Choice and Determination

If we choose, and our choosing is not pure, unanalyzable magic, then there must be some mechanism, however complicated, by which we make the choice.  Logically, it seems that, either this mechanism must be “deterministic” in the sense that if the mechanism is in exactly the same state, and receives exactly the same inputs*, then it will decide in exactly the same way; or there is some purely random component (e.g. quantum uncertainty) that affects the choice.

Neither of these options “sounds like” free will.  But if this is not free will, and free will is not simply a meaningless concept, or at least irrelevant to the choices we actual can and do make, then there must exist some entity whose choices are being constrained by this process.  That is, there must be some entity that is not “free”.   But if some entity is unfree, what entity is it?  If “you” are not exercising “free will” in these conditions, who are “you”?

We, the material, biologically constructed entities that we are, do make choices, and our choices are made in an effort to further the ends that we have conceived for ourselves.  This much is manifest.  It seems meaningless to me to say that we do not have free will in these choices based on some highly abstract argument that somehow we will never make the choices we don’t end up making.  What does it even mean for us to somehow be “able” to make the choice we do not, in fact, end up making?  I don’t see how that idea can be rendered coherent, except by reference to physical/mechanical potentialities, and epistemic possibilities that are fully compatible with the “deterministic” mechanisms of choice referred to above.    

In any case, other than these organic mechanisms, which make choices in the manner that we, in fact, make them, there is no entity here that can be “unfree”.

Of course, our choices are constrained, by the materials and opportunities available in our environment, by our abilities, physical and cognitive, by our histories, including things that have happened to us and previous choices we have made.  And of course the ends and goals that we conceive are formed by similar internal and external factors.  But for this to mean that our choices, from among the options that seem epistemically possible to us at the given moment, are “unfree”, there would have to be some self, other than the selves so constructed by history, biology, and prior choice, whose freedom was constrained, whose will was being denied, by the choices the biological “we” are making.  I cannot, for the life of me, conceive of what that other self might be.

I conclude that to say that people do NOT have free will makes no sense.  All that is left is to either accept that the way we actually choose represents free will, or to take the question of free will as an ultimately meaningless “pseudo-question”.  But at this point the choice is purely “semantic” in the colloquial sense of “just a matter of words”, and it makes no real, philosophical difference which wording you pick.

*The conditions of the mechanism being in “exactly the same” state and receiving “exactly the same” inputs  are considered only to focus on the logical argument.  They are both, in practical reasoning, impossible.  The universe is far too complex for it ever to be put back in the same state twice, and as for our “mechanism”, it is altered by every experience, and therefore can never be in the same state twice.  Even settling for “highly similar” is dubious.  Most significant human choices are, neurologically, a chain (actually a highly “parallel” web) of micro decisions, each of which potentially alters decisions further down the line, possibly in a binary manner (on/off – no shades of gray).  The end result, it seems to me, must show sensitive dependence on initial conditions, whether the component steps do, or not.  (They may.)  Thus even “similar” inputs to a brain in a “similar” state can lead to widely different outcomes.

Note:  I wrote most of the above text while I was reading Ch. 2 in Daniel C. Dennett’s book “Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting”, a book which I have subsequently completed.  I think my views on this, as on many other topics, are broadly compatible with Prof. Dennett’s.

Two Roads

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
Took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
- Robert Frost

Something's lost, but something's gained in living every day.
- Joni Mitchell

For some reason, in recent weeks, I've been driven to compare and contrast the above two quotations. They have a certain similarity in meaning, do they not? And yet they are subtly different. The more I reflect, the more I find in favor of Joni Mitchell.

Not stylistically, certainly. For all her colossal talent, the quintessential songstress of a certain moment of California hippie-dom's sparkling sunlight (and dreary underbelly) is no match as a crafter in words to the doughty mender of New Hampshire's walls. But content is a different thing.

Both fragments are about life choices, and the opportunities that are lost, as well as the satisfactions found, in making them. Frost's poem focuses on one big choice, and claims that has made all the difference. There is a certain smug self-satisfaction lurking behind the words. In the body of the poem (before the quoted lines), he plays at regret, but really he is confident that his choice was right (as well as being the one most people would not have made), and he is quite proud of this.

Mitchell's lines, on the other hand, recognize that we make a thousand choices, large and small, every single day of our lives, and every one of them "makes the difference" in the sense that while certain opportunities are opened up, others are irrevocably closed. The lines evoke a certain optimistic fatalism. Unlike in Frost's perception, we are not so much the authors of our decisions as we are the playthings of fortune. We can hardly guess the implications of every little choice, and most of them we may not even be conscious of making. You win a few, you lose a few. There is a keen awareness of the loss, but, on consideration, the gains make up for them, after all.

Both poets have observed something crucial about our lives, and either vision may seem more apt in some particular time and place. But for me, at least, the older I grow, the less I feel like a person who's made one big choice, or even a number of big choices, that consciously structured my life according to some master plan, and the more I feel like the willy nilly plaything of the gods.

Yet some things have been gained, for all that.

