Freedom and Meaning

I) Imagine you wake up in a white box outside of conventional space-time. A drip feed is keeping you alive by pumping nutrients directly into you, with absolutely no waste products. What would you do? How would you decide what to do? Nothing you do would have any context; there would be no means of discerning one choice from another. For eternity you would be trapped. Perhaps the only choice available to you is whether to tear off the drip-feed and wait to die, or hold out for the hope of escape (which is of course futile, as this is an evil analogy!)

A less evil analogy could be as follows. Imagine you have been invited into the control centre of the universe by an omnipotent being. Before you is a vast computer containing a million switches. There is no way of knowing what any of the switches do, and no way of seeing the aftermath of pressing them. Again, there are no meaningful choices to be made here, and you may as well leave.

A final (slightly more evil than the above but less evil than the first) analogy could be as follows. Imagine you are a sentient mind in a vast box the size of a star, with thousands of liquid-metal tentacles spiralling out from your core. The universe is now your oyster, but would you return to Earth? Would you seek out other creatures like you? What would you do? How would you decide?

II) Context is necessary for meaningful choice, and thus for freedom. We cannot choose without a context to act within. This context is not only our environment and space in the narrative of the world, but also our physical limitations. We understand the universe through our bodies. We are creatures which were generated out of the cosmos and this puts us in common with other creatures. We are human beings, and though we may take this obvious fact for granted, it is an essential part of how we choose and what we choose. Simply put, choice is not something “pure and detached”, but “messy and involved”.

The context common to all of humanity, for all of history, is that we are in relation to nature. The natural phenomena of Earth is a gift which exists before we do, and which we have played little part in generating. We have followed plants and animals through time, and they have intrigued us, given us something to fear, impressed us, or all of these things at once. We have always lived in a world with nature.

A world without nature would be disastrous in and of itself, but also for its effect on us. It would deny us the intuitive pleasure gained in just observing, say, a tree, with no conscious purpose as to why. We cannot articulate why it feels meaningful, but this does not deny its meaningfulness. It demonstrates the remaining mystery of our being, that we are not only the mind which perceives; there is more at work inside us. If we were to destroy nature in its entirety (a scenario which is possible as our technology and greed grows exponentially) we would be destroying the background of every human civilization in history.

III) We are forced into the world, naked and hungry. We are forced into the small personal narratives of our day-to-day lives and the meta-narratives of breathing empires, woven so tightly together that without intending it we can effect distant narratives. We are forced into a language, which creates for us a boundary, or foundation, of word-thoughts. We are forced into a morality, absorbing the values drummed into us whether we like them or not. We are forced into a world-view consisting of all the information we uncritically absorb in our pre-philosophy days. As children we make decisions despite our lack of understanding, and this is our original sin, not some spiritual fall, but our immature actions.

None of this means that our personality is decided for us, nor our choices. For if you accept that context is necessary for there to be meaningful choices, and thus some form of choosing will, the fact that we have circumstances is what grants us freedom.

The fact that we cannot decide entirely what our “fate” will be, that we cannot immediately overcome subconscious forces and bend the world around us is all a necessary part of our freedom. Our will to choose may be messy, it may contradict itself, it may be ponderous and take time to unfold, but it is there. Indeed, it is precisely the time that it takes our choices to manifest inside a context that makes our choices meaningful. Rapid choices which are instantly fulfilled run against our nature. Rapid choice, like rapid change, eventually exhausts all possibilities and leads to a stagnation from which nothing good might be salvaged.

IV) What happens in this nightmare scenario of too many choices, too many entrances, all of them leading nowhere? What happens when we have infinite expectation, no boundaries, no real communities? We are living it.

It is known as Consumerism, although this is a euphemism for materialistic nihilism. Obsession with commodities, rampant and endless desiring, with no meaning even within oneself. This mindless hedonism is divorced from any narratives, it is atomizing, separating, and fundamentally unrewarding. It is fleeting, empty, unattached, and nothing sticks inside the soul. It is the bad form of individualism, an unhealthy individualism where the individual is defined by what they can have and not what they are, a mark so staining that it makes all individualisms seem wretched. Taken to extremes it destroys all connection to the past and all concern for the future, all meaning divorced from its context. The worse it gets the more powerful it becomes; this goallessness is what keeps the wheels of consumerism turning; it thrives on the void inside us and spins an illusion of symbolic rewards to account for it. It is the destroyer of narratives, the generator of irreverence, whose war-cry is “I don't care about anything but my own little buzz”.

It is a negative form of nihilism, where all paths lead nowhere, and there is not even a personal notion of truth. If we say that free will needs to be utterly free to be called free, then we are paradoxically left with the destroyer of freedom.

