alas and Haus almost make it seem like we have no free will in our choices....
I don't think we have nearly as much free will as we've been trained to believe, and, as this (restricted) New York Times article suggests, many scientists suspect this is true as well.
Here's a longish couple of snippets since that link prolly won't work for you:
A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.
As a result, physicists, neuroscientists and computer scientists have joined the heirs of Plato and Aristotle in arguing about what free will is, whether we have it, and if not, why we ever thought we did in the first place. . . .
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, ''Free will does exist, but it's a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.
''The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don't have it,'' he said....
and
In the 1970s, Benjamin Libet, a physiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, wired up the brains of volunteers to an electroencephalogram and told the volunteers to make random motions, like pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he noted the time on a clock.
Dr. Libet found that brain signals associated with these actions occurred half a second before the subject was conscious of deciding to make them.
The order of brain activities seemed to be perception of motion, and then decision, rather than the other way around.
In short, the conscious brain was only playing catch-up to what the unconscious brain was already doing. The decision to act was an illusion, the monkey making up a story about what the tiger had already done.
Dr. Libet's results have been reproduced again and again over the years, along with other experiments that suggest that people can be easily fooled when it comes to assuming ownership of their actions. . . .
But most of the action is going on beneath the surface. Indeed, the conscious mind is often a drag on many activities. Too much thinking can give a golfer the yips. Drivers perform better on automatic pilot. Fiction writers report writing in a kind of trance in which they simply take dictation from the voices and characters in their head, a grace that is, alas, rarely if ever granted nonfiction writers.
and, in conclusion,
So what about Hitler?
The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility. According to those who believe that free will and determinism are incompatible, Dr. Silberstein said in an e-mail message, it would mean that ''people are no more responsible for their actions than asteroids or planets.'' Anything would go.
Dr. Wegner of Harvard said: ''We worry that explaining evil condones it. We have to maintain our outrage at Hitler. But wouldn't it be nice to have a theory of evil in advance that could keep him from coming to power?''
He added, ''A system a bit more focused on helping people change rather than paying them back for what they've done might be a good thing.''
Dr. Wegner said he thought that exposing free will as an illusion would have little effect on people's lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most of them would remain in denial.
''It's an illusion, but it's a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,'' he said, comparing it to a magician's trick that has been seen again and again. ''Even though you know it's a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don't go away.''
In an essay about free will in 1999, Dr. Libet wound up quoting the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once said in an interview with the Paris Review, ''The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.''
Which is pretty much where I fall: of course you and I have some limited choices. But don't exaggerate your freedom, be aware of your limitations, and then Make Your Actions fucking count! And when someone suggests that maybe you're not in as much control over your own decisions as you'd like to believe, pause and think: they're probably right. And if they're saying sexism and racism might be at work behind your actions, don't look at them like they're being ridiculous. Of course you're not going to be fully consciously aware of sexism and racism in your unconscious, shaping your decisions. None of us are aware of our unconscious. But we can become more aware, and we can be more skeptical of ourselves and the stories we tell ourselves about our selves.
I'm suggesting that readers of McCarthy, too, should be skeptical--of him and of themselves. |
