Random Dose of Optimism

Yes, You Do Have Free Will. So Choose to Read This Post

Like millions of others, my family and I have spent part of this year’s Christmas holiday watching some version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Actually, we watched two, starting with Bill Murray’s mad-cap Scrooged and following-up with a much darker made-for-TV film from 1999, starring Patrick Stewart. The production was inspired, in part, by Stewart’s one-man stage performances as the character, and Stuart gives a powerful, tragic interpretation of Scrooge, a man so consumed by his traumatic past that he is unable to experience any emotion other than anger, manifested as a chronic, toxic misanthropy.

A Christmas Carol is, of course, an unabashed Christian parable, perhaps the most influential in history outside the Bible itself. Scrooge is visited by ghosts over three nights (the same number as Christ lays dead in his crypt), until his “resurrection” on Christmas morning, having seen the error of his ways. But the story resonates with people of all faiths, or no faiths, because of its theme of hope. Scrooge is old, but he ain’t dead yet. There’s still time to fix his life. To change. To choose.

I have always thought that the power to choose–the divine gift of free will–lies at the heart of A Christmas Carol, as it does with all great literature. Of course, it’s hard to imagine Scrooge, after seeing the tragedies of his Christmases past, present, and future, to wake up on Christmas and say, “Meh, I’d rather keep being a ruthless businessman. Screw Tiny Tim.” But he could. He might. The ultimate choice given to us is the option to change the nature of our own hearts, our way of thinking.

This matter of free will seems particularly salient this year–this holiday season–because the very concept is under attack. If you Google the term “free will,” you will be presented with a barrage of links with titles like “Is Free Will an Illusion?” and “Is Free Will Compatible with Modern Physics?” Along with the rise of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, a parallel trend has arisen among theoretical physicists who doubt that free will is even a meaningful concept. After all, if our consciousness is merely an emergent phenomenon of electrical impulses in our brains, and if our brains are, like everything else, determined by the laws of physics, then how is free will even a thing? Every idea we have—every notion—must somehow be predetermined by the notions that came before it, the action and reaction of synapses in our brains.

Our brains, in other words, are like computers. Mere calculators, whose order of operations could be rewound at any moment and replayed again and again and again, with exactly the same results.

Ah, but what about quantum mechanics, you say? The principles that undergird all of quantum theory would seem to imply that human thought, even if you reduce it to electrons in the brain, might be on some level unpredictable, unknowable, and therefore capable of some aspect of free will. Not at all, reply the physicists. The scale at which Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applies—the level of single electrons and other subatomic particles—lies so far below that of the electrochemical reactions in the human brain that their effect must be negligible. That is, a brain with an identical layout of neurons to mine would have exactly the same thoughts, the same personality, as I do. It would be me.

It’s this kind of reasoning that leads people to hate scientists at times, even people like me who normally worship scientists. The arrogance of the so-called “rationalist” argument—which comes primarily from physics, a field that, in the early 1990s, discovered that it could only explain 4% of everything in the universe—seems insufferable. But more to the point, I would argue that the rationalist rejection of free will leads to paradoxes—logical absurdities—not unlike those created by the time-travel thought problems that Einstein postulated over a hundred years ago.

For instance, imagine that one of our free-will denying physicists wins the Nobel Prize. He flies to Stockholm to pick up his award, at which point the King of Sweden says, “Not so fast, bub. You don’t really deserve any praise, because all of your discoveries were the inevitable consequence of the electrical impulses in your brain.”

“But what about all the hard work I put in?” the physicist sputters. “All the late nights in the lab? The leaps of intuition that came to me after countless hours of struggle?”

“Irrelevant,” says His Majesty. “You did all that work because your brain forced you too. Your thirst for knowledge, and also your fear of failure, were both manifestations of mechanicals in your brain. You had absolutely no choice in the matter.”

“Well, in that case,” replies the now angry physicist, “maybe YOU have no choice but to give me the award anyway, regardless.”

“Hmm,” muses the King. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“So, can I have it?”

“I dunno. Let’s just stand here a minute and see what happens.”

