Your Ability to Imagine a Scenario Does Not Make It “Theoretically Possible”

or, Where Imagination Does and Does Not Help You Understand What Is Possible

Stuart K. Hayashi

Introduction
In my home state of Hawai‘i, superstitions abound. Every New Year’s Eve, one does not merely practice particular rituals but also eats particular foods. I have been assured that this will please the spirits and they will reward us with good fortune throughout the year. I think these celebratory rituals can be fine and maybe even wholesome when recognized and practiced just as general symbols of desire for happy outcomes. But I worry when they take on priority because it is believed, on some level, that they might be true literally. When I ask different people if they believe in all this literally, they usually give the same reply. They shrug, laugh sheepishly, and say, “Well, ya never know. It’s possible there might be something to all this.” People believe this might possibly be true simply because they can imagine it.

This notion that if you can imagine a scenario, that proves that it is possible, is very common. It serves as the major excuse for belief in the supernatural, such as fortunetelling, ghosts, demons, and deities. It is also a rationalization that underpins so much pretentiousness in formal philosophy.

This is may be familiar to you. It has become routine that, after taking Philosophy 101 class, someone will say, “Gee, maybe my whole life is not real. Maybe all of my experiences are an illusion, and I am actually a brain in a jar imagining my life. This is theoretically possible.”

Such talk was popular long before the release of The Matrix. It has an extensive history of being entertained copiously in formal philosophy, in some form or another. Immanuel Kant had a version of it, and it is famously associated with Plato. The idea was also extolled by the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi. He said that one day he dreamed he was a butterfly, but maybe he is actually a butterfly dreaming that it is Zhuang Zi. Buying into the assertion that what we interpret as sensory evidence might all be misleading, the philosopher Karl Popper proclaimed seriously, “...we never know what we are talking about.” (To that I reply, “Speak for yourself, buddy!”) And although Rene Descartes ultimately did not affirm his agreement with this idea, he still presumed it deserving of very serious consideration. 

There is also the nineteenth-century Romanticist poet William Blake. Blake famously disparaged scientists in general and Isaac Newton in particular. In his estimation, for Newton to discover the principles of Nature is to rob Nature of its beauty and wonder. I rebut that assertion here. Along lines similar to these other fantasists about imagination, Blake asserts, “Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.” Hence Blake constructs a straw-man misrepresentation of rationality that is most unflattering. He pronounces, “The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination.”

Disturbingly, the Enlightenment Era philosopher David Hume was explicit in saying that his ability to imagine a scenario was sufficient grounds for deeming it a theoretic possibility that deserves your study. This starkly contradicts Hume’s reputation among today’s professors — that he was a strict empiricist all about sensory experience. As worded by Hume, “To form a clear idea of any thing [that is, to imagine something vividly] is an undeniable argument for its possibility and is alone refutation of any pretended demonstration against it.”

We will return to this erroneous supposition of Hume’s a bit later in this essay. Although Hume made some very sound arguments for free-market economics and having a laissez-faire and constitutional liberal republican Night Watchman State, much of his influence in the area of epistemology, such as with what he has said above, has contributed to setting much of Western society on the wrong track. It is based on his own arbitrary imaginings that Hume pronounces that all conclusions from inductive reason are perennially and existentially suspect, as a philosopher “cannot defend his reason by reason.”

People who indulge in this talk — that being able to imagine something is proof that it is possible — have no actual basis for doing so.

I already knew that years ago, and I would offer them this same reply.

I can imagine an isolated ice cube falling to the bottom of a glass of water and remaining on the bottom for eternity. My ability to imagine this is still no basis for introducing this scenario as a theoretic possibility. For a proposition to be worth some consideration as a theoretic possibility, there must be evidence to support it.

And, as far as I was concerned, that was that. However, on Thursday, July 27, 2023, I came up with some additional points about this. These additional points, I think, make use of more-formal logic. My new manner of phrasing the matter goes farther down to the foundation of metaphysics and epistemology. The main purpose of the essay you are reading is for me to present my argument in this new form. But, first, I must give some background information that serves as the basis for my new argument.

 

 
The Context Behind the Issue
This idea that your sensory experiences might be distorted or illusory, and that there might be a truer plane of existence with which you have not yet made contact, is called metaphysical Idealism. This is not to be mixed up with moral Idealism, which is a persisting commitment to ethical principles. And the ramifications of metaphysical Idealism are not confined to metaphysics. In the realm of epistemology — the discipline that studies how do we know what we know — metaphysical Idealism is frequently accompanied by epistemic Rationalism, which should not be confused with rationality.

This epistemic Rationalism is the notion that there are valid and true ideas we hold that are innate, à priori, and which are truer than knowledge that we can induce à posteriori, meaning from from sensory experience. Someone can be a Rationalist without agreeing that it is theoretically possible that all sensory experience is suspect or misleading or illusory. Still, being an epistemic Rationalist is a very convenient position for someone who agrees that all sensory experience is illusory.

For a metaphysical Idealist, epistemic Rationalism is supposed to answer the question, “If everything learned from sensory evidence is subject to doubt, how do you know that all of that sensory evidence is thrown into doubt?” Once again, people say that their ability to imagine that waking experience is an illusion is enough to make it a theoretic possibility. Those who are most adamant in metaphysical Idealism and epistemic Rationalism go farther, saying they know all this conjecture is a legitimate evaluation.

There is a name for this idea that your consciousness can recognize truths — truths about entities that exist outside of your  own consciousness — independently of investigation of those entities by means of sensory experience. That is, the idea is that even if no one ever investigated the matter by means of sensory experience, you can still know what is true about the entities existing outside of your own consciousness, entities such as trees and flowers and volcanoes and clouds and galaxies and other humans.

The name also applies to a still-more-radical idea. The more-radical idea is that, independent of going through sensory motions to affect the entities outside of your own consciousness, your consciousness alone can will those entities outside of your consciousness to change their nature and behavior. The name that the writer Ayn Rand gave those ideas is “the Primacy of Consciousness.”

It is true that your own consciousness can sometimes influence the entities outside of it. But your consciousness can do this only by means of going through motions with the realm of sensory experience, not merely thinking with your consciousness but acting in reality, through physical motions, to implement the ideas from your consciousness.

For example, the Wright brothers conceived of — imagined — heavier-than-air flying machines when none had existed. Then, through their efforts, they created airplanes in reality. In this respect, what once manifested only in their imaginations had also become real entities that existed independently of their consciousness.

But they did this through sensory experience. They observed that, as birds flew, the birds changed the direction of their flight by changing the direction of their wings and the angles at which edges of their wings had bent. The brothers then employed their bodies to draw up plans and diagrams that they formulated to accommodate such observations. They built models and prototypes of a flyer, and they employed their senses to observe the results of tests they ran on such prototypes. By contrast, for the Wright brothers to employ a Primacy-of-Consciousness mindset would have been for them merely to attempt to wish or pray airplanes into being. After all, their father was a priest. 

Likewise, here is another example of the Primacy of Consciousness. Suppose that on Monday, I pray that Hawai‘i will not be hit with an earthquake on Tuesday. Then, on Tuesday, Hawaii experiences no earthquake. Then I chalk up the absence of such a disaster to my having prayed to God. I still performed a physical action — I put my hands together and spoke with my mouth. But there is no evidence that this had any causal effect on seismic activity. Moreover, because God supposedly can read my mind, it probably would have been just as effectual if only in my head did I ask God that there to be no earthquake. Hence, this is the Primacy of Consciousness at play.

It is also the Primacy of Consciousness when my loved ones eat a particular dish on New Year’s Eve to bring good luck. Here, good luck refers to steady finances and the good fortune of a hurricane not hitting Hawai‘i months later. Again, this ritual does involve a physical action with entities outside of people’s consciousness. Still, there is no actual evidence of a causal connection between eating a particular food and Hawai‘i having averted a catastrophe. In practice, this is the same as trying to wish away the tropical storms.

In contrast to the Primacy of Consciousness, Ayn Rand discusses the Primacy of Existence. It starts with the most obvious observation you can make — something exists. Something that exists is called an “entity.” Your recognition that something exists will produce a corollary recognition: a consciousness exists — your own. Were it not for Existence, there would not be something there for your consciousness to recognize, and there would definitely be no consciousness there to recognize it. Likewise, were it not for Consciousness, there would not be anything to recognize the existence of itself or anything else.

Your consciousness is clearly important. But when it comes to your consciousness recognizing what is real and true, or at least theoretically possible, looking at Existence must be the starting point. In the realm of Existence — what I also call Nature with a capital N — we find there are some principles that apply consistently. The law of gravity is an example.

And every entity has attributes through which your consciousness can distinguish it from other entities. The pertinent attributes of an entity are what we call the entity’s nature. It is in a tree’s nature, for example, to consist of cells, to grow, and to release oxygen as it takes in sunlight to produce its own food. By contrast, it is not in the nature of a tree to transform into a 400-meter-long rhinoceros and stampede over a city. We discover the respective natures of entities through repeat observations with the senses.

Recognition of an entity by its pertinent attributes is Aristotle’s Law of Identity. Here is how you apply that law. You observe one entity, Entity 1, whose attributes allow you to place it in a particular classification, a particular category — the concept of it. Then you observe Entity 2, which shares the same pertinent attributes as the first entity. Applying the Law of Identity, you recognize Entity 2 as being of the same category as Entity 1.

