The Leaf

Once upon a time there was a leaf on a tree.

One fine day, the leaf became conscious and started to ask questions about itself and the meaning of life. It enjoyed the experience of being alive.

But here’s something you probably didn’t know about leaves – they can only see the colour green. So the leaf couldn’t see the branch it was attached to, or the main trunk of the tree. It thought it was just floating in the air, independent and free.

After a while, the novelty of being a leaf wore off and the leaf, who was on a lower branch of the tree, looked up and saw there were leaves that were higher up in the air, where they got more sunlight and had a better view of the world.

“I want to be where those leaves are”, the leaf thought to itself. It spoke to some other young leaves who told it that if it just wanted it badly enough, and was prepared to work for it, a leaf could move anywhere it wanted to. After all, those leaves somehow got up there, so why not us? We are just as deserving.

So the young leaf decided to work hard to improve its circumstances. It would focus all of its energy on moving higher up in the air. Now, sometimes, when it focused hard, the leaf could feel itself moving and thought it was succeeding. It didn’t understand that the movement was the result of the wind blowing. But other times when it focused hard, the wind didn’t blow, and the leaf was frustrated with its lack of progress. After a while, the leaf got depressed.

“Life’s not fair,” it would think. “I suck at being a leaf. I’m a bad, stupid, unworthy leaf. I don’t believe in myself enough. Nobody will ever love me.”

One day, it got talking to another, older, wiser leaf.

“You seem happy,” said the young leaf to the wise, old leaf. “What is your secret?”

“The secret, young leaf, is to know that you are connected to all other leaves by a tree,” said the wise leaf. “In fact, you ARE the tree.”

“What is this tree you speak of?” Asked the young leaf.

“It’s the invisible framework that connects us all and gives us life” said the wise leaf.

“But how do I get to be one of those higher leaves?” asked the young leaf.

“You are ALL of the leaves,” replied the wise leaf. “You are the entire tree. You are just one node of consciousness in the entire tree of life.”

“I understand that you are probably right in theory,” said the young leaf, “but how does that help me? How can I be happy?”

“Accept that you are the tree and enjoy the experience of also being a leaf,” said the wise leaf. “It won’t last forever.”

“But I can think fro myself,” said the young leaf. “Surely that means I am free to do whatever I choose.”

“Thinking and choosing are just chemical events generated by the tree,” said the wise leaf. “Like photosynthesis. Do you think you are free to photosynthesize?”

“No, but I’m not aware of the photosynthesis,” said the young leaf. “It just happens.”

“Exactly,” said the wise leaf. “You are aware of your thinking, so you think you are in control of it. But it’s really the same process as the photosynthesis. Both are just chemical events happening to the tree. Accept you are the tree, and everything will become clear and life will be simple, free from stress and anxiety.”

But the young leaf couldn’t see the tree, so it refused to accept what the wise leaf said. Leafs, like people, can only hear when they are ready to hear.

“If I accept what you’re saying, I would be miserable,” said the young leaf. “That would mean I’m stuck being a lower leaf. It seems like a defeatist, fatalist philosophy.”

“On the contrary,” replied the wise leaf. “Acceptance of the reality of things is the only path to permanent happiness and peace. Fighting against reality is a certain path to misery.”

But the young leaf was too caught up in its desire to be special, so instead of accepting the truth of the tree, it tried to escape its misery by drinking and binging Netflix, took up obsessively going to the gym, read a lot of books about having a positive mental attitude, eventually becoming angry at itself and bitter at the world, until it finally withered away and died and was replaced with a new leaf.

The tree smiled as the new leaf became conscious and started to ask questions of the other leaves.

Copernicus, Free Will and You

Whenever I get into a conversation with someone about free will for the first time, they will usually end up saying something like this: “But I experience the world as if I have free will.”

They are, of course, wrong. They experience the world exactly the same as someone who doesn’t believe in free will (like, for example, me).

We both experience the same thing. What is different is the way we interpret what we experience.

Here’s a good analogy.

One thousand years ago, if you asked most people about the relationship between the Earth and the Sun, they would have told you that it was obvious: the Sun revolves around the Earth. If you tried to tell them that, in fact, the opposite was true, they would have laughed in your face.

