Self and Free Will 243“9x6” b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanityand events turn into certainty only at a juncture we called “the present.”
What accumulates in the past is a stockpile of certainties.
Natural laws are derived by observing the regularity of events
using a process called induction. Inductive confidence increases
with the number of observations made, or the size of the population
observed; it approaches but never reaches certainty. For illustration, if
you inspect 100 apples, and they are all good, you may conclude with
some confidence that all the rest are good, but it may turn out that
the next one (the 101st) is bad. Next, if you inspect 1,000 apples, and
they are all good, you may conclude that all the rest are good, this time
with even more confidence, but again it may turn out that the next
(the 1001st) is bad. David Hume in the eighteenth century expressed
doubt about the reliability of induction. In a more humorous tone,
Bertrand Russell presented the parable of the inductivist chicken. The
chicken, being fed by the farmer every day, predicted that it would
continue to be fed. With each passing day it strengthened its induc-
tivist belief, only to be surprised when one morning the farmer came
and wrung its neck.^9 Russell concluded that certitude does not belong
in this world.
Whether we like it or not, we live in a probabilistic world. We cannot
sort out the multitude of interacting factors in nature. The overall result
is seen in the variation of individual occurrences, be it a leaf, a flower, a
snowflake, or a person. To deal with uncontrollable variations at differ-
ent levels of reality, the mathematic science of statistics was invented.
Statistics deals with an entire group by assuming each occurrence as a
random event, regardless of the underlying mechanism. It gives us the
mean (average) of the group, along with the degree of confidence in the
form of standard deviation. Statistics is the only way to make sense of a
probabilistic world.
We see this approach applied to a bag of gas. Molecules in a gaseous
state are in constant heat motion, called Brownian motion. Although pre-
sumably each molecule jostles around according to prescribed mechani-
cal laws, it is impossible to track down all of them individually. Boltzmann