Posts Tagged ‘determinism’
could I ever manage to get my head around epigenetics?
Nessa Carey’s book, The epigenetics revolution, was published in 2011, and discusses, and introduces, to many of us, gene methylation, histones, a number of different types of RNA, the names of specific genes, karyotypes, selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), phosphorylation, the Waddington epigenetic landscape and much else besides. Wikipedia’s account of epigenetics is no doubt more up-to-date, and is just about book-length (how long does a book have to be?), with over 200 references to scientific papers and such. Although the term was coined in the 1940s, the study of epigenetics is very much a 21st century thing, Our current knowledge of the area, like our knowledge of neurophysiology, has been one of the great developments in modern science. To read about it is exasperating, because there’s just too much to learn, to explore, to get your head around, and yet it’s vital to an understanding of who and what we are. When I think of SETI, for example, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, I wonder – how could such ineffable super-complexity have developed more than once in the universe, even given its incalculably massive extent?
I wish I was young and gifted with the opportunity to work in such a field, one which explains us, or tries to. How we manage to replenish all the cells in our bodies throughout our lives – not perfectly, for then we could live forever – but for a period extended enough for us to learn our own history, to fall in love, to learn from our many mistakes, to experience, delight in and suffer through all the stages of life, to observe all its amazing variety – the birds and the bees as they say, and the flowers and the trees, all of which have their genetic blueprints.
To think we had virtually no idea of this only a century ago, and we are 300,000 years old as a species, and DNA-driven creatures have existed for millions, maybe billions of years on this planet. We only worked out the structure of this molecule in the 1950s, and now we know for example that a spruce tree contains about six times more DNA than a human, and that it’s likely that our world was preceded by an RNA world, which still enlivens the viruses that plague us with influenza, hepatitis, polio, COVID-19 and so much else.
And all this epigenetic stuff – which is mainly about DNA methylation and histone modification – has been going on beneath our awareness, and certainly without our permission, since our life began as an embryo. That’s how our cells differentiate into some 200 different types. It has much to do with whether we’re tall or short, sickly or healthy, extroverted or introverted – even before we’ve ever met another soul. All of these goings-on in our growing bodies, as well as the inter-connections, disconnections and reconnections in our growing brains, in the time spent connected to a placenta and the subsequent years being buffeted by parents, relatives, strangers and frenemies, are what shape us for a lifetime.
So where am I going with all this? Those who know me might guess, and be much annoyed, or much heartened.
To return to Carey’s book, which explores, inter alia, how laboratory creatures like rats and mice show specific patterns of behaviour for a lifetime after early deprivation, stress and other conditions, I was struck by this passage:
The human brain possesses sufficient flexibility to generate adult outcomes in response to similar childhood experiences. Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand others to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections – that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It’s hard to imagine this, so let’s visualise each connection as a disk that’s 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion disks on top of each other and they will reach to the sun (which is 93 million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.
That’s a lot of connections, so it’s perfectly possible to imagine that our brains have a lot of flexibility. But the connections are not random. There are networks of cells within the giant grid which are more likely to link to each other than to anywhere else. It’s this combination of huge flexibility, but constrained within certain groupings, that is compatible with a system that is mechanistic but not entirely deterministic.
Nessa Carey, The epigenetics revolution, pp 235-6
This is, I believe, the only passage in Carey’s 300-page book that refers to determinism, and of course it struck me enough to write one word in the margin.
‘Really?’
I don’t often write in the margins of my books these days. Decades ago I had a girlfriend who expressed shock and great disapproval at finding margin notes in some of my books. She apparently found this behaviour to be sacrilegious in some way. Texts were sacred even if they were reproduced in their thousands. So, though I respectfully disagreed, I’ve reduced my sacrilegious behaviour, maybe to honour her memory. But this time I couldn’t resist.
– ‘mechanistic but not entirely deterministic’? What is the difference between these two terms? Aren’t these mechanisms determined by other mechanistic processes? Isn’t this what the book is all about? Isn’t this how we know about epigenetic processes, because they produce certain changes under certain specific conditions? Aren’t the determining factors precisely what we’re looking for, and what knowledge is all about. And yet there is, I find, a kind of fear or distrust of the word, even amongst those researchers who rely on mapping out the causal chain, often a complex and elusive one, to make good their discoveries. Whether we’re looking at the causes of cancer, or how one or two bees become queens while thousands more become workers, to mention just two topics explored in Carey’s book, we’re always trying to uncover and explain the determining conditions. It’s the sine qua non of all science.
Maybe I’m mis-representing Carey here. Maybe she meant, when she described the ‘huge flexibility’ of our neuronal system, the impossibility of trying to pin things down, cause-and-effect-wise, with absolute certainty. But then, that’s not what she wrote. She wrote ‘not entirely deterministic’, and that was a red flag to me. So what was the part that escaped determinism? It doesn’t actually make sense.
The idea, it seems to me, and the argument that most people try to use against determinism, is that complexity trumps it (sorry to use the word ‘trump’ here). If complexity was infinite, that might be so, but complexity isn’t infinite, it’s just complex.
So, that’s enough for now. Again, I wish I was fifty years younger, and a more disciplined person than I was in my youth, because I’d love to be working in the field of organic chemistry, or molecular biology, or neurophysiology, rather than peering at it over a vast stretch of ignorance, as I am today. But never mind…
References
Nessa Carey, The epigenetics revolution, 2011
on epigenetics and the free will debate, and such…
The free will thing has come to the fore of my head again recently because of an offhand ‘no free will’ remark I made, which of course caused some friendly argy-bargy. When the topic comes up I like to throw ‘the lot’ at it, our early neurological wiring, unwiring and rewiring, our hormonal activity, our genetics, our epigenetics, our position in the womb, our early interactions with parents, siblings and others, our culture, our gender, our first language, the time and place of our birth and so on.
Of all these variables, epigenetics is one that’s likely to catch people off guard. If they ask, I’ll say it’s all about gene expression, hoping that will silence them, and even impress them. But if they inquire further, I’d only be able to say something like ‘environmental factors affect how genes are expressed’ – and that would be the limit of my knowledge, even though, some years ago, I read Nessa Carey’s The epigenetics revolution, published in 2011.
So now I’m reading it again, and it seems for the first time. I’m finding it really hard to understand, and I’m sure it isn’t Carey’s fault. I suspect it’s the kind of topic in which you need to be active in the field to fully understand it, and even then….
But, I’ll have a go. Rett syndrome is a rare but devastating neurological disease which occurs almost exclusively in girls. Apparently, if a male child contracts it, it’s more or less immediately fatal. As AI (never lies) puts it:
Infants typically develop normally for 6 to 18 months before experiencing a severe regression in motor skills, speech, and hand use. While there is no cure, symptoms can be managed with targeted therapies and specific medications.
