Free-Will, Identity, Decisions and Choices

Let's start with the nature of the "I" I'm saying is free.

I don't know about you, but I'm not a ghost of identity passing through the walls of my brain and body, wondering why my material manifestation does so many silly things. The "I" I feel I am is no more one unified process than my body is one unified process. My body is a rag-bag of inter-connected parts, each with its own function, each monitored, loosely controlled and crudely co-ordinated by the autonomic nervous system, and sometimes consciously, and with no guarantee that all of them will work well together. Since the brain is part of the body, this applies to the brain as well. I see, hear, taste, estimate what is about to happen in my world (do I have time to cross the road before that slower-moving car gets here?), judge the people and things in it ("ugh, what a Spring 2003 office block") and a dozen other things, all at the same time, in what used to be called a "stream of consciousness". The human brain is a motherboard with many special-purpose CPU's, only one of which is there to have that conversation in our heads we call "consciousness". All the real work is done in the background, as it should be. The flaw in the traditional way of thinking about ourseleves and our identities, and hence of the nature of our freedom, is to suppose that we are in some way One, that there is one process - a soul, mind, spirit -  that "is" us. We are a bundle of processes, many of which can communicate with each other but might not on occasion.

One of those processes has priority over the others, when it is engaged. This is the process which chooses the other processes get to use my body and the other resources I have. Sometimes that choice is made on a whim, or out of habit, or under the spell of a strong emotion - wisdom literature and guru books, and every book about being an effective manager, stress keeping the decision-making process conscious: do nothing without considering its effects, and do nothing in the heat of the moment. Some people do this better than others, I do it badly, and for most people, you can see the wheels turning when they try. That process is where freedom lives: it is the part of "I" which chooses and decides.

When I choose or decide I am influenced by what I have learned, experiences I may or may not have mis-interpreted, by what I have seen, heard, tasted and felt, by rumours, facts and thousand-year-old ideas, and my thinking is flawed, messy, incomplete, as deductively fallacious as valid and full of leaps and non sequiters. I limit my choices to what is possible, affordable, legal and acceptable, and that perhaps of all the choices, none are what I would do if I had the money, nerve and courage. Some of the thinking is conscious - feels like a conversation in my head, like reading without moving my lips - and some of it, perhaps the bulk of it, goes on silently. Just because I can't hear it doesn't mean it isn't happening, and it doesn't mean it isn't me who is doing it. The idea that thinking must be conscious or it is not thinking is a silly prejudice. I don't know about you, but I need as much thinking as possible to be going on silently, so I can concentrate on listening to music, or gazing at a blue sky. I want to know I will figure out the solution to a work problem without it interrupting my enjoyment of the present moment.

These influences are not constraints, just as reasons are not restraints and faulty reasoning is not a symptom of being human. These influences are, in fact, part of me. I am defined in part by my education, my experiences, what I heard from my parents, at school, on the radio and television, what I read, what I taught myself. Part of "who I am" is someone who can understand a proof in mathematics, identify the major 1950's jazz musicians after one chorus, and absolutely refuses to take part in fancy dress parties. It makes sense to say that "I" make a decision before I become conscious of having done so - actually, I thought everyone did that, it's how you know it's the right decision for you - but it makes no sense to say that the decision is not therefore my decision, as if only what I do consciously is "me". We are what we do, and what we intend to do, and we are the the gap between the two as well.

Reasons, arguments, influences and reasoning are important. It's not a decision unless there are reasons. If there are no reasons, it's an impulse, or a whim, and if being free isn't one thing, it's being at the mercy of every whim that passes through our pretty little heads. An adult may have all sorts of odd ideas flitting through her head, but she decides which one she will act on, if only by rolling a dice, and then deciding to abide by the dice's "decision". (The Dice Man decides to follow the dice, and part of that story is just how much self-control and will it takes to do so. Random living can be as demanding as routine living.) 

(One reason that neuroscience seems so determinism-friendly is that it only looks at, as it must, toy decisions made in falsely simple circumstances. It doesn't look at the long decision-making processes of businessmen, or jurors, or me when my mobile phone contract is coming to an end. In these processes there may actually not be a point where anyone "decides" to do a particular thing, rather there is a drift towards the eventual choice as one by one the alternatives are eliminated for cause. Long-process decisions may include short-process decisions but are not resolvable into a series of them.)

