Determinism Versus Causality: Frozen Abstractions

The first three weeks of my first semester of my first year of the OAC have made conscious an idea of mine that had been brewing subconsciously for some time: that the vast majority of people today, including many Objectivists, engage in what is known as the fallacy of the frozen abstraction, especially in regard to quantum mechanics (from the online Ayn Rand Lexicon):

A fallacy which may be termed “the fallacy of the frozen abstraction” . . . consists of substituting some one particular concrete for the wider abstract class to which it belongs—[e.g.,] substituting a specific ethics (altruism) for the wider abstraction of “ethics.” Thus, a man may reject the theory of altruism and assert that he has accepted a rational code—but, failing to integrate his ideas, he continues unthinkingly to approach ethical questions in terms established by altruism.

In this case, a specific form of causality, determinism, is substituted for the wider abstraction of causality. Now, most people don't even recognize that there can be a difference between determinism, the idea that the (fully determined) state of a system at any given time necessitates completely both all future states and all past states, from causality, the idea that an entity can only act in accordance with its nature, so when a quantum physicist observes a decaying atom behaving in a non-deterministic way, he states that it behaves in an acausal (and therefore without identity) way. Objectivism, however, does recognize a distinction between causality: it rejects determinism, yet demands causality. For example, within Objectivism man has a non-deterministic-yet-causal free will: the nature of his consciousness is such that it can make non-determined choices. My goal here isn't to defend or attack that particular view, only to point out a contradiction that many Objectivists maintain: when presented with a claim that, for example, an atom decays non-deterministically, they reject it out of hand on the grounds that it violates causality and/or identity. Now, I haven't looked at the evidence for this claim well enough to say that it is true or false, but I can say that, within the framework of Objectivism, it cannot be dismissed on philosophical grounds. Yet, many Objectivists do.

When Miss Rand identified the freezing of "ethics" at the specific type of ethics, "altruism", her response was to explicitly identify altruisim as merely a type of ethics, and then to go on to explicitly identify an alternative. I will attempt to do the same for causality and determinism here.

To quote from Galt's speech a bit, "The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is caused and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature." So a ball rolls because it is round, a computer processes because of the arrangement of its wires, and a brain leads to consciousness because... Well, we don't know, but because of the nature of brains. Conversely, a brain can't roll (well), a ball can't compute, and a computer doesn't lead to consciousness. Note that it need not be known which aspect of an entities nature leads to the nature of its actions, it merely need be that there is some aspect which leads to the action. Moreover, it may be that at some fundamental level the only answer possible to the question "which attribute" is "it is, therefore it does", i.e. "why does an electron have charge? An electron is, and therefore does have charge" (this is not to say that an electron is necessarily one of those fundamental cases, but it might be.)

What, then, is determinism? Determinism takes causality and specifies: it says that the relationship between the nature of entities acting and the actions they take is of the very specific form of "a certain set of fully-definable characteristics completely set the exact action taken at any point in the future, and is could only have arisen from a specific set of circumstances at any given point in the past." So the kinetic theory of gasses specifies a deterministic model for the action of gases in a container: the positions and momenta of every particle in the container at any given point will fully determine the future positions and momenta of those particles (assuming there is no influence from outside of the container).

So is there anything that can be described as causal but not deterministic? Certainly; free will is the prime example of such a phenomenon. It is certain that nature of a healthy human brain leads to the ability to make choices; all such brains are capable of making such choices and things that aren't such brains cannot make such choices, and anyway to deny causality would be to embrace a contradiction (Dr. Peikoff's Objectivism:The Philosophy of Ayn Rand can answer why better than I). But free will is just as certainly not deterministic: there is no set of characteristics (not even the values of the person in question) that will fully and eternally determine the outcome of choices made; a person can and does choose. Just as egoism is an alternative to altruism in ethics, free action is an alternative to determinism in causality.

One important difference between the ethics case and the causality case is that, while there is only one correct type of ethics for man, there is not necessarily only one correct type of causality for entities. Gases may behave deterministically alongside humans behaving freely with no contradiction. This leaves open an important question: are there any other types of causality? While an assertion of a new type of causality would require stringent proof, there is no way to philosophically dismiss all such claims out of hand.