Tuesday, March 13, 2012

On Choice

And so my students, in general think of themselves as radically free-willed individuals. They make choices. They do shit. And they are right, up to a point. The problem is an extension of my last post - our American ideology and even down to the grammatical structure of our language suggest a subject spewing his will all over the object world.

But the world fights back. Reality has its own structure - now you're part of reality, obviously, but you don't control the structure of the world; however, you do contribute, alter, play with, and do all kinds of other things to help that structure be a structure.

So what tends to happen, as I see it, is that things that appear as choices have pull, have a sort of ontologic and even theologic magnetism. For example, I could choose to not use the internet tomorrow, but I would constantly feel it working on me, trying to seduce me. And like most people, I actually don't have the choice, unless I don't want to be capitalistically viable, to not get online. I teach - I check email. I fucking hate email, but I must check it and respond to it, no matter how poorly written it is. On the plus side, student emails are often a good source of interpretative practice in making meaning - or making mean, which is what I seem to be doing now.

Point being - you aren't in control. You are always-already responding. However, you have some control. You can usually choose a more or less meaningful response. I mean sometimes you're just sort of screwed - if the cop asks me why I was speeding - I don't have much room for meaningful response. I think the correct answer is something like "I'm sorry - I'm dying - I'm on my period (which I doubt would work for me, though in a transgendered, hyper-politically correct world, who knows), I am in need of evacuation and so forth. But usually, one has choices, in fact, usually one has too many choices.

But this in itself is still part of the system. If I'm hungry I have lots of choices; however, I don't have choices that aren't there. If I want fastfood I'm in luck in my town; if I want Thai food I'm not. So the choices are always-already limited by the environment.

The point is pretty simple - you aren't in control and neither is the "world." What you are involved in is a constantly evolving negotiation of possibilities.

Okay why does this really matter? Well I am thinking of this in terms of the larger framework of Global Capitalism and something occurred to me in the reading and thinking about Don Delillo's amazingly smart novel Cosmopolis: sometimes the very notion of free-will turns back on itself in weird and violent ways.

In America we are constantly taught an ideology of autonomy. You are you - I am me - and we are not connected unless we choose to be. (Sounds like a bad nursery rhyme) So if this is the ideology that's being manifested it means that outliers - Occupy (Wall Street and so forth) people (who I always pulled for) and extremists like the Unibomber (who I didn't pull for, but will say he's more interesting than most terrorists - not sure that's worthy of an award though) actually contribute to the ideology of choice, which creates the idea that we have a functioning democratic system. "How can you say people don't have power - look at all those protesters?" But those protesters, since they don't have the resources to radically change the global, end up reinforcing the system they are so very mad it. And to be clear - I want them to keep it up, but strategy is more important than ever.

Finally, just to be appropriately recursive: did I have a choice to write this? Yes. Sure. I could have not written it. However, did I feel compelled? Yes. Am I responding to the world? Yes. Perhaps the most appropriate term is neither free-will or determinism, but rather the old, wonderful religious term: vocation. Vocation means that the world calls and you choose to respond. But it's not one choice among many - the choice is to "become who you are" or nihilism. Perhaps not that drastic - but perhaps THAT drastic.

Oh - and nothing is behind anything - that one is still coming in full, and partially implied here.

2 comments:

  1. I'm a determinist for a very specific and personal reason. I studied artificial intelligence in college and someday I want to make a machine more intelligent, creative and passionate than myself. So, I have to believe we don't really have anything special that enables us to break free from the material confines of the physical world.

    But it sure feels like I have choice. I came up with a bizarre theory in order to justify my cognitive dissonance (believing in determinism yet continuing to act as though I had free will) My philosophy professor failed it because it sucked. But I continue to like it and cling to it like most people do with failed, unprovable ideologies.

    Anyway, it basically separates existence into deterministic and non-deterministic layers of abstraction.

    At the atomic layer you have quantum probability where nothing is defined until you measure it. I don't really understand it, but I believe it because of the Feynman experiment. That seems undeniably non-deterministic.

    Then at a higher level of abstraction you've got your standard Newtonian physical world where tables are hard and if you bump into them with your knee it will always hurt. That level seems to me to be pretty deterministic and that's where I hope to create my sentient machines.

    Then you've got human cognition which while part of the Newtonian physical world seems to have something extra that really makes it seem like everything isn't pre-determined. This is where my argument fell apart. I resorted to criticizing philosophy which isn't well appreciated in philosophy circles. I basically said that the search for ultimate truth is useless if the fundamental nature of the lowest level of existence is non-deterministic. All truth is simply aggregate probability that sums almost to one (but never quite.) If there's no such thing as truth, then we should focus on what works.

    In other words, test whatever can be tested using the scientific method. Anything you can't test/prove, just believe whatever makes you the most happy/functional/good person. And if you're having trouble figuring that out, test that. =P With my belief in that philosophy pretty much ended my belief in philosophy.

    What works for me is believing I have free will because the alternative is pretty shitty and no one does it anyway. Another way of putting it is that if you can't act as though something is true, what's the point in believing it?

    So I cling to my cognitive dissonance and believe that humans are just simple newtonian meat machines and yet act as though I'm in control of every decision because it makes me happy. And everyone lives happily ever after until my sentient robots get a taste for human flesh.

    To relate this back to your blog, I think the illusion of control is itself an illusion. You can do whatever you want. You just don't want to do what you can (often with good reason.) The prison of our will is constructed from the predicted outcomes of our potential actions. Since humans are actually terrible at predicting outcomes, we make shoddy prisons and then fail to see the gaps between the bars. Such is life.

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  2. Actually I realized I didn't address your main point. I love the idea that we are more subject to the universe than the universe is subject to us. Our personal narrative is plot driven, not character driven. I like the idea of vocation as well.

    But I do think that insofar as we make choices, they are often unnecessarily constrained by weak predictive power and a commitment to arbitrary conventions. That's another belief I don't really act on. But I wish I did.

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