Agency is going through the same fits as religion. When Nietzsche regarded society around him at the time, he declared that God is dead and asked now what? This is precisely the same challenge in different clothes.
Preserving âlaw and orderâ without a concept of real responsibility is a daunting task.
Dan Dennett
Without a God to use as a bully pulpit and mechanism of fear, how could we keep people in line in cohesive societies? Without the notion of human agency to allow for responsibility and blame, how can we keep people in line in cohesive societies? Only the predicate has changed, but the question remains, do we persist in lying for the so-called greater good? This is similar to the Santa Claus myth to keep young children in line.
If nobody is responsible, not really, then not only should the prisons be emptied, but no contract is valid, mortgages should be abolished, and we can never hold anybody to account for anything they do. Preserving âlaw and orderâ without a concept of real responsibility is a daunting task.
âDan Dennett, âReflections on Free Willâ (naturalism.org)
One might like to think that lying is psychologically pathological, but it seems to be a significant part of the human condition. The fundamental question doesn’t appear to be ‘should I tell the truth’, but rather ‘Can I get away with lying?’ Despite all the talk of Truth and integrity, this seems to be the default state of humans. This renders integrity just another lie. But you knew that already, but let’s not fall into another Foucauldian rabbit hole.
We no longer have any sympathy today with the concept of âfree willâ: we know only too well what is is â the most infamous of all the arts of the theologian for making mankind âaccountableâ. . . Everywhere accountability is sought, it is usually the instinct for punishing and judging which seeks it⌠the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty.
â Twilight of the Idols: âThe Four Great Errorsâ, 7
Whenever I hear the phrase, ‘We don’t need to argue semantics’, two thoughts come immediately to mind.
We do need to argue semantics
Your position is shrouded in the ambiguity that you’d prefer remain intactâeven if you are unaware of the ambiguity
This might be something less, but I find that many philosophical arguments are causedâat least in partâby a lack of a common foundation.
A common response to a ‘definition check’ is ‘you know what I mean’ or ‘everyone knows what X means’. My response is, respectively, ‘I might know what you mean, but I want to be sure’ or ‘great, so this should be easy for you to provide’.
I’ve spend some hours cobbling together another video that I labelled Free Will Scepticism: Would-Be Agency & Luck. I’ve embedded it here. The script is below.
Human agency does not exist. Free will is an illusion. Like the appearance that the sun rises in the east and sets and the west, we only appear to have free will.
There are some nuances and varying degrees of this belief, but if one believes in the scientific notion of cause and effect, that every effect is the result of a prior cause of causes, one inevitably ends up in this camp.
Video: Free Will Scepticism: Would-Be Agency & Luck
[REDACTED]
Without going into details because the focus of this segment is on luck, Iâd still like to set the stage for the uninitiated.
Regarding the universe, we recognise a relationship between cause and effect. If we rewind to follow this logic back to the beginning of time and started again, weâd end up in exactly the same place. This is known as deterministic. What happens next is determined by what happened before.
And this is not just a scientific view. Those who believe that God caused the universe can arrive at this same place.
Owing to advancements in scientific thought, most philosophers today do not believe that the world is deterministic, per se. Given theories of quantum mechanics and probabilistic outcomes, they believe in so-called natural physical laws, but probability is also part of this model.
One may strike a billiard ball with a cue stick to cause it to strike another ball, knocking it into a pocket. In our knowledge of the universe, this is unsurprising. If one set this up mechanically, leaving no room for variation, we could run this scenario over and over again forever, and the ball would go into the pocket every time. The outcome is established by the laws of physics.
Billards Animated GIF
Actually, this is just another illusion. The laws of physics cause nothing. They are just a way of describing how things unfold in our universe. But just like saying that the sun rises in the east, we can employ idiomatic language and people know what we mean.
This was an illustration of determinism. Indeterminism accepts these same laws, but it adds an element of probability. In our mechanised billiards example, perhaps a ball is randomly rolled across the table in such a way that it might interfere with the path of the balls.
If the random ball does not interfere with the path, its presence is irrelevant. If it does interfere, there are a few different outcomes.