Entities perform actions. A cloud above you is an entity, and it sending raindrops down upon you is its action. Actions are caused by the respective natures of entities. In the past, when you observed clouds become a very dark gray, these clouds followed up by raining upon you. Today you see another cloud that is a dark gray. Applying the Law of Identity, you predict that this dark gray cloud will likewise send rain.

Derivative of the Law of Identity is the Law of Causality. The fact that entities have particular respective natures is a fact that affects the events that these entities cause. When two entities are of the same type, A, and they are under the same set of pertinent conditions, B, the same stimulus, X, will cause them to react in the same manner, Y.

We have two mobile phones, A, that are similar enough in the pertinent context to be regarded as being of the same type. These are phones 1 and 2. Both of them are under the same condition, B — they are not broken. On Phone 1, I input your phone number. This is the stimulus or causal agent X. This results in your phone ringing, effect Y. Applying the Law of Identity, we ascertain that if, after you have hung up from the first call, I punch in your number on Phone 2 as well, it will likewise cause your phone to ring. We infer that the action of my inputting your number will be consistent in causing your phone to ring. As Ayn Rand phrases it, “The Law of Causality is the Law of Identity applied to action.”

These are the same sensory observations denigrated by metaphysical Idealism, epistemic Rationalism, and, implicitly, by all those who presume that their ability to imagine a scenario is sufficient to prove that it is possible.

Again, the vast majority of philosophy instructors will tell you that David Hume was a consistent empiricist. That is, he was the opposite of a metaphysical Idealist and epistemic Rationalist, of which Plato was both. If they could put aside their prejudicially motivated revulsion toward Ayn Rand long enough to learn her terminology, philosophy instructors would say that admirers of Ayn Rand’s should concede that Hume argued from “the Primacy of Existence.” But I find, sadly, that what Hume has said about imagination and theoretical possibilities is an instance of him showing favor to the Primacy of Consciousness.

In contrast to metaphysical Idealists, epistemic Rationalists, and — in this instance at least — David Hume, I shall now present my new argument about why a posited scenario must have evidentiary backing before it is to be welcomed as a theoretic possibility.

 

 
My New Way of Phrasing It
Again, many people in Hawai‘i say that it is theoretically possible that if we appease spirits on New Year’s Eve by eating a particular lucky food, those spirits will help protect us throughout the year. And, again, many people chirp that it is theoretically possible that their whole lives are an illusion and they are actually a brain in a jar being made to dream the dream that is their lives.

As with any supernaturalistic claim, these people begin by imagining a scenario arbitrarily, and then they try to rationalize it after the fact. This approach exemplifies the Primacy-of-Consciousness mindset. Now let us proceed from the other end. Let us acknowledge the Primacy of Existence.

We start off by looking at entities — the objects that exist. To speak of what is “possible” is to speak of a judgment made about some posited event. “Events” are just actions performed by the entities. That is why we look at the entities before we consider their actions and the events or possibilities associated with them. Moreover, the qualities of an action are influenced by the qualities of the entity performing it. Hence, it is only by learning about entities and their attributes that we ascertain what is possible for them.

That is why there is no proper basis or justification for us to speak of what is “theoretically possible” for an entity in the absence of observational knowledge of that entity’s attributes. Facts and evidence about an entity are epistemically foundational, and “possible” is a derivative attribute of that entity’s actions that hinges on such an epistemic foundation.

To be rationally justified, then, in saying that an event is theoretically possible is to say the following. It is to say that even if we are not sure that this particular event will take place, we have gained enough knowledge of the pertinent entities — enough evidence — for us to make an educated guess that they possess the necessary attributes that would enable them to contribute to the occurrence of this event.

Here is how humans actually arrived at the concept of possibility. Nature has many attributes that we understand at least on a general level. When we say a particular outcome is possible but not certain, what is uncertain is a specific outcome. The specificity of it is crucial to our discussion. Should you roll a conventional six-sided die 🎲, it is uncertain whether you will roll a 1 instead of a 6. However, from our knowledge of what is certain on the more-general level, we do know that the possible outcomes fall within a set of particular parameters that is substantiated by evidence, often substantiated to the point where the parameters themselves are certain.

That we know it’s specifically uncertain whether the roll will result in a 1 or a 6 is based on our observation-based general certainty of the conventional six-sided die’s attributes. It is certain that the respective faces of the conventional six-sided die 🎲 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. This certain knowledge of reality’s attributes is the actual basis for the theoretic possibilities to contemplate. Based on reality’s attributes, it is theoretically possible that we may roll a 1 or a 6. By the same token, it is not theoretically possible for this conventional six-sided die to land on Infinity or 3.14 even if we imagine it.

Rather than any arbitrary postulation that can be imagined, “possibility” refers to uncertainty over a specific outcome among other specific outcomes that can result. And even when the specific outcome is uncertain, sensory evidence has given us enough general knowledge to be confident about the range that those specific still-uncertain outcomes fall within. And at the center of that general range is evidence for which we can be rationally certain. “Possibility”-and-“uncertainty” over something specific still presupposes a more-generalized certain knowledge about it.

By contrast, when someone floats an arbitrary postulate, such as that astrology predicts the future, often this person issues a particular challenge and advances a particular insinuation. The challenge is for any would-be doubter to put forth an effort to disprove the postulate completely. The insinuation is that, in the absence of such an effort, those who initially doubted the postulate must now concede that the postulate has gained clearance for admission into consideration as a theoretic possibility. Anyone who refrains from entertaining the postulate as deserving of consideration — even if that refraining was originally by passive default — is allegedly duty-bound to engage with arguments for and against the arbitrary postulate, on the pain of otherwise being exposed as intellectually lazy and intellectually dishonest.

It is that challenge and insinuation that are intellectually lazy and intellectually dishonest. There is no limit to the number of arbitrary postulates being foisted in our culture. Anyone who tried to engage with all or even most of them would waste all time on this pursuit, and partake in nothing else in life. On any occasion in which someone floats an arbitrary postulate, it is not incumbent upon me to poke holes in it to justify my passively refraining from entertaining that postulate as a possibility. When someone wants me to welcome the postulate as a theoretic possibility, the burden is on him or her to show evidence for the existence of conditions that can contribute to its occurrence. Thus, we do not rule out possibilities from limitless arbitrary imaginings. Instead we rule in possibilities based on their evidentiary support. 

There is only one set of circumstances in which we have a firm footing in ruling out what was previously considered a possibility. It is this. Initially, based on the knowledge we have, we rule in a set of theoretic possibilities, such as A, B, and C.  Then we conduct further investigation. Based on the additional knowledge, A and B still appear viable. However, the new information we have gained about the attributes of the pertinent entities exist in such a manner as to preclude C from happening. At that juncture, we can rule out C.  But insofar as any proposition is made in the absence of evidence, that proposition is not to be ruled either in or out as a possibility. It deserves simply to be ignored so that we can devote our precious time and attention instead to propositions that are buttressed by evidence.

That is why it is inappropriate — why it is the Primacy of Consciousness — when people start with some arbitrary imagining, call it “theoretically possible,” and then try to rationalize it after-the-fact. To understand the Primacy of Existence is to start with observations and facts. And it is after we learn about an entity’s capabilities that way, when we can apply imagination to imagine possibilities in such a manner that can actually get practical results.

Yes, even when an outcome is uncertain but possible, all the possibilities fall within a particular range. When experts dismiss a possibility as impossible only for it to come true, it is because they misjudged the edges or boundaries of that range. We will shortly get to a case study in that. When experts’ proclamations about the possibility or impossibility of an outcome are proven wrong, their misjudgment over the boundaries of the range in possibilities does not vindicate the presumption that arbitrary postulation imagined may fall within the range of possibilities.

And it is through sensory-based data-gathering that we learn about what does and does not fall within the range of theoretic possibilities. By gathering more data for the senses to observe, we can properly revise our understanding of where are the outermost edges of that range in possibilities. Yes, what we consider possible or impossible can be rightly revised, but those revisions are always based on the evidence of the senses. That is an essential point when it comes to the Wright brothers and the experts who, in hindsight, were unwise to ridicule them.

 

 

 

What About People Who Accomplish What Was Previously Thought Impossible?
The invention of airplanes provides an instructive case study in ascertaining what is and is not possible, and in imagination’s proper role in rendering such judgments. The Wright brothers were highly imaginative. They conceived of a heavier-than-air flying machine at a time when none had existed and in which the consensus was that such a product of their efforts would never take off — pun intended.

“We knew,” said Wilbur, the older Wright brother, “that men had by common consent adopted human flight as the standard of impossibility. When a man said, ‘It can’t be done; a man might as well try to fly,’ he was understood as expressing the final limit of impossibility.”

It was for such reasons that the prospect that the Wrights would succeed at flying was widely dismissed. It was dismissed even by the eminent physicist and entrepreneur Lord Kelvin, who played a major role in laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable and who provides the namesake of the scientific unit for measuring temperature. “...I have not the smallest molecule of faith,” he wrote, “in aerial navigation other than ballooning or of expectation of good results from any of the [aeroplane] trials we hear of.” 

