We feel only what is captured by our sense-organs and then by our internal emotional assessments of the condition of this one body and of the contentment of this one mind.
We are, at the lowest level, survival-machines with features accumulated across time over our lineage.
True, we can empathize with others, but that is a function of who brought us up, who we know, who we like, and it has cultural limits ranging from the subtle to the severe.
And that brings us to our next level.
For empathy is a trait of social animals towards their own and their like.
It does not exist between predator and prey or between solitary predators.
It exists between rival packs of social animals only when there is plenty, more than enough for all.
But that is a rare condition. Call it Utopia.
We are, at the second level, social apes, viscerally, emotionally aware that our strength and survival flows from the strength and survival of our social group.
And on our standing within that group. At this level, we care far more about how our views and ourselves are viewed by our peer group than about anything as abstract and otherworldly as truth or justice in their purest essences, pruned of every trace of partisanship.
Just think of the sincere repentance of many who have violated a law after they’re caught, after they’re convicted. The law hasn’t changed. What’s changed is their exposure before their social group, their loss of standing within the group.
Stronger together
Narrowly v. Broadly Determining Influences
The more direct the determining influence on our behavior, the more narrowly deterministic that influence is.
As determining influences grow less direct – at higher levels of organization built atop more basic levels – the less narrowly deterministic that influence is.
More broadly determining influences permit a wider range of means by which a particular functional structure or process can be performed.
The most directly causal and narrowly determining level of causes is physics, the study of how the simplest units of matter and energy (and their shady cousins, dark matter and dark energy) are determined by a few universal forces (4, at last count) and a dozen and a half fundamental physical constants.
Yet distinct levels of organized structures and processes build upon physics, adding their own features and own constraints to those that objects are already imbued with from physics. (Think of epigenetics, where environmental and behavioral factors change how genes work without altering the DNA; by analogy, higher level organizational constraints can alter outcomes at that level, e.g., how full an electron shell is of electrons determines some of the properties of elements.)
And the more complexly organized the structures and processes, the greater the range of means available to perform functions required by those structures or processes.
In short, complexity multiplies the alternative means available for achieving a functional end. Can you see where this is heading as regards choice and free will?
Take evolutionary biology. Survival for animals, both predator and prey, requires sensory sampling of their surroundings to find needed resources and escape dangers. A wide variety of sense-organs (in both the signals they register and the forms and sensitivities of the organs ass embodied in a species) have evolved to perform that function, several species arriving at similar solutions independently.
Less narrowly deterministic still are calculations of personal advantage (due to fixed habits, biases and miscalculations on the choice-limiting side and pioneering innovations on the choice-expanding side).
Less still calculations of group advantage, since these must reconcile multiple individual perspectives amidst factional maneuvering.
Less still calculations of what is right — that is, of how agents should act toward one another, setting personal and group advantages aside — since these must reconcile every voiced perspective compatible with moral agency, and do so against every entrenched or consciously emerging partisan interest.
This last kind of influence, actions guided by the golden rule — or its purebred equivalent, the categorical imperative — is the least narrowly determined of all, for its only influence is an internal voice challenging our right to pursue personal or group advantage to the disadvantage of others, with other moral agents and innocents receiving the greatest consideration.
That means bending away from nature, as determined by all our lower levels, all grasping the levers of action with more muscular hands than that sometimes isolated inner voice.
For ethics and morality are the least muscular influence on the levers of action, products of an always possible yet distant culture of best practices, seeking hegemony over instincts more deeply rooted in our natural origins, narrowly deterministic, self-centered and ethnocentric as they are.
The narrowest determination is that of a physical cause, the domain of the hard sciences, where the cause (or fixed combination of causes) so reliably predicts an effect that the effect follows invariably from the cause.
This makes possible a crucial cultural habit, the scientific method.
