Freedom Man

When I was a very young man, for a time I adhered to a philosophy I called “libertarianism”, under the influence of a rather obscure author named Harry Browne, and his book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.  (No, I never read Ayn Rand.)

Later in life, I realized that one of the central premises of libertarianism, as I knew it, was irredeemably incoherent.  This is the idea that no one has the right to interfere with those of my decisions that affect “only me”.  I came to realize that, as we are members of a social species, unavoidably members of one or more overlapping communities, the conceptual boundaries of a decision that affects “only me” cannot be rationally delineated.  I also came to realize that some of the ideas that had attracted me to Browne’s version of libertarianism were less libertarian, and more like a version of classical (Greek and Roman) stoicism, absent the mystical underpinnings.  These ideas could be summed up by saying that you are responsible, on a certain level, for your own “happiness”, or physical and psychic well-being.  This is not to say that you cannot understand that you have been victimized, by fate or by other humans, but rather to say that, at any given point in your life, you are faced with real, de facto choices for how to move forward.  Regardless of how this came to pass, your future happiness is best ensured by taking responsibility for those choices, and making them  as wisely and resolutely as possible.  Further, to accept these facts, and this responsibility, is psychically liberating, in-and-of itself.

Browne’s contribution, which has had enduring value for me (long after I threw out the rest of his ideas), was to base this concept of personal responsibility in a materialist philosophy, unlike the classical stoics, who believed in a universal soul or mind, divided into parts or sparks indwelling in each of us – personal souls which desired nothing so much as to reunite with the universal.  Giving the stoical concepts a materialist base also avoids the worst rhetorical abuses of classical stoicism, like advising adherents that even if you were captured and tortured by an enemy, you could literally feel no pain, if you were true to the dictates of your own inner soul.

Speaking of the universal soul or mind (the ancient Greek term “psyche” did not distinguish between the two), leads me to a semi-related thought:  to say that there is no universal mind, and no souls to unite with it, is not the same as saying “we are tiny, isolated, alone.”   I’m not just referring to the aforementioned overlapping communities (the person who cries “we are alone” in existential angst on the denial of a supreme being hardly denies those).  But the concept of “us” as atomic individuals, as something that could be “isolated” somehow, separated from the matrix we are a part of, doesn’t seem consistent with the actual state of affairs.

The fact is, if you step back far enough, “we” hardly seem to exist – certainly not as indivisible atoms.  Physically and psychically, “we” are complexes of complexes, colonies of colonies, each, on each level, having fuzzy boundaries which rather vaguely distinguish and define both its limits and its interactions; stronger interactions each with “each other” (parts of the same organism); and generally and observably – but still vaguely – weaker ones with “the other” (the world beyond the organism).  These complexes of complexes are hardly isolated from the universe.  They could not possibly be – their boundaries are too fuzzy, and irreducibly overlap!   The “self” that feels oppressed with solitude is just a particular sub-bundle, and a rather confused one, at that, which invents a mystical purpose and something to commune with to try and solve an imagined problem.

The title I selected for this mini-piece was suggested by Jim Morrison’s song “Universal Mind”.  Which has almost nothing to do with the two disparate points of this essay.  But one of the complexes of my psyche happens to work like that.  At least I didn’t call it “Turning keys, setting people free.”  That would have been hubristic.  (And now, with my suitcase and my song, I’m off…)

Pondering Truth

When we speak of “truth” do we describe some single entity or quality in the world?  Or is “truth” hypostasized to simplify a complex of relationships between the inner and outer worlds that we do not (cannot?) understand?

Is “truth” an operational concept?  There is no operational difference “now” between a justified belief and a justified true belief (a.k.a. “knowledge”, at least in many philosophers’ systems).  I make the same choices, take the same actions either way.  But there may be an effect on the outcome (or not).  Is “truth” operational in evaluating outcomes, and therefore, perhaps improving the reasons for future beliefs?

Even in evaluating the outcome of past choices, I still don’t “possess truth”.  I only formulate, and attempt to justify, further beliefs (e.g., beliefs about my past beliefs).  In Dewey’s terminology from Experience and Nature, truth does not seem to be something we can “have directly”.

There is a state of the world, and there is a state of my mind (or yours), which is, itself, part of the state of the world.  The state of my mind includes a simplified, impressionistic “image” (in some neural/synaptic medium) of the state of the world – to the extent it is accessible to my imagination.  In that image, the state of my mind figures under such rubrics as “reasons” and “beliefs”.  Based on my state of mind (at any given time), I will make certain choices, and take certain actions.  Partly because of such actions, at some future time the state of the world, and the state of my mind, will be different.  By comparing the current state of my mind (and especially its world-image) to my memory of its prior state, I make judgments about the truth of my previously held beliefs.  I formulate (reasoned) beliefs about my prior beliefs.

