavery a central plank of its platform. (Given the current neo-Confederate dominance of the party, that history is ironic to say the least. But it’s true.)

The writing was on the wall. The planter interests in the South, facing eventual loss of the political game, decided to upend the board. That was the first time that, faced with loss of control over the federal government, the South decided to destroy it. It would not be the last time.

Next week: The American South (Part II) dealing with the Civil War and its aftermath.

Broadening This Blog

This is a brief post to acknowledge a departure from the way I originally envisioned this blog. I was going to stay away from politics and economics and stick to spirituality, philosophy, and fantasy storytelling. Those who have encountered me in other contexts know that this resolve didn’t come from a lack of interest in politics or economics, or a lack of opinions and knowledge. I was just trying to focus on a particular area of thought and avoid drifting all over the landscape of my global interests, but you know what?

Screw that.

You can’t really separate politics from spirituality. You can and should keep organized religion out of government, but that’s not the same thing. Part of the transformation emerging from spirituality is an increase in caring, and if you care you’re political. Certainly I am. And I’m not saying this blog will turn into a political one from here on; I’ll continue writing on topics of spirituality, philosophy, and fantasy as I feel inclined. But right now I feel inclined to do something else. I’ve added a new category, Politics & Economics, to accompany the existing ones of Fantasy Storytelling, Philosophy, Spirituality, and Book Review.

I originally wrote a treatment of economic evolution intending it to be a post, but on reflection it’s rather long for a post (over 4000 words). Rather than break it up into several posts, I’ve decided to publish it as a page. You can find it here.

Free Will

I’m going to weigh in now on a subject with a lot of philosophical controversy: the question of whether free will is real or illusory.

We all have the sense that we have free will. That is, in our subjective experience, it seems very much as if we approach choices and make them consciously, and that for any situation where we make choice A, we could have made choice B instead. This common-sense perception leads to a philosophical debate involving free will and determinism with essentially three positions:

• Compatibilism is the belief that determinism and free will are compatible (that is, both can be true). Compatibilists assert that in a free choice, it isn’t true that one could have chosen B instead of A, but say that the completely determined results of our own mental processes, which inevitably choose one or the other, constitute free will. In this view, free will means only that one’s choice is not completely determined by any outside influence. It is completely determined, but since one’s own mental processes are a factor in making that determination, that constitutes free will.
• Incompatibilism is the belief that free will requires indeterminacy, and this takes two forms. One of these is hard determinism, the belief that free will requires indeterminacy, that the universe is deterministic, and that consequently free will does not exist. Our subjective perceptions of it are illusory.
• The third position is metaphysical libertarianism, which is the other side of incompatibilism. Metaphysical libertarians argue that the universe is indeterminate, and free will exists as a manifestation of that indeterminacy.

My own position is the third one, with a couple of twists. I accept that free will and determinism are incompatible, although what might be called “unfree will” and determinism are not. If the mental processes leading to a choice are significant but determined, then we have will (or something that might be called that), but not free will. I observe, and will discuss below, that the universe is in fact indeterminate, and believe that free will arises as a function of that indeterminacy.

One of the critiques of metaphysical libertarianism is that what we are calling “free will” is actually randomness, and not what we usually mean by free will at all. When confronted with a choice, we don’t think of this as if we were rolling dice to choose among the options, but as if we were weighing the options and making a conscious choice on the basis of either reason or feelings (or both).

This is on the surface a valid criticism, but I believe it can be resolved by introducing the concept of perspective. Free will and randomness are both manifestations of indeterminacy, but one is experienced in the first person and the other observed in the third person. This difference in perspective is the only difference between the two; essentially, they’re the same phenomenon observed or experienced from two different points of view. I’ll come back to this in a bit, as it’s the main point of this argument, but before that I want to detour into philosophicl physics and discuss whether the universe is or is not determined.

I’m not going to go much into theological determinism, which depends on a belief in an omniscient God (a belief I do not hold), but will observe that the concept of perspective resolves this as well. We can simultaneously have free will from our own perspective, and be determined from that of God.