As many critics have pointed out, this kind of materialist thinking inevitably leads to a kind of fatalism of the sort found in some eastern religions. If human beings really have no free will—that is, if we are basically automata in thrall to the physical activity of our brains—then what’s the use of struggle? Why bother trying to improve yourself, to become a productive member of society, or become a better person?

Straw man! scream the physicists. No one is advocating we give up the struggle to lead better lives. That would be the end of civilization. No, we simply mean that this struggle is an illusion, albeit one that we need to exist.

Okay. So, you’re saying that we all have to pretend to have free will in order to keep the trains running? We must maintain the illusion of free will in order to continue the orderly procession of existence? But doesn’t this position, itself, imply a kind of choice? After all, if we have no free will, it really makes no difference whether we maintain the illusion or not.

Doesn’t this very discussion represent a rejection of passivity and the meaningfulness of human will?

My fear is that many young people today will be overexposed to the “rationalism” I describe above, especially when it is put forth by otherwise brilliant people. For those who are already depressed by such assertions that free will is an illusion, I would direct you to the great stories of world history. All the enduring mythologies, from the Greek tragedies to the Arthurian legends to the Hindu Mahabharata, revolve around the choices made by their heroes, their triumphs and failings. As a fiction writer, I would argue that the concept of “story” itself is almost synonymous with choice. A boy is confronted by the wolf. Will the boy run left or right? Will he lead the wolf away from his friends back at the campsite, or will he lead the wolf to them, hoping they can help scare it away (or, more darkly, that it will eat one of his friends instead)?

One can also take hope in the fact that not only can physicists still not explain what 96% of the universe is but they can’t explain what consciousness is. Of course, some would argue that consciousness, itself, is an illusion. But this leads to an entirely new set of paradoxes and absurdities. (As David Bentley Hart once replied, “An illusion in what?”)

Personally, I suspect that consciousness comes to exist around or about the same moment in a specie’s evolution when the individual can choose. That is, consciousness implies a kind of choice. It might be a very elemental, even primal kind of choice—perhaps simply the choice of whether not to swim harder, or fight harder, which I believe even minnows and ants can make—but it’s still a choice, and not merely a matter of pure instinct.

One of my favorite TV shows from my childhood was Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner”, whose every episode begins with the titular character proclaiming “I am not a number! I am a free man!” This assertion, shouted on a beach by the mysterious village in which he has been imprisoned, is followed by the sinister laughter of Number 2, the Orwellian figure who has been tasked with breaking the prisoner’s will. Number 2 is, of course, an awesome and terrifying figure, armed with all the weapons of modern society: technology, bureaucracy, and theory. But he’s still wrong, and he’s ultimately unable to grind the prisoner down.

That’s the hope I cling to, the Christmas message I espouse. Namely, that we’re all able to choose to resist the fatalism of rational materialism. That we can all, eventually, escape the village and be better human beings.

Anyway, that’s my Christmas Eve rant.

(Author’s Note: this is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)

In his amazingly good sci-fi novel, The Peripheral, William Gibson describes a environmental cataclysm called The Jackpot. The name is perfect, in that it evokes not a single-cause catastrophe but rather a horrific alignment (like the diamonds on a slot machine) of multiple ones. Global heating. Drought. Pollution. Pandemics. Poverty. Et cetera.

But, as is ruefully noted by the protagonists of Gibson’s novel, The Jackpot hit at almost the same time as a technological revolution (actually several revolutions) that might have avoided it. Geoengineering. Nanotechnology. Artificial Intelligence. Fusion power. Genetic engineering.

All of these fields are exploding, right now, in the early 21st Century. That’s why I’m guarded optimistic about humanity’s chances of surviving the next fifty years. (Note that I said “surviving”; it’s going to be incredibly challenging, and will involve great suffering and sacrifice.) Many environmentalists scoff at this kind of optimism. There is no technological silver bullet, they warn, that will get us off the hook.

And, of course, they’re right. There is no big silver bullet. But there might be a lot of small silver bullets that, if aimed precisely (have I tortured this metaphor long enough?) might at least blunt the looming crisis.