Is “truth”, then, just something we invent to explain our relative satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the outcomes of our past endeavors?  The trouble with that idea is that our feeling of satisfaction may be connected to aspects of the outcome which some mythical unbiased observer would be unwilling to call “truth”.  For instance, a racist may desire to join an organization of like-minded individuals.  His belief that African Americans are genetically inferior to “Aryans” may help him in that endeavor, and thereby lead him to be satisfied, but we would not want to call his belief “true” on such grounds.  Then there is the growing body of psychological research indicating that our brains have evolved so as to readily adopt certain beliefs which are adaptive, but not (necessarily) “true”.  An example is the “confirmation bias”, where by our minds tend to disproportionally accept data that confirms what we want to believe, and reject data that disconfirms it.  Another example is the “hyperactive agent detection” that Daniel Dennett discusses in Breaking the Spell (among other places).  Other examples can be found in various papers in Naturalizing Epistemology (Hilary Kornblith, ed.)

It seems there is something actual about the relationship between our mental states and the world state that we are trying to capture with the concept “truth”, which is related to, but not simply reducible to, our degree of satisfaction with outcomes.  I admit, at this point in my life, to be still wondering (persistently) about exactly what it is.

Postscript on Confirmation.  As with many of the musings on Persistent Wondering, this one pretty much starts “where I am” and doesn’t make much of an effort to relate to an audience that may not be starting at the same place.  I apologize for that… but after all, I am portraying myself as a “wonderer”, and making no claims to be a teacher.  (Lame excuse.)

In this essay in particular, though, it seems to me that many people may wonder why I would feel – at all – that “truth” is not directly accessible.  In many (most?) of our everyday interactions with the world, confirmation of our beliefs is direct and immediate, and seems incontrovertible.  I believe I left my keys on the kitchen counter.  I go downstairs – I either find them there, or I do not.

Other “facts” are not so easily confirmed or disconfirmed, though.  There are the challenges of philosophical skepticism.  How do I know I am not dreaming?  Or hallucinating?  Or a disembodied brain kept alive in a vat, with my neural inputs manipulated by alien scientists?  Then there is the question of “modeling”.  Complex physical or social systems cannot be grasped by our minds in their complete and detailed totality.  We need to abstract from them, simplify them, in order to understand them.  Do concepts like race, class, culture, the national income “truly” conform to some real world objects, and if so exactly what and how?  How do we indubitably confirm or disconfirm them?  Theoretical physics provides examples, also.  Do the objects of modern theoretical physics – quarks, bosons, photons – “really” exist, or are they just a convenient (not necessarily unique) way of mathematizing experimental results?  Are the relatively abstract and indirect confirmations of physics experiments really of the same class as our confirming (by looking) that our keys are on the counter?

But really, ALL of our knowledge involves some such modeling (abstraction and analysis).  All the objects we conceive involve some level of abstraction – focusing on certain aspects of experience and ignoring others.  Something of this is suggested by Heraclitus’s statement thousands of years ago that “You can never step into the same river twice.”  What exactly is a river?  Is it the specific water molecules?  But they start out in a glacier and end up in the ocean.  Is it the banks?  But they shift with time as soil particles are removed and deposited.  Is it some abstract (fractal?) pattern that encompasses changes over time?  What is the “truth” of the matter?

Our mental states (beliefs and so on) consist in synaptic patterns, roughly, stable-yet-changing patterns of chemical interactions between neurons.  The state of the world consists in the interplay of forces amongst patterned matter and energy, extending strongly or weakly between the various points of the entire universe.  It is not clear that some unique and transparent correspondence can be established between those two things and unambiguously labeled “truth”.  On a conceptual, theoretical level, the question of the truth of our beliefs, their confirmation or disconfirmation, is not at all a trivial one.  Although on the pragmatic level of day-to-day actions, it very often is.

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.

Questioning “Cogito”

It seems to me that Rene Descartes’ famous “Cogito ergo sum” begged the question.  His premise “I think” depends on his conclusion, “I exist”.   

Certainly the stream of impressions he adduces in support of his conclusion demonstrate something – but what?  A more appropriate conclusion would be along the lines of “Experience manifests, therefore something is,” or, more succinctly, and tautologically (this is not a bad thing): “Experience is, therefore something is.”  Or, to once more in this space quote the words (if not, in this case, the meaning) of the X-Files’ Fox Mulder:  “There is something out there.”