Determinism: An Operational Definition

When we say that the universe is determined or not determined, what do we mean? Traditionally determinism is defined in terms of cause and effect, so that we say set of conditions X causes outcome Y with no possibility of variation Y2. This is somewhat problematical in that the idea of causation itself is impossible to prove; all we can verify is consistent correlation. I may observe that every time I hold a rubber ball aloft and release it, it falls to the ground, and refer to the theory of gravity as expounded by Newton or by Einstein to explain how the nearby mass of the Earth “causes” the ball to fall. All I can really say, though, is that the ball falls to the ground every time it’s released while I’m standing on the Earth and does not fall if I release it aboard a spacecraft in orbit. From the standpoint of science, what matters is the mathematical equation describing this behavior of the ball. The idea of causation as such isn’t necessary or implied.

Setting causation aside, then, we can define determinism in terms of consistent and inflexible correlation: set of conditions X is followed by set of conditions Y, with no possibility of variation Y2. This means that, with perfect knowledge of conditions X, we can predict conditions Y without possibility of error. If we can (in principle) do this, then the transition from conditions X to conditions Y is determined. If all events in nature follow this pattern, then the universe as a whole is determined.

The qualifier “in principle” above acknowledges that our ability to measure conditions X is not perfect, and we may also be in error about the process by which conditions X become conditions Y. Either of these would result in a failure to accurately predict the event without violating determinism. In that case, conditions X do lead invariably to conditions Y, but we failed to predict the outcome accurately either because we were in error about the starting conditions, or because there was a flaw in our theory about how things work. We may call this technical unpredictability. The events are unpredictable not because they’re genuinely indeterminate, but because of failure on our part.

Determinism fails for any given event under one or both of two conditions. Either perfect knowledge of starting conditions is impossible to achieve under any circumstances, regardless of how good our measurement tools become (uncertainty of initial conditions) or the event’s unfolding is described by indeterminate equations (indeterminacy of process). Either of these means that the world is genuinely indeterminate, at least in part.

What appears to be the case is that indeterminacy of process is not true, but uncertainty of initial conditions is.

The Uncertainty Principle and Chaos

Most people have heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: the hypothesis (well confirmed by now) that the product of the uncertainty of any two so-called “Heisenberg pairs” of attributes — most famously the position and momentum of a moving object, although there are others — must always be at least equal to Planck’s constant. We can, in theory, achieve perfect knowledge of the position of a moving object, but only by increasing uncertainty about where it’s going (momentum) to infinity, and vice versa. If we know exactly where it is, it could be going anywhere; if we know exactly what direction it’s going and how fast, then it could be anywhere in the universe right now. Or, more normally, we can have some kind of idea of both, but not perfect knowledge of either one.

Planck’s constant is a very, very tiny number indeed, and is significant only at the level of subatomic particles. Still, the same rule applies to macroscopic motion as well. Our uncertainty about the current position of the moon times our uncertainty about its trajectory and velocity must also be at least equal to Planck’s constant. That’s a ridiculously trivial uncertainty (the uncertainty caused by technical errors in measurement is much greater), and doesn’t stop us from accurately predicting the moon’s orbit and phases for practical purposes. But philosophically, we have to acknowledge that the moon’s motion is indeterminate, even if the parameters of the indeterminacy are of no practical significance.

There’s more than this happening, though. Chaos mathematics describes processes in nature that are unpredictable on a macroscopic scale. These are deterministic equations, but are infinitely sensitive to the starting conditions, so that extremely tiny errors in measurement result in vast errors in prediction. Chaotic functions describe things in nature that certainly seem to be indeterminate: turbulence, for example. If one explores the literature, one finds the assertion that these are actually deterministic processes, based on the fact that the equations describing them are deterministic. That is, indeterminacy of process is false.

But if these processes are infinitely sensitive to initial conditions, which they are, and if we add the uncertainty principle into our understanding of them, which we should, then we can see that uncertainty of initial conditions is true, and therefore the processes are indeterminate, their deterministic mathematical description notwithstanding. They are infinitely sensitive to indeterminate initial conditions — and that means the processes meet the operational definition of indeterminacy presented above. Indeterminacy of process is false, but uncertainty of initial conditions is true.

We have, therefore, an indeterminate universe. In many of its processes, the indeterminacy is of practical importance, but even where it’s not (e.g. the orbits of the planets), it still exists in nonzero value, and is therefore philosophically real.

