Materialism, Free Will and Mormonism

Speaker 1

We’re going to go back to Adam Davis now for a meditation on the implications of materialism, which in the physical world can easily be translated into determinism. So if the universe, including its spirit matter, is material, are we ensnared in a deterministic universe or is there a way out? Adam.

Adam Davis

So as mentioned, I will be talking a little bit about materialism, and so far materialism has been one of the basic assumptions of a lot of our discussion. And I'll mention what we mean by materialism in a little bit for those that might not be clear. But as I was thinking about all these things, I came across one of a certain problem, and that is that while we like materialism, we also enjoy the idea of free will. This is something that we just don’t want to give up, the idea that we have free will. And indeed, our theology demands it. We call it moral agency or other names, free agency, and so on. So we have to have free will.

Adam Davis

So free will is not something that is easy. Since the earliest days of philosophers, this is a subject that has been debated. As long as we’ve had recordings of philosophy, free will has been a topic of discussion. And it continues to be the discussion today. It’s-- if you try to read everything on free will, you would not be able to. It is not something that is finally and cleanly resolved. As much as we like that we have a free will, the idea, it is not philosophically granted.

Adam Davis

Okay, so materialism is not the hedonism of buying and selling and stuff like that. That’s not what we’re talking about here. Another way we use is physicalism to distinguish it. But the idea of materialism is that the entirety of the universe is stuff, okay? Not just the rocks, not just the stars, but our thoughts, our emotions, everything has some kind of material analog. And there are different branches of materialism and different ways of materialistic thought. I’m not going to get into that. Suffice it to say that we as Latter-day Saints find the idea of materialism appealing.

Adam Davis

But we have to be careful about materialism because as our non-theistic friends accuse believers in God of putting God in the gaps, we also have to be aware of not doing the opposite of that. That is to assume that our current understanding is complete. And indeed, that assumption would be the height of presumption. So we can be materialist, but we need not presume that we have a full understanding of all physical law. Okay, so that’s important.

Adam Davis

So here’s the scripture. Brother Leigh read it, and you have it here again in case you forgot. This is the idea that there is no such thing as immaterial matter. Okay, it’s all stuff. We have no idea what it means by more fine or more pure. I talked a little bit about, you know, what we can do with it. But it does lend itself to the idea that Mormonism may be compatible with materialism.

Adam Davis

But materialism and free will do not get along. And there’s three particular problems that I wish to address in the idea of materialism and free will, and that is the idea of creation, determinism. But not only is determinism a problem, so is indeterminism. And so we’re caught in between both problems.

Adam Davis

There is a materialist philosopher. He’s a non-theistic philosopher, he gives what is called the basic argument. This is Galen Strawson, and I found his argument fairly persuasive. And it has three basic points.

Adam Davis

Point one is that we do what we do in any given situation because we are what we are. That is, boys will be boys. Okay? And this is not really a problem for me. I think that’s a good statement.

Adam Davis

The second statement Is that in order to be ultimately responsible for what we do, we have to be ultimately responsible for what we are, at least in certain crucial mental aspects. Okay, so if we want to be accountable for what we do, we have to be in some ways accountable for who we are, because what we do is who we are. So points one, no problem. Points two, I don’t have any problem with. And point three is the kicker.

Adam Davis

We cannot be ultimately responsible for who we are if we are causa sui-- not causa sui, that is the cause of itself. That’s Latin for cause of itself. Okay? So we can’t make ourselves. And if we can’t make ourselves, we can’t be anything other than we are, and therefore we can’t be responsible for what we do. This is a real problem. And then people try to get around it, but it is a very significant problem.

Adam Davis

Mormonism, unfortunately, has a great out. And this has been mentioned by many, many LDS philosophers. In fact, there’s probably many of you who already know what the answer is. The answer is intelligences. Okay. So this is Mormonism’s solution because what’s special about intelligences, the doctrine of more-- Mormon doctrine of intelligences, that gets us out of here?

Adam Davis

Well, intelligences and to avoid any confusion with the idea of mental intelligence, I’m going to call it intelligent matter because I’m a materialist and we’re talking about materialism and free will. I’m going to use the phrase intelligent matter. Intelligent matter is uncreate. That it has always existed and will always exist, and that it cannot be formed and assimilated. Okay? It is there. It is causa sui. We also will assert that intelligent matter is the core of man’s agency. Okay, so if our agency comes from something that God did not create, if our-- then God cannot be culpable, this is a theodic-- argument of theodicy. Fairly old hat stuff.

