THE OPPOSITE OF FREE WILL

June 4th, 2019

This episode was inspired by reading Annaka Harris’ book ‘Conscious’. You can find a link to her book at the bottom of this post.

The debate that surrounds free will is often an unproductive quagmire.

One problem with this debate is that it’s often approached as a binary topic.  Do we or don’t we have free will? 

The phrasing of the question here is perhaps the first problem regarding the debate.  Even worse, in such debates, it’s never thoroughly discussed what is left over if free will doesn’t exist.  Surely something must exist, some sort of consciousness at the very least.

Without free will, the default assumption seems to be a kind of zombie existence (to reference David Chalmers’ philosophical thought experiment).  When we think of a zombie, we think of some sort of robotic being with simple drives that lacks a greater awareness of what it’s really doing and why.  Many other entities, however, seem to fit into this description but which on further reflection seem to be more aware than we realize.  For example, it’s been shown that trees care for their young in complex ways via underground root systems and through a symbiotic relationship with fungi networks, and if this doesn’t imply some sort of awareness, we can certainly highlight the Venus Flytrap which is quite clearly aware of an insect that lands in it’s ‘mouth’.

That word may in fact be on the other side of the free-will debate: awareness.  Even if we are to take the stance that free will does not exist, that certainly doesn’t imply anything about awareness.  Anyone who can reflect on the fact that they are experiencing something has awareness.  Even a tree without a brain can be aware of all sorts of things. 

However, is a tree aware of the planet Mars?  or the Andromeda Galaxy?  It’s hard to think that any tree in the history of trees has ever been aware of these things in the way humans are.

This reveals a gradient of awareness that is separate from free-will, and perhaps, we can think about the free-will problem on a spectrum where one end is simply unattainable.  Free will is that unattainable end of the spectrum and at the other end of the spectrum is the least amount of awareness possible.  The easiest example might be something like a rock, or a chair… though, that does mean these things are not aware.  We need only wonder if any of the carbon making up the chair was once a part of Cleopatra’s amygdala.  That possibility is certainly quite real, and if it was the case, does that mean that at one point in the time part of the chair was more aware?  We can think of a deceased person.   Such a body was certainly more aware while living, presumably.

So perhaps the question of free will is a red herring: an unproductive question that fuels merry-go-round debates and discussions.  Perhaps the harder, and more fruitful question is: can an increased awareness approach free will like an asymptote: forever getting closer but never actually making the jump.

How might this work?  Well, it seems that our brain hands us a slightly delayed version of reality, we are continually experiencing everything with a lag.  We are in essence living in the past, however incredibly recent.  We essentially experience what happened.  We are taking in the results of prior conditions.  What happens to our reactions to such conditions relative to different levels of awareness?

The more sensitive or aware we are to what is going on, or what has just happened, the more thoughtful we can be about our plans, actions and behaviors for the future.  Someone who lacks awareness is clearly bound to make the same mistakes over and over.  But someone who is paying more attention more acutely is more likely to pick up on the key factors that can ensure that such mistakes don’t happen again, or at least happen less often in the future.  This does not necessarily imply free will, but it’s certainly a welcomed improvement from a total lack of awareness.

The opposite of free will need not imply that we are zombies, but perhaps that we exist on a spectrum of awareness.  And even if we concede that free will is a bit at odds with scientific determinism, we can still strive to increase our awareness and therefore precipitate a greater possibility of a better future by being more in tune with the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

This episode was inspired by Annaka Harris’ book ‘Conscious’.  You can order your copy by clicking on the book below:

NOT SUCCESSFUL

June 3rd, 2019

A virtue of language is that there are many ways to say the same thing.  Though these different ways might in essence communicate the same thing, each way imparts a different flavor that can greatly alter the way a message lands.

Doctors are phenomenal in this regard.  When talking about test results, doctors don’t say “You’re healthy,” they say “Your test results were negative.”  Imagine for a moment a teacher in high school saying this to a student. . .

An area where this strange flip-flop nature of language’s flavor can benefit us is failure.

How shall we say it?

I failed?

How can ‘I failed’ be rephrased with a different, better flavor without losing the meaning of the message.

