Determined, page 36
Someone named Bruce Stephan survived both the collapse of the San Francisco Bay Bridge during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the days they were bombed, yet lived another sixty-five years. On the other hand, Pete Best was dropped as the Beatles’ drummer a few weeks before they had their first hit, and Ron Wayne, who was one of the three cofounders of Apple Computer, didn’t enjoy working with Steve and Woz (to show my Silicon Valley bro-ness), and quit after a few weeks. Meanwhile, there’s Joe Grisamore, world record holder for having a mohawk that towers three feet above his head.
What does it mean that the universe converged on those two mothers giving advice to their children? Or that Stephan and Yamaguchi were lucky, Best and Wayne were arguably not, and Grisamore lives in Minnesota? What does it mean that the doctor who will someday tell you how many months you have left is currently standing in front of an open refrigerator eating cold pad thai noodles? And that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck got back together, while Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon never did? Most fundamentally, what does it mean that you can look at two five-year-olds and accurately predict which of the two will be elderly from diseases of despair by age fifty and which will be an eighty-year-old having a hip replacement in time for ski season?[1]
What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.
A whole field of psychology explores terror management theory, trying to make sense of the hodgepodge of coping mechanisms we resort to when facing the inevitability and unpredictability of death. As we know, those responses cover the range of humans at our best and worst—becoming closer to your intimates, identifying more with your cultural values (whether humanitarian or fascist in nature), making the world a better place, deciding to live well as the best revenge. And by now, in our age of existential crisis, the terror we feel when shadowed by death has a kid sibling in our terror when shadowed by meaninglessness. Shadowed by our being biological machines wobbling on top of turtles that go all the way down. We are not captains of our ships; our ships never had captains.[2]
Fuck. That really blows.
Which I think helps explain a pattern. One compatibilist philosopher after another reassuringly proclaims their belief in material, deterministic modernity . . . yet somehow, there is still room for free will. As might be kinda clear by now, I think that this doesn’t work (see chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . .). I suspect that most of them know this as well. When you read between the lines, or sometimes even the lines themselves in their writing, a lot of these compatibilists are actually saying that there has to be free will because it would be a total downer otherwise, doing contortions to make an emotional stance seem like an intellectual one. Humans “descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known,” said the wife of an Anglican bishop in 1860, when told about Darwin’s novel theory of evolution.[*] One hundred fifty-six years later, Stephen Cave titled a much-discussed June 2016 article in The Atlantic “There’s No Such Thing as Free Will . . . but We’re Better Off Believing in It Anyway.”[*]
He just might be right. Chapter 2 discussed a study in which a sense of “illusory will” could be induced in people. One subgroup of subjects, however, was resistant to this—individuals with clinical depression. Depression is often framed as a sufferer having a cognitively distorted sense of “learned helplessness,” where the reality of some loss in the past becomes mistakenly perceived as an inevitable future. In this study, though, it was not that depressed individuals were cognitively distorted, underestimating their actual control. Instead they were accurate compared with everyone else’s overestimates. Findings like these support the view that in some circumstances, depressed individuals are not distortive but are “sadder but wiser.” As such, depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality.
And thus, perhaps, “we’re better off believing in it anyway.” Truth doesn’t always set you free; truth, mental health, and well-being have a complex relationship, something explored in an extensive literature on the psychology of stress. Expose a test subject to a series of unpredictable shocks, and she will activate a stress response. If you warn her ten seconds before each shock that it is coming, the stress response is lessened, as truth girds predictability, giving time to prepare a coping response. Give a warning one second before each shock, and there’s too little time for an effect. But give a warning one minute before and the stress response is worsened, as that minute stretches into feeling a year’s worth of anticipatory dread. Thus, truthful predictive information can lessen, worsen, or have no effect on psychological stress, depending on the circumstances.[3]
Researchers have explored another facet of our complex relationship with truth. If someone’s actions have produced a mildly adverse outcome, truthfully emphasizing the control he had—“Think how much worse things could have been, good thing you had control”—blunts his stress response. But if someone’s actions have produced a disastrous outcome, untruthfully emphasizing the opposite—“No one could have stopped the car in time, the way that child darted out”—can be deeply humane.
The truth can even be life-threatening. Someone teetering on the edge of death in an ER, 90 percent of their body covered in third-degree burns, gathers their strength to ask in a whisper whether the rest of their family is okay. And most medical professionals would be mighty torn about telling the person the shattering truth. As some evolutionary biologists have pointed out, the only way humans have survived amid being able to understand truths about life is by having evolved a robust capacity for self-deception.[*] And this certainly includes a belief in free will.[4]
Despite that, I obviously think that we should face the music about our uncaptained ships. This, of course, has some substantial downsides.
