The Free Thinker

Darwin, Aristotle, and Causation

Joyless Moralist asks: "When did you become such an apologist for Darwin? I'm shocked!"

My position on Darwin is this. Darwin developed a very powerful concept, namely, evolution as descent with modification and natural selection, which marks an important departure in the theory of causation, applicable especially to biology but to some extent in economics as well and maybe in other fields. His mistake, which has been prevalent ever since due to man's romantic weakness for coining creation-myths, was to interpret it as a tool for discovering origins. But the Darwinian concept of descent with modification plus natural selection doesn't, strictly speaking, tell you anything at all about origins, still less that all the complexity and variety of life originated that way. Stories about origins can only be developed by combining the Darwinian mode of causation with very non-obvious, debatable, at best intuitive assumptions about the a priori probability of various potential beginning-states. When they are spun out into a comprehensive natural history, so many unwarranted (if we are to credit the reader with a high degree of philosophical maturity we can even say untenable) universal negatives must be assumed that Darwinism degenerates into mere dogmatism or myth.

The real, valid use of the Darwinian concept of causation is as a way of understanding the phenomenon of ecological equilibrium.  Note first of all that ecological equilibrium is something that we actually observe in historical time, unlike evolution, of which can observe very little and only in marginal cases.  Experiment can at best show the existence of Darwinian evolution, which we can deduce from logic alone, and can give us no hint of the power, versatility, creativity, etc. of this mechanism.  No, the real value of Darwinism lies in the false prediction that a naive Darwinism would predict, namely, that descent with modification and natural selection should be causing constant change and biology should be in a state of flux rather than stable order.  Given that descent with modification and natural selection should (be expected to) cause evolution, why do we not observe evolution in historical time, but instead, we observe species and ecosystems continuing century after century and millennium after millennium with very little change, unless they are disrupted by man? The answer to that question, the answer to which one is compelled by seriously facing that question, revolutionizes one's ideas of causation.  It shows why, if the world is not simply to be in flux (as we see it is not) it must be a certain way; it must be one of a subset, large yet vanishingly small compared to the set of all conceivable biological worlds, of equilibrium ecologies in which populations and trait distributions are in a state of delicate yet stable balance.

The following world is an example of one that Darwinian reasoning might rule out.  A species called the "buffalo lion" exists which, looking something like a cross between a buffalo and a lion, can eat both grass and meat, and can even tear down trees and eat wood like a termite, whch has long tunks and sharp teeth and hunts in packs, very effectively, so that it devours everything in sight, with weapons superior to the defenses of any animal. Other than that, the world looks like ours, with similar flora and fauna. A Darwinian can make an educated guess of why this world will not be observed.  A species so potently all-devouring as the buffalo lion would lay waste its environment and cause an ecological catastrophe, and our flora and fauna could not survive its onslaught. The scenario could, in principle, occur briefly, but it would quickly pass away as buffalo lions drove other species to extinction. 

Now, does all this "refute" Aristotelian metaphysics?  On the one hand, it's true that it's not exactly clear how the scientific method, with its hypothesis and experiment, can refute a metaphysical proposition.  Suppose that Aristotle says that an acorn becomes an oak because that is its telos or final cause.  Suppose that we can provide a complete, experimentally supported description of why an acorn becomes an oak which relies entirely on efficient causes and makes no appeal to final causes.  Is Aristotle's claim thereby refuted?  I don't know.  But it does seem to have been shown that it is unnecessary and unhelpful to take final causes into account to explain the acorn becoming an oak.  And since telos was a scientific theory, an effort to explain the world we observe, that does seem to be a reason to abandon the concept.

