Determined, page 66
*There’s a wonderful quote often used about emergence: “The locusts have no King, yet all of them march in rank.” I like the irony of this, since it’s found in a book that extols the putative individual who gains the most if the world runs on centralized top-down authority—it comes from the Old Testament (Proverbs 30:20). Oh, and by the way, why do locusts march? Each locust marches forward because the locust immediately behind is trying to eat it.
*Jargon: they all have a “steroidal ring structure.”
*For completeness: The top hormone in the left column is aldosterone. Starting at the top of the right column, the hormones are cortisol, a neurosteroid called pregnenolone, and progesterone.
*Twentieth-century philosophy pretty much only considered the hypotheticals of strong emergence, and Bedau makes an eye-catching plea for why philosophers should become interested in weak emergence—because it’s how the real world actually works.
*Brazilian philosopher Gilberto Gomes, defensively disavowing magic, writes that in his compatibilist viewpoint, “this I is not an abstract or supernatural entity outside the realm of natural causality. The I is a self-organizing and self-steering system.”
*I.e., LSD.
*Trick question.
*This experimental approach alludes to classic research by Solomon Asch in the 1950s showing that an unnervingly large percentage of people will conform in particular settings to something they know is wrong (with the full range of what wrong can mean, ranging from “Which line is shortest?” to “Should these people be exterminated?”). Little surprise that this and other classic conformity and obedience studies were prompted by World War II: Did all those Germans actually believe that stuff, or were they just being team players?
*Another fascinating example or macro influencing micro concerns something covered in chapter 3—on the average, people from individualist cultures look at the person in the center of a picture, while those from collectivist ones scan the entire scene. Reflect on this: Culture is as emergent as things get, influencing what foods are sacred, what kinds of sex are taboo, what counts as heroism or villainy in stories. And all this determines the microfunction of neurons that control your unconscious eye movements. Hmm, why’d you look at that part of the picture first? Because of my neuronal circuitry. Because of what happened to my people five centuries ago in the Battle of Wherever. Because . . .
*Despite the fact that, to quote the architect Louis Kahn, “even a brick wants to be something.”
*In this case, a “particle” is anything from subatomic particles to atoms, molecules, and macroscopic things like dust motes.
*These factors influencing Brownian motion are formalized in the Stokes-Einstein equation (named for Sir George Stokes, a viscosity savant who died shortly before Einstein burst on the scene). The numerator in the equation concerns the main force that increases motion, namely temperature; the denominator concerns the forces countering the particles, namely high viscosity of the surrounding environment and large average size of particles.
*Which is why identical twins, with identical genes, don’t have identical cells even when each twin consists of just two cells, with the differences magnifying up from there. This is part of why identical twins aren’t identical people with brains supposedly sculpted identically by their identical genes.
*With the movement pattern showing a power-law distribution. Back to chapter 7—around 80 percent of foraging forays are within 20 percent of the maximal foraging distance.
*In the small-world category, one of the contributors to this topic, favoring a free-will stance for both humans and other animals, is neurobiologist Martin Heisenberg. Yes, son of Werner Heisenberg. Apparently, the tree freely wills an apple to drop locally.
*And note here how the New Age interpretation has just jumped from considering the consequences of the formal process of “measurement” to the highly personal process of “observing.”
*Which has not only caught the public’s imagination but also generated endless Heisenberg uncertainty jokes (Heisenberg, speeding down the freeway, is stopped by a cop. “Do you know how fast you were going?” the cop asks. “No, but I know where I am,” Heisenberg replies. “You were driving eighty miles per hour,” says the cop. “Oh, great,” says Heisenberg, “now I’m lost.”).
*Bohr also supplied one of my favorite quotes about the scientific venture: “The opposite of fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”
*I thank physicist Sean Carroll for guiding me through much of this. By the way, research on entanglement was the basis of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger.
*Implicit in this is that you can experimentally induce entanglement in two particles, which seems to involve pointing lasers at things.
*Or at least way faster than the experimental limits of time resolution, on the scale of quadrillionths of a second. Which is at least nine orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. By the way, if I understand things correctly, superposition of a single particle can be thought of as involving entanglement—an electron is entangled with itself as it passes through two slits at the same time.
*In 1905, Einstein was the most glamorous, dashing revolutionary since Che (if time flows backward). As he aged, though, Einstein led some rearguard reactions against subsequent physics revolutions. This is a familiar pattern with many revolutionary thinkers. The psychologist Dean Simonton has shown that this closing to novel ideas is a function not so much of someone’s chronological age as of their disciplinary age—it’s being acclaimed in a particular field for a long time (after all, all anything new and revolutionary can do is knock you and your buddies out of the textbooks). Years ago, I did a quasiscientific study (published in that esteemed technical journal The New Yorker), showing the ways in which most people, acclaimed thinkers or otherwise, close to novelty in music, food, and fashion as they age. Learning of Einstein as an aged counterrevolutionary disappointed all of us who had the obligatory poster of him sticking out his tongue on our dorm room walls.
