Video: Why? – “What for?” or “How Come?” — 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 team—whether 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 stuff—at 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 to—we 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 to—we must explain how the laws came to be and why there are these laws and not other laws—and 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 it—the 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.
…to which he responds with the top clip by Dan Dennett making my same point a decade ago—or 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,—NOT 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 acted—MYTHOLOGICALLY. The “non-free will” is mythology; in real life, it is only a question of STRONG and WEAK wills.—It 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 it’s the other way around
Smolin relates that the prevailing perspective today is that time is an illusion—name-dropping Plato and Einstein, who hold this view. He conveys that he used to share this belief, but now he disagrees—whence 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.
— Lee Smolin, Time Reborn
Next, he posits that some people believe in timeless events—events 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 “eternal love.” We speak of “truth” and “justice” as timeless.”
Love, truth, and justice are all human constructs—weasel words.
“Whatever we most admire and look up to — God, the truths of mathematics, the laws of nature — 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.
— 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 it’s about objects that exist once they’ve been invented, either by evolution or human thought.”
— 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.
— 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 physics—it reduces everything to parts until there are no longer subparts, at which point the process fails—and 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 theory—just 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 relationships—the 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 narrative—Determinism. 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 example—not a moral consideration—, the random event involves the outcome of a match by their favourite sports team—or perhaps s/he’s won at Lotto—, our agent had no say in the outcome of the event. From the agent’s perspective—considering the illustration—s/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 sugar—or 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.
— Slavoj Žižek (Guardian Web Chat, 6 October 2014 (revised 8 October 2014))
I agree with most of Ĺ˝iĹľek’s sentiment here. I dissect it into four elemental blocks, three of which I care about.
Žižek 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 satisfice—a portmanteau of satisfying and sufficing—rather 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 restraint—but 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 happiness—by whatever measure—is fleeting. And it fleets fast—usually 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˝iĹľek 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 Existentialist—the 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.
EDIT: Since I first posted this, I’ve discovered that computer algorithms and maths are not playing well together in the sandbox. Those naughty computer geeks are running rogue from the maths geeks.
In grade school, we typically learn a form of PEMDAS as a mnemonic heuristic for mathematical order of operations. It’s a stand-in for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction. This may be interpreted in different ways, but I’ve got bigger fish to fry. It turns out that many (if not most) programming languages don’t implement around a PEMDAS schema. Instead, they opt for BODMAS, where the B and O represent Brackets and Orders—analogous to Parentheses and Exponents. The important thing to note is the inversion of MD to DM, as this creates discrepancies.
And it doesn’t end here. HP calculators interject a new factor, multiplication by juxtaposition, that mathematician and YouTuber, Jenni Gorham, notates as J resulting in PEJMDAS. This juxtaposition represents the implied multiplication as exemplified by another challenge;
1 Ă· 2âś“3 =
In this instance, multiplication by juxtaposition instructs us to resolve 2âś“3 before performing the division. Absent the J, the calculation results in ½✓3 rather than the intended 1/(2âś“3). As with this next example, simply adding parentheses fixes the problem. Here’s a link to her video:
And now we return to our originally scheduled programming…
Simplifying concepts has its place. The question is where and when. This social media war brings this back to my attention.
As depicted in the meme, there is a difference of opinion as to what the answer is to this maths problem.
6 Ă· 2 ( 1 + 2 ) =
In grade school, children are taught some variation of PEMDAS, BOMDAS, BEDMAS, BIDMAS, or whatever. What they are not taught is that this is a regimented shortcut, but it doesn’t necessarily apply to real-world applications. The ones defending PEMDAS are those who have not taken maths beyond primary school and don’t use maths beyond some basic addition and subtraction. Luckily, the engineers and physicists who need to understand the difference, generally, do.
Mathematicians, scientists, and engineers have learned to transform the equation into the form on the left, yielding an answer of 1. If your answer is 9, you’ve been left behind.
Why is this such a big deal?
When I taught undergraduate economics, I, too, had to present simplifications of models. In practice, the approach was to tell the students that the simplification was like that in physics. At first, you assume factors like gravity and friction don’t exist—fewer variables, fewer complexities. The problem, as I discovered in my advanced studies, is that in economics you can’t actually relax the assumptions. And when you do, the models fail to function. So they only work under assumptions that cannot exist in the real world—things like infinite suppliers and demanders. Even moving from infinite to a lot, breaks the model. Economists know this, and yet they teach it anyway.