So where's the freedom? You're staring at it: it's right in front of you. Papa Hegel said it, in his Aethestics. Freedom arises because my consciousness stops paying attention to the outside world and looks inwards at itself. (I had to read it over a number of times to make sure I hadn't been dreaming or misunderstood. Is it that simple?) Only the external physical world, including the people in it, can compel and constrain, so when I turn my back on it, I become free - even if I can't put my decision into action for fear of the Secret Police or for sheer lack of energy and money.

I'm free when I stop trying to do what you want me to do. This doesn't mean I act selfishly, become self-centered and ignore the rules and the needs of other people, it means I don't have a knee-jerk reaction to satisfy your every whim and demand. It means I  "stop and think". Learning to stop and think, to not do as we're told or as we think others expect, to ignore our first impulse, and decide for ourselves, is part of becoming an adult. The teenager who doesn't "feel" as if they are free is quite right: they haven't achieved these disciplines yet.

The beauty of this is that it doesn't matter how I do it, or what does it, or even if I'm aware of much of it. It doesn't matter how you got your ideas of why I should do, or how I wound up thinking that what you think I should is so darn important. What matters is that I stopped responding to your priorities, and started responding to mine. The hardware and software I use to do it doesn't matter. It's that I do it that matters, not how I do it or which exact part of my anatomy passed what chemicals and electrical impulses to what other parts. In programming, we call that last bit "implementation" and everyone knows there are a hundred ways of getting the same result from the same inputs. 

Freedom is not, in other words, a relationship I have with the Universe, but one I have with other people. I am not free because somehow I can dodge an hypothesised universal Laplacian causality with some Heisenbergian indeterminacy, nor because I can shake off all my schooling and indoctrination and choose freely. I am free because I briefly ignore everyone else and make up my mind to do what I want, which may or may not suit you, depending on how suiting you suits me. My guess is that there are many people who are so caught up in the race for power and influence, or the search for love and reassurance, or so bound up in their relationships with others, or in the endless reflecting mirrors of second-guessing and people-pleasing, that they really do not experience themselves as choosing, and whose consciousness has yet to turn away from the world, look inside itself and summon the courage to say their first "YES" to themselves.

Memories on Paris Metro Line 11

During the days in Paris, I took the 11 line a couple of times. It goes through the Marais, which is why I took it, to get to Rambateu, but the reason I remember it especially is that it has a stop called Telegraph. And Telegraph is near the rue du Borrego, and that's where, back in the day, Susan Dawn lived, in a one-room apartment in a huge modern block of flats overlooking a courtyard. She had garden furniture in the room (which was nomad-style at the time) and the bed was on the floor (ditto) opposite the large window.

How do I know the geography of her flat? I have mentioned that I was once a Nine. You may rightly be sceptical. So hear this. Before the Eurostar, to get to Paris, we took a train to Dover, a ferry to Calais and a train to Paris. That's what I did one week. I was drinking then, so I made my way to the buffet car and found myself talking to a middle-aged wiry American of dubious abode and solvency, and a very attractive blond English girl about my age. I have no idea what we talked about, though I do remember the train made an odd noise that suggested something had fallen off, and stopped for a while in the middle of nowhere. By the time we reached Paris, I had Susan's number and the promise of a date if I called. Yes, I was That Guy. Not often, but I had my moments.

I don't remember where I was staying, though I think it was somewhere in the 9th. I may have spent the first night in the hotel, but I didn't spend the second, or the third there. One morning I went out for croissants and cigarettes, and I'm not sure if it was the two croissant and pain au chocolate that raised eyebrows, or my choice of cigarettes, which was Boyard. (Boyard make Gitanes taste like Silk Cut). Ah, those were the 80's! Susan made the rent as a tour operator contact - the person who meets you within a day or so of arriving, talks about the location, books any outings and gives you a free drink on the hotel? That was Susan. Minus the carte de sejours, which meant she was off the books. She had a pretty spectacular figure and by today's standards was a bit messed up. Given that she was a 70's teenager like me, that made her ordinary. We spent the free part of her day wandering around Paris, had supper in Montmartre, where frankly the food was as awful as the location was allegedly picturesque. We always took taxis back to her place - she had this formula to describe her address "(something) rue du Borrego, c'est pres de la Metro Telegraph (and something else)". Somewhere along the line we drank a rose Cote de Provence, a wine which has never tasted quite as good as it did then.

