A futile exercise but fun anyway.
The question of agency or free will and consciousness more generally is still very much unresolved. How far back do concerns about free will go? There is agreement amongst palaeontologists that there is archaeological evidence for innovation between 60 and 30,00 years ago. We noticed aspects of our environment that were not immediately relevant to task and we became capable of symbolic thought. This latter feature contributed to sapiens’ cognitive revolution. It’s fair to assume that idle speculation of a 17-year-old male at that time might have included some self-reflection along the lines of “What made me say that?” to a prospective mate who spurned his adolescent advances. He may have concluded he couldn’t help it. Thus, began proto enquiry into free will. But to achieve real polemic in this area you need to invent writing beyond recording items sold. Of course, this reached an apotheosis with the Ancient Greeks and Chinese philosophers from same period.
Now when a historian of Yuval Noah Harari’s breadth of creative interpretation applies his historically derived insights to the frontiers of contemporary science he tends to the hyperbolic. In Homo Deus (2015) he concludes that arguments about the individual self since the Ancients are delusory and that “…the single true authentic self is just another liberal myth.” Furthermore, on a roll here, he states “Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self, which allows us to vote in polling stations, in the supermarket and marriage market.” (p. 338) This analysis, derived from Harari’s appraisal of aspects of Humanism, is echoed in a paper on ‘governmentality studies’ ( Laura Cremonesi in Foucault and the Making of Subjects, 2016, citing Rose, O’Malley, O’Malley and Valverde, 2006) which noted “… freedom as choice, autonomy, self-responsibility, and the obligation to maximise one’s life as a kind of enterprise” was a key tenet of the neoliberal project. (Hence, it’s easy to see why Foucault, broadly of the left, was reluctant to use the word autonomy.) Even school leavers today need CVs despite having no ‘life’ to speak of. Once you’ve left school you are now obliged to leverage your social media platforms for career enhancing purposes. If you want to ‘make it’ what choice do you have? Ha!
Not only is structure, which I take to mean both the material and cultural environment, constantly shifting in morally progressive and regressive ways but also the interplay between the subconscious and conscious is a not a static process. Thus, attempting to isolate sources of agency in that not-quite-infinitely-complex-matrix would seem to me to be an ultimately frustrating exercise. To further complicate matters, sentience or mind or self or thing-that-imagines uses electro chemical connections between the brain like capacities of the heart and gut as well as that stuff enclosed in thick bone on top of your spine and therefore trying to map neural geography, which might be useful for targeted medical interventions, does nothing to elucidate consciousness.
You might think a brain in the heart and stomach a bit of a stretch, but an argument based on language might persuade you. Nicholas Humphrey in A History of the Mind: Evolution of the Birth of Consciousness (1992), says that “… in some areas of discourse linguistic culture is still at the infant stage.” However, could it be the case that we’ve known what constitutes consciousness for some time. The clue is in the language we use to describe sensations. Emotionally you can feel; trapped, despair, euphoric or desperate. None of these sensations are directly related to vision, touch, smell taste or hearing and yet they are an amalgam of all the senses. How we use organs and senses to describe emotional states is instructive. Your heart can be broken or swell with pride; a gut instinct and a visceral hatred; smell a rat. “I see” on its own usually means “I understand” and we ‘envisage’ future scenarios. Distasteful is often applied to occurrences unrelated to eating. We can be very ‘touched’ by the plight of another. A Cockney in London might describe someone as ‘good for a touch’– meaning they might lend you some cash. What is actually being moved when we are watching a poignant death scene in a movie? And where does your hand reflexively go when you are so moved – your heart. Those sensate derived expressions point to the possibility that we are in fact beyond infancy when it comes to advancing the epistemology of consciousness.
To further the cause of unifying the mind and body let’s talk about ‘muscle memory’. As a tennis player I know my muscle memory is as crap as my ‘brain’ memory. I have long known to carry on swinging my racquet on the forehand after striking the ball until my wrist is somewhere close to my left ear. My muscles should know by now but only rarely does my racquet impart the correct amount of topspin to allow the ball to be struck with decent force generated by bending the legs and rotating the shoulders without the ball landing outside the lines. Interestingly, all we tennis players know that thinking about the separate components of a decent stroke just before the hitting the ball or worse, during, guarantees a bad shot. Trust your muscles, joints, cartilage and hand eye coordination to do the right thing without you getting in the way! A better example of where muscle memory does exert positively is in the fingers of a fast typist who doesn’t have to even look at the keys. I’m always astounded by the speed with which young people’s thumbs dart about their phone keyboards seemingly independent of their hands! Guy Claxton has a lot to say about trusting intuition and actively allowing the subconscious (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) to slowly reveal the direction in which a solution might reside. The title of his book hints at where his preferences lie– Hare Brian Tortoise Mind. (1997)
A more accessible and generally more rewarding intellectual foray into consciousness and how much decision-making choice we have can be found by avoiding sociologists altogether and seeking instead the insights of a philosopher, namely Daniel Dennett. Being a philosopher, he has license to use insights from other disciplines, the most plundered of which is the evolution of the biosphere. I thought I was interested in the evolution of consciousness so I quite enjoyed Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which he caught up with in the 80s. He found Jaynes’ multidisciplinary approach entertaining. Then a bit later in early 90s on one of my many trips back to the home country I stumbled upon a paperback face up on top of a pile of books about waist height in a densely packed book shop in Camden Town. An area of London freighted with spectral wisps of his tattered memory. Crowds heaving past endless stalls of black tee shirts and DMs of every colour. Even then the gaudy Gandalf ban the bomb graffiti looked ersatz – a pathetic reluctance to abandon youthful glory. Or probably more prosaically, judging by the multitude of tourists– nostalgia sells. The title of the book staring up at Benjamin from waist height was like a beacon, an anchor or a signpost out of this trashy urban fakery. It boldly proclaimed CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLAINED. “Ooh yes please, I’ll have that!” I thought. Of course, it did nothing of the sort. It merely, well not merely, deftly trawled through truckloads of neuroscience and its relation to sense perceptions and what we don’t need consciousness for. As he clearly stated he was explaining the different approaches to phenomenology, materiality and ontology– academically well-established philosophical concerns– but not actually explaining consciousness itself. So, I realized what I was really interested in was the evolution of morality.