The development of this syndrome happened to coincide with infants receiving the MMR vaccine, which, as we know, caused much controversy some time ago, but the mechanism was worked out in 1999. It mostly has to do with mutations in a gene called MECP2, which severely affects the production of a functional MECP2 protein. Dysfunction/mutation in other genes have caused the syndrome, or something like it, in a minority of cases. The cells are able to methylate their DNA correctly, which is what much of what epigenetics is all about, but they’re unable to read that section of the epigenetic code properly. So Rett syndrome isn’t a mental/psychological disorder at all, it’s purely genetic, and because the dysfunction is on the X chromosome, and because females have two X chromosomes while males have XY, the male karyotype is more vulnerable to the condition.
I choose this extreme condition (suffered by one in 8500 females) as one among many examples of how our genetics can fail us, and there are many others, much more subtle and hard to pin down, both in terms of our genes themselves and how they are expressed. We – I mean the scientists and researchers among us, and those going along for the ride – have learned especially in recent decades just how complex and beyond our control our brains and bodies are, not just in terms of physical make-up, but genetic and cultural inheritance. A regular awareness of this – a mindfulness, if you like – helps me to cope with the people who damage our world – the war-mongers, the bullies, the intolerant and over-confident – as well as to sympathise with the overwhelmed (like myself).
So, again to epigenetics – I’ll keep trying to comprehend at least some of it, as it’s intrinsically interesting when it’s not completely baffling. Meanwhile, I’ve had a book recommended to me, by two humanists and no-free-will proponents, called Being: why it’s harder to be human than a hamster or a herring, by a daughter and father duo, Rachel and Ross Menzies. Sounds like an antidote to all that epiphenomena…
References
Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution: How modern biology is rewriting our understanding of genetics, disease and inheritance, 2011.
the highs and lows of determinism
The other day I was in a cafe in the inner suburbs here, eating lunch, reading, wondering what to write about next, when in walked a tall dark stranger. She was dressed in black slacks and a black puff-sleeve top over a white shirt – very corporate to my mind. Though I didn’t see her face as she walked to the counter I could see by her hands she was African, most likely. She was very very slim and well over six feet tall. Striking, to put it mildly. I thought of the Masai people, but a quick bit of research brings up the Dinka and the Nuer of South Sudan. I couldn’t stop gawking, and was rewarded as she turned and walked right by me to take up a seat at the back of the cafe. She couldn’t have been more than 20 years old, and was surely the world’s most beautiful woman (I’ve observed quite a few of those).
I had to chuckle. I’ll be 70 next July and I’m five foot six at full stretch. And I had to wonder, too. Is being a very tall woman as much of a ‘problem’ as being a small man? Forget sports – low centre of gravity, great height and reach, etc etc. As for being well short of the average, all the way through school I was picked on, generally in a ‘good-natured’ way. I was popular enough, perhaps because I never complained, certainly not to the authorities. Not just because I wanted to be liked, though that was surely part of it, but mostly because I was fully anti-authoritarian. My peers were my mates, or to be avoided (and sometimes to be worshipped from afar); the teachers were mostly just low-lifes.
The real problem with being a short male though, is this strange equation of shortness with some kind of ‘non-seriousness’ especially during youth. Tall boys just aren’t picked on and pushed about the way short boys are, whether or not they’re physically strong. Within reason, that is. If you’re a short weight-lifter who likes to show off his muscles, maybe not, but…
So there’s three occasions forever stuck in my memory. The first two were more or less identical. I was surrounded during break-time outside of our first-floor classroom, lifted and turned upside down, hoisted over the bannister of the stairwell, and jiggled and shaken merrily by a half-dozen or so classmates. I was compos mentis enough to note that the two young gentlemen gripping my legs were our most celebrated athletes, but I still had images of my heart slipping out of my throat and plopping sloppily onto the bottom steps some 20 feet or so below (I’ve never measured it).
How long did these hijinks last? Isn’t it funny how time passes slowly when death’s in the air. But don’t worry the other piece of fun was less deadly. There was a large papier-mâchéd box outside the school library (class project no doubt) designed for putting in book returns, pretty well just the right size for a mini-student like me to be stuffed into. And so they did, leaving my legs to dangle outside the box for anyone to see. So the school bell rang, everyone went back to class, and I waved my legs merrily, waiting to be rescued. But nobody came – of course, nobody used the library in my school. So, after a while I thought of escape, which was quite easy – the box was wired shut and a bit of jiggling and pulling soon freed me….
Reflecting on these memories has upturned more, but the point is clear. Little kids just aren’t taken as seriously as big kids. And if they stay little, they won’t become Presidents or ‘leaders of men’ – or women. Height restrictions in some occupations make sense, I suspect most don’t. And, of course, short people earn less than tall people, on average.
It’s quite tragic – look at Trump (sorry, don’t) – six feet three inches of unadulterated wanker. Robert Reich, one of the USA’s finest political leaders and a true humanist, suffered fatally, so to speak, for being four foot eleven. Of all the dumb criteria for measuring a person’s worth – think of those dwarves – Dopey, Grumpy, Sleazey, whatever, what chance did they have with Snow White?
So I’m wondering how many full-blown libertarians are my size. It’s a silly thing to wonder about, surely, and yet…
Objectivism? Eh what?
and dollars…
As a person with a bad habit of self-isolating, I occasionally check out the possibility of meet-ups in my area. So I was amused by one that definitely didn’t appeal, except for playing a ‘fly in the ointment’ role. It’s called ‘capitalism and coffee – an objectivist meet-up’, and is based on the ‘philosophy’ of Ayn Rand – of course.
So it’s back to the free will issue, one which, I must admit, I quite enjoy rabbiting on about. So, even the most ardent libertarian or free will enthusiast will have to admit that, say, humans aren’t free to become sperm whales, and vice versa. We’re definitely trapped in our species-dom. Even so, every sperm whale is an individual, as is every human. And isn’t this individuality a feature of every dog or cat you’ve ever owned or known? I’ve been familiar with quite a few. But we don’t tend to believe that their (mostly) delightful uniqueness is entirely of their own making, or even partially so. Different breeds have different characteristics, and within those breeds there are levels of timidity, gregariousness, aggression and so on. So each of these pets is unique, but not by choice. So why do we, or some of us, like to believe that we are free to choose our own nature? Our individuality is evident enough, there is nobody else on the planet quite like us, but nobody else has experienced quite the same parenting and formative experience. Even physically, we’re virtually never mistaken for somebody else.
Of course, freedom is appealing – what could be more so? We’re appalled by what is being imposed on people in Ukraine, in Palestine, in North Korea, in El Salvador, and by the impoverished circumstances of children in many regions, who haven’t had the luck of being born to comfortably-off parents in a WEIRD country.