One, it knocks a ball off course, so the final ball does not go into the pocket.
Two, its path is such that although it collides with a ball, this event does not interfere with the final ball ending up in the pocket, so a person fixated on the pocket might not notice anything more than a slight delay in the occurrence of the event.
The second scenario depicts indeterminism.
In both scenarios, the ball expected to go into the pocket is the would-be agent. As illustrated, the ball itself has no agency. None of them does. Its fate, to borrow a term steeped in metaphysics, is entirely subject to the actions before it. And then thereâs chance, so letâs continue.
Humans are ostensibly automatons, subject to their genetic and environmental programming with no degree of free will. Letâs say that in a given context each person can be described by a certain wave function. For the sake of simplicity, letâs just pretend that it can be represented by a sine wave. As with any waveform, we can illustrate it by plotting it on a 2-dimensional plane, having amplitude on the Y-axis and time on the X-axis. Letâs consider this to be analogous to a personâs biorhythm, and letâs further consider that this represents the would-be agentâs mood or propensity to behave a certain way.Â
Arbitrary Disposition Cycle
Practically, there might be more functions, so letâs just say that this is the average of all of these other functionsâperhaps the other functions being how much rest was had the night before, when and what the last meal was, traffic encountered on the way to work, and any number of other personal considerations.
For any stable wave, we can plot the period from peak to peak or trough to trough. Letâs use trough to trough to represent a period of a day but from 2:30 am to 2:30 am rather than from midnight to midnight. This is one complete cycle. The offset is just to more easily facilitate the scenario.
Given this frame, weâll put noon in the centre between the midnights as expected.
For the purposes of illustration, weâll draw a horizontal line to represent a threshold depicting a change in disposition. Weâll use this later.
Finally, letâs show time increments by hour, so we now see 24 hours in a day. And we can see that at noon the wave peak rises above the threshold and falls below the threshold again at 5 pm.
Letâs presume that this wave function represents that of a criminal trial judge. There is support for this notion as published in Daniel Kahnemanâs 2021 book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, wherein he notes that trial judges are almost as predictable as a watch, that their sentences are more correlated with time of day and the aforementioned factors than anything related to lawâsave for the laws of time, I suppose.
Remembering thatâlike all peopleâthis judge is an automaton. Letâs build some characterârather characteristics. Judge Judy believes that people are fundamentally bad and not to be trusted. She believes that they have free will and are accountable for their actions, though she does also allow for extenuating circumstances when considering sentencing, the usual suspectsâbad childhood, chemical dependency, and whatnot. People who believe more strongly in free will are more likely to believe in harsher punishment. Judy is no exception.
Using this function as a guide, above the threshold represents her propensity for leniency. She tends to take lunch regularly before noon and is more lenient for a period after lunch. Data show that this effect is closer to a couple of hours after the midday meal, but we are simplifying.
Zooming in, letâs just consider a single day in the life of another would-be agent who as it happens will be interacting with our Judge Judy. Iâll take this opportunity to introduce the work of Neil Levy.
Neil is Head of Neuroethics at the Florey Neuroscience Institutes and Director of Research at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics.
He is the author of Hard Luck, five previous books, and many articles, on a wide range of topics including applied ethics, free will and moral responsibility, philosophical psychology, and philosophy of mind.
Levyâs book promotes the concept that even if we allow for human agency, much of this supposed agency is undermined by luck. This will not only become evident in the scenario we are working through, but as a human, you may come upon a decision-point, where probability and luck come into play. You have no control over what ideas pop into your headâor donâtâand in what order. The choice you ultimately make is limited to what these ideas are and how they do or donât manifest. Without going too far astray, perhaps youâve constructed a false dichotomy.
Dark Alley
Perhaps you are confronted by a stranger in a dark alley. You observe that itâs a dead end. The stranger, asking for money, approaches you in a manner you interpret as menacing. As he reaches into his coat, you pull out your concealed weapon and fatally shoot him.
He was unarmed. No longer in panic, you realise that you are not in a dead-end alley.
