07.10.11

Free will arguments, and science of history arguments

Posted in General at 12:07 pm by nemo

Is There A Science Of History?
Attmpts to prove the existence of free will can flounder in confusion, while the study of historical dynamics and the place of free agents can indirectly found the question in something close to a certainty: we must have free agents for history to make sense. That free agency could be limited or evolving, or purely potential, but it almost has to be there. It is not there for rocks, somehow inchoate in animals, and beginning to become real in hominids, finally becoming an assumption of historical action in man.

The attempt to posit a science of history suffers a severe complication in the dilemma of freedom and causality, with a series of confusions not dissimilar to what we see with the question of the evolution of ethics. But as we proceed we will discover nature’s ingenious and, in the end, obvious solution to the contradiction, one visible in some of the simplest situations of ordinary life.

A Science of History? The question of a science of history provokes a contradiction as an antinomy of causality and freedom: in the stance of science, there must be a science of history, but in the consideration of freedom there cannot be a science of history. This variant of a classic Kantian antinomy is resolved in a dialectic that ‘somehow’ unites both thesis and antithesis, and bursts asunder the limits of space-time in the context of a discovered analog to ‘transcendental idealism’, the classic companion to Newtonianism. If we connect this to our question, when did evolution stop and history begin? we can precipitate the same antinomy for earlier ‘evolution’. The Darwinian framework is inadequate for this situation. As we will see there can be a science of history: this requires an evolutionary basis, and a mediation of causality and freedom together, a strange requirement, one most surprisingly satisfied, and very exactly, by the data of the eonic effect . We must connect history and evolution in a new way, and this can be found if we pursue a ‘science of freedom’, in the resolution of the paradox of determinism. We can bring evolution into history by asking still another paradoxical question, Has man become ‘homo sapiens’ yet, by ‘evolving freedom’ (according to various definitions of freedom)? If man is ‘not yet free’ the ‘evolving freedom’ must show a macro aspect, otherwise, as his freedom evolves, man’s self-evolution will become a micro process, exiting from evolution in our Great Transition. In fact, as we discover the eonic effect we see that nature provides us with the elegant and simple solution to these enigmas of the descent of humans. We will adopt a rubric of ‘self-consciousness’ as the intermediate transitional category, compatibalist with respect to causality and freedom.

A Science of Freedom? The idea of a ‘science of freedom’ emerged in the wake of the Kantian critique of metaphysics. We can easily establish that, while such a science is not easily attainable, the idea itself is at least coherent, and can be approached empirically. As an example consider the relationship of a computer with a GUI and a user. The tandem system, computer/user, is a relationship of the user’s options and the computer’s (deterministic) program. We must analyze a combined system in which the field of the user’s options and its relationship to a larger system must be studied together. The eonic model discovers such a system in historical/evolutionary terms.

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