Determinism as the cause of free will

Allometric scaling laws in biology and physics

Which biological laws, if any, might be universal? As working hypotheses, astronomers and astrophysicists expect that the laws of physics and chemistry, as we understand them, and based on observations and experiments on and near Earth, apply throughout the galaxy and the universe. To what extent this expectation is tested by experiments and observations is a subject of continuing debate. Many astronomical observations can be interpreted as supporting these hypotheses, but they might break down in extreme conditions that are not similar to what can be achieved in Earth-based observations and experiments. At least to the extent that biological laws are emergent from physics and chemistry, we might expect that there are also biological laws, as we understand them, that hold throughout the Galaxy and the Universe. An obvious candidate for such universal biology is Darwinian evolution through mutation (and recombination) and natural (and artificial) selection and including also sexual reproduction, speciation, interand intra-specific competition, predation, parasitism, and symbiosis. This geomorphism, like anthropomorphism, is sometimes justifiable, sometimes just wrong. But some of the arguments for some of the laws of biology are, if correct, then universal. In this brief note, there is time to try to sell only one or two quick ideas. I would like to convince you that: (1) A level-of-development parameter can be defined for Earth’s biosphere in terms of total usable information contents in genes in genomes and memes in brains and extrasomatic memories such as libraries and magnetic disks. The concept of progress can then be defined as an increase in this level-of-development. (2) Earth’s fossil record shows that unsteady progress has occurred. (3) Even after Darwin and the modern synthesis of Darwinian theory and modern genetics, we really don’t understand why. But (4) we can approach the problem by considering the differential survival of information replicators, that is genes and memes. And (5) a reasonable extrapolation of the trend predicts continued progress for Earth’s biosystem and presumably also for other biosystems and civilizations elsewhere. Even a cursory examination of Earth’s fossil record firmly establishes the phenomena of evolution. From no fossils in the oldest rocks through single-celled organisms, then wigglers, eaters, creepers, crawlers, swimmers, runners, fliers, thinkers, up through the

Paradigmatic examples of laws drawn from physics are accompanied by a rich explanatory structure that supports unificatory efforts. Part of the reason these efforts have been successful has been their identification of conservation laws, whose greater necessity allows them to act as constraints. Within biology, much of the debate over lawhood has focused on whether restricted regularities should be treated as laws, rather than finding parallels to how physical laws are structured. This paper argues that extending that structure to biology is both possible and well-motivated by building on the functionalist approach to lawhood. Through two specific examples – the West Brown Enquist model of metabolism and the neutral theory of biodiversity – I show there are principles in biological theorising that can be interpreted as analogues of conservation laws. This reveals a similarity of nomological structure between physics and biology which is often obscured by methodological differences. Commitment to these laws in biology supports the view that theoretical progress can be made by focusing research efforts on unificatory principles.

Implicit in the reasons given in Chapter 1 for development being ignored until recently as a potential causal factor in evolutionary theory is the general concept of reductionism. It is a strictly reductionistic approach either to believe that phenotypic variation is equivalent to genetic variation, or to act as though this were the case until disproven. Thus, to take but a single example, we find Stebbins (1974), who is avowedly a “strict reductionist,” stating that “in the future all general theories about evolution will have to be based chiefly upon established facts of population and molecular genetics.” Reduction is, of course, a powerful tool, but it is one with which biologists have in general had difficulty, and which in recent years has come under strong attack and defense (see Williams, 1986). The basic reductionist statement with which we are all comfortable is ontological, namely that the processes underlying all living phenomena are reducible to the operation of mechanical causes: there is no irreducible vitalist essence. Reductionism in this sense is unexceptionable and universal in science. The more difficult sort of reductionism to deal with is theory reduction. A simple expression of this would be the statement that the laws of chemistry are all explicable in terms of the laws of physics, or the laws of biology in the laws of chemistry. Nagel (1961) shows that such theory reduction requires that, for example, the laws of chemistry must be deducible from the laws of physics and that the terms and concepts of both sets of laws be “connected” (see, for example, Newton-Smith, 1982; Beckner, 1974). Another way of putting it is that the laws of physics must be of wider scope than the laws of chemistry, which then constitute a series of special cases of the former, under particular boundary conditions. Talking about theory reduction within the biological sciences, where general theories of broad scope are lacking (except the general theory of evolution that all organisms are related by descent), is somewhat pretentious. In the biological sciences we are forced to work more modestly with rules and probabilities rather than grand laws.

