More Sunday thinking

08/07/12 15:11 [Sunday]

I concluded towards the end of my adolescence that the universe is a sequence of events which take place. If the universe is just a passive sequence with nothing of the teleological in it, then the sort of thing that comes to mind is: there’s nothing we can do about it so why worry? And this as a person who had been subject to a lot of anxiety and worry in my younger years I found a desirable way of looking at things.

But it is not quite the case that ‘there’s nothing we can do about it’ because plainly human action - even individual action - can and does have a pronounced effect of ‘altering’ what happens in the world. I put ‘altering’ in inverted commas because my view is that human action does not cause a real alteration because the human action itself is predetermined according to the molecules knocking about in the synapses in people’s brains. If a person does something - votes in the House of Commons, say - it seems to create a change but it isn’t genuinely change because the ‘decision’ of the MP to vote is itself part of the sequence of events taking place to constitute the universe.

So where does this leave modal verbs? Modal verbs express things which are desired as a possibility and the urgency people feel to get the desired achieved. If a thing ‘should be’ then it isn’t the same as saying it ‘is’. The existence of modal verbs shows up the fact that human users of language naturally think in terms of teleology, of things being intentioned and brought about through wilful effort.

The facts modal verbs express can almost be explained in terms of mathematical probability. The punter feels urgency for his horse to win the race - he is half-way to striving with the horse - and that horse does win, in a certain percentage of trials. Probability is another way the individual who worries can cease to worry: there is some threat (he can tell himself) and in x% of cases the threat will eventuate but in (100-x)% of cases the event threatening will not occur.

To tell the full story I need to explain what intention is, and bring in ‘striving’. A goal which is intentioned through the Will is just that - a goal - and anyone who has read up on Artificial Intelligence (which I’m not sure exists any more) knows that goals are achieved (in x% of cases) through mechanisms of feedback. That is if the agent is going wide of the mark he takes action to bring himself back into line. If the horse is not winning the race the horse tries harder and (taking a step backwards, that is in the chain of causality) the jockey kicks him harder. Although it may be predetermined whether or not I am going to post this on my Blogger blog the sequence I go through in deciding - sometimes it is more of an effort - is part of what is predetermined, and the degree to which I will strive, and the specific steps I take in striving, are part of it too. And then - what we may not have thought in the first place when conjecturing that the universe is nothing but a sequence of events which take place - we have all the interest of explaining what goes on when people (or horses) strive plus the interest of teaching them in specific fields what best to do in striving. We have the interest of judging whether the striving will succeed, which for some means backing horses and showing a profit.