The processes of the human brain that lead to decision-making and action are almost certainly chaotic in nature. They bear greater resemblance to the weather than to the swing of a pendulum. While this hasn’t been formally verified as far as I know, it’s what we should expect, and therefore, pending confirmation by further study, we may tentatively affirm that human behavior is indeterminate.

This leads back to the idea of perspective, and the relationship between indeterminacy and free will.

First versus Third Person Perspective

I’ve explored this concept before in the context of discussing consciousness. This is a different vector of the same concept, which may imply something about the relationship between consciousness and free will.

Free will is a concept that has meaning only in the first person. I intuitively believe that I have free will, just as I intuitively believe that I am conscious. Because you are like me in certain other respects, I tend to also believe that you are conscious and that you have free will, although strictly speaking I can’t confirm either of these. But I can imagine being you, and when I do, I imagine being conscious and having free will, just as I experience the same myself. But when we don’t think of something in terms of having a first person perspective (e.g., the weather), we don’t think of it as having free will, even if it is indeterminate. We say instead that the process is random.

When a person confronts a set of possible actions and makes a choice among them, what happens is that his brain employs knowledge of these circumstances together with memory and motivations/feelings to conclude which action is probably going to have the best outcome (or which one feels the most satisfying to take). These memories and feelings, together with perception of the circumstances themselves, constitute the initial conditions of the process, and the laws, whatever they may be (this is an area where knowledge is very crude at present), governing cognition and motivation constitute the process of decision-making itself. If, as I think likely, this brain activity is a chaotic function of some kind, or several of them, then we may suppose the processes themselves to be determined — but the initial conditions are indeterminate; it’s uncertain how we’ll perceive the set of options we face or our feelings about them. As such, the outcome is also indeterminate. We can think of this as a random function, like rolling dice. But it doesn’t feel that way, and that’s the objection that’s typically made to this idea.

But here’s the question: what would the dice feel like in “deciding” what way to fall?

It seems like a nonsensical question because we don’t conceive of dice as “feeling” like anything: they don’t have a first-person perspective. (Or if they do, it’s opaque to us.) But if they did, the indeterminacy in how they fall might seem radically different from the dice’s own point of view, than to us, observing the event in the third person.

And the same can be said of a person’s choices, with the difference that we assume the person does have a first-person perspective and we do conceive him as “feeling” like something. But consider this.

I observe someone approaching a crossroads. He takes the turn to the left rather than going straight ahead, going back, or turning to the right. I have no way to predict beforehand which turn he will take, so from my perspective, observing his behavior in the third person, it seems to be random. He, on the other hand, knows why he chose to go left, and so even if he didn’t know ahead of time which way he would go, his choice doesn’t seem random at all to his own first-person perspective.

To make this clearer, let’s assume he had a valid reason to make any of the four possible choices. Straight ahead, the path leads to his home. The right turn leads to his bank, the left to a bar, and the way back to his place of employment. He might approach the intersection, find he is short on cash, and turn right to make a withdrawal at the bank. He might decide to go have a few drinks. He might decide instead to have a quiet evening, and go home. Or he might discover that he left his keys at the office, and turn around and go back. These initial conditions are not predictable, and so his choice is also unpredictable with perfect certainty, even to him. His action is indeterminate. But it still doesn’t seem, from his own first-person perspective, to be random. But it does seem random to me, looking at the whole thing from the outside.

Indeterminacy can apply to any process regardless of point of view. Randomness, however, exists only in the third person, while choice exists only in the first. His choice is indeterminate, but doesn’t seem random because, from his own first-person perspective, it isn’t. But it’s still the same process that I, viewing it from without, can describe in the third person as random.

It’s random from one perspective. It’s free will from the other. And that, I believe, is the resolution of the problem.

Virtual God

An idea came up in the course of writing Refuge Volume Two: The Ingathering that I want to explore here in a non-fictional manner. The idea involves God as a virtual reality.