ACCORDING to the traditional view of man, what distinguishes him from animals is his freedom to choose between one course of action and another, his freedom to seek good and avoid evil. The animal has no freedom, but is determined by physical and biological laws; like a machine, the animal responds whenever the appropriate stimulus is present. But because man has free will, we cannot hope to explain his behavior merely in terms of causes. Man cannot be bound by physical or biological laws. While divergent views have gained some recognition, for example, the idea that man is a machine, or the idea that all of nature is purposive, the prevailing view has been one that implies that man somehow transcends the deterministic laws of nature. Two developments of the present century have challenged this traditional view of man and nature: quantum mechanics, which suggests that physics is not deterministic, and psychoanalysis, which suggests that man is not free. In response to these developments there has been a resurgence of interest in the determinismfreedom problem, especially among philosophers and physicists. Psychologists, however, have been strangely quiet about the problem, even though they are deeply implicated in it. I will indicate here the position I believe has been assumed, usually implicitly, by experimental psychologists today regarding determinism and freedom, and I will spell out some of the implications of this position for the problem of morality. In discussions of free will and determinism tlere are often a number of issues in question.' The present discussion will be concerned with just one issue: the predictability of behavior. Some men, who will be called indeterminists, contend that human behavior is not entirely predictable from antecedent conditions, so that by the power of his will a man is free to controvert the determining efficacy of prior experience and conditioning. The indeterminist has the advantage of tradition on his side of the argument, but does he have any evidence to support his position ? Let us see.

In The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism [1], Peter van Inwagen argues that if the universe is deterministic, then will does not exist. (He is silent about whether the universe is in fact deterministic and about whether will in fact exists.) This is in contrast to the compatibilist position, which holds that free will and determinism are not contradictory. Briefly, van Inwagen's argument is that when an agent with free will performs some action, she (by definition of free will) could have performed a different action. But in a deterministic universe, acting a different way requires either altering the past or violating the laws of physics. So van Inwagen concludes that the agent could have either altered the past or violated the laws of physics. Finally, van Inwagen says that it is obvious that nobody can alter the past, and by definition of the phrase law of physics, nobody can violate the laws of physics either. So our hypothetical agent in a deterministic universe cannot exist.

Since parts of future biomathematics which involve further development along directions already predominant can be extrapolated from the other papers in the volume, the purpose of this paper is to investigate less obvious, and therefore more speculative, directions. In particular, I intend to show reason to suspect that the laws of biology are of a different mathematical form than the laws of physics and that, therefore, the mathematical models of the future in biology will be radically different from the models used in physics. I will primarily concentrate on casting doubt on the ultimate usefulness of many differential equations models by examining the extent to which the mathematical assumptions underlying these models reflect biological reality. Since these mathematical assumptions seem to be seriously discordant with important parts of biological reality, this type of mathematical model should ultimately be replaced by essentially different types of mathematical models.KeywordsEvolutionary TheoryElapse TimeTree TrunkDifferential Equation ModelBiological RealityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In this paper, I investigate the nature of a priori biological laws in connection with the idea that laws must be empirical. I argue that the epistemic functions of a priori biological laws in biology are the same as those of empirical laws in physics. Thus, the requirement that laws be empirical is idle in connection with how laws operate in science. This result presents a choice between sticking with an unmotivated philosophical requirement and taking the functional equivalence of laws seriously and modifying our philosophical account. I favor the latter.

All living processes are linked to changes in energy. Therefore, energetic considerations are of prime importance at almost all levels of physiology. Energy, i.e. the ability to do work, appears in many forms in the inorganic world, e.g. as mechanical energy, light energy, electrical energy or heat. Within the discipline of physics, the ways in which the different forms of energy are transformed into each other is described by the laws of thermodynamics. It is possible, in principle, to apply these laws and the terms used for their description, for example enthalpy, free energy, entropy and chemical potential, to living systems as well. It is justifiable to assume that living and non-living systems differ only in the degree of their complexity, and therefore that the laws of physics are also laws of biology, at least potentially. However, this does not mean that physical laws are sufficient to describe biological systems fully.

According to the adaptive markets hypothesis developed by Andrew W. Lo, financial markets are governed more by the laws of biology than by the laws of physics. In this interview with CFA Institute Magazine, Lo explains the inspiration behind AMH theory, its application in building portfolio tools and financial regulation, and why a decision-making process needs to consider the human element.