Perhaps we can say:

I did not succeed.

This means the exact same thing as I failed and yet it imparts a wholly different flavor.

One leaves it more open-ended, the other is a conclusion.  This later way that frames failure in terms of success is also phrasing the situation with a positive word.  We hear the word ‘success’, which is inherently positive. To help us wonder what sort of effect this flavor has, we can test it immediately in this way:

don’t think of a pink elephant. 

What do you think of? 

A true absence is impossible to think of, so even though there was no success, there is a ghost of the idea, and more importantly there is an absence of a far more negative way of phrasing the same exact thing: we do not hear the word ‘failed’.

Any effort to achieve something positive is inherently a success over inaction, so even if our efforts do not produce our imagined result, there is still something tiny to celebrate – the fact that we tried.  This tiny positive kernel can perhaps be very important during a time when we have to reorganize our idea of how things work, since our efforts didn’t work out the way we imagined.

Language is full of small subtle hacks like this.  Another one is explored in Episode 100 regarding the word ‘yet’.

Such small flavors might seem innocuous or too small to be concerned about, but we need only think of actual flavor, of foods, and how often the smallest subtle addition can suddenly bring a meal to life.  That secret ingredient as the mythical meal always has.  

We must also remember the phenomenon of compounding interest.  Small changes, repeated over and over, add up in ways that go far beyond our intuition.

Who can tell just how much radical good might bloom from phrasing our language in more virtuous ways.

This episode references Episode 100: Yet, a Way Out of the Box

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: CONCRETE BUTTERFLY

June 2nd, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Charles.

Lucilius was called upon to pay a visit to a troubled young man, who had been cursed with an indelible sadness, resigning himself to his room for months.  To the young man’s parents the boy was sick, but none of their feeble help seemed to do anything.  And so after exhausting their efforts they asked if Lucilius might help.  Lucilius told them he wasn’t sure he could be of any help, but that he would meet with the boy.

“You are here to cure me?” The boy said with exhausted scorn, without hope nor pleasure.

“I don’t claim to cure anything.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m not sure yet.  Hopefully to do no harm, and with luck, maybe be some help, but the truth being, I know nothing of the hell within you.”

“Then you know about as much as I do.  I don’t know why I am this way.”

“Is it important to know why?” Lucilius asked.

“If I knew why, then I could fix it, like anything else that is broken.  If you know how it is broken then you know why it doesn’t work, and with that you can begin to fix things.  But I don’t know why, or how.  I just am this way.”

“You assume something is broken.”

“Of course, other people don’t feel this way.”

“Different does not necessarily mean broken.”  Lucilius said.

The boy looked hard at Lucilius.  “Well I feel broken.”

“On the contrary, someone who can withstand the burden of such heavy things must be strong.”

The boy’s hard stare was unchanged, unmoved, perhaps sadder still at the mention of a word and feeling that felt so far away.  He merely looked back to a corner of the room where there seemed to be refuge.  Lucilius looked around the room and saw in the bright split between dark curtain and the edge of a window, a moth slowly flapping its wings on the sill, exhausted and trapped.

“May I open a window a little?” Lucilius asked.  The boy only shrugged his shoulders, so, Lucilius got up and cracked the window.  The small breeze made the moth’s wings tremble a little, and it lifted on the fresh air and fluttered out into the sky.  Lucilius watched it a moment, thinking.

“In a valley between mountains, there was a colony of butterflies,” Lucilius began, “and among them was born a butterfly made of concrete.”

The young man looked over at Lucilius, confused and feeling for once in a long while: curiosity.