When the police arrive, they inform you that the person you killed is known` by law enforcement and social services, who have been keeping an eye on him because he had limited cognitive capacity and resided in a group home. Not only was he not armed, but the detective on the scene noted that what he was reaching for were pens with inspirational inscriptions that he routinely sold to earn money.
Whilst you may not have been able to determine that he was otherwise harmless, it was your âluckââbad luckâthat you didnât happen to see that you were never cornered in the first place.
Nevertheless, you are arrested.
In another scenario, perhaps there are two judges. Judge Judy and Justice Joe. As it happens, Justice Joe has a cycle reverse to Judy. Where Judyâs mood is better after lunch, Joe is fasting, and his mood gets worse. This means that your fate now is not only tied to the time of day but it’s also linked to the luck of which judge will hand down your sentence.
If you are a strict determinist, then the âuniverseâ has already determined which judge will sentence you.
If you are an indeterminist, then the universe will flip a coin. And the probability of a case running long or short might determine the time of day.
In the end, as are you, the judges are slaves to their programming, and any alteration of inputs will just be processed through whatever theyâve become until that point. They have no more free will than you do. The die has already been cast.
Do you believe you have free will? If so, why. Are you a determinist or an indeterminist? Or are you a compatibilist who believes that free will and determinism can coexist in the same universe?
The title of this post is admittedly pompous, but I promise it’s relevant. I was chatting with an online colleague about the travails of my anti-agency journey. I’ll lay it out here as well.
About a month or so ago, I embarked to research on my suspicion that human agency is ostensibly hogwash*. I went down many rabbit holes to find the skeletal remains of many rabbits who have embarked on this path before me. I thought I had some unique epiphany and I would just have to articulate my position, but it turns out not to be the case. In fact, it’s a crowded spaceâlots of skeletal Leporidae. Moreover, many of these blokes are still alive and kicking.
As it happens, we all fit under the large umbrella of free will scepticism, but there are several flavours mostly differentiated by where one prunes the branch. Scepticism of free will is the common bond, but the differences, as one might expect, lead to different implications. Some branches still allow for responsibilityâeven absent agencyâ, others even insist on responsibility despite not having agencyâand still others, like me, claim responsibility is impossible.
All of these perspectives hinge on the validity and strength of determinism or indeterminism. Soft determinism (AKA compatibilism) allows for free will and determinism to coexist, so that’s not on my radar.
As I’ve cited elsewhere, there are not many non-religious determinists these days, as the state of science and quantum theory pretty much obsoleted the idea. But by my reckoning, from the perspective of the would-be agent, it doesn’t matter because in either case, this person (or other animate objectsâno need to overspecify) is affected by the causal chain and does not affect it. This lack of affectation is precisely why we can’t attribute responsibility or desert.
This is not just some philosophical mental masturbation. It turns out that entire legal frameworks are designed on the prevailing held beliefs, and the more degrees of free will a culture assumes people have, the more punitive that society isâand vice versa. More on this in a future post where I intend to write about Gregg Caruso’s perspective and where and how our positions deviate.
Video: Why? – “What for?” or “How Come?” â Daniel Dennett
As a rule, I don’t have much faith in humans. It would be apparent if you read some of my posts. I find most people to be akin to vapid sports fans: Hooray for my teamâwhether that team is political party or persuasion, science, religion, and whatever. Not a lot of critical thinking or reasoning. I believe Geuss mentioned that most people are just trying to make it to the next day and acquire more stuffâat least more stuff than the neighbour. Social media is a turn for the worse. Luckily and thankfully, there are exceptions to this rule.
Engaging in a CS Peirce forum that I was invited to because of some interactions I had in a postmodern forum, I asked for the source of a Peirce claim made by another Lee Smolin.
When you explain a system by referencing the laws, that’s not the end of the explanation; you have toâwe must explain how the laws came to be and why there are these laws and not other laws.
Lee Smolin on CS Peirce
At 8:43, Smolin cites Peirce by saying ‘that when you explain a system by referencing the laws, that’s not the end of the explanation; you have toâwe must explain how the laws came to be and why there are these laws and not other lawsâand he goes on to say this is 1893⌒
Video: Are the laws of the universe immutable and unchanging?