The scientific method is designed to produce such certainty, wherever its exacting conditions can be met. What cannot be channeled into a decisive experiment — that is, a controlled observable process that either forces a predicted result or unambiguously fails to do so — cannot be dealt with using the scientific method..
Level upon level, from the simple, durable and unchanging to the complex, transient and evolving
The Range and Scope of Possibilities Is What Makes for Agency
So many possibilities… but how to do it right?
The key, then, is the range of possibilities left to the object acted upon with which that object responds or reacts to the external event.
Simple objects are passive, simply following the universal laws of cause and effect.
But some objects are also subjects – that is, though objects under the laws of physics, their complex internal structures filter and shape their reactions to external events, leaving them room to maneuver.
This leaves subjects room to maneuver, complicating the causal connection between external cause, internal effect and outward reaction, by interposing many other factors, including degree of awareness, interests, motives, habits, experiences, learned skills, and so on, all of which may vary in kind or degree.
Three examples will suffice.
1. Genetic transcription failure,that is, mutation. Genetic transcription is a biological process that occurs in predictable predetermined patterns most of the time. But random variations are occasionally produced by various factors including radiation, internal malfunction, and so on. Mostly inconsequential, those that are consequential either work to end the lineage that carries them or work to preserve it.
So, mutations are deterministic in theory, since their causes can be sought and often found, yet indeterministic in practice, since they cannot be fully predicted or guarded against.
2. A multiplicity of means suitable to achieve a selfishly motivated end. In one sense, the end — the psychological motive that sets the end, with circumstances offering multiple conceivable pathways to that end — determines the motive narrowly and deterministically. But in another sense, the choice is open to imaginative innovation, experimental trial-and-error, and sudden insight, all limited by habits formed from prior experience, bias, tunnel vision, prejudice and unwitting assumptions and oversights.
If, from a theoretical perspective these personal idiosyncrasies, and other noise in the data, can all be imagined to be, in principle, traceable to narrowly deterministic causes (a massive, paradigm-defining assumption), from a practical perspective this knowledge is beyond the agent’s reach.
In competitive contexts, this means that strategic thinking displaces scientific thinking.
Moreover, as circumstances shift, so do the possibilities for improvisation. Solving some problems means being the right person at the right place at the right time.
So, some improvisations, insights and triumphs rely on space and time aligning with the unique perspectives of individual and culture.
When Caesar was passing through a small town, a townsman called out that Caesar would not be Caesar were he born there. Caesar paused and then replied “Nor would you have been Caesar, had you been born in Rome”.
Acts responding to so many factors are determined broadly rather than narrowly. Force plays – in which the trapped player has no viable alternative to the one he is forced to adopt – are rare but possible in strategic contests.
The human fascination with games and contests of all kinds rests on the incomplete predictability of outcomes, of which gambling is a notable behavioral indicator.
Moreover, as circumstances change historically, so do the possibilities of innovation, as many forms of economic, technological, military, political and social innovation build upon prior innovations.
Empirical signs of this are the poor record of forecasters and futurists in the fields of technology, business and politics.
3. Moral dilemmas. Moral dilemmas, and the moral realm altogether, are only manifest when they run counter to the general direction of more obviously causal influences. Moral questions are about not causality but the moral worth of actions.
In other words, moral questions only arise when strong needs, desires or motives run counter to a broadly-recognized code of conduct forbidding certain acts.
Torture, and other forms of pressure, work to restrict the scope of agency by crowding out moral choice with more urgent causal concerns.
Causality, in the narrowest sense, only enters into judgments about legality or morality when the capacity for agency is questioned, in judicial determinations of criminal insanity or moral competence.
Thus, the legal certification of a defendant as a competent and responsible moral agent is a judgment that the agent was sufficiently free of narrowly deterministic influences to be held responsible for their own actions.
What’s it all for? – a la HamletWhat’s it all for? – a la Abraham and Isaac
Conclusion
Objects are narrowly determined by external causes. They have no internal environment independent of their external environment, nothing to carry information or adaptations within a genetic lineage.
