Ok, hang with me here. I am doing research into how the brain processes language, aural, written, and visual, and I am in a chapter of a book describing the nature and power of images. There is much to be blogged about in this chapter, particularly to how we learn, but part of the discussion has centered on the implications of free will and election (or determinism) from the perspective of Chaos Theory.

For now, I will simply link to Chaos Theory so that you can read it for yourself. Basically, part of the theory has randomness within a deterministic system. In theological terms, it’s free will inside election.

I want to give you a quote from the book I’m reading called Visual Intelligence. What I will quote is to be found in other books on the mind, especially in the field of neuroscience. The quote, and a long one, is:

Although such scientific determinism might seem to preclude the philosophical concept of free will, researchers in Chaos theory use recent insight into the workings of dynamical systems to explain the coexistence of both. Although classical physics models assume that everything is determined by initial conditions, Chaos theorists have found nevertheless that such deterministic systems can and do generate randomness in a “spontaneous emergence of self-organization.” According to physicist Doyne Farmer,

On a philosophical level, [the phenomenon of chaos] struck me as an operational way to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next….the important problems out there in the world [have] to do with the creation of organization, in life or intelligence….Here was a coin with two side. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.

Continuing down the page…

In his postscript specifically on “Free Will,” associated with Chaos theory to explain how it is that we can feel as if we are in conscious control when we are not: “such a machine” as the mind represents, he states,

will appear to itself have Free Will, provided it can personify its behavior - that is, it has an image of “itself.” The actual cause of [any] decision may be clear cut, or it may be deterministic but chaotic - that is, a very small perturbation may make a big difference to the end result. This would give the appearance of the Will being “free” since it would make the outcome essentially unpredictable….Such a machine can attempt to explain to itself why it made a certain choce (by using introspection). Sometimes it may reach the correct conclusion. At other times it will either confabulate, because it has no conscious knowledge of the “reason” for the choice. This implies that there must be a mechanism for confabulation, meaning that given a certain amount of evidence, which may or may not be misleading, part of the brain will jump to the simplest conclusion.

Source, Visual Intelligence, pg 96-97.

One of the things I was taught about free will and election was that it was not an either/or scenario, but a both/and, two sides of the same coin. It depended on the perspective. With all the talk of the rising of reformed theology within certain denominations, it might be an interesting journey to spend some time looking at coexistence, rather than exclusivity.