To get to the “I exist” actually requires a number of additional premises, first of all that this experience means something – that it is rule-based – and possibly even that is connected to something we might call a “real world”.  Descartes makes this connection only after establishing “ergo sum”, and then he makes it only by reference to a perfect and benevolent God – a premise that seems as improbable to me as it seemed certain to Descartes.  My own preferred premise for the orderliness of Experience is the anti-skeptical one:  “If  I don’t assume some rule-based nature to Experience, then there is no point in going on further with analysis”.  This is a weaker premise than Descartes’, but it has the decided advantage of being not false.  There is also the empirical argument, that I can test the rule-based nature of Experience experimentally, and therefore demonstrate it.  While testability is important, its importance is sometimes overestimated, since I cannot possibly subject every needed rule about Experience to my own personal set of empirical tests. 

As for the “real world”, well that’s really definitional, isn’t it?  I.e., a term of convenience more than a necessary premise.  If I can predictably alter Experience by action, and if I can generalize the rules for doing so such that some person on the other side of the planet whom I’ve never met can apply them to some experience I’ve never had, and also alter Experience to conform to the predictions, then it may be useful to introduce the idea of a “real world”, but this concept can hardly can be constructed so as to be testable (hence meaningful) beyond the definition just given.

Of course, as I have implied elsewhere in this blog (“Starting from Zero”, May 30, 2010), I do not really accept the Cartesian method of applying radical doubt to build up a whole body of knowledge about the world from a bare minimum of assumptions, let alone “clear and distinct” (hence immediate and unquestionable) impressions.  We always come to any problem with a whole theoretical structure, which we can twist, bend and otherwise alter piecemeal, but which we can never throw out en bloc to start afresh.   

Nevertheless, it can be fun, and sometimes instructive, to play with the Cartesian approach as with a game.  And then, developmentally, we do, at some point in our lives sort of start to build a world view from experience upon a base of the biologically given.  So it seems perhaps some form of the Cartesian approach may have a certain psycho-historical relevance.  But this is only more or less.  Given that the biochemical environment in the womb begins to affect development even before the brain begins to develop, there are no clear limits between “experientially derived” and “biologically given”.   It’s a problem with inherently fuzzy boundaries.    It is worth noting, to, that the psychological “program” or world view starts to develop long before the wiring of the biological “machine” – the adult brain – is complete.  Starting from zero remains problematic – in this case, because it’s hard to define the zero point.

Considering the developmental problem, I have written, before (“The house I live in”, October 24, 2009) that I think our concept of “I” or self is not inbred, but is learned from experience, and not at a particularly early point, either, which also contradicts the primacy of Descartes’ “ergo sum”.

Another way it is interesting to contrast Descartes’ “Cogito...” with modern thinking is in the nature of the self, itself.  Descartes, of course, assumed some privileged level of granularity associated with the self.  As a Christian of his age, he could hardly have done otherwise – the individual self was the level at which the soul was allocated, the soul was essentially indivisible, and was in a sense synonymous with the self, so clearly an individual was a discrete, and in an essential sense indivisible unit.  A person could colloquially be of “two minds” about something, but that didn’t disturb the essential unity – one of those two opinions had to be the “true” one (at least in the sense of “true to oneself”), and the other false.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the unitary nature of the self came under attack philosophically, psychologically and neurologically.  One good book that includes a good analysis of the nature of the self is Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained.  The impression I drew from that book (consistent with others I’ve read, see note on references) is of a brain consisting of numerous centers, each evolved perhaps for one primary purpose, but co-opted to other uses, in other networks, by the opportunistic nature of evolution (see “Adaptation? Or Carpe Diem?”, November 30, 2010), with a conscious sense of self perhaps developing only rather late as a sort of supervisor circuit riding on top of this loose, collaborative network of parts.  In this analysis, to be of “two minds” about something may literally mean that two different parts of your brain produce differing explanations or predictions, or desire different goals.  There is no meaningful sense in which one of these is more “true” to your “essential nature” than the other.

But as I said in “The house I live in”, the constructed and non-atomic nature of my self doesn’t make it a useless concept.  As the wag said, and insofar as my day-to-day experience goes, I think I am, therefore I am, I think.

Useful references, cited or otherwise: Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, ch. 4; Gary Hatfield, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Descartes and the Meditations; Daniel C. Dennett Consciousness Explained; Stephen M. Kosslyn & Olivier Koenig, Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience; Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain; Joseph M. Schwartz, The Future of Democratic Equality; John Dewey, Experience and Nature.