“The concrete butterfly emerged from his leathery cocoon and saw all around it butterflies quickly fluttering their delicate wings and lifting easily, gently into the air.  The concrete butterfly tried to do the same, flapping its rigid heavy wings, but he felt no lift.  The other butterflies soon noticed him, so different from all the rest.  And in their ignorance, they grew fearful, and they quelled that fear by making fun of the concrete butterfly.  Their careless loud remarks drifted down from the flickering crowd, and the concrete butterfly looked on his own body and understood their disgust, their hate.  He began to crawl away from the colony of butterflies and soon found a crack in the mountain’s side.  He crawled into the darkness and wept about himself.  And again the next day when he awoke and crawled outside, forgetting his heavy wings and heavy body, the other butterflies, seeing him flapping his wings as though he might fly laughed and jeered at him until he resigned himself back to his cave, where he wept again, but he stopped short with a strange thought.  The grass did not fly, nor the trees nor the flowers nor the pond nor the mountains.  Perhaps he wasn’t a butterfly, he wondered, and suddenly those other butterflies seemed now so different from himself.  But what was he, he wondered?  By this time, he was so tired, exhausted, he decided he didn’t care, and with that final thought he fell into a deep slumber.  From then on he only ventured out for the nectar of young flowers that were not far of the ground, one’s that he could bend down with his heavy arms and drink from, and always keeping far from the colony down in the valley.

He kept to himself in this way, until a fateful day when he woke and heard a crashing sound coming from the mouth of the cave.  He lifted his heavy body and lumbered toward the jagged shape of light that on this day was not bright, but dim and flashed with brilliant light with each crashing sound.  The concrete butterfly emerged to find a great storm raging through the valley, and in the torrent of rain and wind that seemed to rake the trees painfully of their leaves, the concrete butterfly realized that not all were leaves being shorn from the waving branches.  In the mess of the air, the colony of butterflies were helpless on their withered, wet and pelted wings, rolling dangerously in the chaos.

The concrete butterfly watched as the torrent slammed one butterfly from the colony into the rock face, crumpling it’s body, it’s wings in tatters.  In that moment of horror, the concrete butterfly felt something else, something he’d never felt before.  The wind edging beneath his folded wings.  Without thinking, he spread his wings, and the fierce wind caught them, and for the first time the concrete butterfly lifted high into the sky.  His strong, heavy wings balanced against the onslaught of wind and smoothed the pressure it brought like wide knives.  In that moment the concrete butterfly forgot about everything and felt for the first time the sheer pleasure of taking flight.  Intuitively, he started tilting his wings to the different crashing currents of wind, all the while rising higher and higher into the sky.  He felt instantly as though this was not some second-nature, but his first, and knew that he had been living a life in wait for this moment.  But he still had not fully realized just what his life had been in wait for.  The pleasure of that first flight calmed, just enough and he looked down, and saw again, now below him, the violence being done to the great colony of butterflies.  He heard their pain and sorrow as they screamed, helpless in the storm, and the concrete butterfly reacted without thinking:  He tilted himself forward and drew his wings in and dove down towards the colony with tremendous speed.

Just as his strong legs grasped another butterfly as it tumbled through the air, the concrete butterfly spread it’s wings and carried the other, swiftly riding the crazed wind until he was back at his cave.  The colony butterfly was terrified and confused at the sudden calmness of the cave and looked back just in time to see the concrete butterfly spreading it’s wings once more and lifting into the the storm. 

He worked tirelessly, using the great wind of the storm to save the colony from the storm, plucking each of them from the rolling wind and bringing them back to the cave, until the cave was full and the muddle of air and sky was clear of butterflies.  The last of them safely in the cave, the whole colony stared in fear and awe at the concrete butterfly.  He looked at them all once more, deciding that he only cared that they were safe.  Then he turned a lumbered back out of the cave.

The colony watched on as the concrete butterfly spread his wings and lifted into the storm, to play, on  great winds that they could not handle.”

The young man was staring at the floor.  He finally breathed in, deeply, as if to sigh.

“You’re saying some great difficulty - some kind of storm - is headed my way?”

“Maybe.  There’s no telling what might be around the corner for us.  But, it seems you can probably handle whatever comes your way.”

The young man let out a single, doubtful hiccup of laughter, “What makes you say that?” he asked.

“You are still here.”

COGNITIVE SLUMBER

June 1st, 2019

It’s easy to call people sheep, claim that no one thinks for themselves, and that we’re all mindless zombies – there’s plenty of evidence to point at that seems to prove this.  This cognitive slumber, however, is a bit of a paradox.  A small example to illustrate this is the widespread agreement we have about how rare common sense is.  Overlooking the obvious problem regarding the word ‘common’ here, we can ask if this view of other people is simply another example of the cognitive slumber we are trying to pin down.  Do people say that common sense is rare because it is, or simply because it’s common to hold this linguistically infuriating belief? 