Not being a direct quote, I was experiencing difficulty finding the source of the citation, so I asked in the Peirce group. As I am wont to do, I added that I didn’t buy into the assertion, but if I could find the source I could gather more context.
I don’t buy into the assertion that in describing a system one needs to provide an origin story, so I was hoping to discover context to determine whether it’s Smolin or Peirce to have an issue with.
I was given a citation that didn’t happen to be accurate,
A second member chimed in that of course one needs an ‘original state’, so I clarified that it was not the original state that I held issue with. It was the narrative behind itâthe story of the origin, not the origin itself.
He responded, ‘That’s Deacon!’ More precisely, the response was as follows:
YES!!!!!!! That’s Deacon!!!!
I’m not even schooled in Peirce, and now I’m getting his classmates.
To my origin clarification, I also added this bit:
I feel that ‘reasons’ or ‘whys’ are less important than ‘how’. In fact, I feel that ‘why’ is often used in English as a synonym to ‘how’ in many contexts.
So when asks ‘Why are you late?’ they are really asking ‘How it is that you’ve arrived late?’ or ‘How come you’re late?’ Why feels like a metaphysical stand-in for how.
âŚto which he responds with the top clip by Dan Dennett making my same point a decade agoâor I suppose that I am making his same point a decade later.
It seems that I’m late to the party yet again. This is becoming a trend.
The CAUSA SUI is the best self-contradiction that has yet been conceived, it is a sort of logical violation and unnaturalness; but the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with this very folly. The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness. If anyone should find out in this manner the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of “free will” and put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further, and also put out of his head the contrary of this monstrous conception of “free will”: I mean “non-free will,” which is tantamount to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not wrongly MATERIALISE “cause” and “effect,” as the natural philosophers do (and whoever like them naturalise in thinking at present), according to the prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the cause press and push until it “effects” its end; one should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure CONCEPTIONS, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and mutual understanding,âNOT for explanation. In “being-in-itself” there is nothing of “casual- connection,” of “necessity,” or of “psychological non-freedom”; there the effect does NOT follow the cause, there “law” does not obtain. It is WE alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world, as “being-in-itself,” with things, we act once more as we have always actedâMYTHOLOGICALLY. The “non-free will” is mythology; in real life, it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.âIt is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every “causal-connection” and “psychological necessity,” manifests something of compulsion, indigence, obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom; it is suspicious to have such feelings–the person betrays himself. And in general, if I have observed correctly, the “non-freedom of the will” is regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a profoundly PERSONAL manner: some will not give up their “responsibility,” their belief in THEMSELVES, the personal right to THEIR merits, at any price (the vain races belong to this class); others on the contrary, do not wish to be answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to GET OUT OF THE BUSINESS, no matter how. The latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their favourite disguise. And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as “la religion de la souffrance humaine“; that is ITS “good taste.”
Einstein was wrong. Time is not the relative factor in space-time. Space is. Time is constant. Here’s a lecture on the topic of the book.
Lee Smolin Public Lecture: Time Reborn
As a result of a discussion with a colleague, on the possibility of variability or mutability of so-called physical laws, he recommended Lee Smolin’s book Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. He mentioned that it would be suitable as an audiobook. Since I had a credit on Audible, I decided to use it so I could listen to this without deep scrutiny and a need for taking notes.
There is a nice review in the Guardian from 2013. I suppose I am a bit behind the times.
Whilst running errands, I listened to the Preface and Introduction. I stopped at the start of the first chapter, and am debating whether to continue. Given his setup, I don’t believe I am Smolin’s target audience. Many of the beliefs he is attempting to dispel, I already don’t hold. Yet I don’t feel that I need to hold time as a constant to hold them. He seems to feel otherwise.
Preface
For the record, Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, who has written several books in this space. Quickly, recapping some of his points:
He provides examples of various illusions humans tend to be swayed by:
Matter appears to be smooth but turns out to be made of atoms
Atoms seem indivisible but turn out to be built of protons, neutrons, and electrons
Protons and neutrons are further made of still more elementary particles called quarks
The sun appears to go around the Earth, but itâs the other way around
Smolin relates that the prevailing perspective today is that time is an illusionâname-dropping Plato and Einstein, who hold this view. He conveys that he used to share this belief, but now he disagreesâwhence the book. He tells us:
Not only is time real, but nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time.