“But I experience the Sun revolving around the Earth! It’s obvious that the Earth isn’t moving because we can’t feel it moving. We don’t experience it moving. But we look up into the sky and we can experience the Sun moving around the Earth. You dumbass.”

Of course, what they were actually experiencing was the Earth revolving around the Sun. They had the exact same experience as Copernicus when he published “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” in 1543. What was different was how they interpreted that experience.

So it is with free will. We all experience the same thing. We walk around, decisions are made; actions are taken.

The difference is that some of us interpret those things as “the laws of physics”. And some of us interpret those things as “free will”. Same experience – incorrect interpretation.

The same is true with our relationship to the universe. Most people imagine themselves as being somehow separate from the rest of the world – in it but not of it, independent from it. Again – same experience, incorrect interpretation.

There is only the universe. It’s just one thing. One construct. We are not in the universe – we are the universe.

The atoms that you’re made of are the universe. The universe isn’t some kind of blank canvas that you’ve been painted on. The universe is both the canvas and the paint. The universe is the sum total of all of the matter and the energy and the anti-matter and everything else. It cannot be divided into universe and non-universe.

Most of the atoms that make up your body today were something else 20 years ago. And they will be something else 20 years from now. They continue. The universe continues. You are those atoms. There is nothing else.

You can only be the universe. Nothing else makes sense.

Suicide, Free Will & A Monster

RIP Chris Cornell. I’m seeing a lot of posts on Facebook about suicide awareness today and I’m wondering if suicide hotlines work. If your brain is in a state where you’re seriously contemplating suicide (as opposed to just feeling down with remote thoughts of suicidal ideation), are you likely, in that state, to call a hotline? Does anyone have solid data? According to this article in Scientific American, “it is essential to recognize that most suicides are driven by a flash flood of strong emotions, not rational, philosophical thoughts in which the pros and cons are evaluated critically.”

This article quotes extensively from psychologist Roy Baumeister, who according to Wikipedia is now based at the University of Queensland. Baumeister simultaneously claims that “disbelief in free will can lead people to act in ways that are harmful to themselves and society” and yet “feelings of worthlessness, shame, guilt, inadequacy, or feeling exposed, humiliated and rejected” lead to suicide. In my experience, when you stop believing in free will, those “feelings of worthlessness, shame, guilt, inadequacy, or feeling exposed, humiliated” disappear. Where there is no free will, there can’t be any shame or guilt or inadequacy. Your actions are determined by physics, beyond “your” control. Even if your brain chemistry is going haywire for some reason, once the underlying neural structures have changed so fundamentally don’t believe in free will, it seems unlikely to me that any of those feelings can arise (beyond momentarily popping up before being negated).

In other news – Roger Ailes died. Not suicide, perhaps surprisingly after the year he’s had. I tend to agree with Matt Taibbi that Ailes was “one of the worst Americans ever”:

He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America’s vicious and bloodthirsty character.

We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we’re that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.

Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate.

And, of course, he played an enormous role in making Trump President. But as I keep saying (and I’ve been saying it since Bush) – Trump isn’t the problem, he’s only a symptom of the problem. I suspect that focusing on removing Trump is missing the point.

Spurious Article Defending Free Will

I read this article by Terry Eagleton in The Guardian tonight and it was so lame that I had to write a rebuttal. My commentary is in **bold.