What You’d Give Up Along with Free Will
The most immediate area of distress is consistently the running-amok challenge, returning to chapter 11. For Gilberto Gomes, “[rejection of the idea of free will] leaves us with an incomprehensible picture of the human world, since there is no responsibility or moral obligation in it. If one could not have done otherwise, it cannot be the case that one ought to have done otherwise.” Michael Gazzaniga recoils from rejecting free will and responsibility because “[people] have to be held accountable for their actions—their participation. Without that rule, nothing works” (and where the only thing that might constrain behavior is people not wanting to hang out with you if you run amok in particularly unwelcome ways). According to Daniel Dennett, if there were no belief in free will, “there would be no rights, no recourse to authority to protect against fraud, theft, rape, murder. In short, no morality. . . . Do you really want to return humanity to [the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas] Hobbes’s state of nature where life is nasty, brutish and short?”[5]
Dennett bad-mouths neuroscientists along these lines by frequently telling his parable of “the nefarious neurosurgeon.” The surgeon does some procedure on a patient. Afterward—because, hey, why not?—she lies to him, claiming that during surgery, she also implanted a chip in his brain that robs him of free will, that she and her fellow scientists now control him. Unburdened by a sense of being responsible for his actions anymore, unconstrained by norms of trust that make for the social contract, the man becomes a criminal. That’s what neuroscientists do, concludes Dennett, in “nefariously” and “irresponsibly” lying to people about how they have no free will. Thus, along with the terrors of mortality and of meaninglessness, there’s the terror that there’s a nasty, brutish, short murderer standing behind you in line at Starbucks.
As we’ve seen, rejection of free will doesn’t doom you to break bad, not if you’ve been educated about the roots of where our behavior comes from. Trouble is, that requires education. And even that doesn’t guarantee a good, moral outcome. After all, most Americans have been educated to believe in free will and have reflected on how this produces responsibility for our actions. And most have also been taught to believe in a moralizing god, guaranteeing that your actions have consequences. And yet our rates of violence are unmatched in the West. We’re doing plenty of running amok as it is. Maybe we should call this one a draw and, based on the sorts of findings reviewed in chapter 11, conclude at least that rejection of free will is unlikely to make things worse.
Rejecting free will has an additional downside. If there’s no free will, you don’t deserve praise for your accomplishments, you haven’t earned or are entitled to anything. Dennett feels this—not only will the streets be overrun with rapists and murderers if we junk free will, but in addition, “no one would deserve to receive the prize they competed for in good faith and won.” Oh, that worry, that your prizes will feel empty. In my experience, it’s going to be plenty hard to convince people that a remorseless murderer doesn’t deserve blame. But that’s going to be dwarfed by the difficulty of convincing people that they themselves don’t deserve to be praised if they’ve helped that old woman cross the street.[*] That problem with rejecting free will seems legit, if rarefied; we’ll return to this.[6]
For me, the biggest problem with accepting that there’s no free will takes the nefarious-neurosurgeon parable down a different path. The surgery is done, and the surgeon lies to the patient about no longer having free will. And rather than falling into mundane criminality, the patient falls into profound malaise, an enervation because of the pointlessness. In the short story “What’s Expected of Us,” Ted Chiang takes a cue from Libet, writing about a gizmo called the Predictor, with a button and a light. Whenever you press the button, the light goes on a second before. No matter what you do, no matter how much you try not to think about pressing the button, strategize to sneak up on it, the light comes on a second before you press the button. In the moment between the light coming on and your supposedly freely choosing to press the button, your future action is already a determined past. The result? People are hollowed out. “Some people, realizing that their choices don’t matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the Scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action. Eventually, a third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma.”[7]
It’s that yawning chasm where, amid “This happened because of what came before, which happened because of what came before that . . . ,” there’s no place for meaning or purpose. Which haunts philosophers, along with the rest of us. Ryan Lake of Clemson University writes that rejecting belief in free will would make sincere regret or apology impossible, robbing us of “an essential component of our relationships with others.” Peter Tse writes, “I find [a leading incompatibilist’s] denial of moral responsibility a profoundly nihilistic view of human beings, their choices, and life in general.” Philosopher Robert Bishop of Wheaton College, in dissecting Dennett’s thinking, concludes that “he believes that the consoling perspective he offers is the only way for any of us to maintain a healthy, affirmative, outlook on life and remain meaningfully engaged in it.” Life lived “as if,” viewed through free will–colored glasses.[8]
This one looms over us. Evolution, chaos, emergence, have taken the most unexpected turns in us, producing biological machines that can know our machine-ness, and whose emotional responses to that knowledge feel real. Are real. Pain is painful. Happiness makes life frabjous. I try to ruthlessly hold myself to the implications of all this turtling, and sometimes I even succeed. But there is one tiny foothold of illogic that I can’t overcome for even a millisecond, to my intellectual shame and personal gratitude. It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something “good” can happen to a machine. Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.