One thing I've never been able to understand about final cause is: How can one speak of a cause proceeding from the future (final = end) to the past? Surely causation, like time, is one-directional, going only from past to future and not vice versa! But maybe final cause can be consistent with the idea that causes must precede effects if the final cause, as a goal or purpose, pre-existed the effect. And that is easy enough to understand if we're talking about a human being with a plan or purpose: the human being conceives the plan first, then engages in actions to bring it about.  Aristotle sees purposes at work in biology too: a rabbit's long ears have the purpose (i.e. telos, final cause) of hearing predators.  Observation gave abundant reason to think this way; as indeed does casual language.  But how can the "purpose" of a rabbit's ears be the same sort of thing, metaphysically, as a "purpose" conceived in a human mind as a motive for action?  In what mind does the purpose reside (for it certainly does not reside in the rabbit's!)?  It might sound appealing to a partisan of Christianity to say "God," but that is a false move, for we know what "purposes" are from our human experience, and this does not give us the right to extend the concept or purpose to God.  And if He does have purposes, our access to knowing them is limited at best.  If one is forced to ask foolish questions like, "Why does God, when equipping rabbits with long ears, value the rabbit's safety over the wolf's supper? Why does God exhibit the opposite preference when designing the wolf's fangs?", it is a sign one is on the wrong track.

A concept of evolutionary causation dispenses with the need for any concept of "purpose" in biology as something basic or fundamentally causal.  To say that the purpose of an acorn is to become an oak comes to seem merely poetic, even anthropomorphic, as if an acorn wants to become an oak in the way a boy might want to become a priest.  To create a concept of telos by conflating human purposes with "purpose" as exhibited in the way animals and plants are adapted to their environment then appears to be a mere mistake.

Continuing an earlier discussion:

A formalization might be of use. Suppose there are six relevant circumstances: A, B, C, D, and E. Person P has feasible options F and G. The determinist view is that, if A, B, C, D, and E really are ALL the relevant circumstances, then they must determine that P will choose either F or G. The free will view is that P might, in all the circumstances, choose either F or G. Naturally, if he is asked to justify choosing F, and if A, B, and D favor F over G, he will say he chose F because of A, B, and D. But he might just as well have chosen G, in which case he would say it because of C and E. There is typically no way to quantify the "strength" of the reasons for each choice and say which is "stronger." To this a determinist would say that if, confronted with circumstances A, B, C, D, and E, Person X sometimes chooses F and sometimes G, or if Person X chooses F while a not-relevantly-different Person Y chooses G, then A, B, C, D, and E must not constitute a full set of relevant circumstances. There must be some circumstances J, M, and Q (say) which are also relevant. But what if we hold J, M, and Q constant as well and still observe that when the new list of relevant circumstances are the same, the same person on different occasions, or different but relevantly-identical persons, sometimes choose F and sometimes G? In that case the determinist must search farther afield for circumstances that differed that can be suggested, plausibly or not, as possible causes for the different choices observed. No matter how often he is disproven by showing that any given list of circumstances, the determinist need not despair, for there are always more circumstances he can appeal to if need be. His position is that *some* set of circumstances is sufficient to determine choice; we may never find it, but no matter. Determinism is a leap of faith. Not being one for leaps of faith, I dismiss determinism as an irritating distraction. Of course, one can also deny free will by accepting that the choice is not determined but attributing the variation to randomness. Never mind the difficulty of defining randomness. Common sense recognizes the distinction between chance and choice but this can be put to one side if we like. And if the proponent of free will answers by saying the choice wasn't random because he had reasons for his choice, one can jump back and (forgetting the previous argument) say that that's determinism again. Choice is neither random nor determined. People have reasons for action, which makes choice different from randomness; but a person might fail to act despite having good reason to do so, as often happens. Internal deliberation is not a deterministic process; it involves choice. To ask what is the mechanism of choice is a bit like asking the mechanism by which gravity operates. We observe choice; we observe gravity. Perhaps more fundamental explanations of these phenomena exist, perhaps not, but to insist on finding a mechanism behind everything just leads to an infinite regress. For most purposes they would not be necessary or relevant in any case. There is much that is difficult to understand here, no doubt, but you can only begin to understand it when you take our one, difficult, source of evidence, introspection, seriously. We choose; that's the first fact of our mental experience; reasons play a role, but will and not circumstances ultimately decides; and it is idle to indulge in hypotheticals about whether a long enough list of circumstances could eliminate the scope for choice, for experiment can offer no corrective to intuition. So there is free will; but what is its nature? That's when you can get off the treadmill of sophistries and start to explore the really interesting questions. For example, how is character related to choice? Our character does not make our choices for us. I trust my computer not to lie because it is a deterministic system. I trust my friend not to lie because of his character. But I know that he *could* lie. Our character may help determine the choice set, however. One cannot do what one cannot imagine, and imagination depends on character. Plots of seduction may never even occur to a pure man; shrewd schemes may never occur to a stupid one. Given one's choice set-- the set of imagined feasible responses to a situation-- character may determine the ease with which one chooses certain alternatives. A virtuous man may feel great resistance to lying, while a cowardly man may feel great resistance to standing and fighting at risk of pain and death. Gratitude and blame are responses to choice, and only make sense if there is free will. If you are a robot without free will it is senseless for me to be grateful to you for your services or to blame you for any harms you do me. Of course, one may fail to feel due gratitude to a benefactor or proper blame for cheating or cruelty. One reason this is done is that one may "take someone for granted," forgetting the free will of a parent or a servant and regarding them as indifferently as one would regard a machine. Though culpable, this may be a natural response to something being reliable: If Mommy always makes me pancakes for breakfast, it might begin to seem more like a natural law than an act of will. But consistency is not decisive evidence against the operation of free will. A person may become habituated and act "automatically"-- as drivers stay between the lines of the road without thinking about it-- but a person may also make the same choice, over and over again. And this has implications for theology. Suppose I say that the sun rises every morning not because of a natural law, but because God commands it to rise, again and again, never tiring of it, but always rejoicing in the majestic splendor of its light refreshing and quickening the world. That might give you a sense of insecurity: suppose God should, one day, change His mind. But He will not, "for His mercy endureth forever." Then it doesn't matter, you might say. But it does, I think. If choice, not deterministic causation, makes the sun rise, then gratitude is an appropriate response to every dawning day. And since gratitude, particularly gratitude for something as splendid as a sunrise, is a wonderful feeling, this hypothesis of God's freedom makes the world a pleasanter place.