Freedom Regained by Julian Baggini review – the question of free will

Two or three centuries ago, most of the common people of Europe believed in God, while a small bunch of intellectuals were convinced this was a delusion. For some of these scholars, however, it was a delusion of a mightily convenient kind. Religious faith played a key role in maintaining social order, and so was not to be brutally exposed as bogus. The truth can be wantonly destructive, and not everyone is tough-minded enough to take it. Voltaire was famously anxious about the effects of his own religious scepticism on his domestic servants. Plenty of Victorian agnostics clambered into a pew in the belief that behaving as though there was a God would keep society on the rails. As Friedrich Nietzsche was among the first to recognise, an increasingly secular civilisation had killed God off; but it had disowned its act of deicide and pretended he was still alive.
There is a similar doublethink in our own time, but it is now freedom, not God, which is at stake. Rarely has the idea of freedom been so popular in practice and so disdained in theory. Almost everyone assumes that they are free, except for a small band of neuroscientists and geneticists for whom neural firings or inherited genes lie at the root of everything we do, including our sentimental attachment to the myth of free will.
**Ah no, actually. There are a lot of non-scientists who don’t believe in free will, myself included. We have just spent enough time examining the way our minds work and studying science and have become convinced that free will is indeed an illusion. 
For them, as Julian Baggini remarks in this excellent book, “consciousness is just the noise made by the firing of neurons”. Like the closet atheists of Victorian England, however, these people continue to choose from menus, vote Lib Dem or select posh schools for their children, for all the world as though they were possessed of the very liberty they deny.
**This is a common misconception and reveals that the author hasn’t thought very deeply about the subject. Denying free will does not mean we deny that brains make choices. All we mean is that we fully accept that the choices our brains make are 100% governed by the laws of chemistry and physics and there is no “ghost in the machine” that is magically subverting these laws. Our brains works like every single other part of our anatomy – chemistry. 
For them, social existence is one enormous fiction, in which we suspend our theoretical disbelief in free will and pitch in with the deluded, freedom-loving masses for the sake of a quiet life.
**Again, the author’s attempt at sarcasm belies his lack of thought about the subject. Life without a belief in free will isn’t an “enormous fiction”. Life goes on, decisions are made – we are just aware that every decision is the result of natural processes occurring in the brain. 
Yet some of the versions of freedom these scientists throw out are not worth having in the first place. No reputable philosopher for a very long time has taught that when we decide to put the cat out, we make something called a conscious act of will a millisecond before we rise from our armchairs. To say that I downed the glass of Scotch freely is to say that nobody was holding a gun to my head. It is to describe a situation, not report on an inner experience.
**This may be true for the author but it certainly isn’t true for most people I have discussed free will with over the last 20 years. They absolutely believe that they are consciously in control over whether or not they put the cat out or down the Scotch. 
Free will in this sense is most certainly a myth, and one, as Baggini points out, that was scarcely known to the thinkers of antiquity. He might have added that for a medieval thinker such as Thomas Aquinas, the will is a matter of love and desire, not of steel-hard determination.

Equally vacuous is the idea that freedom consists in a total absence of constraint, as in the callow postmodern cult of “options” (the future, one postmodern thinker excitedly remarked, will be just like the present, only with more options). On this theory, the individual confronts a range of possibilities with complete freedom to decide among them. The only problem with this, as Baggini argues, is that such an individual would not be a human subject at all. We decide what to do on the basis of our values, beliefs, temperament, conditioning, predilections and the like – which is to say that it is we who decide, not some blank space. To be entirely free of such constraints would mean that you had no basis at all on which to choose.