In 1899, Scientific American magazine, too, expressed doubt. A major obstacle to the invention of the airplane was developing a method for safe steering. As the ability to duplicate the method by which birds steered themselves seemed unlikely, the periodical determined that aeroplanes would not have “commercial or military utility.”

In light of a spectacular failure of another experimenter, Samuel Pierpont Langley, attempting heavier-than-air flight, the New York Times pronounced in October 1903 that though such manned flight could happen one day in a far-flung future, it would not happen any time soon. “It might be assumed,” said the Times

that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years...

That same year, on December 10, a second New York Times editorial stated that such a brilliant enthusiast attempting flight should not

put his substantial greatness as a scientist in further peril by continuing to waste his time and money for further airship experiments. Life is short, and he is capable of services to humanity incomparably greater than can expected to result from trying to fly...

A week later, the Wright brothers made their first flight.

To the dismissals in general, the younger Wright brother, Orville, retorted, “If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.”

Of course, in their endeavor to prove it possible for humans to produce heavier-than-air flying machines, imagination was necessary but not sufficient. For what they imagined to manifest as possible, the Wright brothers always had to account for the evidentiary facts of Nature they observed. The reason why the Wright brothers were right. whereas Lord Kelvin and Scientific American magazine and the New York Times were wrong, was that when it came to this issue, the Wright brothers took all the pertinent evidence into consideration much more logically and consistently than did Lord Kelvin, Scientific American, and the New York Times.

What the Wright brothers understood to be “theoretically possible,” at least implicitly, was (a) what they imagined and (b) what they understood to be within the at-least-general bounds of evidence.

Here is a story that is an example of that. To make their first tests on the wings of their contraption, they produced a large kite — the “glider.” The first airplane would have a motor, but, as far as their early experiments were concerned, the glider did not need one. They took the then-motorless glider to Kitty Hawk exactly because its strong winds would carry the glider. In these experiments, they initially relied on “lift tables” provided by another aviation experimenter, Otto Lilienthal.

Lilienthal had experimented on using different shapes for his airfoils — objects to sustain lift in flight, such as wings and tail rudders. The tables were the records he made for the lift-to-drag ratio for each of the various airfoil shapes. Eventually, the Wright brothers noticed major discrepancies between Lilienthal’s lift tables versus their own results. Rather than take Lilienthal’s lift tables on faith, the brothers had to admit to themselves that the tables were inaccurate. They therefore had to apply both their imaginations and empirical knowledge to develop their own lift tables.

Their bicycle shop proved fortuitous in this. They built their own small wind tunnel out of wood. A 1-horsepower engine from their bike shop powered a fan that produced airflow. Out of bicycle spokes and hacksaws, they assembled a “lift balance.” Mounted on top of the lift balance would be (1) an airfoil section they intended to test and (2) a flat plate with a surface area equal to that of the airfoil section. As the airflow impacted upon them, the respective torques of the airfoil section and the equivalent-surface-area flat-plate had to be equal to one another. When the respective torques were equal, the Wrights were able to make accurate measurements of lift-to-drag ratio for 48 different airfoil sections.

Observe the need for both logic and imagination even in just these wind-tunnel experiments. The Wrights had to be logical in accepting the faultiness of Lilienthal’s lift tables. They had to be imaginative in devising their own wind-tunnel experiments. And they needed both imagination and logic to understand how this wind-tunnel model would apply to the actual airplane’s flight later on. This smaller part, and the wider project overall, required both logic and imagination.

It was through such empirical observation that the Wright brothers gained further confidence that the flight of an airplane was indeed possible. Orville said, “I believe we possessed more data on cambered surfaces, a hundred times over, than all of our predecessors put together.” Note his mention of data — as in “sensory evidence.” The data came first — and, from it, the Wrights could ascertain what was, and what was not, theoretically possible. Here, we see that, although “theoretic possibility” is permeated with many still-unknowns, it remains within parameters set tentatively by what is known, including that which is recently-discovered.

Four years before the first flight, Wilbur Wright wrote to the Smithsonian Institution asking for information on what had already been tried. His letter touched implicitly upon the basis in evidentiary support for any theoretic possibility. “I am an enthusiast, but not a crank in the sense that I have some pet theories as to the proper construction of a flying machine. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known and then if possible add my mite [own information-gathering]...”

Yes, de facto, the Wright brothers’ approach was Facts come first; then we apply those facts to revise our understanding of which of our imaginings fall within the range of actual theoretic possibilities.

 As my late father wrote on January 19, 1973, “An idea is not a reality. An idea is a method of perceiving reality.”

It is true that imagination is important. I even argue that imagination is imperative to logic itself. Any time you recognize a causal relationship — where you recognize that if C happens rather than D it will result in E and not F — you are using imagination. In any instance where you consider future consequences to any action, that is imagination at work. When you read a noun and understand the literal entity that the noun denotes, that understanding, too, involves a form of visualization — that is, imagination. Reasoning cannot take place in the absence of this faculty.

In contrast to William Blake proclaiming that the idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination was L. Frank Baum, creator of the Wizard of Oz franchise. Baum understood, at least partially on some implicit level, the need for both imagination and logic. In the preface to his book The Lost Prisoner of Oz, he pointed out,

Imagination has brought mankind through the Dark Ages to its present state of civilization. ... Imagination led [Benjamin] Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.

And, in accordance with the case study I provided in this essay, to Baum’s litany of developments we can add the Wright brothers and their airplane.

I can be killed by something I eat — I might choke or be poisoned. But the fact remains that eating is for survival. Likewise, although this essay is about how people often use their imaginations to indulge in arbitrary falsehoods, imagination is ultimately the tool for adhering to reality. That is what the Wright brothers teach us.

Yes. Imagination is all about reality. That is provided that one remembers that imagination is necessary but not sufficient for discerning which scenarios count as scenarios of possibility.

The reason why Lord Kelvin, Scientific American magazine, and the New York Times were wrong in dismissing the possibility of heavier-than-air flying machines being invented by 1903 was that they misjudged the location of the outermost edges of the range of possibilities. This does not mean that anything imagined deserves to be entertained as being within the range of possibilities. Rather, through their additional sensory-based data-gathering, the Wright brothers were the party that had earned a much-more-solid understanding than did these other parties of where the range of possibilities lay.

The farther we get to the edge of the range of possibilities, the more we find that though we have evidence, the evidence being less plentiful or strong renders the possibility to be one of less confidence until we have additional evidence. And insofar as there is more to learn, the edges of the range of possibility may be fuzzy. But the closer we get to the center of the range of possibilities, the more we can be certain of propositions as they have an abundance of evidence has thoroughly substantiated them.

I have made a diagram to explain this. I apologize that this thumbnail image of it is blurry. You can click on it for a clearer image of the text.    

For a further exploration of where imagination can and does help understand what happens in reality literally, you can read my follow-up essay “Good Fiction Is the Truth” over here.

The Fallacies in Saying “Maybe Our Sensory Experiences Are a Distortion of Reality, and We Are Ignorant of What Is Actual Reality”
I now want to give special attention to the arbitrary postulate that perhaps everything our senses tell us is a misleading distortion, and that there may be a truer reality that exists beyond our ability to perceive anything. According to this postulate, what our senses inform us is not reality but merely a representation of reality — or, more precisely, a misrepresentation of reality. This postulate is an obfuscation of the very means by which we identify what is a representation or misrepresentation of anything.

To say that R is a representation of Q is to say that R is not literally Q but that R at least symbolizes Q in our minds. Moreover, we know R is a representation of Q because it has enough pertinent similarities in attributes with Q for us to recognize R as representational of it. For instance, we know that a toy truck from the brand Hot Wheels or Micro Machines is not literally a truck. But a toy truck from Hot Wheels or Micro Machines provides enough visual and other sensory cues for us to recognize the toy as a representation of a truck.

Here is a pertinent question. If you present a toy truck to a baby before she has ever seen a real truck, will she recognize the toy as a representation of a truck? She will not. You can recognize R as a representation or simulation of Q no more than the extent to which you have knowledge of what Q itself is like literally.

The same principle applies when we talk of a misrepresentation, or at least a representation that has been found to be inaccurate. Consider how whales are depicted on maps of the Atlantic Ocean that were drawn during the high Middle Ages. Of importance here are some facts about whales that became well-known in the twentieth century. First, whales do not possess scales like those of carp — goldfishes and koi — and the arowana fish. Also pertinent are tail flukes — these are the triangle-shaped parts of the tail fin found on fishes and whales. On whales, the tail flukes are horizontal — there is a fluke on the left and another on the right. By contrast, when a fish has tail flukes, they are more likely to be vertical — there is a fluke on the top of the tail and maybe another on the bottom. Not all fishes have vertical tail flukes, but it is the case that all whales only have horizontal tail flukes.

Now take a gander at a medieval map of the Earth and its oceans, and examine what that map labels a whale. Conventionally, the “whale” will be covered in fishlike scales and sport tail flukes that are vertical like a fish’s, not horizontal. These are inaccuracies in representation. The charitable way to interpret this is that the map’s illustrators labored in earnest and the inaccuracies came from their not having the information about whales that became more accessible from the twentieth century onward. But whatever the cause of the inaccuracies, we know of the representation’s inaccuracies only because we have some knowledge of what actual whales are like.

 

 Thus we discern the illogic in someone saying that all our sensory experiences are no more than a representation of reality, whereas the truer reality is unknown to us. We can discern something as a representation of objective reality no more than the extent to which we have already experienced objective reality directly and thereby gained knowledge of it.