â Lee Smolin, Time Reborn
Next, he posits that some people believe in timeless eventsâevents outside of time, eternal and not a function of time. Here’s where he goes off the rails in my book.
“We perceive ourselves as living in time, yet we often imagine that the better aspects of our world and ourselves transcend it. What makes something really true, we believe, is not that it is true now but that it always was and always will be true.”
Evidently, he feels or felt this way. I am sure many others. I am not among them.
“What makes a principle of morality absolute is that it holds in every time and every circumstance.”
My position is that all morality is a social construct, so this doesn’t resonate with me.
“We seem to have an ingrained idea that if something is valuable, it exists outside time.”
Again, I am not in his intended audience.
“We yearn for âeternal love.â We speak of âtruthâ and âjusticeâ as timeless.”
Love, truth, and justice are all human constructsâweasel words.
“Whatever we most admire and look up to â God, the truths of mathematics, the laws of nature â is endowed with an existence that transcends time. We act inside time but judge our actions by timeless standards.”
Yet again, I am unburdened by these beliefs.
Nothing transcends time, not even the laws of nature. Laws are not timeless. Like everything else, they are features of the present, and they can evolve over time.
â Lee Smolin, Time Reborn
I think that this quote is a reason this book was recommended to me. I do believe that the properties that comprise laws can evolve over time. I’m not sure if this is by a probabilistic process or something else. There are a few possible implications. One is that the laws at the onset of the universe may have been different, making the understanding of that time more challenging if not impossible. I don’t know if I believe in multiverses, and I doubt I may ever live long enough to discover. However, even if there is only one universe, per the name, perhaps universes can exist sequentially and when one dies another appears with a different set of initial conditions and properties. Borrowing from evolution, perhaps these survive or perish based on the viability of this combination.
Smolin goes on to posit that, ‘thinking in time is not relativism but a form of relationalism‘.
He continues,
“Truth can be both time-bound and objective when itâs about objects that exist once theyâve been invented, either by evolution or human thought.”
â Lee Smolin, Time Reborn
I’m not sure he is going to define truth, but I believe he conflates moral truths with axiomatic or tautological truths. Perhaps it doesn’t matter because both are constructed.
Smolin makes it clear that he is not a determinist, but unless you take the view he is proposing, as a physicist, you almost have to be. As he says regarding Determinism, theoretically. a person could suss out a mathematical equation to predict every future event. He also considers this belief to be a metaphysical vestige of religion.
Introduction
According to [the] dominant view, everything that happens in the universe is determined by a law, which dictates precisely how the future evolves out of the present. The law is absolute and, once present conditions are specified, there is no freedom or uncertainty in how the future will evolve.
â Lee Smolin, Time Reborn
He continues to describe a deterministic system without mentioning indeterminism, which may be a more prominent belief given what we understand about quantum mechanics. He claims that this perspective diminishes time for several reasons. Inflating or at least elevating time is important for his thesis, and I am thinking that this is more an act of wishful thinking.
He takes a stab at the inherent reductionism of physicsâit reduces everything to parts until there are no longer subparts, at which point the process failsâand explains that by adopting this approach, one needs to get outside of the universe to make some evaluations, but this is impossible. And this might be a true statement, but so what? The answer is not to make up a story that creates an environment where that’s no longer necessary.
Smolin reiterates over and again about timeless laws in a time-bound universe, but I question his notion of timelessness. He admits that he has no grand theoryâjust an idea he hopes others can pursue and build upon. Emergent properties appear to be an emerging theme.
Leibniz is next up, in particular his principle of sufficient reason. Leibniz’ vision is a relational universe composed of a network of relationshipsâthe space is simply the absence of things. He contrasts this with Newton’s view that space is absolute and serves as the container for things. He sets up a future chapter that he says establishes that Leibniz’ vantage precludes the possibility of absolute time, but I don’t see this as a challenge for those of us who believe that time is constructed in the first place.
