Summary: "The conviction persists -- though history shows it to be a hallucination -- that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them; we get over them." John Dewey in The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy Tell me, are you a Homoousian or a Homoiousian? Don't know the terms? In the second century heads rolled over the difference between these two camps. Intellectual culture was all steamed up about whether Jesus was made of the same substance as God or a different one, and the two factions, violent in their conviction went by these two names whose near-indistinguishability reflect the kind of "same difference" indifference most of us have about the question today. Intellectual culture has, as Dewey suggested, gotten over the question of whether Jesus and God are made of the same substance. Since I'm asking you questions, here's another: How long ago did you stop feeding your pet kangaroo moon rocks? Intellectual culture gets stuck on questions that contain false assumptions so hidden it takes us a while to even notice that we're making them. We get over these questions when the false assumptions become as glaring as mine that you have both a pet kangaroo and access to a sufficient quantity of moon rocks to feed him. It can take years, centuries or even millennia to spot the false assumptions. When there's a question we churn over for a very long time without headway, searching for hidden false assumptions is a good bet for how to get over the stalemate. Intellectual culture has been stuck for millennia on the question of whether we have Free Will or are deterministically constrained to behave the way we do. We go back and forth on it, factions emphatic in their arguments pro and con but gaining no ground. I won't recount the whole debate here. I'll refresh your mind though, with this cute, pro-determinism limerick: There was a young man who said "damn." For it certainly seems that I am A creature that moves In immutable grooves I'm not even a bus; I'm a tram. A new field of scientific research called "emergent dynamics" has exposed our hidden false assumptions about Free Will, which I'll try to distill for you here. We assume that Free Will is exercised by a little guy, an agent, a homunculus, a soul, an independent, invisible action-figure who operates the physical world's heavy equipment, exerting acts of entirely unconstrained "Will" that move matter, sometimes even mountains. Our image of this free agent is basically, God's mini-me. God, we intuit is an independent, invisible and indivisible agent who can move mountains, independent of the mountains moving Him. God is not a tram; he's a bus, free to steer where He pleases. The Free Will question is about whether we are like that, exerting independent, un-constrained "Will" on the world. The implicit metaphor for both God or Free Will's source is really a soul, an independent point of origin for "Willed" behavior. When we think about a point of origin for willed behavior, especially an invisible one like God or a soul, we think of it as a point really, not necessarily tiny, but certainly indivisible and solid with no parts and nothing moving around inside it. The Greek word for such things is "atom." Like the one-dimensional points you learned about in geometry, atoms are useful fictions, but they're decidedly fictions. Physicists gave up on atoms a while ago. Even in the physical sciences, we don't fine anything solid, not comprised of parts in dynamical (meaning moving) relationship with each other. It's not that quarks are the new indivisible atoms. They too
