The Uncaused Event

• An uncaused event is impossible to accept, if you think about it.

• It’s like asking a mechanic why your car didn’t start this morning, and her saying: “There’s no reason. Everything is working the same, it’s just not starting now.” – We’d presume she’d missed something.

• An uncaused event = no reason, no explanation, no mechanism, no WHY or HOW.

• Even a miracle has a why and a how.• Bear this in mind as we talk about the rest....

Mechanics

Everything in the physical universe obeys the laws of physics

The universe, then, works like clockwork

Laplace’s Demon

If you could know the state, location and direction of every atom in the universe

+The laws of physics (mechanics, chemistry etc.)

=You could trace everything back to the big bang/map everything until

the end of time

Laplace’s Demon

If you could know the state, location and direction of every atom in the universe

+The laws of physics (mechanics, chemistry etc.)

=You could trace everything back to the big bang/map everything until

the end of time

The universe is pre-programmed, set on its path by it’s starting conditions, playing itself out – no room for variation or “free choice” – life is not even a road, it’s railtrack!

Us #1: Biology

Damage or surgery to the brain can alter your personality

Violent criminals used to undergo frontal lobotomies to make them less aggressive. Cats are neutered for similar reasons (hormones)!

Phineas Gage > had an accident at work that shot an iron rod through his skull, severely damaging his frontal lobes. Apparently hard-working, responsible and popular before the accident, he became childish, aggressive, impulsive and hard to control after. His personality changed so much his friends said he was “no longer Gage”.

This Richard Hammond guy recovered fully from his crash on Top Gear – but now likes celery.

MemoryMemory is certainly affected by brain damage, and is a huge part of our identity

and personality.

People who have severe amnesia often develop different characteristics to their previous personalities

Alzheimers is physical disease that eats away at the brain, and in advanced stages often appears to destroy the existing personalities of the people it affects.

Genetics, Development and Neuroanatomy

The way your brain is structured can apparently determine if you are schizophrenic, dyslexic, autistic etc. and maybe whether you are an artistic person or an athletic person or a scientifically minded person - possibly, even, if you are straight or gay!

Drugs

Drugs chemically alter the brain and it’s processes and can have profound effects on your mood, experience and personality – whether it is as treatment for a mood/mental disorder or illegal narcotics/mind-altering hallucinogens…

Us #2: Social and Environmental

Factors

• Maybe you don’t buy this idea that consciousness simply = the composition of brain and body (I don’t – there are massive problems with it) - But even outside of the biology, cause and effect is at work...

• Our lifestyle, beliefs, opinions, choices and responses are determined by:

• The situations we find ourselves in, our time and place in history, our previous experiences, what we have learnt, habit, our upbringing, our society and culture, our interactions with others – the influences on our behaviour are innumerable – all we really do is respond, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Ways Out? #1: Chaos Theory• The “butterfly effect”• Chaos Theory does not get us out of

determinism – it is all about cause and effect!

• It says that some systems (like the weather) are unpredictable because they so complex ie. they have so many factors that you could never account for them all – and the smallest factor (like a butterfly) could, via cause and effect, snowball to have a massive effect.

• Important – these systems are unpredictable in practice, but not in theory – it’s all about the knock-on effects of tiny causes.

Ways Out? #2: Mind is not part of the mechanical universe

• This has a long history, especially in Religious/Spiritual thinking, but ultimately does not get us out of determinism

• Because, even if it is the case, the mind still has to cause what the body does, and the respond to things happening in the world – it is still in a causal system with the material world, so even if it’s not “physical”, the logic of cause and effect still applies.

• We just want to be the cause of everything, and never the effect – like a “prime mover” – but that means we would never have a reason or explanation for our actions!

Ways Out? #3: Randomness• Determinism says there is no such thing as true Randomness – eg. Tossing

a coin.• A random event = an UNCAUSED event (no explanation, no mechanism)• There appears to be no way of proving an event was actually random –

always presume you just haven’t found the mechanism• Randomness does not help Free Will anyway – we have no more control

over random events than strictly determined ones.

Quantum Mechanics• However – in the sub-atomic world, scientists have had to accept that

some particles apparently act in a random way• Some particles just don’t act in the way they should according to standard

mechanics/the laws of cause and effect – they act paradoxically• However, the way they act is still predictable – because they always act in

that paradoxical way – so we can make new laws for how certain particles act, thought strictly NO-ONE can explain the mechanism behind it. We just have to accept that that’s the way it is.

Hume: Constant Conjunctions• Way back in the 18th Century, Hume pointed out

that that’s how it is with ALL cause and effect.• We only accept that this thing causes that thing,

because that’s the way it has always happened.• Like quantum mechanics, we just accept that

“thing 1” responds like this when we do “thing 2” to it, because of habit – constant conjunctions of cause and effect. There is no logical reason why it couldn’t act differently next time, except that it’d break all the “constant conjunctions” of cause and effect that we’re used to. This is (kind of) what happened when we came to study the quantum world.

• If we split the world into “cause” and “effect” there is always a gap that cannot be bridged between the two.

• In reality we cannot divide things neatly into “cause” and an “effect”, because everything is constantly happening in a continuous chain – there are no beginnings and ends – everything is ONE THING.

Conclusion• “Cause and effect” is our concept of how

things work. We can’t make sense of the world without it, yet it’s a flawed idea.

• “Free Will” is even more fuzzy and hard to pin down as a concept.

• If there is a problem reconciling the two, it’s down to how we concieve of these things – which shows just how inadequate our grasp of “how things ultimately are” is.