Adam Davis

But we have to recognize that intelligent matter to be uncreate also needs to be simple and it has to be irreducible. Because if it’s not simple, then it has to be formed of component parts, which would be the very definition of not being simple. And then if you can have component parts, you can’t be uncreate, because then you could conceive of the component parts as being uncreate. So for intelligent matter to be uncreate, it has to be simple and it has to be irreducible. Okay. Which is, you know, on the face of it, no problem.

Adam Davis

One of the arguments that is often given is the idea, emergence. Now, I’m actually not a fan of emergence, and neither is Gaylen Strawson, the materialist that came up with the basic argument. And the idea of emergence is that there are properties that will exist which are not in any way dependent upon the constituent parts of it. Okay? So the idea is that we have intelligence and agency, we’re based off intelligent matter, but intelligent matter in and of itself is not agent or a causal agent, but that somehow it emerges on top of it, and we can’t trace it back to it. Now if we could trace it back to it, then we can’t talk about it being irreducible and uncreate, as we require. But if we disconnect those two, what we’re basically saying is that here exists a property which in no way has any physical law connection to its constituent elements. And that really tosses all of our physics out the window. It’s in some ways tantamount to magic. And that’s something I wish to avoid. People can talk about emergence a little bit more, but I’ve yet to see a persuasive argument for emergence, at least ontological emergence. Okay.

Adam Davis

So how does intelligent matter deal with things? Well, it deals with it because intelligent matter, by definition, being uncreate, irreducible, simple, is the cause of itself. It can’t be anything other than it is. It is itself, and therefore we can be responsible for who we are, and therefore we can be responsible for our actions. Okay. This is the out, and this is given by various philosophers, LDS thinkers, Madsen, Ostler, and others. This is the response. And many admit that this is a great response. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that it goes quite far enough. So let’s talk a little bit more.

Adam Davis

Determinism is the idea that the laws of nature entail that there is only one future possible. If A happens, then B happens. Always. Okay, and that’s a deterministic universe. Intelligent matter will posit as being undeterministic or indeterministic, because it will be able to act without being acted upon. Because otherwise, we are basically, as I’ve used before, basically a cosmic billiard ball set. Okay, we’re just bouncing around doing what matter does. And we’re essentially having no problem. Okay.

Adam Davis

So I’ve talked about the basic argument that intelligent matter is uncreate. Mormonism gets around it by denying point three. Determinism is the idea that the universe can have only one possible outcome. This is Pascal’s demon. So intelligent matter does not need to be deterministic, but we will still have the problem of indeterminism.

Adam Davis

And the idea of indeterminism is that if event A happens, then maybe event B will happen and maybe event C will happen. Now, this has a lot of support in the idea of quantum mechanics. Now, we don’t know if quantum mechanics is purely indeterministic. There’s actually interpretations of quantum mechanics which are deterministic. But as we see, indeterminism isn’t necessarily our solution either. It does not automatically lead to free will. Okay.

Adam Davis

Those that require indeterminism are called libertarians. And the idea that it doesn’t automatically lead to free will is because if the action or reaction is random, can we really be said to be responsible? And then there’s those that debate it. I’m falling on the idea that random is not equal to free will. There are those that discuss it quite a bit. I’m going to defer this too because this is something that’s gone been ongoing for a long, long, long time. I know, for example, that Blake Ostler is on the side that indeterminism is not necessarily free will. And so you can read some of his comments there. Because I want to get to a problem that I haven’t seen discussed in the idea of free will and materialism. Okay.

Adam Davis

We have the intelligent matter, the indeterminism. The idea that luck does not necessarily lead to free will, but we have the third problem, which I call the black box problem. If I assert that randomness does not automatically lead to free will, I have to ask the idea, well, how can we not be random? And this is what I’m going to call the black box problem. And I call it the black box problem because we won’t be able to look at intelligent matter. We’ve never observed intelligent matter. we can’t actually look at it and see what’s going on. Okay? So we can look at what goes into it, we can look at what goes out of it, but we can’t actually look at it. And I’m going to ask, can we still make any conclusions?