Further, we can discern the even-bigger fallacy in proclaiming that our sensory experiences might be a false representation of an alleged truer objective reality that remains unknown. For us to have a basis in speculating that our sensory experiences might not match reality exactly, once again we would have to know what objective reality is like literally. And yet in this scenario we have already been told that we are wholly ignorant of that very same objective reality.

 

 
Conclusion
When someone proclaims, “It’s theoretically possible that all our sensory experiences are deceptive or unreal, and we are in complete ignorance of reality as it truly is,” that proclamation remains wholly arbitrary. And it is to be written off as such.

In sum, the existence of entities and the facts associated with them are primary, and to discern what is theoretically possible for those entities is contingent upon those facts. That is why, just because you can imagine something happening, that is not sufficient for calling it a “theoretic possibility.”

On Friday, August 4, 2023, I added the part about Scientific American magazine. On Monday, August 7, 2023, I added the paragraph about how, subsequent to ruling in a theoretic possibility with the evidence we had at the time, C, we are justified in ruling out C as a possibility upon our discovering further evidence that precludes it. That same day I embedded the YouTube video about how many animals were represented inaccurately in the European-authored bestiaries of the high Middle Ages. On Sunday, June 2, 2024, I added the quotation from my father. On Saturday, September 7, 2024, I added the case study of what the Wright brothers did about the lift tables. The sentences where I use the word literally were added on Friday, December 27, 2024. On Monday, December 30, 2024, I added the sentences about how imagination is actually a tool for living in reality, provided that one continues to adhere to the rules of logic.  On Sunday, June 29, 2025, I added the passages about William Blake. On Wednesday, January 7, 2026, I added the quotation and observation by L. Frank Baum. On that same day I added the point about how the concepts of “possibility” and “uncertainty” over something specific still presuppose a more-generalized certain knowledge about it. Also on that day I added the diagram to explain how the presence of evidence is what separates which propositions do deserve to be considered as theoretic possibilities from those propositions which do not. on Thursday, January 22, 2026, I added the quotation from David Hume about how human beings cannot defend reason using reason.

‘Property’ Predated the Industrial Revolution But Wasn’t As Adequately Understood Before Then

Stuart K. Hayashi

“An Iron Forge” by Joseph Wright of Derby in 1772

An at-least-vague idea of private ownership dates back to antiquity, but, for most of history, it wasn’t as free-marketers ascertain it to be. I think that the free-marketers’ understanding of rightful private ownership, which largely began to take shape in the seventeenth century and became sufficiently sophisticated with Jean-Baptiste Say and the Industrial Revolution, is the proper interpretation of private property rights. The term property was often used before then, but that version of the idea only vaguely hinted at what property can and should be. A philosophic insight necessary to understanding private ownership rights adequately was still missing.

From hunter-horticulturalist times to the Renaissance, people already understood you need to exercise control over land and objects if you are to live and feed yourself and your children, but they believed such wealth was just “given” or “loaned” by Nature or Wilderness Spirits. They knew all too well that there was some connection between procuring food and undertaking hard work — such as with hunting on land or fishing at sea — but whatever food acquired on land or at sea was something they still regarded as ultimately obtained at the mercy of Nature and Nature spirits. The same applied to timber used to construct huts and cabins. Farmers, too, attributed their bounty to wilderness spirits rather than their own competence, despite nothing being easy about what they did.

People were always fighting over control of objects and spots of land until many of them agreed, This one party controls this object, whereas the other party controls these other objects, and everyone should adhere to that. Still, your right to control your belongings peaceably wasn’t acknowledged as a consistent principle; your rightful control over objects in your custody was regarded, at best, as a permission granted by Society, God, and the Wilderness. The sole utility discerned in the institution of private ownership was that it was intended as a vague, at-best-tentative-and-temporary measure to reduce squabbles.

This is comparable to how parents might assign one level of a bunk bed to the elder child and the other level to the younger child. The elder child exercises control over her own bunk, but she doesn’t truly own it; the authority is simply delegated to her by her parents. Likewise, it was believed that you could exercise authority over a spot of land and its flora and fauna, but this authority was merely delegated to you, under many conditions, by Society, gods, or both. Moreover, most people believed there were still many circumstances under which “Society” would be just in overruling “your” control over the land and objects to which “Society” had assigned you custodianship.

As they saw it, as you owe your wealth entirely to God or Society, the matter is that when the State confiscated or micromanaged your belongings it was, in the case of theocracies, the State acting as God’s agent or vessel to reclaim for God what God had generously allotted you temporary management over, or, in the case of more secular societies, the State acting as Society’s representative in demanding you give back the control of resources that Society had temporarily delegated to you. The clichéd expression “give back to society” echoes this ancient opinion. President Obama’s sentiment of “You didn’t build that; somebody else made that happen” was the original one; it would be eons until someone observed that you did build that and explained how you did so.

The word property became common in the high Middle Ages, but the above was the default interpretation. Indeed, the very expression eminent domain means “superior ownership.” It wasn’t until the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution when philosophers such as Jean-Baptiste Say (Thomas Jefferson’s favorite economist) and his mentor, Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy, more completely realized that wealth is actually technology — human intellectual initiative to reshape the wilderness for human survival and enjoyment — and therefore wealth ultimately has to be created.

As an example, Nature “gives” us petroleum, but it was just a foul-smelling glop that ruined crops until engineers applied science — a uniquely human intellectual input — to make that Nature helpful. Jean-Baptiste Say and A.L.C. Destutt de Tracy — more than Adam Smith and the physiocrats who preceded them — comprehended (1) poverty is the default and that wealth is something produced by intellectual human initiative and (2) once this wealth is produced, someone has to exercise control over it.

The new free-marketers were cognizant that dispute resolution is part of private property rights, but that dispute resolution is not the sole or even main component. What previous writers on private property, such as Marcus Tullius Cicero of ancient Rome, hadn’t noticed adequately enough is that wealth is assembled through rational choices. Cicero and, to some extent, Aristotle before him, grasped that a responsible society has wealth divided among private owners, but Say and Tracy added that as this wealth was made by intellectual human initiative, the party that has first rightful claim over a particular unit of wealth is the party that devised it. This principle especially applies to the inventions you engineered and to the artwork you fashioned. Although he did not elaborate upon the wider implications anywhere near as well as Tracy and Say, Adam Smith here phrases it nicely: “The property which every man has in his own [creative, intellectual] labour [initiative], as it is the original foundation of all other property[ — as opposed to the original foundation of property being the State, Society, the supernatural, or the wilderness — ] so it is the most sacred and inviolable.”

A century prior to Say and Tracy and Smith, it was John Locke who articulated important aspects of this understanding in his Second Treatise of Government. But Say and Tracy gave a more sufficiently sophisticated explanation of it, explicitly noting, unlike Locke and the physiocrats, its applications far beyond land improvements and agriculture.

Already prior to the Industrial Revolution, there were great engineers reshaping nature. The ancient world had Hero of Alexandria, who designed temple doors that opened and closed through steam power. The Renaissance had Filippo Brunelleschi, who contrived a crane for placing a dome on the top of a cathedral. But these people were a tiny minority; the vast majority of people lived on farms. Most people — probably even these pre-industrial engineers — believed that true wealth came almost exclusively from land that could be farmed.

Agriculture was always a technology in and of itself, as people employed selective breeding and irrigation throughout the Bronze Age. But while selective breeding and irrigation were important technologies, farmers persisted in regarding their wealth to be predominantly just some handout from God and the Wilderness. It took the Industrial Revolution’s much more dramatic restructuring of life and the landscape for people to consider that wealth is not passively accepted from Nature but actively produced by the application of human intellectual initiative — that is, entrepreneurship.

This, by the way, is why the title of this post says that it was “the Industrial Revolution,” rather than “the Enlightenment,” that brought about this change in thinking. Even early Enlightenment thinkers, such as the physiocrats and the young Thomas Jefferson, continued to fixate on the ancient assumption that only land was the source of wealth. Although Locke was explicit in observing the role of human intellectual creativity as the major input in the production of wealth — specifically with the improvement of land — he left unclear whether he comprehended how far this principle applied to sectors other than land improvement. It was latter Enlightenment figures such as Say and Tracy, once the Industrial Revolution was underway, who expanded the appropriate coherence of private property and wealth, wider than land and farming, to technology in general. And, indeed, Say and Tracy specifically cited contemporary examples of industrialization to demonstrate how wealth is not passively taken or extracted from the Earth, but produced as intellectual human initiative adds value to the natural raw materials.

Yes, it was the insight of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that you owe the existence of your fortune not primarily to God or Society, but to your own efforts. Hence, when the State confiscates or micromanages your wealth, it is not taking back for God or Society what God or Society had created and then entrusted to you, but instead taking from you the wealth that would not have existed if not for your own productive choices and efforts. As your wealth was created by you, not a permission granted by Society, Society isn’t right to overrule what you do with your own wealth peaceably.

That is the proper understanding, but while the word property is much older — and the idea of one private party having rightful control over a plot of land is older still — the free-marketers’ sufficiently sophisticated analysis of private property is relatively new. In humanity’s two-million-year history, the proper evaluation of private property doesn’t go back farther than 500 years.