Objects are nothing more than the sum of their material parts; they carry no adaptive changes embodied in a genetic lineage.
Genetic lineages introduce the capacity to build upon prior adaptations, both structural and behavioral.
Biology thus introduces the first individuals, in two senses. First, in the sense of lineages of adaptations sufficiently distinct from others to merit designation as a species. Second, in the sense of the individual organisms where such adaptations begin. Thus, organisms and species are both distinct and separate local centers for organizational patterns that simple objects lack.
This lineage of characteristic traits in species and their members adds a local and portable matrix of causal factors to their external environment that partly determines how they react to it.
Terminal force plays, like a bullet in the head, dissolve subjects, leaving only hollowed-out objects in their place. Chemistry reclaims this heap of matter from biology and forensic science pushes medicine aside.
Short of incapacitating a subject, events leave it with open-ended possibilities for reacting to the threats and opportunities, obstacles and resources, offered by their environments.
Without these locally-guided reactions, sentience would be useless and natural selection would bypass it. And evolving capacities for awareness without capacities for motor response would be supremely maladaptive.
The only utility for perishable beings with a survival instinct is to assess inputs against survival requirements, whether by impulse or calculation, and to react differentially based on the likely consequences of each foreseeable path of action.
Thus, biology is fundamentally about being broadly rather than narrowly determined by external events that leave one’s capacities intact.
I’ve talked about the OODA-Loop before (search on OODA), but it’s always worth a revisit.
I find myself living by it more and more.
Background: fighter pilots live and die by making split-second decisions under stress.
Four Steps:
Observe: take in the data streaming in
Orient: assess where the threats and opportunities are
Decide: choose a course of action
Act: execute your plan
Repeat
ReObserve
ReOrient
ReDecide
ReAct
How Life Works
Looking back from 69 years, I see that I used to be too top-down in my approach to decision-making.
I wanted a full schema in place before I took Step One.
I started slow but finished hard.
It worked well enough, but not so well as it could have done.
Now, I’m exploring everything all at once.
I make an initial assessment — enough to know where the cliffs are — and then pick a path and go!
Any assessed path works, so long as it’s not over a cliff that turns the next step into a flying leap!
As data pours in, I adjust.
I’ve modified the war cry of Silicon Valley, “Move Fast and Break Things” — that’s the point of sighting out the cliffs before you take a flying leap.
My version: Move Fast and Drop Things.
If you’re moving fast, you’re juggling many balls: much data, many assessments, decisions and plans, all of them shifting as your actions ricochet into the resistance of brute objects or the actions and reactions of other players facing the same time and resource chokepoints.
So, you’re going to drop things. Just make sure to keep the crucial balls in the air.
Getting the big things right carries the day, and if, by focusing on the key things, you miss a few small things, you can tidy things up when the show’s over.
The stars carry the show, even if the supporting cast just passes muster.
Problem-solving on the fly turns out to be as gratifying as devising the perfect scheme — but it works faster, applies more broadly and accelerates the accumulation of valuable experience, even at age 69!
I am living through a personal renaissance. That’s why you haven’t heard much from me lately: I’m up to my armpits in life!
But I’m expanding my capabilities on many fronts — and this is one of them.
Like the man said (OK, like the cyborg said): “I’ll be back”.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
“a new birth of freedom and… government of the people, by the people, for the people” Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address
What’s Easy
Nothing’s easier than appealing to self-interest. So that will be pervasive in social life and in politics.
Nothing’s easier than accepting as truth opinions that support one’s interests and biases, one’s passions and sense of self — even when these become unhealthy obsessions. So that will be pervasive in social life and in politics.
What Comes of It
Historically, the first governments we hear of — the first , that is, to keep written records of their victories, reigns and actions — are top-down governments, generally run by elites composed of warriors, landowners or priests.
Of the elite, by the elite, for the elite.