*The study is controversial, though, as some scientists suggest nonentanglement mechanisms as explanations. The study involved bacteria that were placed between two mirrors that were less than a hair’s width apart. And the phenomenon was demonstrated in six individual bacteria. One is accustomed to things like “neuroimaging was carried out on six adults carrying the mutation” or “epidemiological surveys were carried out in six countries.” A study using six bacteria seems charming and commensurate with all this weirdness. But given this tiny number of bacteria, one has to ask questions like what each one had eaten that morning; when they were fetuses, whether their moms had regular wellness checks; what kind of culture these bacteria’s ancestors grew up in.
*Interestingly, I’ve seen none of the same done with the indeterminacy of Brownian motion—for example, no one is making a bundle running Brownian transcendence seminars. This isn’t surprising—quantum indeterminacy is about being in multiple places at once, while Brownian motion is about dust particles being random. Thus, I suspect that New Agers view Brownian motion as dead-White-male-ish, like union guys who nonetheless vote Republican, while quantum indeterminacy is about love, peace, and multiple orgasms. (This pretty picture is complicated by the fact that quantum patriarch Werner Heisenberg labored to make an atomic bomb for the Nazis. Historians are divided as to whether Heisenberg’s postwar claim that the bomb didn’t happen because he was quietly sabotaging the effort is a redemptive truth or Heisenberg covering his ass.)
*By the way, the quote at the beginning of this section, “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation,” was made by someone named Tom Williamson who randomly strings together words from Deepak Chopra’s Twitter stream. Two of today’s random fictional Chopra quotes at Williamson’s site (wisdomofchopra.com) are “A formless void is inside the barrier of facts” and “Intuition reflects your own molecules.” The site is discussed in an irresistibly interesting paper by psychologist Gordon Pennycook, entitled “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-profound Bullshit.”
*That said, some experts, such as philosopher of physics J. T. Ismael of Columbia University, view free will as the product of classical physics.
*In the Broadway musical version (but not the movie, I say with inexplicable bitterness), Mary empowers Jane and Michael by singing, “Anything can happen if you let it,” a view about exercising free will to prevent exercising unwanted free won’t. The song then makes Broadway musical history by rhyming marvel (“anything can happen, it’s a marvel”) with larval (Michael: “You can be a butterfly,” Jane: “Or just stay larval”). It took decades for Idina Menzel to top this, singing about fractals in “Let It Go.”
*Eccles is usually framed as a sad tale of the ravages of time, a pitiable octogenarian scientist suddenly proclaiming that the brain runs on invisible star stuff. In reality, Eccles was already heading in this direction in his late forties.
*This is as far as I could get myself to go with Google Translate, as it’s in German.
*This is an overestimate, since you’re not using every hippocampal neuron at the same time. Still, it’s in this ballpark.
*Physicist Sean Carroll emphasizes this dichotomy, noting how in the nonclassical micro world, there is no arrow of time; the only difference between the past and the future is that one is easier to explain and the other is easier to influence, and neither interests the universe. It is only at the macro level of classical physics that our usual sense of time becomes meaningful.
*For Hameroff, this spatial nonlocality (i.e., how, say, one molecule of neurotransmitter can be interacting with a smear of receptors at once) is accompanied by temporal nonlocality. Back to Libet and chapter 2, where neurons commit to activating muscles before the person consciously believes they have made that decision. But there’s an end-around for Hameroff. Quantum phenomena “can cause temporal non-locality, sending quantum information backward in classical time, enabling conscious control of behavior” (my italics).
*Which is glacial from the standpoint of the nervous system—an action potential takes a few thousandths of a second.
*“Much rarer.” If there was spontaneous release of a single vesicle from an axon terminal an average of once every one hundred seconds, then the probability of two being released simultaneously was once every ten thousand seconds (as in 100 x 100 = 10,000). Three at once? Once every one million seconds. Katz was sitting there for a long time to notice all this.
*I’m forced here to use a term that I have desperately tried to avoid in the main text, because of the confusion it would sow. The phenomenon of neurotransmitter being released in irreducible-size little packets is known as “quantal” release. I’m not going anywhere near why quantal and quantum have the same roots.
*As noted earlier, my wife is a musical theater director in a school, which is why this scenario comes to mind. And despite expectations, the outcome is never random—in a pattern well known in psychology circles, the ensemble members are most likely to shout out the first or last options in the list, or the one that is most fun to say (e.g., “Yippee!”), particularly loudly. Then there’s the rare kid who shouts something like “Elmo!” or “Tofu!” and who is destined for greatness and/or sociopathy.