When I transitioned from undergrad to grad school, I was taken aback by the number of stated assumptions that were flat out wrong.
When I transitioned from undergrad to grad school, I was taken aback by the number of stated assumptions that were flat out wrong. Not only were these simplifications flat out wrong, but they also led to the wrong conclusion—the conclusion that aligned with the prevailing narratives.
This led me to wonder about a couple of things
Firstly, if I had graduated with an English degree and then became a PhD candidate in English, would I have also learnt it had mostly been a lie for the purpose of indoctrination?
Secondly, what other disciplines would have taught so much disinformation?
Thirdly, how many executives with degrees and finance and management only got the fake version?
Fourthly, how many executives hadn’t even gotten that? Perhaps they’d have had taken a class or two in each of finance and economics and nothing more. How many finance and economics courses does one need to take to get an MBA? This worries me greatly.
To be honest, I wonder how many other disciplines have this challenge. I’d almost expect it from so-called soft sciences, but from maths? Get outta here.
Half-life of knowledge
This also reminds me of the notion of the half-life of knowledge. What you knew as true may eventually no longer be. In this case, you were just taught a lie because it was easier to digest than the truth. In other cases, an Einstein comes along to change Newtonian physics into Oldtonian physics, or some wisenheimer like Copernicus determines that the cosmic model is heliocentric and not geocentric.
If you’ve been keeping up with my latest endeavour, you may be surprised that free will, human agency, identity, and the self are all human social constructs in need of remediation. Get ready to get out of your comfort zone or to entrench yourself in a fortress of escalating commitment.
Peter van Inwagen is a personality I’ve had on my radar, but I haven’t spent any time with him because he is a referenced influence of Robert Kane or Derk Pereboom, who hold positions I disagree with.
Video: Peter van Inwagen – Big Questions in Free Will
Still, I was interested, so I thought watching a short 13-minute video interview might introduce me to him. I’ve enjoyed other Closer to the Truth content, so I gave it a go. I feel that Peter sets up the problem perfectly. No faults whatsoever. As I see it, the same problem and solution proposal arises that Galen Strawson adopts, yet this is where I disagree with them both.
As noam chomsky has speculated maybe our minds are just put together in the wrong way to find this fault we got a certain set of cognitive modules tossed up to us in our evolutionary history maybe we got the wrong ones for thinking about this problem
— Peter van Inwagen
[TBD]
Unless I decide to unpack the rest, I’ll cut to the chase. The argument is as follows:
Humans are somehow hardwired to blame. (I do not know if this is universally true, but let’s accept this premise as being true.)
Without the notion of free will (or at least human agency), we cannot assign blame.
Therefore, in order to assign blame, free will has to be true.
I don’t disagree with this syllogism. However, in ‘free will has to be true’ , there are ostensibly two possibilities.
Free will exists as a fact in nature—a priori
Free will is a construction—a posteriori
Of course, the general consensus for proponents of free will is that it exists a priori. My contention is that this is not the case. Free will is an a posteriori construction.
Inwagen is falling into a heuristic trap: It feels like it’s true, so it’s obviously true. Borrowing from Daniel Kahneman, he and others are relying on System I and failing to trigger System II, where System II is required. Moreover, I take this position because I don’t think System II has what it needs to accurately analyse and assess the situation holistically. We can’t get outside of the system, so we make up a story that presumably serves our purposes.
I am not one who believes ‘the universe is a simulation’, but I do believe it serves as an apt metaphor. We are player characters in the game and we can’t see outside of it.
I like to sum it all up with the expression, the future can be different, just not because of you.
In grappling with anti-agency or non-agency, I am still trying to find apt metaphors. My latest find is the straw that broke the camel’s back. That, or death by a thousand papercuts.
My contention is that because humans have no material agency, they still have no responsibility—even if I were to agree that the world did allow for free will, is determined, semi-determined, or determined.
All of our genetics, epigenetics, and heredity along with our socio-environmental programming, any agency we might have to exert is essentially the straw that breaks the camel’s back. This story is meant to teach that the final straw cannot be seen in isolation. This straw is not responsible for breaking the camel’s back. It’s just one of a thousand papercuts, to switch metaphors for effect. We don’t get to claim that the last straw has some magical powers. If we have agency, it’s homoeopathic and hardly enough to attribute responsibility.