Although the first intellectuals who stated explicitly the true source of wealth were French, the French were not the first society in general to understand this principle implicitly. That honor goes to the constitutional liberal republic founded on the philosophy of the Enlightenment. As Ayn Rand has her Francisco d’Anconia character articulate in Atlas Shrugged,

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose — because it contains all the others — the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to make money.” No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity — to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first [society in general] to understand that wealth has to be created.

However, Americans understood this on a mere gut level, and even that implicit understanding among Americans seems to be evaporating. The State’s general disrespect for your private property rights will go on and worsen if Americans do not become more cognizant of it as a formal philosophic principle. Regrettably, as much as they are derided inaccurately as defenders of capitalism, most vocal members of the West’s political Right convey tacit agreement with the more primitive interpretation of private ownership.

Since the late twentieth century, more members of the political Right, especially if they have the usual cursory familiarity with Ayn Rand’s writings, have given some lip service to the Enlightenment-era’s discoveries about wealth creation. But, for the most part, their understanding of such discoveries remains superficial at best. Hence, when Reason magazine uploads a video onto YouTube pointing out that the construction of President Donald Trump’s proposed Border Wall will involve the seizing of private land, these same right-wingers are quick to go to the video’s comments section and offer rationalizations for this violation of private property, asserting that the alleged common good to be achieved by the Wall’s erection supersedes your petty selfish ownership concerns.

Today it is common for the advocates of government control — American and otherwise — to scold,

You laissez-fairies accuse us of denying private property rights outright. But we do not. You inaccurately brand us as “socialists” when, in fact, we very much wish for heavy industry to retain private title over its land and capital. Of course we uphold the importance of private belongings; we have private belongings ourselves and do not want to part with such belongings. But what we do admit is that private property isn’t to be revered as sacred. 

You want to believe that your right to control your own private belongings peaceably is some sort of moral absolute, but it is not. You have private belongings that, for the most part, you are right to exercise some control over, but this is just a trust, and your stewardship over this trust was delegated to you by Society. Society, as represented by our democratic government, both reserves and deserves the authority to revoke or override your peaceable decisions with the land and objects in your custody.

For almost all of history, the overwhelming majority of people would agree with that. These apologists for government control — many of whom are Americans who would never think of themselves as “socialist” and are genuinely offended by anyone calling them such — are quite correct when they say that the free-marketers’ interpretation of private property rights is actually not the traditional interpretation in total, but includes an individualism and moral absolutism omitted from the traditional interpretation. But these apologists for increased government control are incorrect to cite this difference as if it were evidence that the free-marketers’ interpretation should be dismissed as invalid. The free-marketers’ interpretation recognizes an important discovery and comprehension, and to deny it is contrary to the goal of human flourishing.



On March 11, 2019, I added the word individualism in the final paragraph, and I added the quotation from Adam Smith about intellectual entrepreneurial “labour” being the source of private property. On that same day I reorganized the paragraphs about whether Americans still understand implicitly that economic value is something created by specific entrepreneurs. 

Laws of Nature Disprove Free Will? The Internal Contradiction in Claiming That

Invoking His Sophisticated Understanding of the Law of Causality, Spinoza Commits the Stolen Concept Fallacy


Stuart K. Hayashi




O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in a man that walketh to direct his own steps.

—Jeremiah 10. 23

Portrait of Spinoza from 1665; courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Roderick Fitts’s essay on free will, “The Freedom of Human Action,” has given me new insight. It pointed out that at least some understanding of the Law of Causality — of the causal link between cause and effect — is implicit in long-term decision-making. I want outcome Y instead of outcome B. I ascertain that doing X will result in outcome Y, whereas doing A will result in outcome B. Therefore, I choose to do X instead of A.

This conflicts with Spinoza’s argument that the Law of Causality precludes free will. If Spinoza is correct that the Law of Causality precludes free will, how can Roderick Fitts argue that some recognition of cause-and-effect connections is implicit in exercises of free will?




Brief Summary of What Spinoza’s Argument Is and What It Overlooks
I have already summarized Spinoza’s argument and given my rebuttal to it. But I will review briefly here. (This link to all my blog posts on free will.)

Spinoza’s argument against free will is as follows: when you observe objects and come to understand the nature/identity of each object observed, you find that one event will yield an easily predictable outcome. The event is an entity — a storm cloud — raining down on another entity, a rock. The rock erodes. Moreover, the storm cloud raining down on the rock caused the rock to erode. Due to the respective natures of both storm clouds and rocks, in any instance wherein a storm cloud drops rain on a rock, the rock will erode. That is because of the nature of rocks; the rock could not do anything else. For a rock to respond in any other manner under those conditions would be contrary to the rock's nature as a rock, contrary to the Law of Identity. If you understand Aristotle’s Law of Identity, and the respective natures of each entity in a situation, you know how the entity being acted upon (in this case, a rock) will act in response.

Spinoza then points out that human beings are also entities — we humans are entities no less than rocks are. Accordingly, the Law of Causality is just as applicable to human beings as it is applicable to rocks. To Spinoza, it follows that human beings are just as predictable as rocks are when heavy rain falls on rocks. It also follows that no human being is proactive but is only reactive to outside stimuli, just as a rock only reacts to outside stimuli. For a human to have free will, that human would have to be proactive, not merely reactive.

As Spinoza puts it,

...nature is always the same... ...that is, nature's laws and ordinances, whereby all things come to pass and change, from one form to another, are everywhere and always the same; so that there should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature's universal laws and rules. Thus the [human] passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from this same [metaphysical] necessity [meaning the same mechanistic determinism of cause-and-effect] and efficacy of nature; they answer to certain definite causes, through which they are understood... I shall, therefore,...consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner...as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.

Spinoza’s argument overlooks 

1. in Nature, an unprecedented effect can occur (this is called an Emergent Property) and
2. that the respective Laws of Identity and Causality are valid does not preclude an unprecedented phenomenon (an Emergent Property) from occurring. 

What an Emergent Property means is this: when particular physical components end up arranged in most particular arrangements, usually nothing new happens. However, when those physical components end up arranged in a particularly fortuitous matter, something unprecedented can occur.

As an example, all of the chemicals that make life possible were already on Earth for billions of years before there were any organisms. When those chemicals ended up being arranged in most possible arrangements, nothing new happened — and that was for billions of years. But one day, those chemicals ended up in an arrangement that resulted in something unprecedented: the first primitive organism emerged. Hence the respective Laws of Identity and Causality being contextual absolutes, which apply consistently in most circumstances for millennia, does not preclude unprecedented phenomena from occurring. And the presence of volition in organisms started off as an Emergent Property. That is why the respective Laws of Identity and Causality can apply consistently in most contexts and remain contextually absolute even if there are natural phenomena that are not as predictable as what happens to a rock when it is rained upon heavily.

Now I will get to how, when Spinoza invokes the Law of Causality to deny free will, he falls prey to the Stolen Concept fallacy. Objectivists are familiar with how a commentator such as Sam Harris engages in this fallacy when he tries to persuade you to reject the idea of free will. (My longer rebuttal to Sam Harris is over here.) If everything you do is a foregone conclusion — being the result of unconscious processes (Sam Harris says your conscious mind only rationalizes taking the action that your unconscious reptilian brain compelled you to perform) — then it is pointless for him to try to convince your conscious mind to change its opinion. Any time a debater tries to convince you to reject the idea of free will, it is premised on the implicit recognition that what your opinion will be by that argument’s end is not a foregone conclusion. Furthermore, when it comes to Sam Harris’s case in particular, it is self-contradictory for him to attempt to appeal to your conscious mind when he argues that it is not the conscious mind that is behind the steering wheel anyway.

Objectivists are familiar with that argument, but that argument only places emphasis on the implicit fact that the person to whom the appeal is being made is the person who possesses free will. I want to point out the other side. The person pitching his own argument against free will — be it Sam Harris or Spinoza — also relies on the implicit recognition of free will as he comes to that anti-free will conclusion. Indeed, Spinoza would be relying on an implicit recognition of his own free will even if Spinoza kept his own conclusions against free will in his own head and never tried to sell anyone on those arguments.




For a Philosopher to Gain a Sophisticated Understanding of the Law of Causality, He Must Recognize Free Will, At Least Implicitly
The reasons are:

1. To make any major philosophic inquiry is a long-term decision. That means:
2. To make a philosophic inquiry is an exercise of free will. And:
3. To reach a sophisticated philosophic understanding of the Law of Causality is a philosophic inquiry. That means:
4. To reach a sophisticated philosophic understanding of the Law of Causality, one must exercise free will.

It is not merely the case that when Spinoza tries to convince you that you have no free will, Spinoza is implicitly recognizing that you do have free will after all. It is the case that even if Spinoza tried to convince no one else — if he only sought to form his own conclusions and keep them to himself — the very act of launching into an erudite inquiry about the Law of Causality itself is an exercise in free will. Before Spinoza initiated his inquiry about the Law of Causality, he recognized there were two possible outcomes:

• Y – Spinoza has a confident, philosophically sophisticated conclusion about whether there is a Law of Causality, a conclusion supported by solid reasoning.
• B – Spinoza has no firm conclusion about whether there is a Law of Causality; he is agnostic on it.

