What this means is that for instance a Darwinist will say that a rabbit *chooses* to run away when it meets up with a fox. So choosing is explained by Darwinists in terms of doing that which gives the optimal survival benefit of genes. But notice one thing here, it isn't actually held to be possible by Darwinists that the rabbit would not run away from the fox. So choosing to run away, is equated with the rabbit being forced to run away by genetic programming. So in the Darwinist conception of choosing, there isn't the possibility of an alternative thing happening.
A right way to understanding minds is to explain minds as randomness generators. For when on the inside an animal experiences emotional turmoil going on deciding between fighting or fleeing, objectively from the outside the decision whether the animal fights or flees looks like randomness. Objectively *all* choices look like randomness, without any single exception. It does not matter if one makes the choice after thinking hard doing deep soulsearching, or if one chooses flippantly, from the outside it all looks like randomness. From the outside a choice always looks like it could have gone either way, which is why objectively it always looks random. To understand choices we do a little trick by imagining what it would be like to be the thing that is making the choices. But such imaginings are subjective. We can't actually objectively observe soulsearching or flippancy of choices we see, we can't measure it, but only experience it by proxy through our imagination.
This seems contrary to observation. Let's use your rabbit analogy.
Far from appearing random, the response of a prey animal is exquisitely tuned to the predator stimulus. An unidentified noise will give the rabbit pause--he may then stand perfectly still to make his precise location more difficult for the predator to discern.
This initial alert state makes the rabbit more sensitive to a second stimulus: a second noise, especially a noise closer in origin than the first, will likely provoke flight. The immediate sight or scent of a predator will prompt the rabbit to flee immediately.
There is nothing random about this; nor, in fact, is it computational in the manner you suggest that Darwinists' claim. It is, however, computational in the sense that the odds of survival have been assessed over the millennia of rabbit and fox encounters by the shifting probabilities of rabbit genes.
The rabbit who flees too soon reveals himself unnecessarily to the fox; the rabbit who flees too late has lost his opportunity to escape. The instinctive responses of the rabbit were computed not by the rabbit mind, but by the sifting of rabbit genes, and the results are inscribed not in a real-time computational model but in the genes that create nearly instantaneous, instinctive responses.
Most crucially, the rabbit's set of possible responses are limited to an instinctive repertoire: he may run or hide; it will not occur to the rabbit to spring from hiding at the fox, thump him soundly with his powerful legs, and then flee while the fox is reeling in astonishment.
So where is the random element in the rabbit's response? The possibilities are few and can be completely described in advance. Do you claim to have observed rabbits who do not flee or hide from the fox? Surely not. Nor, I suspect, can you claim to predict the response of a prey animal to the presence of a predator by flipping a coin.
Let us then suppose that the above argument binds you unfairly tightly to your analogy: the rabbit, you may say, does not possess a mind, or at least not a mind capable of the freedom you ascribe to humans. Very well, let us consider the man and the bear.
A man's genes, too, have been beads on a great abacus over the eons, their living products, men, discovering the odds of surviving the great predators in direct encounters and recording the results via the presence or absence of the genes that produced, respectively, successful or failed strategies. These calculations, like the rabbit's, are also codified into instinctive responses: the hiker who rounds a bend in the trail and comes to face to face with a grizzly bear will experience a powerful urge to flee.
Yet this is a man, and we will assume this is a man with a culture. This man has a mind that can accept or reject the promptings of instinct: in this sense, he is indeed free, because his actions are not constrained by the limits of instinctual possibility. Just as the flow of his ancestors' genes calculated and transmitted the instinctive response to bears, his culture has recorded and preserved the knowledge that to flee a bear is sometimes unwise; his culture may have forearmed him with weaponry that offers the possibility of killing or repelling the bear; he may even have heard of other men successfully startling a bear into flight by opening an umbrella in its face.
Here, then, we have what appears to be freedom. The man can experience his instinctive response, but decline to obey it, instead possessing a set of options offered by his culture and experience. In this sense he can be said to be free, since his possible behaviors are less constrained.
But how does he come by this mind? Was its acquisition random? No, the mind, too, was sorted and sifted out by the grand DNA computation of the ages. The great advantage of individual and social responses that exceed the constraints of instinctive behavior moved the survival arms race out of the pure arena of tooth and claw, speed and strength: a mind that could record and reflect upon past outcomes, that could synthesize novel responses, fueled the evolution of both more powerful minds and their hugely increased power when linked with other minds, past and present: culture.
But consider the man and the bear again. Will the man's responses be random? If he is what we might call a "purely primitive" man, or man the animal, his responses will be instinctive. He will freeze or flee: probably he will flee, because while flight from a bear may sometimes be unwise, freezing in the plain sight of a great predator almost always is foolish, and the DNA-calculations of many generations of primitive men have already recorded those results in his genome.
If he is a man with appropriate culture, then his set of responses is larger, and may even include the creation of novel responses. But will the man's actual response be random? Certainly not: if he is armed with knowledge, weaponry and experience, he will almost certainly fight. If he is armed only with knowledge, he may gauge the bear's affect (Is it in a posture of predation or fear? Is it accompanied by cubs? Is it as startled as he?) and then respond in light of his cultural store, his personal experience, and the present scenario. None of this would appear to be random.
Indeed, if we can specify the man's culture in great detail, if we know about what weapons and training he carries, if we know the affect of the bear--why, then, we can predict with fair certainty both the man's response and its likely success. The accuracy of that prediction hinges on the depth of our knowledge; to increase our accuracy, we need to increase our knowledge; to make our predictions certain, we require more knowledge than we are ever likely to possess.
This, I suppose, is your chaotic Darwinist determinism, though chaotic indeterminacy may be more accurate, if less rhetorical. The rabbit can do no more than respond instinctively, and the responses will be virtually dictated by the stimuli. The mind removes the limiting constraints of instinct--limiting because the great DNA computer is glacially slow--and allows the individual organism and its societies to generate more complex and sometimes novel responses.
Yet the mind, too, is subject to the gene-impacting consequences of failures and successes, the same sifting and sorting that removes rabbits too slow to run from the data set; minds that make too many poor choices are the products of genes that are thus less likely to reproduce.
The behaviors of mind are more complex than the purely instinctive, yet the parameters that make one behavior more probable than another can, often in practice and always in theory, be determined. If we knew all parameters, we could accurately predict all behaviors. But that level of complexity is beyond us: in that vastness you, Syamsu, may see freedom rather than chaotic indeterminacy, but even the knowledge of a few salient factors shows them to be nonrandom.
No sane man's actions appear random to his fellows: we understand them in the light of his past and his present circumstances. The mind does not float in limbo, insulated from the world of cause and effect, but is, rather, its most exquisite creation.
The limits of prediction are the limits of knowledge, and freedom--whatever you imagine that to be--surely should be grounded in something finer than ignorance, and surely cannot be extinguished by knowledge, or else it was never freedom at all.
It is odd that a religious person who believes an omniscient God always knows what a man will do next can insist that a Darwinist who says we cannot predict what a man will do next is an enemy of freedom.
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