I went back out to Paris for a weekend a few weeks later, through Charles de Gaulle, and we had supper Friday on the Left Bank and stayed at her place. I can't remember what we did Saturday night, but I'm pretty sure we went out. Sunday was lunch and flying back. It went okay as I recall.

We met in London that November and it was the disaster that every movie ever says it will be. We saw a play. The weather was cold. Very cold. No connection, no romance, no sex when she stayed over at my place, and looking back on that attic flat in Wimbledon, I don't blame her. That was that.

And that's the bit of my past I left on the 11 Line - a bit you will notice I remember in some detail. I don't reminisce about it every time I travel on it, but I did this time.

Free-Will, Neuroscience, Emergence And All That PR Jazz

What is it about free will that makes it such an attractive target? Perhaps because it's all we've got left now that God has gone. Just as there was a ton of publicity to be had attacking God and every last sentence in The Bible, so there's a lot of publicity to be had saying that we don't have free will or that we're so dumb and easily manipulated we don't deserve it.

Determinism - the thesis that everything but everything in the Universe was pre-destined to happen from the moment of creation because the development of the Universe is governed by the Laws of Nature and the disposition of the particles at the start - was really a PR stunt by Laplace Associates ("We Have No Need For That Hypothesis") for their Celestial Mechanics product. It's not a serious idea and was never intended to be. If you wonder how it was ever taken to be one, remember, you think that bottled water is better than the tap water in a first-world country. That was a PR stunt as well, and boy did it work.

Reductionist materialism - the thesis that everything you value is "merely" a bunch of atoms / whatevers, does not really exist ("Love ain't nothin' but oxytocin talkin'") and you're a fool for taking it so seriously - is just a playground wind-up. It's one thing to say that "emotions are caused by the release of hormones as a reaction to what happens to you" and another entirely to say "there are no emotions, merely hormones released into the blood stream". If there are no emotions, why go looking for hormones to explain them? To reduce X to Y is not to deny that X exists, but to claim that X is caused by Y and can be relieved by an antidote to Y. It's not necessary for me to convince you that your new girlfriend is trouble on stilts - all I need to do is to give you a dose of the anti-love hormone and you'll be free of your unhealthy fascination. Love may be hormonal, but that doesn't make any less all the things every poet in history ever said about it. Unless, that is, you're looking for a reason to be bitter and twisted.

The latest passengers on the Knocking Free Will bandwagon are the neuroscientists. But hold on here: when they publish research that seems to show that decisions are the result of brain processes, our reply should be... Gee, who knew? Followed by... and you'd publish it if you found that decisions weren't a result of brain processes? It's the business of neuroscience to find physical correlatives for what we think of as mental processes, so we should not really be too surprised when they say they have done so. Recently they have discovered that there's a brain process that accompanies a certain type of decision that happens before we become conscious of having made the decision. Lawyers are lining up to claim that their clients, criminals and bank CEO's all, are off the hook for anything they did. One way we know an idea is a bunch of crock is that defence lawyers rush to use it in defence of the clearly culpable.

We should be used to the idea that we are physical bodies and brains, with no magical ghosts, souls, minds or spirits interacting with our bodies (presumably via the pineal gland), and yet with free will. This is the twenty-first century, after all. It's sheer laziness to carry on proclaiming that we are but physical beings and therefore have no free will and our mental life is an irrelevant illusion. The real challenge is to explain how we can be wholly physical beings with free will,  making morally significant choices. From the fuss about the recent research on brain processes, it seems like a lot of people have yet to get the message.

I'm going to do is explain what I understand by freedom and free will. See if it makes sense to you. But don't expect me to argue against the determinists and Sneering Reductionists, and don't expect me to explain why free will isn't some massive illusion. All of these are self-consistent positions - sadly - and there's no way out once you step in. So pardon me if I trust my experience over an hypothesis that was only invented as a publicity stunt anyway.


What free will is not is this: that in the situation S there were options X and Y, and though we did X we could have done Y. This makes far, far too many fuzzy metaphysical claims for my taste. What does "could have done" mean? In practice? How does anyone know I could have done Y, especially since I'm a Catholic / Muslim / Vegetarian / Mother / Barrister and it's against my beliefs / ethics / religion and anyway I don't have that kind of money and have no idea where to buy arsenic? What does it mean to say that X and Y were options? For who? Me? Or a Russian oligarch? (Russian oligarchs have so many more options than I do.) Usually when someone says that I could have done Y, they are making a moral judgement, not saying something about the state of the Universe when I made the decision to do X.