Spinoza wanted outcome Y instead of outcome B. And he recognized that action X led to outcome Y whereas action A led to outcome B. These are the two possible options available to him:

• X – Spinoza initiates a philosophic inquiry on whether there is a Law of Causality, meaning whether causality — cause-and-effect — applies consistently.
• A – Spinoza refrains from launching into a philosophic inquiry on this.

Per Roderick Fitts’s explanation, Spinoza wanted outcome Y instead of outcome B, and therefore he chose action X over action A. And that was an action of free will. The exercise of free will is a prerequisite into a sophisticated philosophic investigation of Causality — this applies even if the investigator never discloses his findings to anyone else. Spinoza invokes his sophisticated understanding of the Law of Causality to deny free will, and yet one must exercise free will to acquire a sophisticated philosophic understanding of the Law of Causality. Hence, even if Spinoza did not try to convince anyone else about the invalidity of the idea of free will, for Spinoza even to conclude in the privacy of his own mind that there is no free will, he must implicitly recognize his own free will and act on that free will.




Wait; Am I Contradicting Myself Over Whether It’s Recognition of Free Will or Recognition of Causality That Comes First?
At this point, a critic might say that I am the one who is contradicting himself. The critic can say,

First you stated agreement with Roderick Fitts that within every act of free will there is, at least on an implicit level, a recognition of the Law of Causality. That would imply that someone understands causality before one exercises free will by choosing one alternative over another. But then you argue that for someone to arrive at a sophisticated, philosophically literate understanding of the Law of Causality, one must both exercise free will and, at least on an implicit level, acknowledge the existence of one’s own free will. But that would imply that someone acknowledges his own free will before coming to understand causality. Well, which is it?

Here is the difference: you do not need to engage in a conscious, long-term decision-making process to grasp causation on a primitive, implicit level. However, for you to gain a sophisticated, philosophically literate comprehension of the Law of Causality, you do need to engage in a conscious, long-term decision-making process while recognizing, at least on an implicit level, that this is an implementation of free will. Therefore, this is what happened: Spinoza first understood causality on a primitive, implicit/unconscious level. It was with that primitive, implicit/unconscious acknowledgment of causality that he first exercised free will. Then he exercised free will in order to gain his sophisticated, philosophically literate comprehension of the Law of Causality.

As noted by child researcher Alison Gopnik in her book The Philosophical Baby, psychologists have conducted controlled experiments on babies that evince that this is the case. In both the control and experimental samples, a baby is placed under a mobile. In the experimental sample, the mobile is tied to the baby’s leg and, when the baby moves her leg, it moves the mobile. In the control sample, nothing ties the baby to the mobile; the mobile moves independently. The babies in the experimental sample stare at the mobile for longer periods of time than do the babies in the control sample, and it is always after the baby has caused the mobile to move. From this, the psychologists infer that the babies in the experimental sample show more interest than those in the control sample exactly because the babies in the experimental sample are first coming to grasp, at least implicitly, that it is their own movements that are causing the mobile’s movements.

This suggests that when a person first comes to understand causality on an implicit, primitive level, that was not the result of some conscious decision. However, we do know that when someone gains a strong and sophisticated philosophical understanding of the Law of Causality, such as Spinoza’s, that is attributable to that person making the conscious long-term decision to study the Law of Causality. And we know that that conscious, long-term decision, picked among various possible options, was an exercise in free will.




Conclusion
Hence, Spinoza both exercised free will and implicitly (but not consciously) understood his own free will in order to come to his sophisticated, philosophically literate comprehension of the Law of Causality. But then he improperly invoked that sophisticated, philosophically literate comprehension of the Law of Causality to deny the existence of free will. That is how his argument commits the Stolen Concept fallacy.

And here is another way that that happens: recognition of any entity as an object that is impacted upon is contingent on the presence of a subject (a conscious observer, such as you) observing that entity as an object. In this context, “object” refers to an entity being observed and the “subject” refers to the consciousness that is observing the object. That is, the subject is a conscious person doing the observing (in this case, you in particular). In this context, the “subject” has agency; it can choose which particular objects it does or does not place its focus upon. In Spinoza’s argument, all conscious, decision-making humans are treated only as objects that are acted upon; his argument overlooks that there are any subjects possessing any agency. But no entities could be recognized as objects if not for there being a subject — you — to focus on them. And which objects you do or do not focus on, depends on your agency — that is, your exercise of free will.

No, Spinoza, an understanding of causality does not preclude free will. On the contrary, a recognition of causality, at least on an implicit and simple level, is what helps someone exercise free will.




On September 2, 2017, I changed every use of the word causation to the word causality.

Scanning the Brains of Those Who Say Neuroscience Disproves Free Will

A Reply to Sam Harris and Others


Stuart K. Hayashi



O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in a man that walketh to direct his own steps.

—Jeremiah 10. 23

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Popular atheist author and neuroscientist Sam Harris denies human volition.  As he states in his short treatise Free Will,

Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less). Either  [a.] our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or [b.] they are the product of chance, and we are not responsible for them.

No, Spinoza and Harris, the Law of Causality Does Not Preclude Free Will
That first possibility that Sam Harris raises is actually an argument made by Benedict Spinoza.  Spinoza was an excellent philosopher in many respects, but not in this one.  This is the ar4gument. It is that to agree that the Law of Causality has both of the following implications. 

1. Every action by non-sapient objects was the logical consequence of some prior cause.
2. We have the Law of Identity. The Law of Identity is that entities act only in accordance with their nature.  Taking the Law of Identity into account, a specific action by a specific non-sapient object could not have been anything other than what it was.  This is due to the nature of the non-sapient object and the nature of the prior event that stimulated this action.  

Here is an example. On account of the levels of moisture in the air, a lightning storm occurs.  A bolt of lightning strikes a branch of the tallest tree in the nearby forest.  The lighting strike severs the end of the branch from the rest of the tree. The rest of the tree catches fire.  All of the actions pertaining to the tree could not have occurred in any manner other than they did. 

It is not as if the lightning strike could have magically transformed the tree into a giant dove and made the dove-tree fly into space.  No, if a bolt of lightning strikes the tree (Event A), the tree will catch fire and the branch that was struck will be damaged (Event B).  On account of the respective natures of the objects in question —  the nature of trees, lightning bolts, and air — nothing but Event B could have resulted from Event A.  That is the Law of Causality, also known as the Law of Cause-and-Effect.  And the Law of Causality is the Law of Identity as applied to action.

As Spinoza would have it,

...nature is always the same... ...that is, nature’s laws and ordinances, whereby all things come to pass and change, from one form to another, are everywhere and always the same; so that there should be one and the same method of understanding the nature of all things whatsoever, namely, through nature's universal laws and rules. Thus the [human] passions of hatred, anger, envy, and so on, considered in themselves, follow from this same [metaphysical] necessity [meaning the same mechanistic determinism of cause-and-effect] and efficacy of nature; they answer to certain definite causes, through which they are understood... I shall, therefore,...consider human actions and desires in exactly the same manner...as though I were concerned with lines, planes, and solids.

The argument of Spinoza — and, here, Sam Harris — is that if we accept the Law of Causality as valid, then that precludes human beings from having free will.  The reason they say this is that surely human beings are physical objects, and the very same laws of physics and causality that apply to trees and air molecules and lightning bolts apply to human beings as well.  

This is the idea. I am just as much a physical entity as a tree is. Therefore, any time some stimulus stimulates some reaction from me, that reaction was not my choice. No, the reaction was simply me (an object) responding accordingly. That is given the respective natures of both the stimulus and me as objects, No other outcome could have resulted.  

If some random stranger comes out of a crowd and kisses me, for instance, and then I kiss back, as opposed to pushing the stranger away, then it means that I had no choice in the matter. I could not have chosen to push the stranger away.  Rather, if I kiss back, that was the only possible outcome of the stimulating event.  To deny that, presume Spinoza and Sam Harris, is to deny the Law of Causality and the Law of Identity.

Actually, another neuroscientist presents another option. This is Michael S. Gazzaniga of U.C. Santa Barbara in his book Who's in Charge?  Gazzaniga points out that the Laws of Identity and Causality do not preclude unprecedented events from occurring (page 71).  For example, at one point in the past, the universe was in one form — something dense and hot.  Then the Big Bang happened, and the universe, as we know it, underwent what is metaphorically called an “expansion.”   That brought the universe into the form with which we are more familiar.  

Likewise, at one point in the past there were no life forms on Earth.  Then some chemical reaction occurred, and the first singe-celled organism came to be. That first single-celled organism did not consist of any new matter that had not already existed on Earth minutes earlier. The matter constituting the first organism already existed prior to the first organism existing. Rather, what happened was that some rearrangement of matter, which had already been on Earth minutes earlier, brought about an unprecedented phenomenon. That phenomenon was the arrangement of constituent parts acting as an organism.

That new phenomenon is called an Emergent Property.  First you start with a set of components. In most arrangements, those components do nothing new.  When those particular components find a particular new arrangement, however, a previously unprecedented phenomenon occurs despite no new components themselves being added. That is the “emergent property.”