In truth, the only thing that is common about common sense is the common belief everyone has that it’s rare.  [As an aside, this whole concept of common sense is easily rectified if we rephrase it as ‘good sense’ which is what everyone means when we talk about common sense.  This is just a linguistic aside, however, and the larger point works just as well, and perhaps even better if we spoke about good sense.]

Much of what we do falls within an analogy with an autopilot.  The formative moments when aspects of our identity came into being were almost never thoughtful, analyzed and weighted decisions.  These moments are forged primarily by the emotional drive of experience.  Nothing is better posed to lend credence to this than the language that surrounds trauma.  The very word is perhaps first and foremost a signal that a person is a certain way because of some awful experience.  We can ask: if a person was incapable of feeling emotion during the trauma, would the effects still carry over into the next day given no damage to the body?  The sensible guess feels like it would be…no.

Cognitive slumber is when the mind does not actively analyze and grade the quality of it’s person’s identity as evidenced by the behaviors and actions the mind sees this person doing.  Or to put it another way, cognitive slumber is when someone functions solely from an autopilot that was formed by whatever emotional experiences kneaded and molded it into that shape.

The end of cognitive slumber is really just a sweet piece of luck.  We cannot really predict the next thought we will have, nor the next sentence in the book we are currently reading, nor what some new acquaintance will say during a conversation.  We move through life compiling the emotional experiences of these unpredictable events, each one pushing new shape into the hardening clay of who we are. 

However, one of these experiences can pierce the mold, crack the identity, and invoke a kind of mindfulness, a circumspection that causes a person to wonder just how they are put together in order to produce the behavior they see themselves doing.

This may be why it’s nearly universally perceived as a good thing to get a wide breadth of experience, because this quantity and variety makes it more likely that we’ll come across an experience that cracks our basic emotion-forged identity, enabling our executive minds to take more active and productive control, and ultimately resulting in a better more thoughtful future.

This episode references Episode 44: Autopilot

QUALITY OF QUANTITY

May 31st, 2019

So goes the old saying: Quantity has a quality all its own.

This concept can manifest in a number of different ways.  Whether it be Ulysses S. Grant pushing towards victory with a higher quantity of soldiers, or a photographer who takes millions of pictures, quantity produces certain qualities that cannot be achieved reliably through any other means.

For Grant, the quality of quantity is simply being able to throw more weight on one side of the equation and keep it that way until the Civil War ended in his favor.

The quality of quantity created by the photographer, on the other hand, is more interesting and important.

Take enough pictures and one is bound to come out well.  While this may at first seem like a slap in the face to the art and practice of photography, it is nonetheless correct.  Given a random distribution of results from a varying application of an action, some of these results are bound to be good if not spectacular given a large enough pool of results to sample. 

Write a million words and there’s bound to be a few sentences that sparkle.  But the point here is that

it’s more likely there will be sparkling sentences in a million words as opposed to just a few thousand words.  The quantity that we produce as creators dictates how much imaginative territory we cover and this furthermore dictates how many chances and opportunities we have to come across real gems of creativity.

This is part of the logic behind Tinkered Thinking’s daily episodes.  While it’s silly think that all episodes would be great, it’s reasonable to operate with the assumption that more good episodes will inevitably arise in the process.

While a creator can toil away, trying to raise the quality of less work, the creator who invokes quantity before quality inevitably – with enough time - gets both, whereas the former creator who concentrates solely on quality without understanding the benefit of quantity is not even guaranteed one these two.

This concentration on quantity also helps when starting things.  Part of understanding the benefits of quantity is that much of it is going to be subpar, like sifting for gold, much of the material moved is just useless slag.  Understanding this decreases any pestering notions of perfection and quickly strips away any fantasies about achieving the ideal result right off the bat.  A creator who knows that a great deal of content is going to be produced can simply get to work instead of perseverating over the perfect way to start.