There's an idea of free will that's just a little bit Romantic - in the way that Sleepless in Seattle is just a little bit romantic - and it goes like this: are we really free when we're the victims of manipulative advertisers, global brands, the indoctrination of schools and grade-inflated universities, peer pressure, employer's expectations and corporate rules, the censorship of the media conglomerates, the thousands of hoops of the bureaucrat, and the tricks played on us by marketeers informed by the latest research in behavioural psyschology? When artists have to have Masters' degrees and networking skills before they can even be considered by a gallery... are we really free? Or are we just choosing conformities?

You get the idea. Romantic free will must be pure or it is not. Free will is unconstrained, uninfluenced, and uncontamiated by the slightest taint of mundane reason, the unfettered expression of our inner souls, acting in a spirit of love, creativity, autonomy and originality. This isn't my idea of free will.

As a side issue, soul-lovers and mind-merchants will try to convince you that things like decisions and choices are "intentional objects" that cannot be understood in a purely material world, and need minds and other mysterious "emergent" objects. Emergence is a bridging idea - in this case between the rather simple way we thought about the world up to the end of the nineteenth century and how we are starting to think of it now. Back in the day, only the fundamental particles were real, and everything else was some temporary arrangement of them, with decreasing amounts of plausibility the more complex the arrangement became. Today we are starting to understand that it's the arrangements that are real, because the fundamental particles come and go. Your skin is real, but the cells are always falling off it. The Inland Revenue is sadly real, but the staff come and go on their temporary contracts. "Emergence" is offered as a magical process by which complicated things appear from seemingly simple components, as if bread dough "emerges" from its ingredients. It doesn't, of course, because it takes something to mix and knead the ingredients before the dough "emerges", even if in the case of the primordial DNA-creating soup, it wasn't an actual baker. Anyone who offers "emergence" as a serious explanation needs to learn more science and technology.

Free will is making decisions and choices, with an important condition, which I first read in Hegel's Aethestics. In the next post, I'll talk about that.

Junk Page Views: blogg.tk and Others

A while ago Google introduced Google Stats on Blogger. Very interesting it is as well. I have recently ascended to the giddy heights of roughly ten page views a day - which can be more than I get e-mails at work - and I would like to think that those are all real people brought here by a search on Google or the "Next Blog" button on Blogger.

Then I saw that a site called blogg.tk was a top provider for a few days. Never having heard of it, I went to have a look. What a nasty site. It seems to be offering software to set up a whole bunch of random blogs from which you can, allegedly, make money. Because if it was that easy, why don't they do it themselves and cut out the middleman?

I had noticed other odd-looking sites before. alphainventions.com was one, remroom.ru another and postring.tk, pu.gg. www.jobsforsmartpeople.com, pingywebedition.somee.com yet others. Many of them are based in, oh!, look!, Russia. I am willing to believe that someone might have been browsing from what looks like a Russian furniture store, but then I trust everything from Russia, from the blondes to the billionaires.

I'm assuming the scam is to spam sad and lonely bloggers like me with views so that we go to their site, where they will infect us with viruses or try to sell us some bogus software that will make us rich or popular or attractive to women. Maybe they will hi-jack the blog. I don't know.

This is never going to be a popular blog. It's too text-heavy, the entries are often long, the tone is personal and the photographs don't feature Abbey Lee or Lily Cole on a regular basis. (I don't know how many page views Terence Tao gets - in a sensible world, it should be thousands - but I bet it's not as many as Rumi Neely gets.) I'm not writing about things people care about, like fashion, music, mathematics and cooking. Nor is it chirpy in tone and garishly colorful in design, which also seems to help.

I would like to know that the page views I get are real. Occasionally someone leaves a comment, which just makes my week. (I've never left one, which I know makes me a Bad Blogging Citizen, but I can never think of anything to say other than "Interesting post" that wouldn't take half an evening to compose. I would feel frustrated if I read "interesting post" because I would want to know why.)

Google know about these junk page views, but doing anything about them isn't on their list.  Best advice seems to be: don't click on the link. Just like you don't "unsubscribe" from spam e-mails.