After all, we’ve been here before. In the mid-20th Century, scientists were warning that current agriculture techniques would not be sufficient to feed the booming post-war population of Earth. A global famine was almost inevitable. But it didn’t happen. Why? Well, in a word, we innovated our way out of it. Improved science resulted in the so-called Green Revolution, which allowed farmers to feed millions more people on the same amount of arable land (which they continue to do to this day).

So, I like to collect articles about possible new “revolutions” that might help us survive, and even thrive, in this century. Here is an article for The Guardian about how scientists are manipulating natural enzymes to break down plastic into basic nutrients (i.e., food). Yes, plastic into food. Will it pan out? Will it be scalable? I don’t know. But it gives me hope.

Check it out…

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/28/plastic-eating-bacteria-enzyme-recycling-waste

Random Dose of Optimism

(Yes, We Should Blast Moon Dust into Outer Space to Cool the Earth)

Recently I was enjoying a long-distance phone chat with an old friend of mine, and the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to the weather. She lives in Ohio, I live in Florida, and yet our answers to our respective inquiries about “How’s the weather where you are” were identical: Hot AF.

Fortunately, scientists like David Keith have been telling us for years that we are not helpless in the battle against climate change. If worse comes to worst, for a few billion dollars we could deploy specialized aircraft to release particles of sulfur (or some more exotic material) into the upper atmosphere, thus reflecting enough sunlight back into space to cool the planet very quickly. Of course, as professor David warns, we have a poor grasp of what possible, global side-effects such a radical course of action might have (although one one wonders if these side-effects could be any worse than a Canada-sized wildfire or a continent-wide heat-wave in India). It is precisely because of these unknown side-effects, he explains, that we need to start thinking about the problem now, with a clear head.

Along these lines, one of the strangest—and yet most encouraging—options to the “solar dimming” set of possible mitigation strategies is the idea that we might blast moondust into outer space. Yeah. For real. This dust, if aimed properly, would linger in one of the Lagrange points between the earth and the sun and, for a time, reduce solar radiation falling on the earth’s surface. The effect would be short-lived due to solar wind blowing the dust away into interplanetary space, but this is a good thing in that the technique would thus be throttleable. We could blast as much as or little dust as needed to cool the planet without plunging it inadvertently into a new ice age. (Have you seen that movie SnowPiercer?) Also, unlike the sulfur-in-the-sky option, the lunar dust wouldn’t contribute to air pollution or acid rain here on earth.

Obviously, the notion that we might somehow shoot lunar dust into space on a routine, industrial scale seems like science fiction. But is it? The space agencies of many nations such as the U.S., China, and Japan have planned future missions to the moon. One can imagine a gradual infrastructure of settlements, supplies, and equipment gathering on the moon over time, much as one formed in the American West in the 19th Century. One could presumably build some kind of mass-driver or rail-gun that could shoot the dust into space, and power it with solar energy. (Extra power could be stored during the two-week long lunar “day” to keep the gun shooting during the “night”).

How much would such a setup cost? Billions? Trillions? On the other hand, how much would it cost to rescue two-hundred million people from Europe if the Atlantic thermohaline circulation is disrupted, as some scientists predict it will? Or to build sea-walls around New York and Miami and San Diego and every other major coastal city? Or to feed South America if the crops there dry up during the next heat wave?

It’s time to think outside-the-box, people.

If worse comes to worst, we shouldn’t rule out going back to the moon. And building a huge cannon there. Or anything else we have to do to cool off the planet.

Here is the original article on SingularityHub where I learned about this idea:

Shooting Moon Dust Into Space as a ‘Sunscreen’ for Earth Could Help Stop Climate Change

Random Dose of Optimism

It’s hot as hell in Gainesville, as one would expect of Florida in July. But I mean, it’s really, really hot as hell.

All over the country, people are feeling the effects of the climate change. Even the most hard-core deniers (some of which are people in my own extended family, whom I love) are starting to sense the truth about what we’re facing as a civilization.

Unlike many, however, I think we can innovate our way out of the mess before it’s too late. But we need a World War II level mobilization of effort and resources to tackle it. In keeping with that idea, here is a cool video explaining one of the best weapons we have in the battle against global warming: carbon capture. No, it’s not a silver bullet, but it is part of the solution.

Anyway, enjoy…