First Principles of Inevitabilism.

Having posted under the tag of inevitabilism before, but not having really explained what the hell the concept means at any length, I thought I'd better remedy the situation. To begin with, it doesn't discount free-will. For two reasons, one rather long, the other quite short.

The Long one:

http://writeitorbust.blogspot.com/2010/02/indeterminacy-of-will.html

That was quicker than you expected huh..? Anyway, to cut that very long blog-post down to the basics, quantum indeterminacy, coupled with the *possiblity* of quantum-event-sensitive brain-state criticalities... Allows me to believe there is an empiric case for free-will, or at least true novelty in decision-making.

The Short one:

We feel as if we live our lives with the option of choice. We experience freedom when choosing, we feel as if we could have made a different decision at a given point in time, we experience regret and pride when remembering the things we have chosen and done. It is impossible to think the feeling of free-will away. And impossible to live without feeling/experiencing it.

To borrow a line from John Searle: Even someone absolutely convinced of determinism does not sit down at a table in a restaurant and, when the waiter comes to take his or her order, just say "My order is determined anyway, so, you know, whatever."

Regardless of the truth of the matter, a society believing, and acting upon the belief, that it possesses freedom of choice will act very differently from one that does not. The simple existence of the concept in the group mind, frivolous or real, has effect.

The long and the short of it is that although I'm a big supporter of strict cause and effect for many things, I believe that simple cause and effect alone has not brought us to the situation we find ourselves in today, there is also the unpredictability of happenstance in the purely physical world, and later the novelty of choice expressed in the world of the mind, once a sufficiently sentient breed of agents come into being. The classic chaos-theory snowball rolling downhill, tapped by the tiny finger of quantum indeterminacy early enough on in its path, will end up in a wildly different place than its utterly determined fellows. Small differences, in a system sensitive to intial conditions, will produce vast divergences in the future.

And here, considering I've just spent a paragraph or two saying "freedom of choice prevents strict cause/effect pre-determination of the future", you'd be forgiven for assuming I'm mad for trying to push an "everything is inevitable" viewpoint. But, cantankerous scum-baggery dictates I once again beg to differ.

It's a question of scale. And probability, and that some decisions are just damn better than others. Let's pause for a picture.

If you look at life in general as a series of conflicts on a population-wide scale, all occurring concurrently - maybe between individuals or groups of people, or perhaps more initially between those individuals/groups and the enviroments they occupied... Then, as illustrated above, some decisions are always better than others.

ie. Swords beat fists.

Sure, it's not impossible that the fisticuff guy could win, maybe the sword-guy has a chest cold that slows him down, maybe a cow swept up miles away by a tornado falls out of the sky with pin-point accuracy, squashing sword guy into a pulp before fisticuff guy even lands a punch. But it's dubious. In a hundred fights of a similar pairs, I think the sword guys would come out ahead - there just ain't that many tornado-cows around.

Let's ask history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca

Numbers of fighters involved:

Pizzaro (Spain): 106 infantry, 62 cavalry, 4 cannons, 12 harquebus [old rifles]

Atahualpa (Aztec): 7,000 of Atahualpa's personal attendants.

How it all panned out: "At the signal to attack, the Spaniards unleashed gunfire at the vulnerable mass of Incas and surged forward in a concerted action. The effect was devastating: the shocked and unarmed Incas offered so little resistance that the battle has often been labeled a massacre. Contemporary accounts by members of Pizarro's force explain how the Spanish forces used a cavalry charge against the Inca forces, who had never seen horses, in combination with gunfire from cover (the Inca forces also had never encountered guns before). Other factors in the Spaniard's favor were their steel swords, helmets and armor, against the Inca forces which only had leather armor and were unarmed. The Spanish also had 4 small cannons commanded by a Greek artillery captain which were used to great effect in the crowded town square. The first target of the Spanish attack was the Inca Emperor[6] and his top commanders; once these had been killed or captured the Inca forces were disorganized as the command structure of the army had been effectively decapitated..."


Final Score:

Spain (aka sword guys) - 1 wounded. 

Aztecs (aka fisticuff guys) : 6000+ dead.

What I mean to say by this is, throughout history, despite there being implicitly a diversity of choices to be made at any one point, overall, mimicking pre-determinism, only a select section of the starting populations would ever remain in existence, namely the ones who acted to follow exactly the path delineated by the best solutions to certain problems. Solutions which existed, in hypothetic form, prior to the event.

Let me expand the scale upward still further: Just follow the arrows as primitive man and woman make choices as they attempt to stay alive on their journey through the landscape of decision/solution:

Very basically, due to the principle of the "last man standing must have done something right" and despite individual free-will, the universe acts as if the future is pre-determined right from the very beginning, at least with respect to life, because *best* solutions to given situations and problems exist, eternal, outside of time.

Whoo. Cthulhu fhtagn.

invisible

Well, okay, it's not that freaky of an idea. In conclusion: let's say we're examining the past and present and trying to divine the future. Let's, for pictorial sensibilities, that the future is maybe looking kinda Barbarella-shaped.



In a determinist universe, we can look at the present, remember the past, do a few sums, and 'ping' - out pops a fully defined 60's Sci-fi queen. In a totally indeterminate (compatabilist) universe however, the present and the past are no good to predict the future, because of all the mini-mini-details/choices having such a 'huge' effect, and this snowballs - adding so much noise to the future that it becomes impossible really to see anything.

Inevitabilism is the middle path. It doesn't pretend to be completely accurate in the details, it simply looks at things on a larger scale, a scale where individual actions largely cancel out. Looks at the stage, rather than just the players, and reads the future from that.