My point is that even if humans are effectively free to choose in the moment as people have proposed, is this sufficient to grant agency cum responsibility? I am reading John Martin Fischer’s Compatibilism chapter in Four Views on Free Will, where he gives an example of not deliberating about whether to jump to the moon because (in part at least) [he] would not successfully jump to the moon, even if [he] were to choose to jump to the moon. I feel the same goes for other non-choices.
If I have only ever watched action movies my entire life or only even drunk Coca Cola, given the choice of an action movie or a romance movie or a Coke or a Pepsi, what choice am I making? It can be said that I can ‘choose’ to watch an adventure movie and a Coke, but in fact, I am habituated to these ‘choices’.
I recall a book by Thomas Moore titled Care for the Soul. In chapter 2, he conveys the story of a man with an alcoholic father, who can either become an alcoholic like his father or abstain. Presumably, he can also moderate a middle path. My contention is that his apparent choice will be pathological. Following is the easiest narrative—monkey-see, monkey-do. If he resists, it’s a reaction, not a choice. Even if he ‘chooses’ a middle path, it’s only reactionary.
An example from my own life experience played out like this. My grandfather was an MIT engineer, but (according to the family narrative), he was a weak man controlled by his wife, who capitalised on real estate purchases during the Great Depression of the 1930s. My dad’s response was to determine that higher education was pointless. He got a high school diploma and became a successful real estate developerõall the while keeping a chip on his shoulder. Whilst my high school classmates were prepping for college with family support, I was told that I would not be supported and that I would have to pay for it myself. (I didn’t qualify for standard loans because my family had too much money. The institutions didn’t care that I had no access to my parents’ money.)
At this point, I just wanted to attend university to acquire knowledge and figure things out. I didn’t even have a major in mind. I just wanted more input because there was nothing I was interested in.
According to Sartre, we always at least have the choice to persist or perish, yet even this isn’t true.
To be honest, I feel like I have choices and have made choices, but I also know I have been fooled by magicians’ illusions. I don’t know the mechanics of these tricks either, but I know that they work because of cognitive flaws or gaps. It’s not much of a leap to accept that free will and agency can operate in the same gaps.
EDIT: As I continue to digest Fischer’s position, I am thinking he is talking about gross motor skills whilst I am trying to focus on fine motor skills, and there’s a disconnect. Free will is gross motor, but agency is fine.
Abortion rights and a woman’s right to choose are on quick repeat in the latest news cycles as the SCOTUS has signalled that it wished to remove a woman’s right to choose. For most of us, it’s plainly obvious that this is codifying religious moral doctrine into law—Judeo-Christian beliefs to be more precise. This Christian belief is predicated on the notion that life is sacred.
In the West or at least in the United States citizens are inundated with this religious tripe, literally from infancy. It’s presented as sacrosanct, but this is not a universal belief.
One of my favourite stories in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years was the recounting of French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s anecdotal observation that a man saved from drowning proceeded to ask his rescuer for remuneration for having saved his life.
As Graeber puts it, a man saved from drowning who proceeded to ask his rescuer to give him some nice clothes to wear, or another who, on being nursed back to health after having been savaged by a tiger, demanded a knife. One French missionary working in Central Africa insisted that such things happened to him on a regular basis:
You save a person’s life, and you must expect to receive a visit from him before long; you are now under an obligation to him, and you will not get rid of him except by giving him presents.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the French philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in an attempt to prove that “natives” operated with an entirely different form of logic, compiled a list of similar stories: for instance, of a man saved from drowning who proceeded to ask his rescuer to give him some nice clothes to wear, or another who, on being nursed back to health after having been savaged by a tiger, demanded a knife.
The interesting thing for me is the way this flips the sanctity of life narrative on its head. As Westerners, it is not only beat into our heads—whether secular or sectarian—, and this sanctity becomes the crux of the pro-life [sic] anti-abortion argument. But this sanctity is just another human construct. Part of the ‘be fruitful, go forth and multiply’ logic. This is arguably just more human hubris.
Of course, this is a slippery slope. Start undermining this narrative, and you start to see eugenic apologists coming out of the woodwork. In fact, we aren’t really that far removed from this notion. Whenever we encounter common enemies, one of the first tactics is to vilify and dehumanise them, so as to soothe the psyche, making it justify killing these subhuman species. In the end, the human mind is very facile.
