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Consider the clothes dryer. It has certain settings, certain speeds, and certain procedures by which those settings and speeds are executed. Not only that, but different dryers have different kinds of chambers. Some are larger in diameter than others. Some have different numbers, and different shapes, of "fins" that help spin the clothes around.
In the apartment complex at which I currently live, a dryer session costs 75 cents. But the dryer isn't very effective. In fact, it takes a minimum of two sessions to get my clothes dry, and it's a coinflip whether my denim's still slightly wet.
But as you might be thinking now, I suppose the degree to which my clothes become dry is a function also of the clothes themselves. If I stuff the thing extremely full, there's less of a chance that I'll thoroughly dry my clothes. On the other hand, if I only throw my jeans in there, my shirts and such are going to stay completely wet.
Let's stop the dryer at an arbitrary point in its cycle and take a look at what we have.
There's the dryer, with all the nuance in its "hardware"; there's the fins, the speeds, the settings, the procedures, the diamater, etc.
And then there's the clothes. The "software." There might be a pair of jeans in there, several shirts... there might even be a few towels, which take up a ton of space.
Combine the two, and you have the "soul" of the dryer (as I'm defining "soul").
Now, this isn't to say that the dryer is a transcendent entity. Its "software" (the clothing) was a relatively recent addition, which came from external sources. And though its "hardware" is far less proximal in causal distance, the dryer still owes itself to a bunch of subcomponents that began relatively far apart from one another. Thinking in terms of causal distance, it would be fair to say that the dryer's subcomponents are "external" to the dryer; foreign entities came together to form the object of our discussion.
If we are biological Determinists, we can think of ourselves like the clothes dryer.
- Our "hardware" came from a distant externality; we were formed from fairly foreign parts.
- Our "software" is more proximal; our current constitution is the product of both our "hardware" and the stuff we've recently taken in. I suppose there's an important functional distinction in that, unlike the dryer, we can reject new "clothing" we find distasteful.
The point of this analogy is to draw attention to the emergent individuality of the dryer-self, and that of ourselves. Our selves receive causal independence through chaos -- emergent complexity in the causal system.
Think of how chaotic is the end state of the dryer-self, hardware and software.
Each nuance (to the molecular level) of the hardware (its material, its form, its procedure, and countless other relevant properties) combines with each nuance (to the molecular level) of each piece of clothing (its fabric, its form, its wetness, and countless other relevant properties), which combines again with other pieces of clothing, transferring wetness, force, and even material.
And what individuality in the end state! The dryer's hardware has X degree of wetness and Y degree of heat, possibly warping and modifying it for the next run. And look at the state of the clothing! Though it looks like a jumbled mess, it was the deterministic product of innumerable causes. It's a unique composition, with wrinkles and fibers and wet spots and positional properties, contributing to a total "dryer entity," hardware and software, that is probably unique in history and unique eternally into the future.
Determinism does not destroy individuality. Nor does it destroy the unique value of the self merely by acknowledging the self as a caused thing. Nor does it imply that our selves are or ought to be human-determinable.
Metaphysical libertarians find fault with determinism because it denies self-transcendence. Determinists, however, are content with the functional grasp toward self-transcendence afforded by complexity and time.
2 comments:
I think this is a good post, though a bit confusing for me to follow at first.
I also wonder if the concept of flexible software inside vs hardware created from distant externalities outside is perhaps a false duality - but despite that the argument holds either way.
I think you're definitely right about the false duality, and I had considered mentioning that, but I figured the entry was convoluted enough as it was.
There's no crisp distinction, really, between the hardware and the software. What if, for instance, a drying boot dents the metal canister? Is the dent properly considered hardware or software? It's stuff like that which makes the set fuzziness apparent.
But it's also useful to talk about the differences between the two -- moreso when it comes to humans, of course.
The nature of our biological compulsions are primarily the result of distant externalities beyond our control, and our rational action is primarily the result of the "spin cycling" of more and more stuff acquired incrementally. But this isn't to say that our biological compulsions can't be modified by the acquired stuff, nor is it to say that the "spin cycling" metaphysically transcends the machinery. :)
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