At certain rare historical moments, this top-down model of government — which mostly goes unquestioned and unchallenged — gives way to a more bottom-up approach.
Democracies are commoner in the West than in the East, although the young democracies of the East — Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and the Hong Kong that was — are center stage in the Pacific theatre.
Xi’s China even claims that such ideas as democracy, fairly contested elections and human rights are cultural peculiarities of the West, imposed by ex-colonialists and not valid in China’s sphere of influence or the Global South.
No wonder he must stamp it out in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for they give the lie to his claim.
The greater prevalence of more bottom-up forms of government in the West may be a matter of historical accidents, with Hellenic political culture exported by Alexander’s conquests and Roman political culture by its conquests, begun by the republic but extended by its emperors.
The Travails of Democracy
This more bottom-up approach is never all-inclusive.
It typically extends as far as those whose active support, military or political, is necessary to overturn the old order.
It’s usually aristocratic, when driven by warlords or military men, oligarchic when driven by landowners or merchants. Athens was unusual in being a naval power dependent on the willing service of rowers, and thus a broader swathe of society, America in being a nation of independent farmers living in self-governing colonies.
Discontent with the way things are (the search for justice, trouble-making, court conspiracies or rabble-rousing , depending on who’s doing it, and who’s viewing it) usually arises in the next circle of insiders just beyond the inmost circle where real power lies.
Power lives in concentric circles
So sedition by persuasion has been the weapon of disrupters since human history began.
In the most top-down governments, the ruling circle is narrow, so seditious persuasion works as a conspiracy among the powerful few within the second circle of power.
In the more bottom-up governments, the ruling circle is broader and more dependent on the favor (mostly as expressed via elections) of the broadest class of true citizens, those with the minimal unit of sovereign power, the vote.
Seditious persuasion works in democracies as an appeal to voters, those within that outermost circle of power, the voters.
Seditious persuasion is impatient with facts and evidence, with legal procedures and thoughtful arguments.
It appeals to interests and biases, to grievances and prejudices.
It works by slogans and insults, by baseless assertions and slander, by rumors and conspiracy theories.
The modern medium of rumor and gossip, social media, are the floodtide river carrying all before them.
The more polarized a community becomes, the more disregarded are the procedural processes for determining truth.
This includes trial verdicts, judicial verdicts, technical expertise, the scientific method, and standards of credibility in both journalism and academic research.
This includes verdicts of the higher courts, the routine compromises between parties and interests that signal normal politics, and even elections results themselves, procedural processes for determining the common good, that is, the best achievable compromise between the many interests that make up the political community.
Such procedural processes are what make a constitution, and what make it different from rule with impunity, power applied without law or limit. Their weakness is the time they take to sift through charge and countercharge, claim and counterclaim.
Partisan disregard for the slow and accountable procedural practices agreed to by all parties opens the field for misinformation, disinformation and all of the self-indulgent nonsense and special pleading that comes with them.
Cheapshots and slogans work faster — faster than thought — as do visceral appeals, appeals to bias, prejudice and self-regard, as do playing upon grievances real or imagined, and conspiracy theories which dance above all evidence, because evidence is part of the conspiracy, too.
The seditious claim more and more reverts to the claim that no one is to be believed but the maximal leader, the one man who can lead the people out of their misery, or so he and his partisans proclaim, with ever less need for procedural processes, evidence or competent argument.
This man is the demagogue, and he has been with us for as long as democracy has.
Athens and Rome were plagued by demagogues, and at times succumbed to them, leading to such disasters as the ill-fated Athenian invasion of Syracuse or the destruction of an entire Roman army by Hannibal at Cannae.
The same factors are in play now as were in play then.
Some things never change.
Because their causes don’t.
It can always happen here, it can always happen now.
Holland’s Geert Wilders, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, France’s Marine Le Pen, waiting in the wings or, in Orban’s case, already inside gumming things up
When All Is Said and Dunn 