* * *
• • •
Despite these various downsides, I think that it is essential that we face our lack of free will. It may look now like we’re heading for a major anticlimax for this book, one that is about as appealing as subsisting on locusts: “This is how the world works; suck it up.” Sure, if you have a burn patient on the edge of death, probably hold off on telling them that their family didn’t survive. But otherwise, it’s usually good to go with the truth, especially about free will—faith can sustain, but nothing devastates as surely as the discovery that your deeply held faith has been misplaced all along. We claim we’re rational beings, so go and prove it. Deal.
But “Toughen up, there’s no free will” isn’t remotely the point.
Maybe you’re deflated by the realization that part of your success in life is due to the fact that your face has appealing features. Or that your praiseworthy self-discipline has much to do with how your cortex was constructed when you were a fetus. That someone loves you because of, say, how their oxytocin receptors work. That you and the other machines don’t have meaning.
If these generate a malaise in you, it means one thing that trumps everything else—you are one of the lucky ones. You are privileged enough to have success in life that was not of your own doing, and to cloak yourself with myths of freely willed choices. Heck, it probably means that you’ve both found love and have clean running water. That your town wasn’t once a prosperous place where people manufactured things but is now filled with shuttered factories and no jobs, that you didn’t grow up in the sort of neighborhood where it was nearly impossible to “Just Say No” to drugs because there were so few healthy things to say yes to, that your mother wasn’t working three jobs and barely making the rent when she was pregnant with you, that a pounding on the door isn’t from ICE. That when you encounter a stranger, their insula and amygdala don’t activate because you belong to an out-group. That when you are truly in need, you’re not ignored.
If you are among these lucky very, very few, the ultimate implications of this book don’t concern you.[*]
A Liberatory Science (without Tongue in Cheek)
A Case Study
In the process of working on this book, I spoke to a number of people who were involved in advocacy for people suffering from obesity. One told me about when she first learned about the hormone leptin.[*],[9]
As background, leptin is the poster child of the “It’s a biological disease, not a measure of your lack of self-discipline” insight, regulating fat storage throughout the body and, most significant, telling your hypothalamus when you’ve eaten enough. Abnormally low levels of leptin signaling[*] produce an abnormally low capacity for feeling satiated, resulting in severe obesity, beginning in childhood. This individual turned out to carry a leptin mutation; inspection of a family picture album suggested that it had been there for generations.
Mutation puts us in the world of medical exotica. Regular ol’ unmutated leptin and its receptor genes come in various flavors, differing in the efficiency with which they function. Same for the literally hundreds of other genes implicated in regulating body mass index (BMI). Of course, environment also plays a major role. Just to home in on one of our familiar outposts, the womb, your lifelong propensity toward obesity is influenced by whether you were undernourished as a fetus, whether your pregnant mother smoked, drank, or took illicit drugs, even by the gut bacteria she transferred to your fetal gut.[*] Some of the precise genes that would have been epigenetically modified in your fetal pancreas and fat cells have even been identified. And as usual, different versions of genes interact differently with different environments. One gene variant increases obesity risk, but only when coupled with your mother having smoked during pregnancy. The impact of a variant of another gene is stronger in urban dwellers than in rural. Some variants increase the risk of obesity depending on your gender, race, or ethnicity, depending on whether you exercise (in other words, a genetics of why exercise melts away fat in some people but not others), depending on the specifics of your diet, whether you drink, and so on. On a larger scale, be of low socioeconomic status, or live in a place where you’re surrounded by inequality (on the levels of countries, states, and cities), and the same diet is more likely to make you obese.[10]
Collectively, these genes and gene/environment interactions regulate every nook and cranny of biology, are relevant to everything from the avidity with which a newborn nurses to why two adults with the same elevated BMI have different risks of adult-onset diabetes.
Let’s look again at that table from chapter 4:
“Biological stuff”
Do you have grit?
Having destructive sexual urges
Do you resist acting upon them?
Being a natural marathoner
Do you fight through the pain?
Not being all that bright
Do you triumph by studying extra hard?
Having a proclivity toward alcoholism
Do you order ginger ale instead?
Having a beautiful face
Do you resist concluding that you’re entitled to people being nice to you because of it?
