Determined, page 9
“Turtles all the way down” is a joke because the confident claim presented to William James is not just absurd but immune to every challenge he raises. It’s a highbrow version of the insult battles that would go on in schoolyards in my youth: “You’re a sucky baseball player.” “I know you are, but what am I?” “Now you’re being annoying.” “I know you are, but what am I?” “Now you’re indulging in lazy sophistry.” “I know you are . . .” If the old woman going at James were, at some point, to report that the next turtle down floats in the air, the anecdote wouldn’t be funny; while the answer is still absurd, the rhythm of the infinite regress has been broken.
Why did that moment just occur? “Because of what came before it.” Then why did that moment just occur? “Because of what came before that,” forever,[*] isn’t absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. The absurdity amid this seamlessness is to think that we have free will and that it exists because at some point, the state of the world (or of the frontal cortex or neuron or molecule of serotonin . . .) that “came before that” happened out of thin air.
In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can’t with anything known to science.
As noted in the first chapter, the prominent compatibilist philosopher Alfred Mele judged this requirement of free will as setting the bar “absurdly high.” Some subtle semantics come into play; what Levy calls “constitutive” luck is luck that is “remote” to Mele, “remote” as in so detached in time—a whole million years before you decide, a whole minute before you decide—that it doesn’t preclude free will and responsibility. This is supposedly because the remoteness is so remote as to not be remotely relevant, or because the consequences of that remote biological and environmental luck are still filtered through some sort of immaterial “you” at the end picking and choosing among the influences, or because remote bad luck, á la Dennett, will be balanced out by good luck in the long run and can thus be ignored. This is how some compatibilists arrive at the conclusion that someone’s history is irrelevant. Levy’s wording of “constitutive” luck suggests something very different, namely that not only is history relevant but, in his words, “the problem of history is a problem of luck.” It is why it is anything but an absurdly high bar or straw man to say that free will can exist only if neurons’ actions are completely uninfluenced by all the uncontrollable factors that came before. It’s the only requirement there can be, because all that came before, with its varying flavors of uncontrollable luck, is what came to constitute you. This is how you became you.[59]
4
Willing Willpower: The Myth of Grit
The last two chapters were devoted to how you can believe in free will by ignoring history. And you can’t—to repeat our emerging mantra, all we are is the history of our biology, over which we had no control, and of its interaction with environments, over which we also had no control, creating who we are in the moment.
However, not all free-will fans deny the importance of history, and this chapter dissects two ways in which it is invoked. The first, which we’ll blow over relatively quickly, is a silly effort by some serious scholars to incorporate history into the picture, as part of a larger strategy of saying, “Yes, of course free will exists. Just not where you’re looking.” It happened in the past. It’ll happen in your future. It happens wherever you’re not looking in the brain. It happens outside you, floating on interactions between people.
We’ll look at the second misuse of history more deeply. Those last two chapters were about the damage caused if you decide that punishment and reward are morally justifiable because history doesn’t matter when explaining someone’s behavior. This chapter is about how it’s just as destructive to conclude that history is relevant only to some aspects of behavior.
Was-ness
Suppose you have some guy in a tough situation—being threatened by a stranger who’s coming at him with a knife. Our guy pulls out a gun and shoots once, leaving the assailant on the ground. What does our guy then do? Does he conclude, “It’s over, he’s incapacitated, I’m safe?” Or does he keep shooting? What if he waits eleven seconds before attacking the assailant further? In the final scenario he is charged with premeditated murder—if he had stopped after the first shot, it would have counted as self-defense; but he had eleven seconds to think about his options, meaning that his second round of shots was freely chosen and premeditated.
Let’s consider the guy’s history. He was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, due to his mother’s drinking. She abandoned him when he was five, resulting in a string of foster homes featuring physical and sexual abuse. A drinking problem by thirteen, homeless at fifteen, multiple head injuries from fights, surviving by panhandling and being a sex worker, robbed numerous times, stabbed a month earlier by a stranger. An outreach psychiatric social worker saw him once and noted that he might well have PTSD. Ya think?
Someone has tried to kill you and you have eleven seconds to make a life-or-death decision; there’s a well-understood neurobiology as to why you readily make a terrible decision during this monumental stressor. Now, instead, it’s our guy with a neurodevelopmental disorder due to fetal neurotoxicity, repeated childhood trauma, substance abuse, repeated brain injuries, and a recent stabbing in a similar situation. His history has resulted in this part of his brain being enlarged, this other part atrophied, this pathway disconnected. And as a result, there’s, like, zero chance that he’ll make a prudent, self-regulated decision in those eleven seconds. And you’d have done the same thing if life had handed you that brain. In this context, “eleven seconds to premeditate” is a joke.[*]
Despite that, the compatibilist philosophers (and most prosecutors . . . and judges . . . and juries) don’t think it’s a joke. Sure, life has thrown awful things at the guy, but he’s had plenty of time in the past to have chosen to not be the sort of person who would go back and put another bullet in the assailant’s brain.