Two narratives – natural science and religious, intersect in the area of ​​unobserv­able ontology – an immaterial, transcendental, but real area that paradoxically exists outside and inside ordinary physical space-time. It is assumed that mathe­matical constructs, physical laws, physical constants, quantum objects, and even biological laws can be associated with this area. It is argued that physical laws are not invented by man, but are discovered, since they contain physical con­stants measured in special experimental works. Universal constants were not invented for reasons of convenience – physics accepts them as an inevitable con­sequence of the coincidence of the results of all special measurements. Observa­tional data are presented that indicate an extremely small change in fundamental constants or even their constancy over the entire time of the existence of the Uni­verse, although this interesting problem cannot be considered finally solved. The ontology of quantum objects is considered within the framework of Seval­nikov's polyiontic paradigm, according to which two modes are distinguished – potential and actual. The potential existence of quantum objects is described by the Schrödinger wave function, and the actual one appears during the transition from the spectrum of possible states to the only observable one. It is emphasized that potential being does not belong to the classical space, but is in an unobserv­able ontology. The observed state, on the contrary, is already in ordinary space – time and can be recorded by the device. This determines the existence of a spe­cial transcendental layer of reality, along with the material, which may indicate a certain duality in the structure of the Universe. Then it should be assumed that our Universe is not a universal, but a multiverse – a set of different worlds onto­logically having a different nature. In addition, the polyiontic paradigm leads to the idea that, at the quantum level, matter can be derived from information hid­den in an unobservable ontology.

We present a part of the multiscale taxonomy of information constructed by the authors. This taxonomy is a unified system of aspect taxonomies of information.

Consider a finite-sized, multidimensional system in parameter state a. The system is either at statistical equilibrium or general nonequilibrium, and may obey either classical or quantum physics. L. Hardy's mathematical axioms provide a basis for the physics obeyed by any such system. One axiom is that the number N of distinguishable states a in the system obeys N=max. This assumes that N is known as deterministic prior knowledge. However, most observed systems suffer statistical fluctuations, for which N is therefore only known approximately. Then what happens if the scope of the axiom N=max is extended to include such observed systems? It is found that the state a of the system must obey a principle of maximum Fisher information, I=I(max). This is important because many physical laws have been derived, assuming as a working hypothesis that I=I(max). These derivations include uses of the principle of extreme physical information (EPI). Examples of such derivations were of the De Broglie wave hypothesis, quantum wave equations, Maxwell's equations, new laws of biology (e.g., of Coulomb force-directed cell development and of in situ cancer growth), and new laws of economic fluctuation and investment. That the principle I=I(max) itself derives from suitably extended Hardy axioms thereby eliminates its need to be assumed in these derivations. Thus, uses of I=I(max) and EPI express physics at its most fundamental level, its axiomatic basis in math.

Principle Range of validity universal 1. First and second law of thermodynamics universal 2. Δ G ≠ 0 open systems 3. Principle of compartmentation living systems 4. Principle of limited modification living systems 5. Universality of the genetic code living systems (exceptions?) 6. Principle of ‘reductionism’: All physical laws are valid in biology This principle is not reversible! There are laws in biology which cannot be used in physics. 7. Principle of homology only applicable to groups whose members possess the same “Bauplan” 8. Principle of causality universal (but epistemological difficulties) 9. Principle of regularity in morphogenesis living systems 10. Developmental homeostasis pattern formation in higher organisms 11. Principle of timing in morphogenesis development in higher organisms

J. J. C Smart (1963) once argued that biology is unlike the physical sciences because there are no laws in biology. While physics and chemistry can construct general theories centered on genuine laws, biology is limited to case studies that make use of the laws of physics and chemistry: biology is more like engineering than it is like the physical sciences. The debate about biological laws has continued since Smart’s condemnation of laws in biology, drawing both philosophers and biologists into its wake. For instance, Mayr (1988) argues that one of the chief differences between biology and the physical sciences is that biology has no genuine laws. Hull (1978) claims that since species and taxa are individuals and not natural kinds, no statements that refer to species or taxa can be construed as laws. Waters (1986) asserts that the principle of natural selection is not a law, and Beatty (1981) argues that the laws of population genetics are not laws. On the other side, Brandon (1981), Sober (1984), Rosenberg (1985), and Resnik (1988) argue that the principle of natural selection is a law, and Rosenberg (1985) asserts that molecular biology also contains laws. Finally, van der Steen and Kamminga (1991) discuss the tension between laws and natural history in biology. In this paper I will examine the argument against developmental laws in more depth. I will agree with the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy that the socalled developmental laws proposed by the process structuralists are not genuine biological laws, although I will not accept the standard arguments for this position. The standard arguments against biological laws claim that biological generalizations are not laws because they describe mere accidental, historical features of the living world. I will argue that, on the contrary, a statement could be a law even though it may describe accidental (or historical) features of the world. Whether a statement is a law depends on the role it plays in inquiry: laws typically play a more central role in inquiry than accidental generalizations. Thus, the reason why the laws proposed by the developmental biologists are not laws of nature is that