The Newtonian view prevailed until Einstein resurrected Leibnitz with his general relativity theory of space and time. The trending vogue is about relationalism, whether biology or information science.
He cites the challenges of maintaining Locke’s views on autonomy and personal liberties in a deterministic world (again leaving indeterminism unmentioned).
And he’s back on the emergence of emergence. (I was in the midst of writing a post on emergence when this interrupted my flow. I suspect it should be forthcoming in time.)
Falling
As it turned out, I ran another errand and listened to the first chapter of part 1. It is about gravity and parabolas, but I shan’t recount it here, save to note that he seems to be of the opinion that many people have the desire to transcend the bounds of human life. He may be right. I am not one of these people.
Harvard’s Bob Doyle submits that people have free will in an indeterministic universe (read: agency) because if in the face of some random event an agent can make a choice, then s/he is responsible for that choice. I believe he is mischaracterising or misinterpreting the situation. I’ve composited an illustration to show where he and I interpret the random event differently. I’ve linked and cued the video to where he makes the statement I am reacting to.
The illustration depicts three event chains. My interpretation of Bob’s case is at the top followed by that of a Deterministic universe, followed by that of an indeterministic universe. At the bottom of the illustration is an index running from t-2 to t2, representing time, where t0 represents now, a decision point.
Determinism
Let’s set the table with the simplest narrativeâDeterminism. Here, every event that occurs was known since the beginning of time. Every state is the result of past events in a causal chain. Nothing can happen that isn’t caused by a prior event. This is the motion picture we just haven’t seen yet. But anyone who has already seen it can spoil the ending because it’s already known without a doubt.
Regarding the illustration, event t-2 causes t-1 that causes t0 all the way to t2 and beyond.
No Escape from Moral Responsibiliy Chart
Bob Doyle, an Interpretation
Although Bob’s case is an interpretation of Indeterminism, let’s consider his position first. Then I’ll suggest where he’s gone astray.
As with the other cases, Bob’s transition from t-2 to t-1 is Deterministic and uncontested. The difference starts where t-1 transitions to t0. In Bob’s world, a random or perhaps a probabilistic event occurs given the agent to make a choice not having been previously determined. Referring to the illustration, because of this event, the agent chooses yes and embarks on the top chosen path, even if the subsequent path is again determined. Bob argues that at t0, the agent has free will, or if we focus our language, is responsible for the decision. By definition, this means that whatever path might be embarked had our agent chosen the lower path will never be known. And that has made all the difference.
Indeterminism
Herein lies the rub. As with the prior two event chains, we arrive at t0, as with Bob’s scenario, we encounter a probabilistic (random, stochastic, aleatory, indeterministic) event. It does not follow that this event confers agential responsibility.
For exampleânot a moral considerationâ, the random event involves the outcome of a match by their favourite sports teamâor perhaps s/he’s won at Lottoâ, our agent had no say in the outcome of the event. From the agent’s perspectiveâconsidering the illustrationâs/he remains on a path. S/he can wish s/he rooted for the other team or had chosen a different number or ticket, but she had no choice.
To anticipate Bob’s response, perhaps she had won and now chooses to quit her job or take holiday. This should have been predictable knowing our agent’s disposition, character, and propensities. At no point did the agent actually possess even a modicum of agency.
Freedom & Creativity
I don’t know much about Bob or his work, but earlier in the video clip he discusses freedom and creativity. My sense is that he interprets creativity as a sort of emergent property that manifests at the moment. I fundamentally disagree with this assertion. The notion reminds me of Hume’s position that unicorns are simply the mental merger of horses and horns. This is not creation so much as a remix.
Later in the video, Bob clarifies that if something randomly pops into our heads and we make a different decision because of it, this is free will. My counterargument is that he is misusing the term random. An unknown origin does not necessarily mean randomly manifest.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I’ve gotten myself down a free will rabbit hole, and as I’ve said before the problem isn’t about free will. That’s a red herring. The issue ultimately distils down to agency and how one defines you or the self.
