Will Out of Mind
This essay was published in Medium
Why do you do what you do? It’s an inquiry as intricate, and unknowable, as why something and not nothing.
My daughter is 4 and increasingly attuned to her own sense of motivation. She has articulable opinions. But most often she crashes hard against the void behind her actions.
“I’m soorrr-eeee!” she screams when I ask why she purposefully dumped a full glass of milk this morning onto the cat.
And, “It was an ak-cident, okay?”
And, “Damn it,” she says. In that order.
I’m 36 years older, and I empathize. I wonder all the time, Why the hell did I just do that? Really, what was I thinking?
Free will as the basic condition of faith in the Abrahamic religions, also why we go to prison
In monotheism, all problems are a problem of choice—exemplified by temptation and posed between the fruits of two trees: life or knowledge.
Choice animates creation to do something it’s not otherwise commanded to do, thereby circumventing the emptiness of omnipotence. The ability to choose to do one thing over another bestows the individual with unique value (soul, spirit, the ineffability of consciousness) that doubles back on the Creator. Free will grants consequence and substance to our submission before God through the operation of faith.
Imagine if Adam or Eve had been automatically obedient in the Garden. Where’s the challenge in that? No victory without challenge and no glory without victory. Ask any rabbi, preacher, or imam—God’s glory is a key takeaway.
But it’s not just God. The ability to choose means we can be held accountable for our actions before the courts. Agency (the freedom of the will to choose) is sine qua non to accountability. Without accountability, punishment is deprived of justice.
Agency is the vital assumption to the logic of a game we’ve been playing since Genesis. Which hasn’t, however, kept us from arguing about the nature of its existence.
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Debates about the degree we “freely choose” speak to the heart of our legal and social structures. The debates also mark an evolution in compassion and intelligence. An evolution that has seen us through the drowning of women on charges of witchery and elevated the field of psychiatry from lobotomies to SRIs.
Whether you’re agnostic on the matter of free will or a true believer, the biological and philosophical shroud surrounding agency (where it begins, where it ends) obfuscates any agreement about its veracity, make no mention of its scale.
Moving ever more firmly into the age of automation and big data, the primordial stew that gives cause to human actions is as viscous as when Abraham was a boy. Or, as neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky puts it in his new book Behave, “the behaviors that interest us [are], in all cases, multifactorial” (602).
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Multifactorial. My daughter can tell you all about it.
Volume multiplied dimensionally and squared by a large, unknown quantity of intersectional layers in the wild hive of any given situation just about sums up the complexity of why she “chose” to dump a glass of milk on the cat.
This level of complexity is especially challenging because it complicates the fundamental logic of our most fundamental game. Free will, that “terrible human need,” provides ready explanation to some pretty terrible stuff—isolating the moral damage of, say, murder and rape to the uniqueness of a person’s character, a corruption of soul.
By attributing the intent or origin of an action to an “independent operator” (in neurological terms this is dubiously referred to as the homunculus, “the little man inside the brain”), we bypass the mess of context—nutritional deficiencies, environmental poisons, mental illnesses, the quality of love you received as a child, or some combination thereof—in clean swiftness to judicial outcomes.
Because what else are we supposed to do?
There’s milk everywhere, the cat is drenched and dripping, my daughter isn’t even dressed for school, and I’m late for work. Is my impulse to forgive a minor and/or temporary imbalance in her biochemistry or pause to recall the fact that she’s 4?
Nope.
I punish. I yell. I throw a fucking temper tantrum. And when I do, when I unleash fury and shame onto my daughter, I feel (at least for a moment) what Sapolsky describes as “a deep, atavistic pleasure.” He continues:
“Put people in brain scanners, given them scenarios of norm violations. Decision making about culpability for the violation correlates with activity in the cognitive dlPFC. But decision making about appropriate punishment activates the emotional vmPFC along with the amygdala and insula; the more activation, the more punishment. The decision to punish, the passionate motivation to do so, is a frothy limbic state. As are the consequences of punishing — when subjects punish someone for making a lousy offer in an economic game, there’s activation of dopaminergic reward systems. Punishment that feels just feels good” (609–10).
Justice exacts a price on the most direct perpetrator, my daughter whose will chose to dump a glass of milk on the cat.
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As human history has matured, circumstance has been given more of a due—but not a lot. Generally, we agree that prosecuting a person’s circumstance is a crummy thing to do. Except that’s exactly what we do all the time. How to explain the median annual income of prisoners in the U.S. prior to incarceration: $20,000 for men, $14,000 for women.
Either poor people are intrinsically driven to criminality, or there’s something more contextual going on. Yet the criminal justice system, an extrapolation of our dopaminergic reward system, holds the one whose will chose to act at its epistemological core.
Agency is to justice as meritocracy is to capitalism as free will is to the God of Abraham.
The choice of complexity, or how to be a better parent
Profiles of the the Alt-Right following the violence in Charlottesville on the weekend of August 12, 2017, reveal this subset of Americans that doesn’t really bother with economics.
After reading Spolsky, I wasn’t surprised. Why trouble with the complexities of structural forces like economics when the panacea to societal ills is the erection of an ethnostate? The reduction of every problem to a problem of “otherness” does away with a lot of difficult context that’s hard to explicate and even harder to negotiate.
Doing a little reduction of my own, I can’t parse any real difference between the Alt-Right’s worldview today and how “people with epilepsy [in the 1400s] were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer” (610) or how your odds of ending up in a U.S. prison are correlated with the amount of money you have in a U.S. bank.
If you believe I’m an asshole for losing it on my 4-year old for dumping milk on the cat, you’d be right. But then you’d also have to fault the way we’ve been fueling our collective sense of justice over the millennia. It’s not just, and our brains aren’t helping.
If you’re persuaded (some people aren’t) by experts in neurology, Spolsky’s Behave makes quick work of the one whose will chooses. Analogous to religion, “the man in the brain” is a useful myth that gives sense to the senseless and simplistic prescriptions to impossible problems.
With this in mind, Spolsky argues that “what must be abolished are the views the punishment can be deserved and that punishing can be virtuous” (611). Which, Spolsky, admits will be tough.
“When contemplating the challenge … it is important to remember that some, many, maybe even most of the people who were prosecuting epileptics in the fifteenth century were no different than us—sincere, cautious, and ethical, concerned about the serious problems threatening their society, hoping to bequeath their children to a safer world. Just operating with an unrecognizably different mindset. The psychological distance from them to us is vast, separated by the yawning chasm that was the discovery of ‘It’s not her, it’s her disease.’ Having crossed that divide, the distance we now need to go is far shorter—it merely consists of taking the same insight and being willing to see its valid extension in whatever directions science takes us (611).”
When we bemoan science or technology or globalization or having children in a country where both parents have to work to pay the mortgage, we’re cursing the complications and complexities of our time.
Beneath these curses is a fanciful wish of a return to a simpler, imaginary life.
The challenge is for us to choose what is already ours to live. Multifactorial complexity is the intractable truth of our reality.
And like the parent I struggle and fail to be everyday, our charge is to intelligently (and compassionately) navigate the milk that’s been spilled on the floor.
“I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters — when we judge others harshly (613).”
Nobody said growing up would be easy.