I had numerous headaches while reading a horrible book on free will. I don’t get headaches very often, so this wasn’t just correlation misinterpreted as causation. The content of the book caused these headaches. Consider the act of sitting and reading prior to the onset of the headache. I am sitting with the book in my hands. There is light in the room, or I wouldn’t be able to read the book. Light is photons which are either reflected off or absorbed by the page and it helps to think that photons travel rectilinearly (in straight lines). The dark ink on the page absorbs photons and the light areas reflect photons. These photons presumably spray everywhere, but our corneas and irises are apt to reflect a sharp image on the photoreceptor cells of our retina. So far, photons reflecting around and being absorbed are physical phenomena that all physical determinist accounts must point to in any description of nature. When I read this book, photons were reflected off the pages and they impinged upon my retina, where they become chemical and electrical energy and then a miracle occurs and I have a headache.
This is the scenario and I want to explore how a determinist could describe this. If the book had been any other book I own, the gross number of photons entering my eyes would basically be the same, but the headache probably wouldn’t have happened. So, how do we explain this. Well, clearly the headache wasn’t caused by a particular number of photons. Photons can be measured, so the total energy conferred to the cells in the retina is the same regardless if you get a headache or not. So, there wasn’t a single threshold of energy that had to be reached to cause the headache. Now recall the first few laws of thermodynamics: energy is always conserved and there is always an equal reaction. Speaking physically, the energy conserved in my retinal cells (in total) was the same in the scenario of this offensive book and almost any other book I own. So, here we have a case where the energy is conserved at the impinging of photons, but there is a difference in effect: in the case of this book, my brain blew a fuse and the body’s emergency shut down network went off. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the work of genius causes all cylinders to fire in key and in unison. To return to the point: the difference in effect must be attributed to something other than the total electromagnetic energy conserved in the retinal cells following the impinging electromagnetic interactions.
The last sentence in the previous paragraph shouldn’t sound surprising because most of us would say that these very specific configurations of light and dark shapes represent (or encode) meaning. At some point beyond the point that the photons are received by the photoreceptor cells, this picture is maintained and shapes are recognized and then a miracle occurs again. Basically, we have to already have the semantic building blocks to build the ideas that are encoded in the words we read. Words are instructions for your brain to build the ideas you see. So, at some level there is the capacity for near infinite grammatical complexity that Chomsky talked about. Different configurations of words construct different ideas, and communication requires that I am able to likewise encode my thoughts into a string of words.
The miracle occurs when you go from the photon configuration to the ideas and then the ideas inspire other ideas and the inspiration compounds. How does a deterministic universe eventually start producing encoded texts in a metalanguage that can produce their own highly tailored causal effect elsewhere, in other minds. The pages will have a similar effect in others, so when you lend the book, similar ideas are conjured up in their head and hopefully they will get headaches too.
Ideas can be encoded and transferred. Language is syntax and any data stream must be compared with some known grammar or syntax. The author of the offensive book sent his final draft off to the publishers and I picked up a copy at my doorstep and the light reflects off the pages into my eyes and I got a headache. Yet there are other things that I read and fireworks go off. In inspiration, something “inspiring” is recognized in the ideas conveyed by the words and this sets off an explosive reaction and neurons fire and energy is released and actual physical heat is generated. And some works produce physical pain.