Free Will

Bryan Caplan at EconLog started an interesting discussion about free will.  My contributions:

Now this is odd. I find myself in complete agreement with Bryan here. Both his conclusion-- that there is free will-- and his grounds for it-- introspection-- are perfectly correct. What is strange is that I first learned these arguments in the book Miracles, by C.S. Lewis, in which he makes the famous Argument from Reason which refutes materialism and affirms God...  As someone who accepts Lewis's argument more or less in full as well as his theistic and Christian conclusions, it is pleasant and strange to hear this sort of argument from an anti-religious writer like Caplan...  Since I agree with Caplan I'll contribute to the cause by answering some of his critics.

Jason writes:

"The falseness of uncaused (or 'self-caused') will has nothing to do with behavior genetics. It's not an empirical truth, it's a logical truth. 'Free will' defined as something neither random or mechanistic is simply incoherent."

As Jason makes no further defense of this claim, the answer is simply that since it is not at all self-evident, the burden of proof rests on him, and he has not discharged that burden. As an aside, the idea of randomness seems at least as logically problematic as free will, yet it is generally credited. Jason goes on to make a completely different argument:

"The anti-materialist free-will argument you are implying is identical to the Intelligent Design argument of "Irreducible complexity": Point to a hole in current understanding, suggest, erroneously, that it can't be solved, and thus the scientific answer for the puzzle is... magic!"

But Caplan is making no such argument. He makes it clear that introspection, not the existence of gaps and residuals in the data, is his basis for believing in free will. And he has also pointed out the error in the heads-I-win-tails-you-lose game the determinists like to play:

"The believer in free will can simply say, 'The good twin and the evil twin just made different choices.' The determinist, in contrast, can only ask for a blank check: 'One day, we're figure out the hidden forces that caused them to be so different. Until then, bear with us.'"