The house I live in

A few weeks ago, some section I was reading in Richard Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of the Mind” impelled me to attempt a moment of pure introspection, turning off any conscious thought in so far as possible, and just trying to be aware of my immediate impressions – sense impressions, and random passing thoughts viewed as an observer rather than as agent. This is not the first time I have tried such a thing. For some reason, on this occasion, the thought occurred to me that I do not directly perceive my “self”. This led me to the conclusion that I infer myself. On further reflection, I speculated that humans, as infants, learn to infer the existence of themselves by comparison with the role others play as agents of actions (causes of effects) in the infant’s environment. They see other effects, with a “hole” in the middle (no agent evident), and infer that they exist, as people like others, in order to fill the hole. The effects inferred to be caused by this “self” are associated with feelings, desires, motivations, so they infer similar feeling, motivated “selves” associated with the other agents, as well.

I offer this as of interest mainly because of the immediacy and specificity of the intuition. I make no claim to originality – if nothing else, I am reminded of the motivating insight in the c. 1972 American Zen book “On Having No Head”, as well as a few barely remembered passages on the construction of the ego in Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents”. I have long accepted the idea that our understanding of ourselves, in the sense of who we are, is constructed and reconstructed over the course of our lifetimes through social interaction and other life experience. And I certainly don’t offer the above speculations as a developed theory. They were the result of a few moments of introspection and reflection – what they mainly suggested to me was the need to do more research into other people’s views on the development of the self.

But I haven’t been able to avoid (or postpone) thinking more about this, because the nature of the self has been an important issue in several books I’ve been reading. It came up in Jean Grimshaw’s book, in her critique of some of Sartre’s ideas, it was important (from very different viewpoints) in MacIntyre’s book, and in Rorty’s, and it is important in Chapter 3 of the book I am reading now: “The Future of Democratic Equality”, by my friend Joe Schwartz, in which he critiques the ability of post-structuralist ideas, including the “fictive” nature of the self, to serve as a basis for building the concepts and institutions necessary to sustain democracy.

I guess I’ll have to read some existentialists and post-structuralists to get a first-hand understanding of their ideas. In the meantime, if I may be indulged in an argument from second-hand sources, it SEEMS to me that a false dichotomy is being drawn; i.e., if a “self” is not some natural, monist, indivisible, unchanging core of our being, then it must instead be “fictive” and “unstable”. Why? An automobile is a constructed artifact, but this doesn’t make it a phantasm, nor does the fact that it would fall apart if all the bolts were removed make it unstable.

I may not know much about the “self”, but I know a lot about houses. I built houses during my teens as a “carpenter’s helper”, working both with framing crews and finish crews; I’ve designed the structure (and restructuring) of many houses in my professional career as an engineer; and I’ve overseen at least four major remodeling projects in my role as a homeowner. To most of us who haven’t had these experiences, houses often seem the epitome of the solid, concrete, and stable. The British even have an expression, “Safe as houses”, which sums this up perfectly. But I, and others in the trade (or other “post-remodelist” homeowners) know differently.

Houses are “fuzzy” things, with uncertain boundaries, and they are in a constant state of flux. Our definition of “house” can change contextually: does it include the furniture? the outbuildings? the stove, sink, refrigerator? The house itself continually changes: we move furniture in or out, put up new curtains, paint the walls new colors. Left to itself, a house will sag, settle, decay. Termites eat the sills and other supports. A house not built properly is especially vulnerable: absent a few nails or ceiling ties, the walls can spread under the base of the rafters, causing the ceiling to crack and the ridge to sag. I’ve been involved in a few projects where houses in which this had happened needed to be pulled back together and resecured.

Houses are of course, initially constructed, and this construction is the result of a social “conversation”. The owner may have his ideas, more or less well articulated; the architect has hers; as does the contractor, and for that matter each of the many individual construction workers (carpenters, plumbers, electricians, painters...) There is no unity in these differing conceptions (despite the ambition of the architect), and each makes its own contribution to the outcome. The “final” product is massively unpredictable in its details as they will stand at the moment of “completion” (an arbitrary moment in time perhaps defined by the Building Inspector making a final sign-off on the permit form). And the house immediately begins to change, under the actions of the kinds of forces described above, as well as from the grander plans of the occupants, who may decide they need a new baby’s bedroom, home office, or kitchen.

Despite all of this, none of us, even we who are well acquainted with these processes, would refer to a built house as “fictive”. Nor, except in extreme (dare I say “psychotic”?) cases would we refer to it as “unstable”. “House” remains a concept, and houses things, that we would rather not do without.

So my “self” may be something that is formed and reformed continually throughout my life, by my social interactions (including those with powerful and/or repressive institutions), and by other things. It may be difficult for me to specify with precision, at any given time, just exactly what my “self” is, or what it contains. It may even be that my sense of agency is in some way illusory, because I can’t help doing what I do because of who I am, and who I am has been (and is being) constructed by forces that are beyond my control. Still, it’s a useful thing, this “self”, and it seems to have at least a certain pragmatic, dynamic stability (even if I can’t precisely define the state to which it “returns” after a “disturbance” – which is an engineer’s definition of “stability”).

So, for the moment, at least, I find I have no more desire to give up my "self" (either as a concept or an artifact) than I have to make my home permanently under the stars.

References: In the course of the above, I referred (yet again) to Jean Grimshaw’s “Philosophy and Feminist Thinking”, as well as Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue”, and to: Richard Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, Sigmund Freud “Civilization and Its Discontents”, D. E. Harding “On Having No Head”, and last but not least Joseph M. Schwartz “The Future of Democratic Equality”. It’s also clear, if I am to get a better understanding of various ideas of the self, that I am going to have to read some Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida, as well as some more up-to-date books on the psychology of ego formulation. (I’m open to suggestions...)