So the place and circumstances in which we’re born are heavily determinising, if that’s a word (it is now – freedom!), but what about the time. I happen to be reading an epic historical study, God’s War, by Christopher Tyerman – well over 900 pages covering the crusading adventures from the 11th century to the 15th, four major crusades and a plethora of minor ones, including the Albigensian crusade against the Cathars in Languedoc and southern Europe. Talk about the past being another country – they do things horribly there. The world Tyerman describes is dominated by more or less fervent religion, which isn’t to say that land-grabbing, rank-pulling and other forms of capitalism aren’t massively in evidence. And reading about it raises obvious questions for me.
I was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1956. What if I’d been born in around the same region in, say, 1156? The town of Dundee probably didn’t exist then – certainly Australia, to which I was taken at the age of five, was then a piece of land completely unknown to northerners. At that time Scotland was being harried by Vikings in the west, 15-year-old Malcolm IV sat uneasily on the throne (of Alba, as it was then known), and Henry II had only recently begun his long reign in the dominant south, after years of civil war. But of course one thing that held fast was religion, i.e Christianity. The Norman conquest had reinforced Catholicism, with Scotland only just beginning to assert independence from the south in religious matters (full independence was attained in 1192 as a result of the Papal Bull of Celestine III, apparently).
There was no way that I could’ve been anything but a Catholic Christian myself in 1192 – as an ageing 36-year-old. And who knows, I might’ve been fit and fervent enough to join the party for the third crusade of that time, led by Richard Coeur de Lion, no less – among other worthies and unworthies. In any case, the last thing on my mind would’ve been free will and capitalist enterprise.
Nowadays, though, free will has become an issue. With the decline of religion in most of the WEIRD world, some have, it seems, come to believe that they are their own gods. But a few problems arise, for obviously we don’t get to choose our parents, our genetic inheritance, the time and place of our birth, our experiences in the womb or in our early childhood. The Dunedin longitudinal study of health and development, which began in the early seventies, and which I’ve written about previously, while not of course designed to ‘prove’ hard determinism, categorised participants in terms of personality types – Well-Adjusted, Undercontrolled, Inhibited, Confident, and Reserved, and has found that those individual types have barely changed over fifty years. Yet within those types there are differences, making every single person on the planet quite unique. But of course uniqueness is not a proof of free will.
So how did Ayn Rand argue otherwise? What is the ‘objectivism’ that she espoused? That’s not an easy question to answer. It certainly isn’t meant as an opposite to ‘subjectivism’, and it seems that very little of her writing analyses the concept of free will directly. Let me take a piece of it for my own analysis:
If [man] chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course. Reality confronts a man with a great many “must’s”, but all of them are conditional: the formula of realistic necessity is: “you must, if –” and the if stands for man’s choice: “if you want to achieve a certain goal”. [from an essay collection – Philosophy, who needs it? – published in 1982, the year of her death]
Rand always uses the male perspective, and was always bizarrely anti-feminist. Apart from that, much of her writing strikes me as pseudo-philosophical, as this passage shows. What is meant by a rational ethics? Are there examples of irrational ethics? Are there unrealistic necessities? Indeed, who needs this philosophy? But to be fair, perhaps this is a bad, decontextualised example. The central point of all this though, is that Rand never really presents a free will argument. Free will, or what she calls ‘volitional consciousness’, is at the heart of her world-view, but it certainly isn’t adequately explained. The term itself suggests the feeling we have when we make a decision, but those feelings, and that decision, are those of a mind or brain that is wholly determined. How could it not be? And not self-determined, because what is an individual self other than an entirely determined entity? How could it be otherwise? And that seems to be the key mistake that libertarians make (apparently Rand didn’t consider herself a libertarian, but that just seems quibbling). They mistake complexity for self-determination, because we’re undoubtedly highly complex beings, perhaps even approaching some cetaceans in that department.
Of course, Rand is simply the product of her upbringing and early experiences. I don’t know much about her background, except that it wasn’t that of a Dalit in Hindu India, or an Aboriginal in Australia, or a Bantu in the DRC, or a woman in ‘modern’ Afghanistan. And of course I’m not at all surprised that her philosophy is popular in the USA. Nor am I particularly surprised that there’s a meet-up dedicated to it here in dear old Adelaide. Actually, I wouldn’t mind attending – but not as myself, more as a ‘fly on the wall’, listening to how they justify and promote themselves. Sadly, though, flies only have a fly’s neural system.
But -that’s determinism for you.
References
https://www.meetup.com/adelaide-ayn-rand-meetup/
Christopher Tyerman, God’s war; a new history of the crusades, 2006
Natural selection – how far does it go?
you don’t control this variability
So let me try to understand something completely different, to do with genetics, neurology and selection theory. I’m reading a rather complex, demanding and ambitious book, published back in 1992, by Michael Gazzaniga, called Nature’s Mind, and sub-titled ‘The biological roots of thinking, emotions, sexuality, language and intelligence’. Selection theory gets a regular mention, and I’m assuming what is meant is the Darwinian theory of natural selection. That’s to say, the idea or finding that phenotypic traits that enable individuals in a species to more effectively survive, thrive and reproduce in their particular environment will be ‘naturally selected’ as against other less favourable traits. And so the species will ‘evolve’, that’s to say change, because individuals with the better-adapted traits for a particular environment will out-compete those without those traits and, crucially, pass on those traits to their offspring. Darwin, of course, could only speculate about how those traits were passed down to the next generation, as the whole story of genetic inheritance and DNA wasn’t fully established until well into the 20th century.
Anyway, Gazzaniga seems to be writing about selection theory as some kind of controversial issue, which surprises me and makes me wonder whether I’m reading him right. So let me focus on Chapter 2, ‘The plastic brain and selection theory’, to help my understanding. Here’s the opening sentence:
Although there is little argument that the selection process is at work at both the molecular and the evolutionary levels in whole organisms, there are major questions about whether the brain develops and functions in accordance with the concept of selection.
I don’t understand what Gazzaniga means by these separate ‘molecular’ and ‘evolutionary’ levels. After all, evolution just means change of a certain type – that’s to say, changes in organisms. And organisms are, of course, made up of molecules, coded for by genes. So the organisational structure of the brain, down to the molecular level (or upwards from the molecular level), has everything to do with our genetic inheritance. So what, then, are these major questions? Gazzaniga puts it this way:
…if, as I argue… the majority of our psychological capacities are the result of natural selection, the developing and static adult brain, which houses the neural circuits that enable the human’s high-powered psychological mechanisms to exist, must develop in a surefire, genetically determined way. At the level of behaviour, for example, we want to see whether or not a baby learns to identify a face, or whether there exist in the brain specific circuits enabling facial recognition, circuits laid down by prior genetic forces arrived at through selection pressure.
