Free Will

Ah, the great debate. Do we have it? Or is it an illusion? This excellent teaching company course asks that question and leaves you to fill in your own answer. Well, opinion. And maybe even that's too strong a word. For the record though, here's mine.

I think the very idea of free will hangs on the 'preceding' idea of an 'I' which has the will to be free (or not) in the first place. In other words, it is a property (or not) of the 'I': Do 'I' have 'free will'. Here's what I think it's like: we can ask whether a car has a manual or automatic gearbox. But there isn't a car. In what sense can we talk about its gearbox?

I think (therefore...?) and have often said here, that this 'I' is illusory. Therefore free will must be illusory too. Extending a better metaphor by Douglas Hofstadter (he tells of the time he tried to take out a wedge of old envelopes from a box in his drawer, and could swear he felt a marble nestled among them. It turned out that the uncanny appearance of a marble was produced by the extra layers around the envelopes' V. Ultimately, he proposes, our self is an emergent appearance of this sort. In fact, it is the most real emergent object in our inner world) - it would be like asking what colour our marble was.

All that being said, I have something else to say. If our 'I's' and their properties are illusory, what do real 'I's' look like*? What does real free will look like? What I am trying to get at is, how can something be called an illusion if there is no real thing that it is deceiving us about? Can you imagine being more of an 'I'? Neither can...I. Neither can I imagine feeling more free than this (I raise my arm. Just because I wanted to). I don't think that's a failing of my imagination. Really, what would it mean to have more of these things, or to have them, if this isn't that? How would they differ, objectively and subjectively?

Can someone show me, or prove to me that there is, a further, real reality where real people really decide to eat real apples? Failing that, I think you may as well say 'This is all we know. It's all real. We really decide to eat real apples'. OK? Imagine being Mario in a Nintendo game. Is a 1up real? Yes! It is as real as you are! And what else do you know? What can you compare your universe with? Of course, poor Mario is not really real, not really free, but who would be in the privileged position to show us this? Until such a time as that standpoint is shown to exist, I think that we can, or may as well, define a self-contained universe and the contents of that universe, all of which obey the laws of that universe, as being real in the eyes of its beholders, as real as they feel themselves to be, as real as they feel themselves free to feel. The rabbit hole stops here. Which is to say, there isn't one. And if there was, or if one is required in your imagination for these things to really exist, then how long could this rabbit hole turn out to be? The Matrix is another Matrix? Ad infinitum.

So what have I said, yes it's an illusion, but it being an illusion is probably an illusion? Hell yeah.

*What is Hofstadter's 'real' marble when the doppleganger is the 'I'?

Rick Roderick

Ah, the myth is something like this: “There are billions and billions of stars. The Earth’s is a tiny one. We crawl across it for a few seconds, and then we individually are gone, and billions and billions of eons of time before, and billions afterwards pass, and the earth eventually goes out like a cinder, and perhaps the whole universe collapses into itself. And after all that has happened, absolutely nothing will have been done.”

Now, that’s a very important myth, many of us believe that one too. But against that background, it becomes difficult as we chip away at our daily little lives… selling shoes, selling tyres, teaching class… to try to find any damn thing that means anything...

In kindergarten, the way we, sort of, discipline our kids… they do their rose and it’s really red and they stay in the lines they get a happy face, you know. If he gets a little out of the lines, they just, sort of… straight face. If they really just draw all over the thing and chaotic Nietzschean wildness: they get a sad face. They don’t turn in the work at all; they don’t get a face: no face.

And I noticed as you go throughout school that this same topography of discipline continues. In elite universities we still go “A”, and the fact that we substituted a happy face for that letter doesn’t mean the message is different. In other words...socialisation; power has already instructed that that “A” is a happy face. And you get an A, and you see a happy face: “A”; happy face. “B”, and guess what you get? “C”…

...the rest of your whole stinking life you are going to be looking for a happy face from someone, you know. Eight years in the law firm and you are looking at all the old lawyers that forgot all the law they knew twenty years ago, and you are waiting for one of those S.O.B’s or whatever to give you another happy face.

Well the challenge of Nietzsche – the sort of left Nietzsche that I want to evoke – is to at least be aware of these intersties of power. To at least be aware of them, and be willing to challenge their boundaries, because it is not a pretty life to always be in search of a happy face, and it is not for your own good...

And you may go “Oh no, they give us choice!” Well, we all know what the array is and how infinite it is. It’s like choosing green beans at the grocery store. How many kinds do they have? Say you want canned green beans. I am a throw back, I like canned green beans. I don’t like those ones you put in a little plastic pouch, I want the canned ones. And I get a choice. There are like… twenty kinds. I have tried a lot of them. I open them and they are all just really bad green beans. They are green and they are beans, and they are this long, they have the same amount of water. And I have chosen, that’s true I have chosen, and I want that freedom to choose, and I will fight and die for that freedom to choose the green bean of my choice. But what I don’t have is the choice to select that autonomous radical project that Nietzsche put at the centre of his writing and at the centre of his attempt at self creation. That’s the choice I don’t have.

I feel sometimes as though I am plugged into a giant computer that will take every command I give it except the one that I want the most. The command that the damn machine blow itself up. It will do anything else I say. I type in “food”, and out comes food. I type in “I want to give this talk in Washington”, comes out. Type this in, comes out… But the one command I want is the command for the damn thing to just go “boom!”, and all the little transistors just to go...

Here I will call to your mind a scene from Blade Runner, where before the replicant dies, he slams his hand on a nail (and many of you may not know this), but when Batty does that in the film, it’s a reference to an action that Sartre has a character perform in “Roads to Freedom”. In “Roads to Freedom”, the Sartre character slams his hand onto a nail to prove that he is free. Because he chose to do it. It hurt like hell, but he chose it. I put my hand on that nail, and that shows I am free, because just as a calculus of deterministic pleasure I would never have done it. It’s a philosophical demonstration… a painful and stupid one in my opinion… but by the time we get to Blade Runner, the replicant slams his hand onto a nail just to feel anything. Just to feel anything. So don’t worry about the communists or the capitalists. Fight to live and feel anything.

A treasure trove of amazingness.

Junior Elvis

Junior Elvis are back in the building, with a new sound and loads of new songs. Brian, Phil, Craig and myself played our first gig at The Tavern and I hope it won't be our last. In my, always honest, opinion the new songs are the finest we've done, and the - for the moment - drummer-less line-up does them the best justice. I give you, for example, our finest song (again, IMAHO) -

Screwdriver played by Bri and Phil - and

Screwdriver from the Tavern gig (roughly bootlegged) - and

Screwdriver

I'm 61

I'm moving on

All I need is one more go

All I need is something to hold on to

All I need is a window

All I need's a room

Had my eye out

And I found this typewriter

It only needs a spool

It only needs a spool

Just need to get inside of this

Just need to get a screwdriver that fits

____

Q&A

Someone at work sent a few 'questions' around, so I thought I'd put my own comments -'answers'? (too strong a word) - against these. I give you the link to 'top questions for those who believe in the theory of evolution'. Should I give the link to anyone else?