Adam Davis

So the outputs I think will obviously determine if we’re not random or if we’re random. One of the criticisms of randomness is that well basically, if there’s a random output, I would be somewhat epileptic up here. I would just be kind of quaking doing whatever. I won’t get into that too much. But the real cuz-- the real question is how can we have intelligent matter and how can it not be random?

Adam Davis

And for it to not be random, we really need two keys of the puzzle. We have to have perception and we have to have memory. Okay, because if there’s no perception, then you don’t know what’s going on and you’re basically acting blind. And if you’re acting blind, you’re basically acting randomly. Additionally, if you have no memory, then you are also acting blind because you have no idea what the consequences of your behavior will be. Okay, now this may seem trivial because we have brains and we have memory and stuff, but we’re talking about the core of our agency.

Adam Davis

And the core of our agency is something which is irreducible, uncreate, and simple. So, how do we get something that is basically-- and you might think of it as a particle. And how do you get information to that particle? Because if it’s just an irreducible simple agent, it can’t store memory in itself because it’s irreducible. And it can’t have lots of perception because it is irreducible. So this becomes a little bit of a problem.

Adam Davis

The information can’t come in all scattered. We have to-- if it’s simple and irreducible, it has to encounter each bit of information in isolation. It can’t remember what happened one moment ago from-- to the next. Because again, being simple and irreducible, it can’t store any kind of information. The only way around this is we have to have the information come in simultaneously. The information has to come in simultaneously. Now, classically, we cannot do that. Classically, you can’t shoot a whole bunch of particles at one particle and have every particle hit that particle at the same time, and then suddenly it has all the information it needs. Classically, that is not possible. And so we are faced with how do we get around this problem of simultaneity?

Adam Davis

The answer, it turns out, may rest in something that really confuses everybody, which is quantum mechanics. And I will posit an observable consequence of this, and the idea that intelligent matter, while we can’t look at it directly, we might be able to look at some of the processes that it would necessarily require and necessarily entail, and some of the outcomes that would come from it. And that is the idea of superposition. With quantum mechanics, we can superimpose lots of information into a single wave state. And so information isn’t just a particle with doing whatever it’s doing, but information is actually lots of states together.

Adam Davis

Quantum computer-- quantum computation is actually working on exploiting the idea of quantum superimposed states. Now a quantum computer doesn’t do anything that a normal computer doesn’t do, but it does it all at once. And so it can do things that a normal computer can do, but it can do it a lot, lot, lot faster because it’s doing lots of computations all at once. And so quantum computers are very, very exciting. And it’s something that will almost certainly be a part of our future.

Adam Davis

Okay, so if we can assemble a quantum state, a quantum state which has all the information, past and present, and our body would assemble that information for us and then pass it to the causal core of our existence, the intelligent matter. Then the intelligent matter could interact with that physical state, that quantum state, and then pass out the outcome. And so suddenly we’re allowed to add all the perception, all the memory that we need And then the intelligent matter can make an intelligent choice as opposed to simply a random choice. And then it’ll pass out the one bit of information. And then the body will act on that, and we get our behavior.

Adam Davis

Now, this has a consequence in the idea of artificial intelligence, because artificial intelligence, as much as I like it, I don’t think can ever result in what we might call a true intelligence. It is created, it therefore fails the causa sui argument, and it also can only be based off of random processes, which in my opinion fails the free will problem. And so intelligent matter is uncreate and it is decisive, at least if we’re some able-- in some way able to pass information to it simultaneously.

Adam Davis

And so can it be detectable? Well, maybe. We can’t look into it, we can’t look at intelligent matter directly, but we can see does our brain assemble information into a quantum state? That might be an observable. And if it’s observable, this gives us lots of evidence that maybe we’re on the right track about thinking about materialism and free will.

Adam Davis

And we would-- if there is some kind of quantum in the state, then we could look, is there anything that interacts with that state causing it to collapse and get the output? And if there is something that interacts with that quantum state, that would be what we would be describing as intelligent matter, which will be the core of our agency. And no, so far it hasn’t been observed, but I’m not aware of people looking a whole lot either. And so this idea is somewhat exciting to me, and I’m going to have to start reading up on my neurophysics and seeing if there’s any kind of ideas there. Okay. And that’s at least a few of my thoughts.