So, as I conceive it, Gazzaniga is exploring facial recognition (presumably that of other humans, but ‘face’ isn’t of course restricted to humans) in terms of learning and distinguishing, but also in terms of genes and circuitry that have evolved to render such recognition as vitally important. He cites the Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Niels Jerne’s view that selection operates at the cellular level, even though ‘it might look like instruction occurred at a higher level of organisation’. A ‘signal’ of recognition will prompt a response, once described as ‘unconscious’ (but it seems most scientists today dismiss this as a ‘woo’ word), that has been selected for on the most basic, molecular level.
So this takes us into a bit of immunology. Jerne used three analogies, as described by Gazzaniga: first, ‘the immune system is forever changed by the appearance of each new antigen, just as the brain is somehow changed by each new experience’, second, ‘each system – brain and immune system, appears to have a memory: when the same antigen presents itself a second time to an organism, the latter produces more and better antibodies’, and third ‘the experience one organism has developed for its immune system is not transferable to its progeny, just as my skiing ability is not necessarily transferred to my offspring’.
So, to antibodies, and the kappa light chain, which is present in the antibodies of humans and other animals. In all creatures who have these molecules, there is a variable and a constant part of the chain. They’re made up of amino acids, and the constant section is constant for all humans (and presumably for other species), while the variable part varies individually, or ontogenetically.
It seems that Jerne, and Gazzaniga, have taken this as some kind of analogy for the brain, the plasticity of which has both an ontogenetic (individual) and phylogenetic (species-specific) element. That’s to say, there’s a great deal of ontogenetic plasticity within the brain’s overall phylogenetic structure. I’m not sure if I’m getting this right, though. Here’s more from Jerne, comparing the immune system and the central nervous system:
In the immune system, the constant part of the light chain is obviously laid down in the DNA of the zygote, and it is equally clear that there is DNA in the zygote that represents the variable part of the light chain, although, ontogenetically, this DNA may exhibit an immense plasticity.
In the central nervous system, instincts are also obviously encoded in the zygote, most probably in the DNA. But if DNA acts only through transcription into RNA and translation into protein, and if the phenotypic expression of instincts is based on particular arrangements of neuronal synapses, the DNA through RNA and protein must govern the synaptic network in the central nervous system.
Niels Jerne, ‘Antibodies and learning: selection versus instruction’, 1967
So what to make of this ‘magnificent analysis’ (according to Gazzaniga)? You could say that it’s another brick in the deterministic wall, that ontogenetic plasticity, that which makes me different from you, starts with ‘particular arrangement of neuronal synapses’, or the particular sets of proteins that bring about those arrangements, or, before that…
I’m no doubt being influenced right now by some very recent discussions/arguments I’ve had on the subject of determinism, so I’m probably going further than Gazzaniga intended with his thinking. Or not. I shall continue reading the book to see if he comes to any definite determinist conclusions, or if he even touches on such a touchy subject.
References
M Gazzaniga, Nature’s Mind, 1992
on determinism and IQ, class, castes and elites
Nehru, of course, belonged to the Brahmin caste
I wrote a post recently on the stupidity of Steven Pinker’s view of determinism, his mocking of ‘the abuse excuse’ and such like, and I noted how people from elite, privileged backgrounds tend to downplay – or desperately avoid mentioning – their advantages while advocating for the ‘common sense’ compatibilism or free will positions of their class.
Something that I didn’t mention though, in that Pinker post, is a recollection that Pinker had written some kind of puff piece about the Ashkenazi Jews (‘The Lessons of the Ashkenazim’ – which I’ve not read as yet)), their high IQs and their over-representation in the fields of elite science, chess grandmastery and such. Pinker, needless to say, is Jewish. Presumably the argument will go that these Ashkenazim have higher IQs for some particular reason, be it genetic, cultural or some synergistic mixture of the two. That’s to say, a deterministic reason.
I’m not Jewish, and I certainly don’t come from an elite background. My father was an unskilled labourer, in a variety of jobs with a variety of gaps between them. My mother was the breadwinner, a nurse who managed to move up the ladder to hospital administration and then nurse education. As migrants to Australia, half the world away from my Scottish birthplace, we were cut off from the wider family, and I didn’t hear much about how any of them made their livings, and, for some reason, I wasn’t particularly curious about them, though I was curious about many other things, or, at least, a few.
Do I have an IQ? The IQ concept has of course been controversial. Is it culturally based? Can it be made less so, or more multicultural, since human culture is pretty well inescapable? Apparently the result can be reduced to a number, and based on that number you can be classed as a genius, an imbecile or anything in between. I myself have never knowingly sat for an IQ test, so I have no number to preen myself on or shake my head over. However, I have taken two tests, one at age twelve, the other at age twenty-nine, which made some difference to my life. The first test was taken at the end of my final primary school year, and had to do with students’ placement in high school the following year. The high school had introduced ‘streaming’, based, apparently on natural smarts – measured by the test I had taken, but perhaps also by other primary school results. There were eight first-year high school classes, divided in two depending on whether you wanted to take French or German as your language choice (there were only two choices, no Tamil or Pitjantjatjara). So the ‘top’ two classes were F1 and G1, going down to F4 and G4. The new students for 1969 gathered together in the grounds of the relatively new Elizabeth West High School for the name-calling. To my surprise, I was the first name called for the F1 class. I was mildly puzzled, but then, some name had to be first. But a week or so later, one of my new classmates – I still remember his name, Blair Farquar – came to me and said excitedly ‘do you know you got the top marks for the class test?’ He’d been asked by our home teacher to retrieve something from her office, and had seen and looked through the test papers, which were numbered in a pile on the desk. I was frankly shocked. I knew I wasn’t stupid, but this news really unnerved me. I felt I’d been handed a burden I didn’t really want. And looking back on it, this test, which wasn’t based on any schoolwork but on reasoning and problem solving, must have been a child of the IQ family. And also looking back, our test results weren’t based on our diligence as students. We didn’t ‘study’ for the test, it was imposed on us without notice. So I couldn’t pat myself on the back for my achievement, I’d succeeded, if that was the word, due to determining factors completely beyond my control.
In any case, I squandered my advantage over the next few years due to increasing tensions at home, and at school, to which I responded with passive resistance and a sense of anti-authoritarianism which has never since left me. As mentioned in a previous post, I dropped out of school at 15. On my last school day, I was smacked across the face by the headmaster, because I was chewing gum while he was questioning me. I’ve no idea why this bothered him so much, but I knew exactly why his behaviour bothered me, and I’d had more than enough of it. I didn’t resume any formal education until I sat for a university-entrance test, as aforementioned, in my 29th year. In the intervening years I worked in various jobs, in factories, in a hospital, and as a general dogsbody in a fancy French restaurant, and became a habitual diary writer and a mover in slightly more intellectual, but small, circles. I developed a self-mocking fantasy of myself as the smartest person without a uni degree in the known universe.