Fast forward 10 years for Dennett and 26 for me at a book fare to raise money for Lifeline he came across Freedom Evolves, Dennett’s 2003 book. Not The Evolution of Freedom, not a done deal but the implication of ongoing moral progress. The blurb on the hardback cover mentioned the word ethics, which was close enough to morality, so I thought I’d see if Dennett’s writing had evolved out of dry appraisals of contemporary accounts of that chimera– consciousness.
And sure enough, the contents pages alone assured me the arguments traversed exactly the terrain regarding agency vs determinism that I was interested in.
Essentially, I was seeking reassurance that humans are becoming more morally aware. Of course, being a philosopher and wanting other philosophers to notice Dennett admits he had to spend 4 chapters translating every day human phenomena into equations, three- and two-dimensional graphs and lots of references to time t. The purpose of this explicatory rigour was to rationally build up and tear down the parameters of determinacy and indeterminacy related to causes of decision making and alternative possibilities. Ever aware of his non philosopher readers, he does invite us to skip those chapters and cut to the epistemological chase from chapter 5 where the relevance of all that arcane concern for time t is put to work on real life situations. A big one of which is ‘creeping exculpation’– a life situation that goes to the heart of judging the extent of responsibility of a miscreant. As knowledge of psychology advances and as more social factors such as poverty or parental abuse are considered, the more we are open to mitigation. His overarching premise is the compatibility between Darwinian evolutionary theory and indeterminacy which implies moral agency.
He is well aware of the advances in neuroscience which might eventually prove the origin of the self but in the meantime, we have to muddle through with what we know and try not to be distracted by seductively spurious theories. Although free will may have been undermined by neuroscience and problematized to within an inch of its life by sociology it is still necessary as a belief to influence moral behaviour. A 2002 study by Kathleen Vohs of Utah University used experiments to show how immorally people behave when they are told they do not have free will. (cited by Steven Cave in the Atlantic 2016) Keen to establish the evolutionary credentials of freedom by setting them firmly in biology Dennett reaches back a billion years. At that time the path to multicellular organisms was opened up by what he calls “horizontal transmission of design” (Dennett, p.151) The crucial aspect of this method of cell reproduction is that the fortuitous collision between two cells produced a fitter “more versatile” cell that was not bound by the hitherto boring and unvaried prokaryotes who inherited everything from genes or vertical transmission and were the only living game on the planet of its first 3 billion years. The other salient reproductive methodology is the distinction between the host cells and the invaders or symbiont cells. (p. 151) It is these latter guys who provide the impetus for evolutionary R&D. This process was compared to the work of an American political philosopher, John Rawls.
He ascribed to the notion of a ‘moral arbitrariness’ that could override even the strength of character to make an independent decision. Or, how we turn out is just dumb luck. Ordinarily we would say merit is the result of natural ability plus, inter alia, application, diligence, persistence and commitment, but Rawls said those meretricious qualities were also merely the result of a combination of nurture and nature over which you had no control. This rather bleak abdication of individual responsibility or agency is hard to argue against but also completely unsatisfactory as a basis to evaluate or judge any act. If such an idea were to drive distributive justice, there would be no need for reward or punishment.
Despite this tension in Rawls’ attempt to deal with the problem of difference when creating a just society, he was, nevertheless, a giant in the field. He was the first thinker who wrote stuff down to fully engage with Utilitarianism in 150 years. Another word for utility is happiness and Bentham, (1748-1832) yes him again, wanted to maximize it for the greatest number. Instead of focusing on the very subjective notion of happiness, Rawls identifies useful resources which he assumes everyone would want more of. (Ian Shapiro, Yale online course, Moral Foundations of Politics, Lecture 16, 2011) Unfortunately, being a philosopher, these resources are not concrete, like good sanitation or education, they are decidedly abstract like liberties and opportunities. Now, Rawls’ underlying hypothetical position to attempt to build social rules from scratch was the ‘veil of ignorance’. This thought experiment invites us to imagine that we are in a state of total amnesia so that we are not even capable of knowing where to look to determine what sex we are. We are also ignorant of our social and economic status as well as our cognitive abilities and capacities or lack thereof. Only then are we free of all biases and therefore able to design rules for society that favour the least advantaged in every conceivable way.
The next 6 pieces are a playful attempt to write ‘big history’ by suggesting a loose analogy between Erikson’s psycho-social developmental stages up to adolescence with human change since the Palaeolithic. The titles are from Erickson’s outcomes from a successful completion of each stage.
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