What, however, if our beliefs and desires lead us to act in a way that feels inevitable? Can we still be free if we could not have acted otherwise? Baggini is surely right to claim that we can. In fact, most of the things that matter – being in love, composing a superb sonata, detesting Piers Morgan, feeling horrified by the slave trade – have a smack of inner necessity about them, as this book argues in a perceptive chapter on art. What define the self most deeply are the sort of commitments from which we could not walk away even if we tried. The point, however, is that we don’t want to. Freedom from such engagements would be no freedom at all. True liberty lies in being able to realise such a self, not shuck it off.
**So if I understand the author correctly, true freedom lies in accepting the fact that our decisions are inevitable? If that’s what he’s saying, and he extends that to all of his decisions, then I’m in total agreement. I suspect, however, that this isn’t what he means. He seems to mean that only some of our decisions are inevitable – others are within our control. 
Most critics of free will assume too readily that it draws on a disreputable idea of human autonomy. To be free is to be absolved from all determining influences – to be self-generating, self-dependent and absolutely self-responsible. This is not so much a philosophical theory as American ideology. A belief in absolute responsibility is one reason why so many Americans languish on death row. The truth is that without an enormous amount of dependency – on our parents, culture, language, nature and so on – we could never achieve the mildest degree of independence. Freedom is not a question of being released from the forces that shape us, but a matter of what we make of them. The world, however, is now divided down the middle between off-the-wall libertarians who deny the reality of such forces, and full-blooded determinists such as the US convict Stephen Mobley, who 20 years ago tried to avoid execution for the murder of a pizza store manager by claiming that it was the result of a mutation in his monoamine oxidase A gene. It wasn’t the smartest way to appeal to a jury of citizens likely to endorse Oprah Winfrey’s view that “we’re responsible for everything that happens to us”.
** We certainly don’t argue that the absence of free will is based on whether or not you are influenced by your culture. It’s obvious that our brains all respond to inputs from our environment. Our argument for the non-existence of free is based on basic chemistry – something I note that the author hasn’t bothered to mention at all in this article so far. 
Men and women aren’t authors of themselves, as a character in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus remarks of its proud protagonist, but neither are they slaves of their genes. When Richard Dawkins describes human beings as “survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”, his language is redolent of neoliberal capitalism as well as the scientist’s laboratory. To see people in this demeaning way is simply the flipside of the idealising talk of pure autonomy. If the former captures something of the bleak reality of the marketplace, the latter belongs to the heady rhetoric that helps to legitimate it.
** The author is one of those people who are content to criticise a theory purely by being sarcastic and not by providing counter evidence. Why is Dawkins’ statement that we are programmed by our genes from demeaning? It sounds to me reminiscent of the Catholic arguments against Galileo from centuries ago. Arguing against a scientific premise purely by saying you find it “demeaning” is meaningless. 
Some neuroscientists imagine they have dispatched the idea of freedom to the outer darkness by mapping the unconscious processes underlying our conscious decisions. If they were not so allergic to Freud, who speaks of unconscious intentions, they might recognise that this is as much stale news as many another supposedly novel insight. Anyway, as this book asks, why should free choices be exclusively conscious ones? A great many factors conspire to shape our decisions, some rational and some emotional, some cultural and some temperamental, some conscious and some not.
** Why should free choices be conscious ones? Simply because the operating definition that most people have of free will is the ability to consciously choose and control their thoughts, decisions and actions. If your decisions and actions are governed by subconscious processes, then you aren’t in control of them – they are determined by chemistry and physics. 
A lot of neuroscience seeks to reduce decisions to behaviour in the brain. But we act according to reasons as well as neurological causes, and reasons are a question of meaning, which in turn involves the inescapably creative business of interpretation. No doubt this is one reason why meaning isn’t exactly a hot topic in the laboratories these days. The primary model of human creativity is language, which, like art, dismantles the distinction between freedom and necessity. Grammars constrain what it is possible for us to say, but they also generate utterances that can’t simply be read off from them. Language isn’t productive because of some transcendent principle or ghost in the linguistic machine that overrides its constraints. On the contrary, a certain self-surpassing is built into the system itself.
** “We act according to reasons as well as neurological causes”. I assume the author believes that reasons are process by some part of the body other than the neurones in the brain? If not, then they are neurological causes. Everything your brain does is neurological – every idea, every thing you learn by experience, or reading a book, or something someone says to you in a class room – it’s all captured and encoded as neurones. 
For most people, Freedom Regained will seem like a kind of Maginot line, defending a territory that is not under attack. This, however, is because the new enemies of freedom are not much evident in everyday life. They are mild-mannered, soft-spoken men and women in senior common rooms, not wild-eyed dictators raving through public address systems. Among its other virtues, the book reveals how many of these soft-spoken types engage in one of the oldest of all debating devices: setting up a straw man of the concept under fire so as the more conveniently to bowl it over. It is just what Dawkins does with God.
** I don’t think critics of free will are setting up a straw man – in fact, it’s the other way around. Authors like Eagleton and Baggini are misrepresenting (and, I suspect, misunderstanding) our criticism of free will. And the fact that his last sentence is another out-of-the-blue attack on Dawkins and, it seems, a defence of the existence of God, says all we need to know about Terry Eagleton’s biases. He may be an esteemed literary theorist, but he’s out of his depth on this subject.