COMMENSAL ISSUE 89

The Newsletter of the Philosophical Discussion Group
Of British Mensa

Number 89 : November 1997

ARTICLES
October 1997 : Vijai Parhar

MISCOMMUNICATION & FREE WILL

Dear Theo,

As my first letter to your SIG I am examining the philosophy of language. The context of my examination is the culture of writing letters to a SIG. An example of this is this letter that I am writing.

Words are fuzzy objects. Each word has a different meaning to each reader and their meanings are different to different extents. There might be more agreement on what 'scanner’ means than on what 'curmudgeonly' means.

When we write sentences down that use words we express our thoughts in a very personal way. That expression is not 100% faithful to the original thoughts and the amount of 'loss of meaning' varies from sentence to sentence. When a reader reads the same sentence his interpretation is very personal. It is very likely that the reader fills in gaps where he doesn't understand or indeed he may intentionally misunderstand if the misunderstanding makes better sense to him. The reader necessarily draws on his past experiences and imagination in the act of reading. Different readers will perform different 'loss of meaning' on the same sentences.

What is the upshot of all this? Well we never get accurate communication. This is further illustrated by replies to the author which often show up the degree of mis-communication. Does this mean no-one should ever talk to anyone else ever again? No, because partial communication is better than no communication (this is a fuzzy proposition and therefore is not always true). Also this 'fill in the gaps' way of acting has parallels in our other perceptions. The human brain deals with fuzzy objects all the time and seems to do it very successfully even though we like to think of the world as being non-fuzzy which it clearly isn't.

I once came across the idea of 'scripts' in a psychology text book. Apparently everyone goes round following scripts all the time. You have a different script for each different situation. Eg. there is a script for eating at a restaurant, a script for walking down the high street, a script for visiting the dentist etc. So the question is 'How much of my free will really is free?'. If we are all just following scripts then there is no real originality of behaviour. The use of scripts is beneficial though because it creates order in our lives. You don't see a nude streaker when you are in the High Street because it is not scripted. If there is no originality of behaviour then it must all be superficial behaviour.

However this does not seem to be a problem since people seem to be quite happy following scripts - it is analogous to a fish that is happy when it is in water but not very happy when it is out of water. The debate about free will has been going on in philosophy for a long time. Personally I think everything is determined and there is no free will. One way out of this is to say that although there is no free will, there are so many parameters involved it might as well be viewed as free will. The analogy would be throwing a dice. It should be possible to theoretically predict its outcome but the maths is so complex that we just give up and view it as being a random event.

Another way out might be to accept the uncertainty elements of quantum mechanics.

How about doing your replies to contributors in a different font ? This would make the newsletter much less confusing.

‘till next time,

Vijai

Vijai : Welcome ! You’ve taken the wind out of my sails a bit by writing something I mostly agree with. On scripts, some people do seem to invent scripts & the trend setters may be the first to act them out. The first streaker wasn’t following a script, though subsequent ones were. I would also add that we can add chaos theory and the sensitivity of non-linear systems to boundary conditions to your list of randomisers.

Theo