Gazzaniga argues that volition in organisms is similarly an emergent property.  At one point in history, our ancestors were much like worms. Our worms ancestors did what their genes programmed them to do.  However, over the course of millions of years of evolution and reproduction and mutation, the chemicals in the bodies of some ancestor of ours were arranged in a new fashion. That brought forth an unprecedented phenomenon. It was a new level of spontaneity in the behavior of this ancestor. It was an enlarged ability of this ancestor to act upon a wide variety of different behavioral options at its disposal.  We had some rat-like ancestor whose abilities were closer to volition than that of its own worm-like ancestor. Then we had some ape-like ancestor whose abilities were closer to volition than those of the rat-like ancestor.

Recognizing that, over the course of billions of years, some unprecedented phenomenon can occur does not contradict the Law of Identity or the Law of Causality.  The reason is that the Law of Identity is contextual.  For instance, suppose I hold one American football and you hold another American football.  Mine has a smudge on it and yours does not.  I say they are both footballs. They have the same shape and are used for the same purpose. Therefore these footballs are both of the same type, the same identity.  Because they are of the same identity, the same Newtonian laws should apply to them.  If I release my grip on the football I hold, it will fall.  The same should happen to your football if you release your grip on yours.  In that respect, they are of the same identity.  

However, that does not mean that both American footballs are exactly the same on the noumenal level.  My football has a smudge, and yours does not.  Mine was made in California; yours was made in New York.  When I said earlier that both footballs had the same identity, I mean that they were same as far as we needed to be concerned in our present germane context. If we just want to play football or throw it around or experiment on Newtonian mechanics, the two footballs are similar enough to be considered of the same type and identity.  It does not mean that the two footballs are exactly the same on the noumenal level.

The same applies to the emergence of living matter from what was once wholly nonliving matter.  The laws of physics mean that, as far as we need to be concerned in most contexts in our lives, the same principles will apply consistently.  Most objects that are released from our grip will fall to the Earth.  In our normal dealings, physical laws are consistent. They are absolute within the context of our normal dealings.  But recognizing this principle — the Laws of Identity and Causality — as contextual absolutes does not preclude the recognition that, because not all similar-and-like events are exactly the same at the noumenal level, it is the case that, once in a while, something unprecedented can happen.  

In our normal everyday dealings, we can consider two reactions by the same sets of chemicals to be similar enough for us to classify them as being of the same type.  Over the course of billions of years, though, because no two reactions are exactly the same at the noumenal level, something unprecedented can happen. Hence, living matter arising on Earth when, just minutes earlier, all matter on Earth was nonliving.

Similarly, the first organisms were relatively predictable in their behaviors, as worms seem predictable to us, doing what they were programmed by their genes to do.  But among the myriad random mutations in the history of our ancestral germline were mutations that made our ancestors, over the course of several generations, more spontaneous and volitional.  

If  the Law of Causality were some Platonic Imperative that transcends all context, then Spinoza and Sam Harris would be correct (1) that it precludes volition and (2) that it even precludes any unprecedented event from occurring ever.  However, we can instead recognize the Law of Causality as a contextual absolute. That means that the Law of Causality regularly applies within the context of our normal everyday dealings, but that, over the course of billions or trillions of years, it does not mean that all natural events of a similar type will be exactly the same at the noumenal level. Depending on how granular we want to be in examining similar events, there may be minute differences.  If we recognize the Law of Causality that applies consistently in the pertinent contexts while not transcending all context itself, then the Law of Causality does not preclude the possibility of unprecedented events occurring.  And one of those unprecedented events was volitional organisms evolving from ancestors that were far less volitional.  

Yes, the laws of physics, the Law of Identity, and the Law of Causality apply both to rocks and human beings.  According to the Laws of Identity and Causality, if water splashes on both a rock and me, both the rock and I will have some type of reaction to this stimulus.  But it does not follow from this that my reaction to the splash of water has to be as predictable as the reaction from the rock.  (A) Looking at reality and (B) observing the respective natures of entities (C) also shows you that I am more complex in my behavior than is the rock.  Recognizing the Law of Identity — and with it, the Law of Causality — means recognizing that I possess volitional capabilities that the rock does not possess.

The quotation from Harris at the start of this essay, then, reveals that Harris presents his readers with a false dichotomy:  either (x) everything in Existence is governed by consistent principles with predictable responses to their respective stimuli, or (y) everything that happens is random chaos.  He refrains from acknowledging the presence of emergent properties.  Within most normal contexts, the same principles do keep applying in most situations.  Therefore it would be an epistemological folly (which, sadly, is made by many people who call themselves Pragmatists) to reject principles, per se, as useless and unreliable.  Nonetheless, while the same principles do consistently apply in most contexts, they do not prevent unprecedented phenomena from occurring.  The emergence of organisms from what was previously only nonliving matter, was one such emergent property.  The evolution of volition among those organisms, too, is an emergent property. 

Yet Harris and his fans can reply that they do not merely have Spnioza's philosophy on their side.  They claim that psychology experiments performed by Benjamin Libet and Chun Siong Soon prove their case.  Therefore, let us take a look at those experiments.

Do Benjamin Libet, Chun Siong Soon, and John-Dylan Haynes Disprove Free Will?
In Libet’s original career-making experiment, conducted in 1979, Libet hooked the human test subject up to an electroencephalograph (EEG), which measures brain activity. In this particular experiment, the EEG measured brain waves in the part of the cerebral cortex most strongly associated with one’s readiness to make motor movements with one’s own body. When someone is ready to move a specific muscle, but has not yet moved, the EEG indicates the activation of one’s “readiness potential.” That refers to the readiness to initiate motor movement. 

 Libet instructed a human test subject to perform a simple motor activity, such as bend the fingers of her right hand or bend her right wrist, whenever she felt like doing so. The test subject also had to look at a clock and remember the specific point in time when she decided consciously to make a specific movement. Libet found from this experiment that the test subject’s readiness potential became active in her brain an average of one-third-of-a-second prior to making the actual movement. Therefrom, Libet concluded that the human test subject’s subconscious mind anticipated what would, an average one-third-second later, be the consciously-recognized decision to make a movement.

In 2008, Chun Siong Soon, John-Dylan Haynes, and the rest of their team ran a more technologically sophisticated version of that experiment. This time, Dr. Soon’s team hooked up the test subject to an fMRI — functional magnetic resonance imaging device — that provides a diagram of exactly what parts of the brain are activated as a person performs a specific motor action or so much as experiences an emotional reaction to some stimulus. When someone performs an action or emotionally reacts, blood flows to specific areas of the brain, and these areas light up in images taken by the fMRI scan. 

 In the experiment, while having their brains fMRI-scanned, human test subjects were to stare at a personal-computer monitor that would flash a series of letters onscreen, one letter at a time. The letter could be any of the 26 of the English alphabet and would be drawn by the computer at random. Simultaneously, the human test subject could, at the same instant that any letter flashed onscreen, press a button. It would be either the button on the left or the one on the right. The test subject would press the button on the left using her left hand, and use the right hand for the right button. Naturally, whether the human test subject chose the right or left is something she did instantaneously. There was no time to plan it out in advance.

Whenever someone pressed a button, the computer recorded whether it was the left or right button. It also recorded the letter that was onscreen at the very same instant. On the fMRI, one region of the brain would light up to indicate the choice of pressing the left button, whereas a separate region would light up to indicate the choice to press the right button. The fMRI scans, too, had their own time stamps recording the exact time of day — down to microseconds — that a specific brain region (for left or right) lit up.

As indicated by the time markers on the fMRI scans, the brain region signifying the left-button-pushing lit up for an average ten seconds prior to the left button actually being pushed. It was vice versa for the right side. This indicates that, an average ten seconds prior to the test subject making a split-second choice, that consciously recognized choice had already been anticipated by the subconscious brain by an average ten seconds.




Your Conscious Mind Didn’t Plan to Buy a House or to Marry That Special Person?
Therefrom, Sam Harris concludes that every person’s course of action is automatically set by one’s subconscious. This is quite absent of, or prior to, one’s own conscious reasoning. Indeed, Harris continues, someone’s conscious reasoning serves as nothing more than a rationalization for courses of action that the subconscious has already thoughtlessly put into motion. Beyond that, Harris maintains, conscious reasoning plays no role in deciding someone’s course of action. Rather, what we wish to believe are our consciously-ratiocinated choices really amount to arational instincts being acted upon.

According to Harris's argument, we have conscious thoughts, sure, but when it comes to every major long-range life decision, such as purchasing a house in a particular neighborhood, what determines these courses of action are not our conscious deliberations but our body chemistry passively reacting to external stimuli. This is just as a cockroach is guided, not primarily by some conscious reasoning, but by its inner, instinctual drives. The cockroach’s seemingly spontaneous actions were a complex emergent property that emerged from the interfaces of components of its body chemistry. Yes, humans have conscious thoughts and cockroaches do not, but Harris maintains that what we have in common with cockroaches is that our courses of action, taken as a whole and looking long-range, are guided mostly by something other than conscious reasoning.

To repeat, those who cite the Libet-Soon experiments to denigrate free will, argue as follows. In the experiments, the exact moment that someone’s decision-making process begins can be precisely ascertained. In Libet’s 1979 experiment, the exact moment the conscious decision-making process began was the moment that the human test subject noticed the time on the clock as she chose to bend her fingers. On that interpretation, the subconscious anticipated the conscious mind by at least one-third of a second. Likewise, in the 2008 Soon-Haynes experiment, the conscious decision-making process began and ended the precise moment the human test subject pressed a button. On that interpretation, the subconscious anticipated the rapid-decision-making conscious mind by an average of ten seconds.