V) True freedom, therefore, requires a narrative, individual self-discipline, patient cultivation, a rock to push against, harmony with nature, a community to belong to, a great but not infinite variety, a little wildness, a cause to fight for, a truth to seek, a foundation to stand upon, and, of course, a lot of philosophical thinking.

Selim 'Selim' Talat

Six Points Against Determinism

I) It is unthinkable to me that a living being can be compelled to move by something outside of itself. Influenced, certainly. Threatened, certainly. But utterly dominated to the extent that it is no longer separate from that which would control it? This is surely impossible. Each conscious living being has its own inner-world. Each living being experiences the world in a way that is shared, but nonetheless unique to it. We are all intertwined, undoubtedly. But we are not all One.

We cannot say, therefore, that it is possible for any outside influence to dominate us; to make us act in a way that was unavoidable, or absolute. Any environment allows us some element of choice. To succeed in any environment requires us to meet it half way. The work is never done for you. Even in the most perfect conditions imaginable, you will still need to be driven into action from within yourself.

If we generated an economic and political system which was fairer (and less stupid) than our current grotesque chimera, we would still see some people meeting life half way and others not doing so. We must always include the 'chance-element' of individual human will.

We should strive to understand the influences which shape our character, and we should try to evolve society into a more equal and moral body. But this does not mean that we can engineer away all of the toxins of Man through a mere system change. Many are the social and material determinists who would say otherwise.

II) Deterministic theories are often used to take away responsibility from certain groups in society. The consequences of such thought might lead to the most supreme elitism: we have the ability to decide our own destiny, they do not. Are we not then granting certain generalized sections of society a free pass to be self-pitying and self-hating? By offering people the chance to fail and deny responsibility, are we not cultivating failure?

By maintaining a system which steals away responsibility from anyone (particularly the poor) we are justifying the woeful institutions which sustain their conditions. By reducing and simplifying the experiences of such groups we are not only lazy thinkers, we are allowing the lazy 'solution' to triumph: “They cannot look after themselves, so they must spend their lives on welfare. See, we are doing our part by considering them!” (Middle Class Liberal 1A, The Book of General Middle Class Liberalisms). Yet we must surely have realized by now the psychic and spiritual poverty which can exist regardless of our material conditions.

Even if welfare pay-outs were to the tune of a million pounds a week I would oppose them, for they would not be able to fulfil the need to feel useful and personally responsible for one's own actions - two necessary conditions for flourishing esteem. They would still deflate and flatten the human spirit!

For a person to be governed from above is insult enough. For a person to be grateful for a subsistence wage is equally upsetting. But for a person to be forced to suckle from the teet of a faceless institution, where grown adults are treated like school-children, is the greatest of insults. And an insult against one individual is an insult against individualism itself, for true individualism must be a universal principle to be just. This is why we must consider the suckling State to be a debilitator, preventing the growth of any empowering consciousness by drip feeding us just enough to survive.

III) “If only I had been born into better conditions; a better school, a better house, with better parents. I too could have been a parasitic Chief Executive of a parasitic corporation.” If this sentence sounds familiar to you, then you are surely in the minority! Advocates of determinism will speak of the most 'successful' members in a society and use them as examples of how economic and social factors shape our chances to succeed. These same advocates of determinism are often, without speaking too generally, of an egalitarian stripe, and are trying to convince us all that our position in society is determined, and that 'success' can therefore be engineered.

Yet surely it makes more sense, if one is an egalitarian, to see the so-called winners in the capitalist system as the ultimate losers - people who were too callous or unimaginative for anything more than accumulation of power and material wealth; the basest and lowest desires available to us. Far from being privileged and enviable, the so-called Great Man or Woman is a soulless slave to their own desires, one who despoils other people's chances for their own twisted ideals of self-worth; one who sees no value outside of monetary gain; the most pitiable and empty creature imaginable, one whom I struggle to call a complete human or feel even the remotest love for.

The fact that there are people from privileged backgrounds who rally against such privilege, the late Tony Benn being a prime example, indicates that we can never remove the individual's reaction to their surroundings from the equation; we can always reject our surroundings once we are mature enough to do so. As much as we are influenced by our surroundings so too can we influence them in turn.

To be successful is not to be a parasite or a dictator or a slavering monster. To be successful is to be just, to be fair, to be creative and to love liberty for all. These virtues of character are available to anyone, and as such any determinist who claims that success is out of the hands of each individual ought to re-examine their own criteria.