Exactly. Determinism is a sort of fideism. It illegitimately transforms a necessary postulate of scientific research (for the 'laws,' so called, of nature must exhibit a high degree of consistency for experimental or, more generally, inductive methods to be of any use) into a truth, dogmatically believed, and treated as a conclusion of science rather than, what it really is, an assumption.

A 'God in the gaps,' or 'free will in the gaps,' argument should indeed be prepared to retreat in the face of decisive evidence that the gaps are explicable. A theist who had pointed to miracles as evidence for the existence of God, and who is then confronted with a scientific explanation of the supposed miracle by natural causes, may legitimately say, "While I concede that, in light of this discovery, the evidence for God is somewhat weaker than I had supposed, I still think it is dominant." But if he is wholly unmoved by the discovery, we are justified in doubting his intellectual honesty. A believer in free will who uses the lack of deterministic explanations for some mental events as evidence should concede that his case has been weakened if deterministic explanations come to light.

But what we are faced with here is something quite different. There are still plenty of unexplained mental events, yet the determinists critique 'free will in the gaps' arguments (whether really made by or merely imputed to their opponents) on the grounds that science will presumably someday come up with deterministic explanations of such events. I am not sure what to make of the rather rare situations, e.g., hypnosis, when deterministic processes seem to operating in or at least influencing human behavior where I would have expected free will to be at work. I am not sure if a comprehensive success by science in explaining human behavior would disprove free will or not. What is certain is that science has not comprehensively explained human behavior, or come anywhere close to it.

Peter Tweig writes:

"So to me this says is that as long as there's some uncontrolled residual, that this residual provides evidence for free will."

But again, Bryan is not, I think, making this argument.

Meng writes:

"Without it, one's decisions would be held completely to chance and not to any quality of the person supposedly making the decisions. Causal determinism is not a cage and I wish that people wouldn't treat it as such."

No, free will is not the same thing as chance. This is based on introspection and commonsense: to say "he did it on purpose" or "he chose to do it" means the opposite of "he did it by accident" or "by chance."

Troy Camplin writes:

"The indeterminism of quantum physics is erased at macrophysical levels."

No, it is not. Think of a boulder exactly poised at the top of a hill. It may roll to the left or to the right, and the tiniest force can upset the balance. There is no limit to the degree with which micro causes can lead to disproportionate macro events.

Daniel recognizes this ("we expect nature to be indeterministic"), but makes a different mistake:

"But indeterminism isn't enough to get you free will--a radium atom may not be determined to decay at any particular time, but that doesn't mean that it freely chooses to decay at the time it does. Randomness is just as inimical to free will as determinism."

No, randomness is not "inimical" to free will; it is different from free will, to be sure, but there is nothing inconceivable or improbable about a universe in which both free will and randomness exist, are fundamental, and interact with each other in complex ways. In fact, that is more or less the world of commonsense.

Robin Hanson writes:

"Unless your theory is that humans somehow have some special additional free will not held by all other stuff or even all other life, it seems silly to focus on human behavior for tests. It is far easier to instead test electrons or amoebas."

But obviously the theory is that humans have free will, not that everything does. That is clear enough based on the evidence to which Bryan appeals, namely, introspection. Bryan is a human being, not an electron or an amoeba. His introspective evidence for free will pertains specifically to human free will.

Bryan presumably can't spare the time to respond fully to every commenter on his blog, but it's pretty clear he could emerge from this debate with flying colors. But I would push him farther. If there is free will, must we then reject the impoverished ontology of materialism, with its unwarranted assumption that the entities we encounter in everyday experience can be reducible to those described in physics textbooks? If we reject materialism and accept a richer ontology in which there are such things as rational wills, does it not seem likely that there are rational wills other than those attached to human bodies? In particular, does not the hypothesis that there is a supreme Rational Will which is the source of all others become plausible if not compelling?