Image: There may be free will, but you can’t have it
First, the notion of you or self is a construct.
Second, the notion that this constructed self somehow has autonomous agency is a meta-construct. It’s all smoke and mirrors.
Tea or Coffee
Let’s say for the sake of argument that free will is possible in the face of determinism or indeterminism, which is to say that it is compatible with other of these options. Daniel Dennett seems to say that these things can be compatible, but where they matter are trivial. We have free will to decide if we want tea or coffee, whether to add cream or milk, and whether to add two or three spoonfuls of sugarâor was that honey or unsweetened? But so what?
My argument is that (1) there is no you to decide and (2) even if I accept the notion of you, nothing about you is of your making. Everything about you comes from external forces. The only information you can process comes exogenously from without, and any endogenous interpretive processes rely on external inputs. You are on the titanic, and the best you can do is to rearrange deck chairs.
Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. We all remember Gordon Gekko, the role played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street. What he says, breakfast is for wimps, or if you need a friend buy yourself a dog. I think we should say something similar about happiness. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.
â Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹžek (Guardian Web Chat, 6 October 2014 (revised 8 October 2014))
I agree with most of Ĺ˝iĹžek’s sentiment here. I dissect it into four elemental blocks, three of which I care about.
ŽiŞek talks Happiness
Element One
Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don’t know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists.
Seeking happiness is similar to the enterprise seeking growth. Like growth, happiness is an outcome or a side effect. There is no sense in pursuing it for its own sake.
Herbert Simon noted in the mid-1950s that people satisficeâa portmanteau of satisfying and sufficingârather than optimise. Behavioural economics has run with this in the past few decades.
The challenge is that people don’t know what they want, so they are easy prey for marketers hoping to attract their interest. These are the opportunists.
Most people tend to behave like they are on rudderless ships easily buffeted this way and that. Easily lured by the call of the sirens, the call of marketers and other hucksters peddling happiness. There is the occasional Odysseus cum Ulysses, the metaphor for restraintâbut not of self-control because even Homer realised how ridiculous of a notion that is.
Self-help and fashion industries extract billions from not-quite happy consumers who buy into the false promises and hype. Social media is toxic with these same promises, like the life coach earning some 30K a year dispensing advice.
You need to dream. Dream big. Such and such and so and so had dreams, and look at them. If they didn’t have a dream, they wouldn’t have attained whatever it was they had dreamed. These other losers? They don’t have the right dreams or they aren’t big enough. The universe isn’t going to pay attention to small dreams. You need to attract its attention. Perhaps, these other people just don’t know how to dream. They aren’t doing it right. But I can teach you how to dream for a few shekels.
The problem is that research shows that happinessâby whatever measureâis fleeting. And it fleets fastâusually a matter of weeks. Some people have dispositions that facilitate their happiness. It just takes less for these people to be content. Perhaps they define happiness subjectively as being content. Maybe your threshold is too high. Maybe they are kidding themselves. Does it matter? Perhaps they are not comparing themselves with others, the root of unhappiness.
John Lennon penned a lyric, dream, dream away. What more can I say?
Element Two
So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself.
I disagree with Ĺ˝iĹžek here, but perhaps I am deluding myself. I don’t subscribe to the notions of self or of identity. These are fictions. Finding oneself is just as much a distraction as anything else. You might do this, read books, write blogs, play piano, play cricket, learn Tai Chi, or drink chai tea.
This is where I find myself at odds with Existentialistâthe philosophers who admit that there is no meaning to life but who insist people must make it, e.g., Sartre with politics, Camus with Art, or Kierkegaard with his personal religious experience.
Element Three
We all remember Gordon Gekko, the role played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street. What he says, breakfast is for wimps, or if you need a friend buy yourself a dog. I think we should say something similar about happiness.
I’ve got nothing to write here, which is why I left it out of the graphic. Go buy yourself a dog.
Element Four
If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.
This is an obvious nod to Nietzsche and his master and her aesthetic. Masters have their own ethics and outlook, but the pursuit or maintenance and appearance of power are more important than happiness. The herd, which is to say most people, seek the elusive goal of happiness.
Philosophics 