The idea of God, a cosmic entity with  mind who created everything and loves and guides us, is on one level a metaphor. It’s a crude model describing religious experience. The explanation is that there’s this being, God, who created you, and you contacted him with your mind. Other non-dismissive explanations for religious experience are possible. For example, if one arrives at panpsychism as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, as I argue makes the best sense (here), spiritual experience involves becoming aware of the cosmos as a living consciousness, and of one’s own identity as one with it. This bears some resemblance to non-theistic ideas such as those of Hinayana Buddhism or Taoism. “God” is then a metaphor for the cosmos itself. As usually conceived, God does not exist.

But there’s another possibility — a purely speculative possibility.

What if God doesn’t exist yet?

Deities in Magical Practice

In real-world magic, a lot of practitioners deal with deities in the plural. The magic user “invokes” (calls in, literally) the deity, experiencing heightened levels of a type of magical power associated with it, and employs the power either to alter his own consciousness or to achieve some practical end achievable through the alteration of probability. Among the monotheistic, the tendency is to refer to these beings as angels (or sometimes as demons, compelled to service through God’s name and sigils of power) rather than as deities, but it amounts to the same thing in practice. Pagan magicians call on the deities of various pantheons openly, of course.

Various ideas circulate in magical circles regarding what deities are. Not all magic users believe that the deities they invoke are literal beings separate from themselves. Perhaps a more common belief is that the magic user creates the deity via empowered imagination. The deity is closely associated with some natural source of magical power (the sun, the Earth, nature, the sea, lightning, love, war, intelligence and knowledge, whatever) and by personifying that force, the magician is able to talk to it and ask its assistance. The deity emerges from the mind of the magician, draws power from the natural world through its association with some significant aspect of it, and gains a measure of independent existence as a result of that power-up.

What’s more, one magician doing this is less powerful than many. This is why it’s useful to invoke a deity that has actually been worshiped in the past: the imaginary form is empowered by others who have already created it, and that makes it potentially stronger than a deity created by the magician anew. (Which doesn’t mean there might not be other reasons to do that. But that’s outside the scope of this post.)

The idea of the Virtual God is extrapolated from this.

The Birth Of God

God, in the monotheistic sense, would be a deity created by magic — that is, by the empowered imagination of magic users — associated with the cosmos in its entirety, and on a vast scale. Multiple magicians, as noted above, create a more powerful deity than one working alone.

If we extrapolate that idea to whole planets full of magicians, all of them pouring their mana into the manifestation of God, we might at some point reach a critical threshold where God becomes so powerful that he transcends the normal limitations of magic. All magic operates by altering the probabilities of indeterminate events. Normally, this applies only to events that are indeterminate to the naked eye, so to speak, but in theory all macroscopic events are the products of subatomic events that are themselves indeterminate. The ability to alter the probabilities associated with quantum events is outside normal magical competence, but if it could be done, the result would deserve the title of miracle. Parting the Red Sea. Raising the dead. Walking on water.

Anything. Anything at all.

God As Virtual Reality

Now, let’s suppose that what I described above is possible. It clearly hasn’t happened yet. But let’s say that someday it might, if enough intelligent beings throughout the universe emerge into benign consciousness and will it to be.

That possibility means that at some possible future date, God may exist, even though It does not exist at present. And in that possible future, God is endowed with awesome magical power.

Now, one thing about magical power is that it time-travels. That’s how it’s possible to use magic to predict future events. There have also been experiments showing a PK effect (which is a misnomer, by the way; no actual kinesis takes place, only alteration of probability) occurring before the person causing it makes the effort.

Magical power moves and operates in its own frame of reference, which I call association space. It’s not bound and limited by space-time the way energy is. The arrow of time, therefore, isn’t absolute for it. And that means that, while God doesn’t exist at this time, Its existence in a possible future — so long as that future remains possible — means that Its magical power can, to an extent, influence events in the here and now. One thing It would certainly do is to make Its own birth more likely by influencing the indeterminate events in Its past. That would include the mental processes of those who might bring It into being, or whose thoughts and behavior might lead to conditions where that becomes possible.

And so the Virtual God becomes another model explaining certain kinds of religious experience. It’s certainly an experience of cosmic consciousness, an awareness of one’s own true identity.

But maybe — just maybe — it’s also tuning in to the mind of a real God, who doesn’t exist yet, but someday may.

Do I believe this? Not necessarily. But it’s a fun idea to play with. And I’m certainly willing to include it in my stories.