A great summary of this viewpoint is given by philosopher Neil Levy (one that he does not agree with):
Agents are not responsible as soon as they acquire a set of active dispositions and values; instead, they become responsible by taking responsibility for their dispositions and values. Manipulated agents are not immediately responsible for their actions, because it is only after they have had sufficient time to reflect upon and experience the effects of their new dispositions that they qualify as fully responsible agents. The passing of time (under normal conditions) offers opportunities for deliberation and reflection, thereby enabling agents to become responsible for who they are. Agents become responsible for their dispositions and values in the course of normal life, even when these dispositions and values are the product of awful constitutive luck. At some point bad constitutive luck ceases to excuse, because agents have had time to take responsibility for it.[1]
Sure, maybe no free will just now, but there was relevant free will in the past.
As implied in Levy’s quote, the process of freely choosing what sort of person you become, despite whatever bad constitutive luck you’ve had, is usually framed as a gradual, usually maturational process. In a debate with Dennett, incompatibilist Gregg Caruso outlined chapter 3’s essence—we have no control over either the biology or the environment thrown at us. Dennett’s response was “So what? The point I think you are missing is that autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control, but as one matures, and learns, one begins to be able to control more and more of one’s activities, choices, thoughts, attitudes, etc.” This is a logical outcome of Dennett’s claim that bad and good luck average out over time: Come on, get your act together. You’ve had enough time to take responsibility, to choose to catch up to everyone else in the marathon.[2]
A similar view comes from the distinguished philosopher Robert Kane, of the University of Texas: “Free will in my view involves more than merely free of action. It concerns self-formation. The relevant question for free will is this: How did you get to be the kind of person you now are?” Roskies and Shadlen write, “It is plausible to think that agents might be held morally responsible even for decisions that are not conscious, if those decisions are due to policy settings which are expressions of the agent [in other words, acts of free will in the past].”[3]
Not all versions of this idea require gradual acquisition of past-tense free will. Kane believes that “choose what sort of person you’re going to be” happens at moments of crisis, at major forks in the road, at moments of what he calls “Self-Forming Actions” (and he proposes a mechanism by which this supposedly occurs, which we’ll touch on briefly in chapter 10). In contrast, psychiatrist Sean Spence, of the University of Sheffield, believes that those I-had-free-will-back-then moments happen when life is at its optimal, rather than in crisis.[4]
Whether that free will was-ness was a slow maturational process or occurred in a flash of crisis or propitiousness, the problem should be obvious. Was was once now. If the function of a neuron right now is embedded in its neuronal neighborhood, effects of hormones, brain development, genes, and so on, you can’t go away for a week and then show that the function a week prior wasn’t embedded after all.
A variant on this idea is that you may not have free will now about now, you have free will now about who you are going to be in the future. Philosopher Peter Tse, who calls this second-order free will, writes how the brain can “cultivate and create new types of options for itself in the future.” Not just any brains, however. Tigers, he notes, can’t have this sort of free will (e.g., choosing that they’re going to become vegans). “Humans, in contrast, bear a degree of responsibility for having chosen to become the kind of chooser who they now are.” Combine this with Dennett’s retrospective view and we have something akin to the idea that somewhere in the future, you will have had free will in the past—I will freely choosed.[5]
Rather than there being free will, “just not when you’re looking,” there’s free will, “just not where you’re looking”—you may have shown that free will isn’t coming from the area of the brain you’re studying; it’s coming from the area you aren’t. Roskies writes, “It is possible that an indeterministic event elsewhere in the larger system affects the firing of [neurons in brain region X], thus making the system as a whole indeterministic, even though the relation between [neuronal activity in brain region X] and behavior is deterministic.” And neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga moves the free will outside the brain entirely: “Responsibility exists at a different level of organization: the social level, not in our determined brains.” There are two big problems with this: First, it isn’t free will and responsibility just because, on the social level, everyone says it is—that’s a central point of this book. Second, sociality, social interactions, organisms being social with each other, are as much an end product of biology interacting with environment as is the shape of your nose.[6]
Throw down the gauntlet from chapter 3—present me with the neuron, right here, right now, that caused that behavior, independent of any other current or historical biological influence. The answer can’t be “Well, we can’t, but that happened before.” Or “That’s going to occur, but not yet.” Or “That’s occurring right now but not here—instead, over there; no, not that there, that other there. . . .” It’s turtles in every place and time; there are no cracks in the process by which was generates is in which to squeeze free will.
We move now to probably the most important topic in this half of the book, a way to erroneously see free will that isn’t there.
What You Were Given and What You Do with It
Kato and Finn (names changed to protect their identities) have a good thing going, backing each other in a fight and serving as each other’s wingman in the sex department. Each has a fairly dominant personality, and working together, they’re unstoppable.
I’m watching them racing across a field. Kato got the head start, but Finn is catching up. They’re trying to run down a gazelle, which is tearing away from them. Kato and Finn are baboons, intent on a meal. If they do catch the gazelle, which seems increasingly likely, Kato will eat first, as he is number two in the hierarchy, Finn, number three.