*Yeah, it’s mid-2020, and we just discovered that the car’s battery is dead, three months now into the pandemic lockdown.
*If you insist: about twenty millivolts for the former, half a millivolt for the latter.
*And now we can’t find our AAA card for when the tow truck gets here.
*Searle, a particularly clear thinker and writer, attacks the implausibility of a dualism that separates self, mind, consciousness, from the underlying biology, sarcastically asking whether, in a restaurant, it would make sense to say to the waiter, “Look, I am a determinist—que será será, I’ll just wait and see what I order.” What is the problem of free will in neurobiology? According to Searle, it’s not whether it exists, independent of underlying biology—it doesn’t. For him, the philosophical “solution kicks the problem upstairs to neurobiology.” For him, the problem is why we have such strong illusions of free will, and whether that is a good thing. Definitely not, but we’ll get to that near the end of the book.
*In addition to randomness being a pretty implausible building block for free will, it turns out that it is extremely hard for people to actually produce randomness. Ask people to randomly generate a sequence of ones and zeros, and inevitably, a significant degree of patterning slips in.
*As an aside that might just be mighty relevant to a book about behavior and responsibility, Searle presents an example of those challenges of integrating dramatic inconsistencies into a coherent whole. He was a renowned philosopher at UC Berkeley, with honorary degrees out the wazoo and a philosophy center named for him. Sociopolitically, he was on the side of angels—as an undergrad at University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, he organized student protests against Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, and in the 1960s, he was the first tenured Berkeley professor to join the Free Speech Movement. Admittedly, in his later years, his progressive politics gave way to neoconservatism, but that’s the trajectory of many an aging ex-leftist. But most important, in 2017, the then-eighty-four-year-old Searle, with so much to say about moral philosophy, was accused of sexual assault by a research assistant, and following that, a career’s worth of allegations of harassment, assault, and sexual quid pro quos with students and staff came to light. Allegations that the university concluded were credible. Thus, moral philosophizing and moral behavior aren’t synonymous.
*Dennett is not necessarily tying his wagon to quantum indeterminacy in this scenario; this is merely a clear description of what harnessing random indeterminacy might look like.
*With Roskies and Shadlen defining “policies” as meaning “constitution, temperament, values, interests, passions, capacities, and so forth.”
*People often frame this in the context of the infinite monkey theorem, the thought experiment where an infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite length of time eventually produce all of Shakespeare. A feature of the thought experiment explored by many computer scientists is how to most efficiently check which of the infinitely large number of massive manuscripts generated fits the Bard down to each comma. This is hard work because among the manuscripts produced will be a zillion that perfectly reproduce Shakespeare until the last page of his final play, until veering off into unique gibberish. One experiment used virtual monkeys typing; after over a billion monkey years (how long is a monkey year of typing?), one monkey typed, “VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-’;8.t . . . ,.” The first nineteen letters occur in The Two Gentlemen of Verona; this holds the record for the longest Shakespearean quote by a virtual monkey. Finding algorithms that efficiently filter out the non-Shakespeare from the Shakespeare is often called Dawkins’ weasel (after Richard Dawkins [author of The Blind Watchmaker], who proposed sorting algorithms in the context of the generation of random variation in evolution. This name represents a merciful reduction in the task for the monkeys, who now merely must type one sentence from Hamlet. Hamlet points out a cloud to Polonius that is shaped like a camel. “Yeah, looks like a camel to me,” says Polonius. “Methinks it is like a weasel,” opines Hamlet, questioning the notion of shared reality while throwing down the gauntlet to the monkey typists.
Footnote about a footnote: Killjoys have suggested that even if a monkey typed all of Hamlet, it wouldn’t be Hamlet, because the monkey hadn’t intended to type Hamlet, didn’t understand Elizabethan culture, and so on. This seems immensely cool to think about, with relevance to Turing machines and artificial intelligence. Borges wrote a wonderful story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” about a twentieth-century writer who attempts to so completely immerse himself in seventeenth-century Spanish life that when he re-creates the manuscript of Don Quixote, generates it on his own, it will not be a plagiarized copy of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Instead, despite the word-for-word similarity, it will actually be Menard’s Don Quixote. The story is funny as hell and illustrates why there will never be a Chim-Chim’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Okay, another footnote about a footnote: If you search “infinite monkey theorem” on Google Images, about 90 percent of the primates pictured are chimps, who are apes, not monkeys. Pisses me off. Some good cartoons, though, about “monkeys” typing sonnets about bananas.
*Note that he is using the less common meaning of realized, as something coming into being.