And:

Arare Litus writes:

"The apparent fact that we have free will in no way make it seem likely there are other rational wills not attached to humans, it says nothing about this..."

In a strictly logical sense-- in the sense in which the fact that the sun has risen the past 10,000 mornings does not mean it will necessarily rise tomorrow-- I sort of agree with this.

But consider the following analogy. You describe to me a strange type of building, with a circular base and a pentagonal second story, pink covered with blue stars interspersed with pictures of animals, with fountains shooting off the top and landing in a moat roundabout, and lots of other weird details. You ask me the subjective probability that there is such a building somewhere in Los Angeles. I say the probability is pretty low.

Then you tell me that such a building exists in Fairfax, VA. I doubt you, but you drive me a few blocks down Main Street and sure enough, there it is. Now you ask, what is the probability that a similar building exists in Los Angeles? Surely my subjective probability will rise a lot. I don't know why the building is there, but if someone had some reason to build one here, it seems not terribly improbable that the same motive, whatever it was, induced someone to build one in Los Angeles.

It just so happens that intersubjectivity among humans is mediated exclusively through the physical world. If there are nonembodied rational wills, we cannot experience them intersubjectively, that is, any personal experiences that we or others have with them cannot be intersubjectively confirmed, at least not in the usual way. It does not follow that such rational wills do not exist, any more than the non-existence of the strange building in LA follows from my being unable to afford a plane ticket to get there.

Occam's Razor is at most a rule of thumb, and it is often misapplied or over-applied. Materialism is one misapplication: "Explain the facts with the most parsimonious ontology," the materialist exhorts, and then demands that we accept an ontology so sparing that he cannot even pretend it is adequate to explain the facts (at least, "not yet," he justifies himself with his inexplicable fideistic confidence). So here. Most of mankind for most of history has believed in nonembodied rational wills (e.g., pagan gods, angels, devils, etc.) and many, many people in the past and today have reported personal experiences with them. I am by no means saying that all of this should be credited; but any claim that the mere Occam's Razor principle is sufficient to dismiss it it exceedingly odd. It seems to suggest that we can fully explain mankind's preoccupation with the supernatural without conceding its existence. I submit that this is hardly the case.

One thing that occurs to me upon reflection is that the concept of free will may be more fundamental than the concept of causation.  Whether we can ever observe causation is, after all, problematic.  How can we observe "A caused B," rather than merely "A preceded B?"  Do we deduce the concept of causation from our experience of choosing and seeing consequences?  Certainly the claim that an uncaused or self-caused cause is logically incoherent seems groundless.  I'm not sure that even a world entirely without causation, where everything just happens for no reason, is especially inconceivable.

'Woe to You, Chorazin! Woe to You, Bethsaida!'

Joyless Moralist, commenting on a recent post, brought up a passage from the Gospel of Luke which some have found troubling.  Jesus is speaking, at the time when He is sending out His apostles to preach the Gospel the first time-- not after the Resurrection, but while He is still alive.  In cities that receive them with joy, they are to heal the sick and say 'The kingdom of God has come near you.'  But:

whatever city you enter, and they do not receive you, go out into the streets and say, 'The very dust of your city which clings to us we wipe off against you. Nevertheless know this, that the kingdom of God has come near you.' But I say to you that it will be more tolerable that Day [meaning the Day of Judgment?] for Sodom [a notoriously wicked city from the Old Testament which was destroyed by the wrath of God after its inhabitants tried to gang-rape three travelers, among other sins] than for that city.

Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. But it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, who are exalted to heaven, will be brought down to Hades. (Luke 10: 10-15)

How is all this consistent with God's justice, let alone His mercy?  Surely a merciful God would not desire to bring cities down to "Hades" (which I think is the same as the Jewish Sheol, and perhaps as the Christian Hell; I don't know the relationship between Hades, Sheol, and the "fiery gehenna" and "outer darkness" mentioned elsewhere).  And on what grounds would a just God punish cities which merely declined to receive certain itinerant preachers, or which did not regard the occurrence of certain miracles as an inducement to change their lifestyles?