The Art of Non-Conformity (3): Lucie's Laws

Hold back the sophomore comment about "there can't be ways to be a non-conformist, because then you'd be conforming to the rules of being a non-conformist". I can conform to the rules I choose, and I can choose your rules or their rules, and it doesn't matter, because tomorrow or in the next instant I can change my mind. The point is not to conform to their rules because you can't think of anything better to do, or because you want to be accepted by them.

I'm going to cheat and quote myself, because this is the best way I've put this, though I wasn't thinking about it at the time. This is Lucie and Adam's second date, and Lucie is explaining the Laws she and a friend mentioned as an aside when Lucie and Adam first met.

LUCIE     One: do not watch television and only read foreign newspapers...

ADAM     I can read the FT?

LUCIE     I do. Saturdays. Vanessa Freidman, Jackie Wullschlager, Peter Aspden. Sometimes even to make sure they've kept their promises.

ADAM     Oh. You really do know everyone.

LUCIE     Or I'd have a day job. Rule Two?

ADAM     Okay.

LUCIE     A light suntan and good muscle tone are not optional...

ADAM     Damn straight.

LUCIE     Three: outside the home, even casual clothes should be classy.

ADAM     That's what I was trying to say...

LUCIE     You were. Four: shopping is not...

ADAM     ...a destination activity...

LUCIE     ...so buy your food and washing-up liquid on your way to somewhere else...

ADAM     Aha.

LUCIE     Aha indeed. Five: drinks begin with a w - whiskey, wine and water...

ADAM     You just took that from me.

LUCIE     Well, you might think so. But actually I didn't. Six?

ADAM     Six.

LUCIE     If you can see a crowd, you're in the wrong place...

ADAM     So true.

LUCIE     Seven: butter, coffee and toilet paper, however poor you are, never scrimp on those three things...

ADAM     That sounds familiar, but I shouldn't let on I know it's India Knight, should I?

LUCIE     No. People will think you read your girlfriends' books.

ADAM     And we wouldn't want that. Eight?

LUCIE     Eight: argue with your dentist and your doctor, but not with your petrol gauge or your first impressions.

ADAM     My petrol gauge is as reliable as my first impressions?

LUCIE     Which are way more reliable than your doctor.

(05:20 In The Morning - un-produced theatre script)

Lucie's Laws are about keeping the crap out of your life so you have time, energy and money to enjoy the good stuff. Do what you want except consume junk culture, junk food and the poisonous air of the English media. Rules two and three mean you're going to dress well and you will be going to the gym or playing sports a couple of times a week at least (because being an overweight slob in sloppy clothes is so desirable). Rule four keeps you away from the High Street at the weekends, and from having a family, because you can't shop for a family on an ad-hoc basis. Rules five and seven tell you to aim for simplicity in taste and quality in essentials, not quantity or novelty (that's where most people fall on their faces). Rule eight tells you not to accept so-called experts at face value: many doctors and dentists have ulterior motives, whereas your petrol gauge doesn't (some phone battery indicators do, I read somewhere). Rule six reminds you that the last time the crowd was right was in the mid-Sixties about the Beatles and the Stones. Since then, what's interesting and quality has diverged further and further from what's popular.

You can do whatever else you want. Adam he is an accountant and Lucie she is a PR. You can have a day job or a career. You can like your sex vanilla or kink, you can be a vegetarian who believes in global warming or a carnivore who doesn't, you can have ink or clear skin, you can dig Mozart or Ornette Coleman - as long as you dig someone. You can be well-balanced or you can be a screw-up. You just can't be so messed-up you so things because you think other people think that's what you should do. You can be as dogmatic as you like in the instant, as long as you drop your dogma when it gets in the way of doing what you need to get done.

Sunday Stroll Along The Canal in Utrecht

Once or twice a year I stay with a friend who lives in Utrecht. The more I go over to the Netherlands, the more I like it. Just walking through the streets is restful. Even when it seems, that the Dutch had started their Christmas shopping that weekend.

Friday Afternoon Around Culemborg

Culemborg is a Utrecht dormitory about fifteen minutes south by train from Utrecht. It dates back to the 1300's, with a market square, a church, a very fancy town gate (bottom photo), a modern railway bridge over the river, but no road bridge, so there's a the ferry that runs from about six in the morning to ten-thirty at night. 70 cents the single trip for foot passengers. We had lunch in a cafe - there are quite a few decent-looking restaurants and cafes there - and crossed the river, where the wind was cold, but the cottages picturesque, then returned to the town, stopping at the shop with the marzipan pig to buy some marzipan sweets for desert that evening.