We are currently listening to an audiobook by M.C. Beaton, one of her Agatha Raisin mysteries. I think of these stories as making murder fun, in fact, making the whole range of hyperbolic histrionics hilarious. In the current story, the murder weapon is rhubarb. I'm forgetting my chemistry. I had to Google the "poison in rhubarb". It's oxalic acid. I knew that once. I also had to look up truculent and lugubrious, typical British descriptors for two of the suspects in the mystery. My vocabulary is shrinking, but thanks to Agatha I have retained these two words that were almost gone yesterday. Another 10,000 or so have already departed unnoticed.
One of the words I still know is free as in free choice, free will, and freedom. Paradoxically, our understanding of the word free is one of the determinants of behaviour that makes us more or less free. Our confusion arises from using the word free without defining it or using it to mean different things without saying so. If we assume we are not free, we may blame our mistakes on circumstances, setting us free of blame. If we assume we are free to choose, we must accept responsibility for the consequences even when there are antecedents of our behaviour that are beyond our control; and so we wind up in jail. So it would be better to be free-smart rather than free-not-so-smart. * (note below)
Free-smart would be recognizing that free is a relative term which is always paired with its opposite, determined. Nothing is absolutely free. Nothing is absolutely determined. Everything is somewhere on a free-determined spectrum . To prove my point, today's news reports that a woman in Australia was stuck head-down in a rock crevice for seven hours when she tried to retrieve her cellphone. A moment before she reached for her cellphone she was free not to risk getting stuck. Once stuck, she was not-so-free, but even then she was free to keep breathing and wait while they rescued her, or else die of fright. I am free to lose my porridge imagining the situation she was in, but also free to think about something else.
I will think about something else. I am still plodding through Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined, in which he attempts to dispose of free will by making determinism absolute. According to Robert, the will is determined by genetics, epigenetics, brain structure, hormones, environment, circumstance, experience, culture, the gut microbiome, and so on. The will is determined, period. It makes absolutely no difference whether you are stuck in a crevice or wondering what sentence to type to have some fun with murder. Your next move is absolutely determined.
Robert can define the will as he chooses, which means he has a choice. So do I. I will define the will as relatively free: that is, sort-of dependent on genetics, epigenetics, brain structure, hormones, environment, circumstance, experience, culture, the gut microbiome, and so on; but also sort-of generated by the recursive interaction of an active mind with all the determining factors presented to it. My name for this is free will. Robert can call it hokum if he wants. He is free to do that. He doesn't even have to ask permission. He can just assume that he is absolutely free, ** (note below) although he won't admit it because he is trying to prove otherwise.
I haven't finished the book. I suspect that Robert isn't absolutely deterministic. He's pretending in order to have fun with us and sell his book. For my part, I will admit that the predetermined mental equipment and external circumstances are relevant to the choices one makes. So we are sort-of determined, and we are sort-of free to make what we will out of our circumstances.
If you retrace what I have previously written, you will notice that I have used the word free rather freely, with different flavours of meaning. You might say that each of these two views is embedded in an unacknowledged paradigm. There are two paradigms: the universe as a whole, and the universe composed of discrete things.
Holistically thinking, we may imagine the universe as a dense, evolving cause-effect web with a woman stuck in crevice because the web caught her in dopamine mediated addiction to her cellphone. The cellphone passes the blame to social media. So TikTok gets the blame until it is passed on back to indifferent parenting and then handed off to an economic system that impoverished family life, and so on until it reaches the Big Bang, which is where the blame starts along with everything else. This is all hypothetical, of course. The woman had reasons and perhaps it was more than TikTok. Maybe she needed her cellphone because she was expecting her lover to call and make up after their spat the evening before. Perhaps the cellphone was new and not yet paid for and she can't afford another. Then there is the issue of salience, meaning the importance of various determinants (fear , TikTok, love, money, etc.) and salience is the product of brain structure and a lifetime of accumulated experience tagged with emotion. There are numerous other connections, some unknown and some unknowable even to the woman at the moment she chooses to retrieve the cellphone. Furthermore, when she gets stuck, she is a determining cause of other events, such as putting a rescue team to work for several hours. Clearly the woman is not separate from the web; she belongs to the web. If we try to predict what happens next, the complexity of the task is daunting. Therefore, the holistic paradigm is of limited utility.
Alternatively, we simplify by dividing the universe into discrete things and paying attention to what is immediate, close by and important. Within that paradigm, the woman is an autonomous agent, weighing the loss of cellphone against the risk of falling into the crevice. Her choice may be determined by numerous causes including causes she is not aware of in a causative network reaching back to the big bang. Nevertheless, she is somewhat aware; and therefore her mind in the moment is a good, though imperfect, predictive and motivational tool. She makes a choice because she can. We think of her as a discrete agent, not as an object helplessly caught in a web of causation.
Alas, it's difficult. When we get stuck on a difficult word, we are sort-of free to redefine it and sort-of dependent on people like Robert who write stuff so we don't have to do the thinking. If we accept someone's absolute definitions, we may be assuming that person knows more than is knowable and is more certain than is justified by evidence. In fact, even Robert can't explain or predict choices any better than a guess with an estimate of probability. The universe rolls the dice and we play the odds.You are free to think things through or trust your gut.* I choose to be relatively free from arrogant absolutes, make appropriate use of all the different ways of thinking about this, and be happy that I have a say in what happens next.
This hasn't been fun, has it. *** (note below) Anyway, you have to concede that, whatever we call it, free will is sort-of nice.
You're sort-of welcome.
***************
(*) Free-not-so-smart? That is, free to act without much thought. I won't say free-dumb which would be sort-of clever but disrespectful of people who are unable to speak freely.
(**) Note to self: the free-determined spectrum is different than the free-constrained spectrum. Don't get muddled.
(***) Way too many words, 1060. But then, I am free to exceed my arbitrary 500 word limit. You are free to think of this as a bonus sized note to make up for my skimpy efforts during the summer.
"Thanks anyway, but keep it short next time," I hear you say truculently.
"You're welcome," I answer lugubriously.