The university test was definitely not an IQ test, as it involved writing a couple of essays on a choice of topics, and as a habitual writer, this was my comfort zone. I received acceptances from the two universities in South Australia at the time, Adelaide and Flinders, which enabled me to obtain a straightforward Arts degree – certainly not a road out of poverty. Eventually, after much faffing about, including the publication of a novel, I managed to obtain enough further qualifications to score some teaching work here and there, by which time I wasn’t far off from retirement age.
I write all this, largely because I’m self-obsessed, but also to illustrate the role of determinism. If I was born to nomadic pastoralists in Somalia, or to a Dalit family in Hindu India, I wouldn’t be writing here, and I wouldn’t have scored the kind of meagre successes I might be credited with in the WEIRD world. On the other hand, had I been born to a successful and supportive Ashkenazi family, my connections and my opportunities would have been unimaginably different from what I’ve experienced. And in all this I’m as typical as most other humans on this planet.
So this is important. When you come to reflect on the free will/determinism issue, don’t be taken in by the sorts of claims I once read, I think it was on a Stanford University website, that this is a fun topic to cut your philosophical teeth on. No, it isn’t a fun topic, it cuts to the heart of who we are and what we can become. And of course it’s complex. People from impoverished backgrounds can become Nobel Prize winners, and children of the Ashkenazim can become hopeless drug addicts or career criminals. To understand why that may have happened would mean to look in detail at the determining factors, insofar as they can be uncovered. And when and if you read some of the philosophical arguments on the topic, it’s essential to note the backgrounds of the writers, insofar as they can be ascertained. It will definitely hold the key to their position on the subject – such is my determination.
References
https://newrepublic.com/article/77727/groups-and-genes
Stewart Henderson, In Elizabeth, 1997
Pinker on free will, and more about myself
I’m still feeling anger, after all these years, at the free will proponents who, I feel, have benefitted from a cushy upbringing and have no idea what it’s like to have had nothing like the opportunities they’ve had. Of course, it’s always a worry that we can just attribute our relative failure to that lack of opportunity, but facts are facts, and it’s simply a fact that our macro world is determined.
And so to Steven Pinker, who, in his 2002 book The blank slate, ventured a few remarks on free will. I’ve written about Pinker before, and I consider it amusing to compare my life with his. We were both born in the mid 1950s’ – he’s a bit older – but that’s just about where the similarities come to an end (though I, too, have quite a big personal library – just saying). On the free will issue, I’d be inclined to make the small point, and I think Sapolsky makes it too, that successful career people would be more inclined to believe in free will than more or less abject failures – which of course isn’t saying anything about me.
Chapter 10 of The blank slate is titled ‘The fear of determinism’, and in it he starts looking at determinism from what I would call the wrong end – what he calls ‘molecules in motion’. My own thinking on this always starts from ‘thrown-ness into the world’, at an unchosen time and place, and as an unchosen living specimen. From there we get to our own parentage, our genes and our pre-natal and antenatal development, and their epigenetic effects.
Pinker also jumps quickly into the confusion I always find when I speak to people about this topic – that between determinism and predeterminism/fatalism:
‘All our brooding and agonising over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains’.
Pinker highlights the fear of determinism for a reason, claiming that ‘it is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time’, though it seems to me that few people suffer such fear – and this appears to be borne out by experimental evidence. When we’re primed by tricky lab-coated types to reflect on ‘victims of circumstance’, there is an effect, but it appears to be minimal and short-term.
Of course, it isn’t the fear of determinism that concerns me, but the lack of acknowledgment of its factual basis. Pinker goes on a long and rather facile discourse about lawyers, medicos and neurologists seeking to get wrong-doers off the hook on the basis of defective genes and/or brain processes. Note that Sapolsky admits to having offered his services in this way, generally to no avail. I would note, just in passing, that the USA has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the WEIRD world, by a huge margin. It’s the land of free will after all. No excuses.
Some of Pinker’s ‘analyses’ here really miss the mark badly. For example, he references Dennett, who…
points out that the last thing we want in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires. If behaviour were chosen by an utterly free will, then we really couldn’t hold people responsible for their actions. That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment, or be ashamed by the prospect of opprobrium, or even feel the twinge of guilt that might inhibit a sinful temptation in the future, because it could always choose to defy those causes of behaviour….
And so on. But this is obvious bullshit – even if you fully believed in free will, the threat of imprisonment would be a massive deterrent, especially given the horrific private prisons of the US. And so would the opprobrium directed at you for your wrong-doing, given that we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet. Others’ opinions of us massively matter. Free will doesn’t preclude a sense of right and wrong. It should also be obvious that we are determined, by evolution, to survive and thrive as best we can – so in a world of severe punishments, such as exists in the USA, we’ll obviously be determined to avoid such punishments as best we can, even given a deprived background or a shrunken amygdala.
But where Pinker goes wrong in a way that is, to me, more offensive, is in his mockery of what he calls environmental determinism. It’s the typical upper middle class response, I must say:
The most risible pretexts for bad behaviour in recent decades have come not from biological determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defence, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores….
This little parade of glibness doesn’t, of course, begin to address any real issues. Firstly, there’s little real difference between biological and environmental determinism. Our biology evolves in adaptation to changing environments, as every evolutionary biologist knows, and, to be fair to Pinker, there has been a revolution in our understanding of environmentally-induced gene expression (epigenetics) in the two decades since The blank slate was published. Even so, my experience of growing up in a profoundly working-class environment, in which classroom illiteracy was commonplace, as well as vandalism, neglect and police harassment, makes me flare up when I hear the life-shattering experiences of kids in the street where I lived being dismissed in terms of ‘the abuse excuse’. I also note that in mocking these ‘excuses’ his target is invariably the lawyers (his own class) that bring these claims, rather than the accused themselves, about who’s background he appears to be indifferent. It’s the same clubbish elitism that I found in the dated Berofsky collection I re-read recently, but more focussed on law than philosophy.
Another of the irritations I found in revisiting Pinker’s determinism-free will piece, is that he focusses almost exclusively on crime, ignoring the much larger issues of lives lived in struggle because of determining forces beyond their control – a Palestinian in modern Israel, a woman in Afghanistan, a Dalit in India, an Australian Aboriginal at the time of the British colonisation of that island, a Jew growing up in Germany in the 1930s, the Tainos visited by the Spanish horror in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the Scots massacred in the reign of Edward I, the East Timorese massacred by Indonesian forces, the isolated old women burned as witches… millions of people who found themselves members of the wrong gender or ethnicity at the wrong time – murdered, raped, enslaved, or simply deprived of the means to live a life in which there’s some hope of an upward trajectory. None of us got to choose our ethnicity, our class (yes it does exist), our early upbringing, our parentage, even our level of intelligence, and this is so obvious, and so overwhelming a fact, that it seems to me almost embarrassing to have to point it out. And all of this is profoundly determining. That’s why reading history, as I often do, can be such an affecting experience. It is so full of innocent victims. And of course it continues….