Finn is still catching up. I note a subtle shift in his running, something I can’t describe, but having observed Finn for a long time, I know what’s coming next. “Idiot, you’re going to blow it,” I think. Finn has seemingly decided, “Screw it with this waiting for the leftovers. I want first dibs on the best parts.” He accelerates. “What fools these baboons be,” I think. Finn leaps on Kato’s back, biting him, knocking him over so that Finn can get the gazelle himself. Naturally, he trips over Kato in the process and sprawls ass over teakettle. They get up, glowering at each other, the gazelle long gone; end of their cooperative coalition. With Kato no longer willing to back him up in a fight, Finn is soon toppled by Bodhi, number four in the hierarchy, followed by being trounced by number five, Chad.
Some baboons are just that way. They’re full of potential—big, muscular, with sharp canines—but go nowhere in the hierarchy because they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. They break up their coalition with an impulsive act, like Finn did. They can’t keep themselves from challenging the alpha male for a female, and get pummeled. They’re in a bad mood and can’t stop themselves from displacing aggression by biting the wrong nearby female, then get chased out of the troop by her irate high-ranking relatives. Major underachievers that can resist anything except temptation.
We are replete with human examples, always featuring the word squander. Athletes who squander their natural talents by partying. Smart kids squandering their academic potential with drugs[*] or indolence. Dissipated jet-setters who squander their families’ fortunes on crackpot vanity projects—according to one study, 70 percent of family fortunes are lost by the second generation of inheritors. From Finn on, squanderers all.[7]
And then there are the people who overcame bad luck with spectacular tenacity and grit. Oprah, growing up wearing potato sack dresses. Harland Sanders, eventually the Colonel, who failed to sell his fried chicken recipe to 1,009 restaurants before striking gold. Marathoner Eliud Kibet, who collapsed a few meters from the finish line and crawled to the end; fellow Kenyan Hyvon Ngetich, who crawled the final fifty meters of her marathon; Japanese runner Rei Iida, who fell, fracturing her leg, and crawled the final two hundred meters to the finish line. Nobel laureate geneticist Mario Capecchi, who was a homeless street kid in World War II Italy. Then, of course, there’s Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan with the w-a-t-e-r. Desmond Doss, an unarmed conscientious objector medic, who returned under enemy fire to carry seventy-five injured servicemen to safety in the Battle of Okinawa. Five-foot-three Muggsy Bogues playing in the NBA. Madeleine Albright, future secretary of state, who, as a teenage Czechoslovakian refugee, sold bras in a Denver department store. The Argentinian guy working as a janitor and bouncer who put his nose to the grindstone and became the pope.
Whether considering Finn and the squanderers or Albright selling bras, we are moths pulled to the flame of the most entrenched free-will myth. We’ve already examined versions of partial free will—not now but in the past; not here but where you’re not looking. This is another version of partial free will—yes, there are our attributes, gifts, shortcomings, and deficiencies over which we had no control, but it is us, we agentic, free, captain-of-our-own-fate selves who choose what we do with those attributes. Yes, you had no control over that ideal ratio of slow- to fast-twitch fibers in your leg muscles that made you a natural marathoner, but it’s you who fought through the pain at the finish line. Yes, you didn’t choose the versions of glutamate receptor genes you inherited that gave you a great memory, but you’re responsible for being lazy and arrogant. Yes, you may have inherited genes that predispose you to alcoholism, but it’s you who commendably resists the temptation to drink.
A stunningly clear statement of this compatibilist dualism concerns Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State football coach who was sentenced to sixty years in prison in 2012 for being a horrific serial child molester. Soon after this, a provocative CNN piece ran under the title “Do Pedophiles Deserve Sympathy?” Psychologist James Cantor of the University of Toronto reviewed the neurobiology of pedophilia. The wrong mix of genes, endocrine abnormalities in fetal life, and childhood head injury all increase the likelihood. Does this raise the possibility that a neurobiological die is cast, that some people are destined to be this way? Precisely. Cantor concludes correctly, “One cannot choose to not be a pedophile.”
But then he does an Olympian leap across the Grand Canyon–size false dichotomy of compatibilism. Does any of that biology lessen the condemnation and punishment that Sandusky deserved? No. “One cannot choose to not be a pedophile, but one can choose to not be a child molester” (my emphasis).[8]
The following table formalizes this dichotomy. On the left are things that most people accept as outside our control—biological stuff. Sure, sometimes we have trouble remembering that. We praise, single out, the chorus member who is an anchor of reliability because of their perfect pitch (which is a biologically heritable trait).[*] We praise a basketball player’s dunk, ignoring that being seven-foot-two has something to do with it. We smile more at someone attractive, are more likely to vote for them in an election, less likely to convict them of a crime. Yeah, yeah, we agree sheepishly when this is pointed out, they obviously didn’t choose the shape of their cheekbones. We’re usually pretty good at remembering that the biological stuff on the left is out of our control.[9]
