Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science

by Sagan, Dorion

  The fact that, under experimental observation, tiny foraminifera select certain sizes and colors of glass beads to build their living skeletons, shows that even these tiny creatures have choice. But is it free? Doesn’t a computer have choice as it goes through the complex sifting, winnowing process of its electronic operations?

  In 2002 I impressed undergraduate students in an English class in Danville, Kentucky, who’d read my cowritten work (with the plagiarized title) What Is Life?, in which life is defined as “matter that chooses.” I know that they read the book because they looked genuinely surprised when I admitted I no longer knew if I believed in free will. Three and a half centuries before recent experiments that seem to prove him right, the philosopher Benedict de (or, in his Jewish appellation, Baruch) Spinoza argued, on the basis of logic and intuition, that we do not really have free will. Rather, we are simply not aware of the causes of our own thoughts and behavior. Observing those thoughts and behavior, we jump to the conclusion that we caused them. And, unlike that clown, who entertains us but is not fooled by her pretending to control the trapeze artists, we fall for it, again and again, spellbound by a show that seems to work itself, with neither clown nor safety net.

  “So the infant,” Spinoza writes, “believes that he freely wants the milk; the angry boy that he wants vengeance; and the timid, flight. Again, the drunk believes it is from a free decision of the mind that he says those things which afterward, when sober, he wishes he had not said. Similarly, the madman, the chatterbox, and a great many people of this kind believe that they act from a free decision of the mind, and not that they are carried away by impulse. Because this prejudice is innate in all men, they are not easily freed from it.”

  Lift the book, put it down. Decide, decide not to decide.

  Although now I can see that “choosing” does not necessarily mean “freely choosing,” I might have to change my mind again, whether I choose to, sensu stricto, or not. There is no question that we feel we are free, up to a point, but there is no proof for it either: we may just be unaware, as Spinoza clearly explained three centuries ago, of the causes of our behavior. It is what my mathematician friend Steve Shavel calls “the last Ptolemeic.” Like the idea that we are the center of the universe (as we were in Ptolemeian astronomy), the idea that we are the originators of our own thoughts and behaviors is one we humans don’t want to give up.

  Indeed, it is an insult. I can look out my window and see the Sun come up in the east. In the same way I can feel that it is my free decision to choose this very specific and, hell, sesquipedalian word. How dare Spinoza, let alone Sam Harris three centuries after the fact, call into question the subjectively obvious reality of my own freedom.

  I remember my astonishment upon visiting my father’s house above the gorges of Lake Cayuga in Ithaca, sitting on his plush black leather couch before a glass coffee table in an open room and “proving” my freedom by lifting a water glass of my own volition.

  Although the discussions I had with him sometimes hid our emotional attachment and conflicts under the umbrella of intellectuality, this particular conversation seemed to be all, or mostly, business. I was in the company of a red-headed girlfriend who was a great admirer of science and thrilled to meet my famous father. I was feeling good about myself not only because I was with her but because I had just finished a book, What Is Life? that, unlike some of my other attempts, finally seemed to be a successful blend of science and Continental philosophy. Influenced by Heidegger’s student, the philosopher of biology and scholar of Gnosticism, Hans Jonas, the book made a strong argument that one of life’s signal traits was its sentience and, part and parcel of that, its existential power over itself, its power to choose.

  The friend took what I then thought was the underdog position in her discussions with me. Determinism was such a powerful scientific principle, and the causality of chemical and physical links so powerfully explanatory throughout nature, that there did not seem, that we had no call—other than the usual hubris—to exempt our selves from these causal networks. If I thought that I, like Samuel Johnson rebutting Bishop Berkeley’s idealism with the kick of a real rock, was going to lay to rest scientific determinism simply by picking up a glass and saying, “I decide,” I had another thing coming to me.

  Just because it seems that Earth is flat and at the center of the universe, just because it is comforting to think that I am controlling my actions, doesn’t make it so.

  Niels Bohr, who argued with Albert Einstein’s famous determinism, going so far as to say that Einstein should quit telling God what to do, also said, “There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”

  Can free will and its opposite both be true? Another great physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, seemed to think so:

  According to the evidence put forward in the preceding pages the space-time events in the body of a living being which correspond to the activity of its mind, to its self-conscious or any other actions, are, if not strictly deterministic, at any rate statistico-deterministic. For the sake of argument, let me regard this as a fact, as I believe every unbiased biologist would, if there were not the well known, unpleasant feeling about “declaring one’s self a pure mechanism.” For it is deemed to contradict free will as warranted by direct introspection. So let us see whether we can draw the non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises. . . . My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. . . . Yet I know by incontrovertible experience that I am directing its motions of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility. The only possible inference from these two facts is I think that I—I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt “I”—am the person, if any who controls the “motion of the atoms” according to the Laws of Nature. . . . It is daring to give to this conclusion the simple wording that it requires. In Christian terminology to say “Hence I am God Almighty” sounds both blasphemous and lunatic. But please disregard these connotations for the moment and consider whether the above inference is not the closest a biologist can get to proving God and immortality at one stroke.1