Note that this interpretation assumes that once the brain-measuring instrument detects the activation of “readiness potential,” that necessarily indicates that the decision to make a specific motor movement has already been finalized. To proceed from that assumption would be to deduce that once the readiness potential for moving the left hand is activated, the decision-making process has concluded. It is also to conclude that the motor movement that occurs ten seconds later is not the final stage of the decision, but rather something that happens ten seconds subsequent to the decision-making process’s conclusion.

Such defenders of free will as University of Manchester geriatric medicine professor Raymond Tallis and psychiatrist Sally Satel observe the flaw in any citation of these experiments to prove the allegation that free will does not exist. The flaw is that to cite such experiments as proof of free will’s nonexistence, happens to ignore the contextual and continuous nature of human volition.

To argue that the experiments precisely identified the exact instant in time when a human decision begins (at the noumenal level) and the exact instant when it ends (at the noumenal level), is to presume that any human decision can be observed in isolation from the wider context with which it intertwines.

First off, every choice is made within a larger context and cannot be understood when examined apart from that context. One decision begets the need for other decisions, still. My decision to walk to a grocery store to purchase ice cream begets still other decisions. Now I must decide which flavors I am to purchase and whether I am to purchase the ice cream by means of cash, check, or credit card.

Moreover, what starts out as a small, seemingly trivial decision can expand into a whole sequence of small choices that ultimately culminate in choosing to undertake a major long-range project. For instance, when I was six years old, upon some impulse of her own, my mother gave me some sheets of paper and colored markers and asked me if I wanted to draw. On my own impulse, I went along with that. Without much fussing over my choices or the limits of my resources, I drew an entire series of drawings of some of my favorite video-game characters at the time. Also without thinking much about it, my mother asked me if I would like to staple the drawings together into a book. Again, in the absence of ponderous deliberation, I answered her in the affirmative.

Days later, again without a painstaking weighing of my options, I chose to draw more home-made picture books. Increasingly, I wrote captions to each picture. The captions evolved into sentences. What began as a series of random images evolved into a short story. Through a chain reaction of such events over age six, I decided that my life goal was to be a professional writer. Now, that is a long-range choice that requires years of dedication and various long-range consequences.

To stay true to that choice throughout one’s adult life does require painstaking deliberation and a serious weighing of options. Following through on this long-range choice also encompasses an entire series of steps wherein I make smaller, easier choices, such as what sort of font I might use when I type out a manuscript.

Entities and their actions are interrelated in a wider context. One action of a specific entity relates to that entity’s other actions, being an effect of prior actions and a cause of subsequent actions. During waking experience, the decision-making process is therefore an ongoing, continuous process. It is not as if, during a single duration of time in which I am awake, my volition starts, stops, and then starts again. Therefore, volition itself is an ongoing, continuous process that requires no noumenal-level beginnings or endings. Within the span of your waking experience, the volitional process exists holistically, as a continuum. As a corollary, you cannot, on some noumenal level, pinpoint the exact moment when the process of a making a specific decision begins.

Often, the implicit and initially superficial recognition of having to make that choice starts out vague and faint. The urgency of the need for a committed position on the decision becomes clearer and more apparent over time, as more sensory evidence accumulates. If, between February 1 and March 1, I notice I have made a net gain of four pounds in weight, the need to decide whether I will change my eating or exercise habits will not be obvious. I might give it some passing thoughts before temporarily forgetting about it. Should I gain thirty pounds between March 2 and April 2, though, then recognition of the need for a long-range decision becomes starker. 

 Even when we consider such sophisticated scientific instruments as EEGs and the fMRI, such machines cannot ascertain, on the noumenal level, the exact beginnings or endings of the process of coming to a specific decision. These beginnings and endings bleed together into a continuous whole. This is just as how, although a pet dog is made out of atoms, we cannot, through unaided senses, discern where one atom of the dog begins and another ends.

That my subconscious might anticipate my conscious mind in recognizing my need to make a long-range decision of life-changing consequences, does not preclude the necessity of applying conscious deliberation to such a decision. Yes, long before my conscious mind responds, my subconscious might (1) prove sensitive and responsive to the environment, (2) send signals to my conscious mind, and (3) prepare my body for specific motor movements. That my subconscious responded to something prior to my conscious mind responding to it, and then readied my conscious mind for conscious thought, does not mean that my subconscious overrode my conscious mind and “therefore made the decision for me.” My conscious mind still has to be there to weigh each option and contemplate the consequences of taking any option.

Moreover, contrary to Sam Harris, it is not a matter of a woman’s subconscious proactively leading her in her course of action and of her conscious mind passively following along and rationalizing decisions that have already been finalized. Rather, it is a matter of both one’s conscious mind and one’s subconscious both being active during one’s waking experience. It is also a matter of the conscious mind remaining proactive in deciphering signals sent from the subconscious. It is also a matter of the conscious mind weighing options and judging which subconsciously-motivated impulses are or are not safe to act upon. Then it is up to the conscious mind to decide proactively which desires should or should not be acted upon, which vaguely-considered plans should be provided further detail and ultimately implemented.




A Complex, Volitional Choice Doesn’t Require a Conscious Account of Every Motor Movement, . . . Let Alone Every Conscious Motor Movement Being Thought Up Prior to the Subconscious’s Activation of Your “Readiness Potential”
It would be silly to conclude that a long-range goal is not consciously chosen if not every single motor movement that contributes to meeting that long-range goal is consciously-thought-out and planned. Here is an example that Raymond Tallis provides. Today I might decide to walk to the grocery store. On my trip there, it is not as though I consciously think about every single step I take. I do not think “Now I bend my left knee. Now I raise my left foot above the ground. Now I place my left foot on the ground again, but farther ahead than it was previously. Now for the right foot...” On this trip to the grocery store, explicates Raymond Tallis, “there isn’t a separate decision corresponding to every one of the hundreds of steps” taken to get there (page 249). That I do not consciously think out every literal step, does not prove that conscious thought played no role in the overall, larger goal of making the trip from my home to this retail establishment.

Likewise, as I type the first draft of this essay, I do not consciously think out every stroke of every key as I type. It is not as though I must tell myself, “First I will type the F key. Then I will type the I key. Then I will type the R key...” I just type. I do not agonize over every single sentence. I just type out the sentences as they pop into my head. Agonizing over specific word choices or grammatical choices comes later, upon rereading and editing the draft. Recognizing the fact that my commitment to writing was and is an overall conscious choice, does not hinge upon believing that every specific procedure involved had to be consciously thought-out prior to my cerebral cortex activating the “readiness potential” of my fingers.

Yes, the subconscious parts of my brain might activate before my conscious mind becomes aware of it, as my body makes specific motor movements. Yet it is a tremendous leap to conclude from this that my decades-long dedication to becoming a writer — a choice first made years ago, and a choice that is renewed every day — was a choice not made by me but rather simply a course action that my subconscious simply programmed me, before the fact, to undertake. When we look at the wider context of long-range life decisions, the results of Libet’s and Soon’s neuroscience experiments cannot erase the conscious thought that went into my making, and my renewing my commitment to, various choices that I know will affect me for years to come.




The Concept Theft Involved in Trying to Convince Me, Consciously, That My Consciousness Is Not in Charge
And, again, there is a self-refutation in Harris’s own attempt to explain his conclusion verbally. The snag is that Harris’s explanation appeals to his readers’ and audiences’ conscious cognition. Should it be the case that one’s courses of action are determined by the subconscious, and conscious reasoning has no influence in that, then it is self-defeating for Harris to attempt to explain his argument.

According to Harris’s own logic, his reader’s subconscious will predetermine agreement or disagreement with his opinion prior to Harris being able to finish his articulation. That would thereby render it superfluous, before the fact, for Harris to explain himself. As Wayne Dunn puts it,

Determinists hold that man’s every thought and action is necessitated by factors beyond his control. Yet, curiously, a determinist typically cites “evidence” for his philosophical convictions. To which you might respond: “So, let me get this straight. Only after scrupulously ‘weighing’ the facts did you conclude that determinism is true, correct?” When he says yes, he’s busted. For if determinism is true, then one could not “weigh” the facts: all one’s opinions are pre-set, including opinions on determinism. Choosing to believe that men lack volition is a contradiction in terms. (And choosing to evade the issue is also a choice.)

True, people often have particular emotional predispositions toward particular courses of action that antecede their rational thoughts about the matter. Also true, it is common for people to employ conscious reasoning, not to reconsider their choices but merely to rationalize their immediate preconceptions or the beliefs to which they have already committed themselves for years.

Ultimately, Harris overlooks that when it comes to long-term decisions, such as purchasing the right home, human beings often do employ their conscious reasoning for the purposes of making their final decision. Moreover, their conscious reasoning does influence them insofar as the conscious reasoning provides a check against following one’s impulses. That is exactly why, when one deliberates over a decision that requires an enormous investment of money and years’ worth of commitment, someone is capable of changing her mind.




On September 1, 2017, I added the quotation from Spinoza.  On November 20, 2017, I changed every instance where I used the expression “Law of Causation” to “Law of Causality.” On Sunday, July 25, 2021, I changed the grammar. I shortened the sentences.