These days the boffins think that we’re just passengers in this life. They’ve looked at the way our brains organise responses to our environments, and they think that all our actions are predetermined. It is either the environment itself that chooses how and why we make decisions, or our choices are made by our subconscious before we even know that a decision has been made.
It’s a confusing line of argument, because feeling like we make our on choices is fundamental to who we are and how we find comfort in our existence. It says that, surely if life is already predetermined then the roll of the dice is enough to guide me? I’ve learned to be sceptical about all that. Even if fate is merely providing succour by appearing to grant me choice, then the appearance of choice is in itself an instrument helping unfold the future as it decends upon us.
This is because we are each of us the stone in a river of time. Our lives flow towards us, and over us, and we each experience the sensation of being alive, of recording the past as it becomes real.
So let’s say the boffins are correct. It is fated at the genetic level how each moment will fall upon me. If that is the case, then none of my decisions are my own. And knowing the past is therefore all the more important. We are then a backward-looking species, one confined to a knowledge of what has gone, and awaiting what will become.
But I’m not convinced. There is truth in the idea that we are backward-looking. The know-ability of the past does define our actions, but the assumption that we can each make choices to influence our futures, or to alter the course of the flow of time, is fundamental to our self-awareness, and our conceptualisation of the present. Knowing the past is a way to better understand how the future is approaching, because it provides the clear indications where the high-water marks are, and the rise and fall of the events that can end, or alter, our existence.
Our mere existence in time is enough to alter the course of the flow, as I shall deomonstrate. Though we might not have influence over every small choice we are offered, and we might not have all the free will some philosophers might have assumed we do, we are each actors in the great unfolding of the universe’s knowledge. Each of us a small, chaotic actor in a collossal drama.
7 July, 2008 at 10:24 am
I don’t think that there’s many significant boffins that believe that we are just passengers.
Have you read Daniel Dennett? Freedom Evolves is very good -
http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Evolves-Daniel-C-Dennett/dp/0142003840/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215382074&sr=1-5
There’s a lot about how we make, the process by which we make, decisions which is determined – our brain has evolved in certain ways, the past environment has played a major role in that and the present one provides our present context.
But one thing that the brain is designed to cope with is the unexpected – we do get to choose since in an unpredictable world we have no option but to choose.
But does that mean we have “free will”? Not necessarily.
It’s a fact that we have a psychology that is the product of evolution and that many of our decisions are made before we are conscious of them, you can’t just argue that you are “unconvinced”. Any theory of free will has to come to terms with these facts.
But read Dennett – he covers all of your points with far more lucidity than I can.
You talk about one sort of knowledge of the past – conscious awareness of past events – but there’s another very important knowledge of the past – how our evolution has built our brain – our brain structure is the physical memory of all the successes our ancestors had in making decisions.
9 July, 2008 at 8:53 am
I was thinking this could be framed in terms of your pathways analogy.
We navigate the landscape of our social environment via pathways that have been worn by our ancestors going back a few million years. But those pathways are chemical and so we’re often not aware of them.
Someone like Foucault might characterise them as “ruts”, although he was of the opinion that they’ve been constructed – socially – by only recent generations and mainly by those with power.
9 July, 2008 at 12:15 pm
i think this is where the ‘water’ metaphor keeps coming in. water wears a path that can be altered, but not comprehensively.
in travelling upstream on a river we subtly change it’s course in a chaotic way. the small motions of the paddles making tiny alterations to the overall flow, and effecting the flow of the river as whole.
12 July, 2008 at 1:07 am
Significant boffin who thinks we are just passengers: Galen Strawson.
Not that I am really with him. I am with you in thinking that the belief in free will is fundamental to our self-awareness, our being. I also think Paul Ricoeur’s (startlingly simple) observation that everything we experience happens in the present is significant, in much the same way as you observe our sense of the past to be essential to our concept of the present.