So, finally, it isn’t the fear of determinism that should concern us – it’s the very fact of determinism.
I’ve been lucky, on balance. I was brought, as a five-year-old, to live in one of the richest and most peaceful nations in the world. I can’t praise or blame myself for this. Certain aspects of my treatment both at home and at school resulted in, for me, a fairly extreme anti-authoritarianism, and something of an over-self-reliance, which has its positives and negatives. But I benefitted from a world-full of books in our house, which took me to places of wonder outside myself. And I’ve benefitted from a nation with a strong social safety net, a minimum wage which is the highest of any nation outside of Luxembourg, a justice system that eliminated the death penalty nationwide almost 60 years ago, and a political system that was the first in the world to grant votes, and the right to stand for parliament, to women. It also rates as one of the least religious nations on earth – which for me is a godsend.
More on determinism from me, no doubt, as I plough into the second half of Sapolsky’s Determined.
References
Steven Pinker, The blank slate, 2002
Bernard Berofsky, Free will and determinism, 1963
Robert Sapolsky , Determined, 2023
Sean Carroll on free will – a sort of compatibilist
this comment, from a site called ‘physics of free will’, seems to miss the point completely
There are a few positions on the free will issue, and probably three principal ones. They are, compatibilism (the most common position, particularly among philosophers), incompatibilism and libertarianism. I’m not interested in discussing libertarianism, which is just too weird. Compatibilism, argued for by Daniel Dennett in Elbow Room, amongst many others I’ve read, including Steven Pinker, and most of the contributors to Free will & determinism, a mid-twentieth century collection edited by Bernard Berofsky, claims basically that though our macro world is deterministic, otherwise science would never have gotten off the ground, we as complex, thinking and deciding individuals, make life choices all the time, in large matters and small, choices which we claim as our own, with all the praise and opprobrium that comes with our decisions.
Those that argue for incompatibilism, or hard determinism as it’s sometimes called, question, among other things, this notion of the self-determining self. Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University, has written a comprehensive defence of the incompatibilist position in Determined, which together with his earlier book Behave, and Sam Harris’ book Free Will, and reflections on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (a 50-year-old longitudinal study of, inter alia, personality types and how they change, or not, over time), has shifted my own stance on the issue from a wobbly compatibilism to a much more firm incompatibilism.
So to Sean Carroll, eminent physicist and science communicator and author of a 2016 book which I bought the other day, The Big Picture: on the origins of life, meaning and the universe itself – obviously inspired by my own writings. He devotes six pages of his 441-page book to the free will question, so it’s probably not a big issue for him. And indeed, it’s pretty inevitable that successful and highly respected individuals, who have contributed positively to science and human understanding, as Carroll undoubtedly has, would wish to be given credit for their achievements, and to believe that their own decisions and their own hard work have brought them to the position of respected public intellectual that the likes of Carroll enjoys today.
However.
I’m not going to research Carroll’s background, any more than I’ll research the backgrounds of other compatibilists such as Dennett and Pinker, but I think I can safely assume that none of these individuals were born into dire poverty, or a toxic family situation, or a war zone, or a strongly kinship-oriented, non-English-speaking culture. When I think of free will, or the lack thereof, it’s these Big Factors that come to mind, not whether I chose to have muesli or shredded wheat for breakfast. It’s typical, for example, that Carroll uses this example in demonstrating our ability to choose:
Imagine you’re a high school student who wants to go to college, and you’ve been accepted into several universities. You look at their web pages, visit campuses, talk to students and faculty at each place. Then you say yes to one of them, no to the others. What is the best way to describe what just happened, the most useful vocabulary for talking about our human-scale world? It will inevitably involve some statements along the lines of ‘you made a choice’.
Clearly Carroll knows his readership – educated citizens of the ‘Western’ or WEIRD world – so I can hardly blame him for his choice of example. However, he doesn’t really question the essential word ‘you’ here, and seems to think it’s all about a confused use of language and categories:
… the mistake made by free-will skeptics is to carelessly switch between incompatible vocabularies.
Describing the choices we make about what to wear in the morning, he writes:
That’s a decision that you [my emphasis] have to make; you can’t just say, ‘I’ll do whatever the atoms in my body were going to deterministically do anyway’. The atoms are going to do whatever they were going to do, but you don’t know what that is, and it’s irrelevant to the question of which decision you should make. Once you frame the question in terms of you and your clear choice, you can’t also start talking about your atoms and the laws of physics. Either vocabulary is perfectly legitimate, but mixing them leads to nonsense.
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture, p 379
This is, unfortunately, a classic straw woman argument. No careful-thinking incompatibilist is going to bring up atoms or even neurons to explain this particular everyday choice. Amongst the determining factors will be: what clothes are available to the subject; the weather; what job, activities or tasks she expects to engage in; her mood; her age and gender; her culture; her taste, developed over a lifetime and influenced by family, peer group, class etc. The ‘you’, the self, is constructed of many of these elements and more, including daily effects (the weather) and lifelong ones (culture, genetics) operating very much down to the neuronal and hormonal level – but there would rarely be a need to reach down that far to explain the person’s choices.
While I recognise that Carroll has barely skated over the topic in six pages, I find it bizarre that he doesn’t touch on the Big Issues here – culture, upbringing, genetics and our arbitrary ‘thrown-ness’ into the world – and their massive determining effects. He does end on a note of compromise and uncertainty however, while still, I think, largely missing the point:
Most people do maintain a certain degree of volition and autonomy, not to mention a complexity of cognitive functioning that makes predicting their future actions infeasible in practice. There are grey areas – drug addiction is an obvious case where volition can be undermined, even before we go all the way to considering tumours and explicit brain damage. This is a subject in which the basics are far from settled, and much of the important science has yet to be established. What seems clear is that we should base our ideas about personal responsibility on the best possible understanding of how the brain works that we can possibly achieve, and be willing to update those ideas whenever the data call for it.