IV) Deterministic predictions can be useful in a broad sense. ”If there is an increase in unemployment, an increase in robbery will follow.” This is useful to know, especially if you are in a position of political power. Although it does not mean that the increase in robbery is due to the actions of people being determined by their social and material conditions, only that they are choosing a new means to fulfill their basic needs (there is after all, the percentage of newly unemployed in the example who did not turn to robbery). Our choices may be limited by circumstance, this is a sad and unjust truth, but there are always choices to be made.

Furthermore, these kinds of predictions often assume that the values people have absorbed, or chosen, are some kind of fundamental law of reality. An increase in robbery will follow an increase in unemployment if and only if the people within a society accept the values of that society (i.e. acquisition of material wealth, work ethic, shame and praise, and so forth). I highly doubt a group of newly enlightened zen buddhists would turn to robbery if they faced unemployment!

Deterministic predictions are not so useful in a narrower sense. The nearer we close in on an individual's character, the harder it becomes to make any form of predictions. To introduce a scientific analogy, gravity seems all well and good when you are dropping a hat onto a table, but examine it at a quantum level and it becomes harder, if not impossible, to predict the motion of its infinitesmal components. The more complex the prediction, the less likely it is to be fulfilled. The vaguer and broader the prediction, the more likely it is to be fulfilled. This could put the determinist on the same par as a tabloid horoscope if they are not too careful!

V) Genius! Genius is not predictable. Of necessity, it 'transcends' (or rather just pushes out) the boundaries. Genius indicates that the world is not static, and not entirely predictable. It is in flux, and sometimes it allows an out-and-out genius to flourish and benefit us all. How many men and women of genius will emerge in the next fifty years? What will they bring to the narrative of humanity? Who knows!

VI) To close, let us consider a (possibly) utopian scenario. We can imagine a state where everyone is free to act so long as they do not harm the liberty of another, recognising that liberty springs from society, and society requires equality. In this truly free state, can it be said that anyone's actions are determined by their environment, social and material conditions?

Selim 'Selim' Talat

Reflections on Free Will

This article is motivated by some comments I read on a philosophy post. It seems everybody believes in free will. Has nobody ever read Schopenhauer’s essay on free will? It is a very important question because the belief in free will does have some very perverse effects. But how can the belief in free will have any perverse consequences?

First of all what is it we call free will? Basically, the capacity for one individual to make decisions freely, so that each decision, lets say: “Should I turn left, or right?”, could have been equally one or the other. I decided to turn left freely, but could have decided also to turn right, there is nothing that has made me turn left. The belief in free will is the unbelief of any kind of destiny that you wouldn’t be able to escape from. And because we are so fond of freedom, most of us believe free will exists.

Maybe free will got so popular because it was the negation of the inevitable destiny that many religions exposed as the only truth, leaving man with no hope to escape a difficult life, it was your destiny, you could just accept it. Christianity developed a crumb of comfort: the hope of a better existence in death… But even within the Christian church the question of free will was present because if it didn’t exist it meant that man couldn’t be taken responsible for his bad actions. And the religions of the book quite like to make you feel guilty, it is their best stock-in-trade.

So, apart from having read Schopenhauer’s essay, in which he demonstrates that free will isn’t free, I experienced life, and for as much as I look into it there hasn’t been anything close to free will. I find particularly representative of his essay (and of my experience) a short sentence he wrote: “Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants”.

But after all who cares? Everybody should believe what they want! How can that particular belief in free will have a negative effect?

So now let’s just consider what precisely motivates this article: the example of domestic violence. Haven’t you ever heard someone say that they didn’t understand why a person stayed in a visibly toxic relationship? Because there is no reason a human would freely choose to live in hell, is there? Would you?

In the most recent researches on trauma consequences, namely PTSD and Complex PTSD, what comes to light is that it conditions one’s future choices in life, one’s reaction to different life stimuli. Even neuroscience seems to point out against any possible free will as Donald Hebb theorised in his book: The Organisation of Behaviour: a Neuropsychological Theory.

So here is one of the perverse effects of believing in free will: free will implies that a person living in a toxic relationship chooses to do so, and they do, but was that choice free? Or was it a choice conditioned by past experiences?

And when people judge another based on this belief in free will, they turn a victim into a willing accomplice, when that person was just following the path that their past created. Sometimes a conjecture of events makes it possible for someone to untie the bonds that kept them in the hell they were. And sometimes there is no such conjecture. Does that make one better than the other?

Free will is just another of those nice ideas that people who have had an easier path like to sustain, because it flatters their ego to believe that they made good choices in life. It is perverse because it compromises the idea that we were all born equal, because it prevents a more empathic society. We are what our life made us, and we should be at least empathic with the people that have had a different path.

Alice S. Dransfield

Further reading – A Schopenhauer essay: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/human/chapter3.html