With some books, my attention is caught immediately and completely. For whatever reason, I find myself so captivated by the topic or the richness of the prose that it’s hard to stay way: perhaps the book speaks to me or something in life in a way I didn’t expect? The Trial by Kafka was this way for me (a sublimely-bleak look at human alienation and impotence in conditions of modernity) and 2666 by Roberto Bolano (a massive tome on Mexico, triangles and an escaped Nazi), and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (which I loved in all its anxious, convoluted and verbose wonder…and considered rereading).
But just as often, I find myself going from desultorily gliding book to book, reading a few simultaneously (one a work of fiction, another of philosophy, another of history or political economy). There is so much to know in the world, so much that strikes one’s curiosity, piques one’s interests. So hard to settle on just one. But I guess this is a microcosm of a challenge of our existence: how to make any choice.
I try to finish the books I read, but also, if I’m not enjoying it: what’s the point? An old Philosophy professor, who looked like a mix between Jerry Garcia and Santa Claus (and loved the Grateful Dead) and who always wore shorts no matter the weather once told me: there are an infinite amount of books, and a finite amount of time. Read the ones you enjoy, and unless you’re a professor, you don’t have to finish them all.
I think that was good advice. Still, I like to finish books, especially tough ones, and typically do: I guess that says a lot about me…
I think, in general, it is important to understand that which we take issue with. Especially if we seek to criticize it. Any critique must be based on a reasonably-complete understanding of the thing critiqued.
To that point, I’m starting a book called Determined, by Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford Neurobiologist, and from the moment I heard of the concept, it rubbed me the wrong way. Still, I will slog through this book for as long as I can stand it.
I agree with his initial point that the world is determined, and us as beings are determined by the social and biological history of the world, but I don’t think a determined world eliminates all possibility of a conditioned free will, as I posted early about. But his claim is that free will is an illusion entirely, which frankly, I think is an exaggerated claim he makes to sell more books.
Still, the question of free will is an important one, but I’m already disliking the definition he’s using of free will, which is overly reliant on a chemical/biological picture of things, a neurological explanation, rather than one grounded in our felt experience, which he hasn’t taken account of yet (perhaps he will later).
But this is why, I think, a neurobiologist should be careful about wading into philosophical waters. Just because we can explain what is happening with neurological explanations is not to say that there does not exist some way in which we are driving the event, even if we are not able to chemically or biologically map or identify that exact thing. Also, just because he cites certain philosophers doesn’t mean he’s covered enough philosophical territory to justify his claim, which is a high bar indeed, that no free will exists *at all.*
To this point, I am also reading Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (I am reading this book at the pace of about 3 pages per hour, given its extreme linguistic density). But he is much more focused on our felt experience, and he takes what is called a phenomenological approach (focusing on the phenomena of our felt experience and how it relates to how we think of ourselves in the world). He has a concept called ‘thrownness’ which I think is perfectly equipped for this kind of conversation.
Thrownness entails the state of being we find ourselves in when we are born. We are ‘thrown’ or born into a family with a particular culture with a specific biology at a precise moment in the history of the universe, all circumstances which certainly influence what we might be or could be, but this is not to say they determine us entirely.
Part of being a human being is working out, throughout our whole lives, what we are or who we could be. What our existence means to us in the context of a world we are thrown into. Things that have no definite or clear path. No determined way, even if they are circumscribed by our environment. Instead, in my opinion, the present is full of what Hannah Arendt (a student of Heidegger) calls the uncertainty of the present (the space between the past and the future which is still and always being built by us and plays a role in the construction of the future) which no complete accounting of the history of the universe could or would fully explain because the present is always the present and uncertain because it is not yet fully known (and may never be known fully).
If Sapolsky’s argument that free will did not exist were true, then all we would need to know is everything about the past and then the present and future would be determined and understandable (theoretically). And while we learn more everyday, this could never be. A complete understanding of everything has never been achieved, even when we thought we had it. As an example, Einstein’s ideas completely changed physics in a way that was totally unpredictable, even as physicists were of the opinion that they were reaching a point of a complete understanding of their discipline.
But also a final and full understanding of the world is also not possible because any human thought is limited by the fact that it is thought within the interpretive framework of a human world. There is no way to see the world from outside a human lens, or at least not completely. Even with Sapolsky, his discussion of free will is done within the world and language of human sciences, which are backed by evidence and experimentation but are also still from a human vantage point of interpretation. So to say he is discovering or unearthing some hidden scientific truth about the will or freedom in the context of the universe is to forget that he too is human, not some outside observer with a final or complete answer that nobody else has access to and ends the debate on free will for good (a debate that philosophers have been engaging in for centuries, I might add).
Moreover, no matter how many answers exist to address this question, the debate between Free Will and Determinism has raged for centuries, and will likely continue for as long as there are human beings to debate it, as long as there are new people who have new and novel ways of thinking about it, as there have been for so long.
Bearer of Pity 