Ibid, p 384
To me, this feeling of volition and autonomy is simply a product of complexity, and a sense of that complexity being inside us. We feel it, especially when faced with tough choices, or regretting the road not travelled. But what is the difference here between me and my pet dog? Does she feel anger, shame, regret? The general human response would be – maybe, but not like us. And what about bonobos? Cetaceans? We recognise, with all these mammals, that they are ‘individuals’. All dogs I’ve owned, or known, had their own personalities, I recognised that they ‘thought’, and so reacted, differently from each other. There may be similarities in breeds, just as we recognise cultural similarities in humans, but there are individual differences due to being ‘the runt of the litter’, being over- or under-fed by their owner, being brought up with other dogs or not, being pampered or neglected, and so on. But do we grant them free will? Surely not. And only humans, it seems, have the power to grant beings such power! Which is why we grant it so readily to ourselves. It’s just another example of human exceptionalism, as defined by humans. Remember how we were the only tool-makers, the only language-users, the only mourners of the dead….?
In my next piece on this topic I’ll look at what Steven Pinker had to say about free will in his 2002 book The blank slate. I wonder if he’s changed his mind since….
References
Sean Carroll, The Big Picture: on the origin of life, meaning and the universe itself, 2016
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: life without free will, 2023
Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 2017
Daniel Dennett, Elbow room: the varieties of free will worth wanting, 1984
Steven Pinker, The blank slate, 2002
Bernard Berofsky ed, Free will and determinism, 1963
olde worlde arguments on free will and determinism – MacIntyre, Bradley etc
when you’re at the centre of your universe…
I’m struggling my way through some of the olde worlde philosophical discussions on the free will/determinism theme, which seem so abstruse and beside the point that I’m not quite sure why I’m bothering, and I actually find it more fun to look up these boffins on Wikipedia, etc… e.g.
Abraham I Melden – (1910- 1991) Canadian-born, associated with California and Washington Universities, essays on ethics and human rights, action theory
Donald Davidson – (1917-2003) US philosopher, taught at Uni of California, Berkley, also at Stanford, Princeton, etc, analytic philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, action theory. I actually read a book of his decades ago.
Alasdair Macintyre – (1929 – ) Scottish-US philosopher, has taught at Essex and Oxford Unis in England, and at Wellesley College, Notre Dame, Yale and many other Unis in the US; Aristotelian philosophy, history of philosophy, virtue ethics, converted to Catholicism in the 80s (!!).
Again we find these philosophers getting stuck on the definition of terms – rationality, entailment, and many other irrelevancies. Take this passage by Macintyre and do what you want with it:
The logically unsophisticated determinist may seek to put his views beyond refutation by asking how we can be certain in any given case that some one of these features [the ‘indefinitely long’ set of determinative features set out by Aristotle et al, and added to by Freud and ‘future neurologists’ etc etc] will not be discovered or does not go undiscovered. But this question only has force, so long as we use the word ‘certain’ in such a way that we mean by ‘a certain proposition’ a proposition that we can have no reason to doubt; whereas in empirical discourse we mean, or ought to mean, by ‘a certain proposition’, not one that we can have no reason to doubt, but one that we do have no reason to doubt. This kind of determinist then can be answered by saying that a given act is free, if on reasonable inspection we find that none of the relevant features are present….
Got that? This is high-quality philosophical gobbledygook, which has no relevance whatever to the real matter of determinism, which has to do with your parents and ancestors, the culture and language you were born into, your genetics and the epigenetic effects upon them, your developmental experiences, your diet, how much sleep you’ve been getting lately and a multitude of other impacts upon your life, which ultimately determine whether you become a university professor in the USA or a Dogon hunter in Mali or Burkino Fasso, out of billions of possibilities…
But of course not billions of possibilities. If indeed you were born into the Dogon community of the Sahel in the early twentieth century, you would never have become a prominent Anglo-American philosopher fifty years later. If you were born Jewish in Germany or Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, you would have been lucky to survive the holocaust. If you were born in rural China in the same period, you’d have been lucky not to starve to death as a result of ‘The Great Leap Forward’. And so on – think of Palestinians today in Gaza, or the Sudanese in Darfur and Khartoum. In short, the issue of determinism is no game, no amusing thought-bauble for undergraduates to cut their philosophical teeth on, it’s in fact what’s behind much of human inequality and suffering – as well as success.
So, though I’m committed to finishing the collection of essays edited by Berofsky, for deterministic reasons (though hardly reasons, more like neurotic neural impulses), I’m just doing it to clear the way for the brighter light of Sapolsky.
Some of these philosophers debate or deliberate over whether reasons are causes, presumably preliminary to being able to claim that reasons emanate from the reasoning mind, which is free to reason as it wills. But of course this is BS, we reason according to all the influences that have contributed to our reasoning style and skills, and most of those influences occurred early on, which is why the Dunedin longitudinal study of personality types has found what it has found – that our ‘type’ is fixed at an early age. But the philosophers in the Berofsky volume don’t take the long view at all, They’re constantly reflecting on the moment – of deliberating, of deciding, of choosing etc, while employing some abstract agent in the process (always ‘he’), and tying themselves in knots, so it seems to me, about the conditions for and constraints against so-called deliberative or rational action. Something about cloistered academics debating each other…
I’ve read further into the Berofsky volume, including essays by:
Richard Taylor – (1919-2003) US philosopher, mostly associated with Brown University, author of Metaphyics (1963) and Virtue Ethics (1991), and many other works.
John L Austin – (1911-1960) British philosopher with the standard credentials, educated and taught at Oxford, with teaching visits to Harvard and Berkley, etc. Worked mostly in philosophy of language, principal work, How to do things with words (1955/62)
Both of these philosophers’ essays miss the point horribly, it seems to me. Taylor spends a lot of time on the meaning of ‘deliberation’, as if this could clarify the free will/determinism issue in any way, though I was struck by one brief remark at the end of a fairly cogent paragraph :
… philosophers, no less than the vulgar, are perfectly capable of holding speculative opinions that are inconsistent with some of their own beliefs of common sense.
As a compleat vulgarian myself I want to protest, but then ‘speculative opinions’ can be anything, really, so I’m not sure what point is being made, other than that philosophers are generally considered to be superior beings. Well, if this volume is anything to go by….
But Taylor’s contribution is beaten hands down in terms of erudite vacuity by that of Austin, whose essay ‘Ifs and cans’ took me precisely nowhere. To me, it seems boringly obvious that analysing the meanings of words won’t much help us in clarifying the determining factors in the lives of people (or birds, trees, or bacteria). We, like all living things, live and continue to live, or not, due to preceding factors, such as a mix of gases creating what we call an atmosphere, and the still-mysterious formation of self-sustaining and replicating cells, which over millions of years form much more complex organisms which yet cannot but operate under determined conditions. It’s certainly true that we owe our sense of free will to that complexity, but a little close thought, and a knowledge of our deep history, should clarify the matter for us. It’s a bit like we think we’re free to think ‘for ourselves’ because we can’t see our neurons firing, our hormones and other electrochemical processes streaming, our specifics neural regions signalling to or suppressing other regions. So we think it’s ‘us’ that’s doing all this of ‘our own accord’. Do we ever think of bacteria, or even one of our more recent ancestors (e.g Juramaia, a rat-like creature that flourished 145 million years ago) choosing how to survive and thrive? Evolution, apart from anything else, should convince us that ‘free will’ is a myth. When did this free will come about? Gradually, some have said. Dogs and cats, etc have ‘limited’ free will, while we have the whole shebang. How? Uhh, complexity explains it, somehow. The more complexity, the more freedom. Bullshit, I say – it’s just that the determining factors are more complex.