But this may the wrong question.  For does Jesus actually curse or merely predict?  The "woe to you" sounds a bit like a curse, but can be read, I think, as a sorrowful prediction of the consequences of their failure to repent (of actions which they knew by conscience, and not merely by revelation, were evil, even if they had lost their awareness of it to some extent through the dulling effect of sin on conscience).  And indeed, without Christ, who of us is not destined to be "brought down to Hades" in due course?   

A Flaw in Dennett's Enterprise

From Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea:

Whenever Darwinism is the topic, the temperature rises, because more is at stake than just the empirical facts about how life on Earth evolved, or the correct logic of the theory that accounts for those facts. One of the precious things that is at stake is a vision of what it means to ask, and answer, the question "Why?" Darwin's new perspective turns several traditional assumptions upside down, undermining our standard ideas about what ought to count as satisfying answers to this ancient and inescapable question. Here science and philosophy get completely intertwined. Scientists sometimes deceive themselves into thinking that philosophical ideas are only, at best, decorations or parasitic commentaries on the hard, objective triumphs of science, and that they themselves are immune to the confusions that philosophers devote their lives to dissolving. But there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. (Dennett, 21)

Dennett turns a good phrase there at the end.  But is it true?  Certainly it is true of Darwinist science, as Dennett does a good job of showing in the remainder of the book.  It is less clear that there is any "philosophical baggage" involved in ordinary physics, or chemistry.  A dropped ball falls: we all learn that by experiment/observation, and so does a physicist; and while the physicist learns many more things in the same fashion, his general approach need never depart from common sense.  Of course, a Humean skeptic might regard the inductive process by which this conclusion is arrived at as groundless; and if you want to say that all induction involves the "philosophical baggage," fine: but then it is common sense that takes its philosophical baggage on board without inspection, and science-- or at least, physics or chemistry-- is not distinctive in this regard except in that it travels especially light, and especially far.  That Darwinist theory has to take on far more philosophical baggage than other disciplines is a clue that it is not just another science, entitled to the deference we ordinarily give to Science.  Rather, it combines some brilliant insights with a special kind of ideological enterprise, namely: proving that a materialist worldview is viable, or rather, hinting at a prospectus for such a proof.

Dennett hits on exactly what is so brilliant about Darwin: his theory has contributed to the corpus of human thought a new way of asking and answering the question 'why.'  Aristotle said there were four "causes"; Darwin invented a fifth, and highly interesting and illuminating one.  But while this breakthrough has been understandably exciting for many people, Darwinism as a theory of all life is a case of jumping to conclusions.  There may be arguments-- the argument from reason of C.S. Lewis (Miracles) and others is one, I think-- that prove it is impossible for materialistic, evolutionary processes to have given rise to all life as we know it (ourselves in particular) but at any rate the best that can be justly claimed for the theory is that it might be a possibility.  The epistemology, and therefore the epistemic status, of Darwinian evolution is entirely different from that of physics, chemistry, and other proper sciences.  Not only has it not been exhaustively tested in every detail by experiment; it can probably not even be creditable with being falsifiable in the Popperian sense, or at least, to the extent that any falsification-tests can be proposed, far more parsimonious variations of the theory (making no grand claims about the origins of all life) could probably be framed for which the set of falsifiable predictions made by the theory would be the same.  Unfortunately, we have seen only hints of the needed recognition of the limits of Darwinian theory so far.  Most Darwinism continues to be the combination of brilliant insight and dogmatic table-pounding that is Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

A Spokesman for Determinism

Tom Reasoner shows up with a few comments, including a very interesting one at the end of the long discussion on physicalism.  Some excerpts:

From Wikipedia on the uncertainty principle:
“In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a mathematical limit on the accuracy with which it is possible to measure everything there is to know about a physical system. In its simplest form, it applies to the position and momentum of a single particle, and implies that if we continue increasing the accuracy with which one of these is measured, there will come a point at which the other must be measured with less accuracy.”

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle does *NOT* assert that the universe has some sort of random component. It merely asserts that there are limits to our abilities to measure physical properties.

From Wikipedia on chaos theory:
“Systems that exhibit mathematical chaos are deterministic and thus orderly in some sense; this technical use of the word chaos is at odds with common parlance, which suggests complete disorder. ... As well as being orderly in the sense of being deterministic, chaotic systems usually have well defined statistics. For example, the Lorenz system is chaotic, but has a clearly defined structure. Weather is chaotic, but its statistics—climate—are not.”

Chaos Theory is *NOT* non-deterministic. It is a deterministic mathematical paradigm used to predict systems that merely seem inherently non-deterministic.

I'm sure that many scientists do interpret the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to be a case of sub-atomic randomness/non-determinism.  I suppose it does not prove that determinism is false, however; one is still free to adopt it as a dogma, even if science is now at best officially agnostic.  Is Tom a representative of this curious creed, then, I wonder?

Why "The Free Thinker"?

The name of this blog is more than a double entendre, let's call it multiple entendre.

1) Most trivially: I am, I suppose, in a humble way, a thinker; and my writing's available for free!  Get it: free thinker.  More seriously, though, this is a statement about our age: never in history have more thinkers been available to the public for free.  It is the age of free thinkers.

2) At the heart of my political philosophy is an emphasis on freedom of thought.  I tend to share MacIntyre's skepticism about the reality of "rights," yet something like the idea of rights is needed, so this is my variation on it: people form, in some sense, a social contract which requires them to obey the law in matters morally indifferent, but they cannot rightly surrender to the state their conscience.  So if the state forces people to do what they believe is wrong the social contract is shattered and moral people are compelled to withdraw their allegiance.  This requires, above all, freedom to practice religion, the obligation of conscience par excellence, second, an extension of the first, freedom of speech; property rights have an independent rationale-- efficiency and Pareto-optimality-- but are also an essential condition for freedom of conscience, since they make it possible for individuals to sustain themselves independently of the state, and prevent the government from starving dissidents into silence.  My foreign policy is based on the same principle: I advocate, to the extent that it is within our power, ending tyranny/totalitarianism and "making the world safe for freethinkers."  I might call this a form of libertarianism; I don't know how many libertarians would agree.

3. I am not a freethinker in one of the senses in which the term was used, meaning atheist or anti-traditionalist.  To lack a certain respect for tradition-- not an absolute obeisance of course-- is simply a faulty method, for it stands to reason that any belief or practice which has lasted generations is likely to have a good rationale, even if people have forgotten how to articulate it.  But freethinking is an epistemology, one that recognizes no privileged dogmas, neither those of revelation (at least not as privileged dogmas; they are mysteries, which is a different thing), nor contemporary ones like the physicalist view of the universe, or the idea of "sovereignty," or naturalistic evolution.

4. It's an allusion to the philosophy of mind themes that come up.  I am a believer in the will and a believer in the reality of thoughts.  To me, man is, literally, a "free thinker"; that is central to his nature.  Ironically, most so-called freethinkers today are atheists, physicalists, and evolutionists, who don't believe in freedom of the will, and think thoughts are reducible to atoms and electrons.  Their freethinking has led them to deny the existence of free thinking.

5. We are in an age of unprecedented prosperity and growth; an age,too, where education is more widespread than ever, yet there are high and rising premiums to education; an age of technological advance and invention.  It's a good time to be one of those who find their way to the outer edges of inhabited Design space and push a bit beyond it, for the world has never been so ready to amplify the creations of the few pioneer-entrepreneurs, those free-thinkers.   

I think there were some other entendres, but I've forgotten them now...