I need to read more of Sapolsky’s Determined as an antidote to all this philosophasting, but his previous book, Behave, also does the job. The whole book deals with the determining factors that go into any piece of behaviour, from a split-second before it occurs, right back to human ancestry. What more evidence do we need?
Anyway, since these philosophers, arguing among themselves about ifs and cans, as if clarifying these terms might prove or disprove free will, use tennis as an example, i.e ‘he could have smashed that lob’, I’ve been thinking about all the determining factors that might affect the outcome of a pro tennis match.
First, one is seeded well above the other. This will clearly have a psychological effect on both, which will translate into physiological effects, e.g one will play more aggressively, the other more conservatively. But one is coming back from injury and isn’t sure if she’s feeling ‘100%’, and so doesn’t go all out. Also one is playing before her home crowd, which can have subtle pyscho/physiological effects. One is feeling she’s past her best as a player, the other is an up-and-comer. The court surface is perhaps not to the liking of one of them, but a favourite surface for the other. The (perhaps changing) head-to-head record of these two players plays its psychological part. One is on a roll, the other has suffered surprising defeats recently. The crowd noise, the wind factor, the umpire’s previous decisions, the pep talk or strategy talk given by their couch before their match, a nasty argument with their girlfriend earlier in the day, a breakfast that didn’t agree with them and so on, all may play a greater or lesser part, and so in combination determine an outcome which nobody, least of all the players themselves, could have predicted with certainty beforehand. Determining factors are complex, and real – they’re not about the language you use for them.
It seems to me that these mid-century philosophers were too interested in competing with each other, finding fault with each others’ language-based analyses, to see that language in itself has nothing whatever to do with determinism (though of course the language world you operate within – Yoruba, Hebrew, Tigre or Gaelic – will have determining effects on your life’s course). I can’t help but think of Shakespeare’s ‘expense of spirit in a waste of shame’. These writings aren’t exactly shameful but they do seem to me a waste. Clearly these are highly intelligent men, and it’s clearly a shame that they wasted their energies on such fruitless activities. Sabine Hossenfelder put it very simply and emphatically. ‘It’s no good saying you could have done otherwise. You DIDN’T!’ And what you did was determined.
References
Bernard Berofsky, Free will and determinism, 1966.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/rat-creature-ancestor-mammals-11082018/
Robert Sapolsky, Behave, 2016
Robert Sapolsky, Determined, 2023
more gobbledegook on free will?: C D Broad
The Cambridge philosopher C D Broad (1887-1971) was, from what I’ve read, a genial self-effacing fellow, who according to his bio, got into philosophy because he didn’t think he could make it as a scientist. His contribution to the Berofsky volume is, so far, the most incomprehensible piece I’ve read. So, in the French tradition of explication de texte, I’ll have a go at pulling apart the penultimate paragraph of his essay. The whole essay is entitled ‘Determinism, indeterminism and libertarianism’ (published in 1952). The final two paragraphs of the essay come under the sub-title ‘Libertarianism’:
We are now in a position to define what I will call ‘Libertarianism’. This doctrine will be summed up in two propositions. (1) Some (and it may be all) voluntary actions have a causal ancestor which contains as a cause-factor the putting-forth of an effort which is not completely determined in direction and intensity by occurrent causation. (2) In such cases the direction and the intensity of the effort are completely determined by non-occurrent causation, in which the self or agent, taken as a substance or continuant, is the non-occurrent total cause. Thus, Libertarianism, as defined by me, entails Indeterminism, as defined by me; but the converse does not hold.
This sort of language-torturing borders on criminality, it seems to me. But it might be fixed. My simplification:
Here’s my summary of Libertarianism. First, our deliberate acts often (and perhaps always) proceed from a causal chain which, followed back in the past, involve efforts which have little to do with these current actions [if that’s what Broad means by ‘occurrent causation’]. Second, this means that these current acts can be traced causally to those past actions/decisions which…. oh, forget it.
What Broad is engaging in here, presumably without fully realising it, is just word-play. He fails to define ‘occurrent causation’ and ‘non-occurrent causation’, which are key to understanding the paragraph. On the face of it you’d think they mean ’causes that exist’ and ’causes that don’t exist’, but that just sounds dumb, so better to stick with the obscurantism. More important, Broad fails completely, like most of the contributors to this volume, to deal with real situations and the lives of real people. It’s all abstraction, which is often the biggest failing of philosophy. I recall many years ago reading comments, I think by Max Black – another philosopher heavily influenced by Wittgenstein – to the effect that most philosophical problems eventually get taken over and clarified by science (‘theory of mind’ comes immediately to mind – I mean, brain). Meaning, I reckon, that they move from abstract constructions and general formulae to formalised research and the hard data thereby produced.
In any case, Broad relies a lot on the concept of entailment, as mentioned in the last sentence of the above quote, which is essentially a concept in logic. The determinism that Sapolsky is focussing on is about more slippery phenomena, like the combined effects of genes, hormones, neural connections, early childhood experiences, thousands of years of culture, physical development, recent trauma, and much else besides, in our daily decision-making. Strict entailment isn’t what this is about at all, but that hardly rules out or mitigates against a determinism which is multifactorial and inescapable. It turns out, apparently, on the basis of other, more patient (and no doubt smarter) analysts than myself, that Broad is likely, on the basis of this essay, as much a determinist as Sapolsky:
The position Broad reaches is a version of what is sometimes called free will pessimism: free will is incompatible with determinism, but there is no viable form of indeterminism which leaves room for free will, either; therefore, free will does not exist—indeed could not exist.
from Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: Charlie Dunbar Broad
And just a note on libertarianism – it has always seemed to me an ideology of the more-than-haves rather than the have-nots – and I note with some bemusement, and amusement, that it doesn’t rate a mention in Sapolsky’s book. It also seems to run in families – if your Dad’s a libertarian, you’ll rarely feel free to be anything else! In any case, libertarianism is usually defined in terms of individual freedom, which is funny coming from the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet.
To be continued, perhaps.
References
Bernard Berofsky, ed. Free will and determinism, 1966
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/broad/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ludwig-Wittgenstein
Robert Sapolsky, Determined: life without free will, 2023