  I think we may be able to make sense of this seemingly bizarre statement if we consider time. The past seems solid to us, impermeable, closed. The future, however, the now on which we are on the edge, upon which I am as I hesitate midstream in the finishing of this sentence, seems open, liquid—not closed but close, alterable by thought, permeable by whim.

  But can this be so? The past was once the present; they are part of the same process . . . so maybe the difference we see is an illusion, somehow to do with time. If we were raised up to another dimension, then maybe the differences between the great truth of freely deciding (if only to a minor degree our own movements and cable channels and friends and foods) and being cryptically forced to do things would be rectified. The mystical coincidentia oppositorum, the unity of opposites, would be realized—not by a logical contradiction but by a shift of perspective.

  It would not be the first time appearances were found wanting. Any number of optical illusions show that shapes and sizes can differ from our perception; Benham’s wheel, with only black and white curved stripes, produces light browns, reds, and greens that quickly vanish when it stops rotating. Because of the equidistance of our ears, we easily can mistake a sound in front or directly on top of us for one behind us.

  But in general we realize we have been fooled only when one or a number of senses contradict and correct the initial illusion. Thus, if you insert your pencil into a glass of water, it will seem to be bent because light refracts it. To prove this isn’t so you only have to touch the pencil or remove it from the water. The separate senses provide redundancy, giving us a generally coherent picture of the world and allowing us to revise anomalies when they arise. When we can’t, as when a magician does a sleight of h
and, we may conclude that our senses, perhaps purposefully misdirected, have misled us.

  Giuseppe Trautteur, a physicist at the University of Naples, is interested in what he calls the “double feel” of free will. On the basis of logic and experimental evidence, Trautteur accepts that free will is an illusion, but he argues that it differs from other illusions because, unlike them, it cannot be directly tested. For example, we check with a ruler that the two lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion are actually equidistant, or with our hands that the sight of a pencil apparently bent in a glass of water is in fact an optical illusion. There is no such recourse to redress the strong feeling of free will that, however, we can learn to experience doubly. Experientially it is there, but cognitively, as we investigate it, it begins to fade. Trautteur calls “double feel” this experience “of a conscious subject who feels he is performing a free action and at the same time is ineluctably convinced of the illusory nature of free will.”2

  It is interesting to speculate how Spinoza, who seems to have been the first person to have logically deconstructed free will, came to his conclusion. Deeply influenced by René Descartes, Spinoza turned the dualist on his head. He was what I would call a Cartesian monist: someone who accepted Descartes’s influential separation of reality into “thinking stuff” (res cogitans) and “extended reality” (res extensa), but then put the two—mind and matter—back together again. The speculative answer to my question is rather obvious: in recombining the artificially separated mind from matter, Spinoza returned to it the attribute science had granted matter, considered causal, “mechanical,” explicable by laws of physics. Reunified with matter, mind, including God’s mind and humanity’s, became as causal as the motions of the planets or the eternally valid relationship of two lines.

  Descartes, you’ll recall, who was into anatomy, speculated that the pineal gland, at the time known only from human brains, to be a sort of hotline to God and free will. For Descartes, humanity shared in the divine ability to choose outside the causal network of science. The world of things was separated from the world of thoughts, which we alone possessed in the animal kingdom. It excused our use of them, unfeeling brutes, investigable automatons. It also allowed us to examine the material world as a mechanism. This seems to have been a sort of compromise with the church, concerned about the increasing successes of the scientific method and its encroachment into the sacred realms of the heavens and life.

  Spinoza’s monism owed much to Descartes but was more consistent—and it had far-reaching political and scientific repercussions. I knew Spinoza was a huge influence on science: he was a great favorite of Einstein and I remembered that my father, an atheist, said he believed in the God of Einstein and Spinoza—which is, in a sense, to say that he did not believe in God at all, because, depending on how you read him, by “God” Spinoza means Nature—not just visible Nature but nature as timeless and infinite, the impersonal, certain, necessary, eternal, and true realm accessed by the mathematicians and geometers. Spinoza extended Descartes’s realm of geometry and necessity to include the human mind and God. He basically took back what Descartes had granted to the church. There were no special allowances where the realm of necessary relationships and causality did not apply. In fairness, Descartes, having learned from the examples of the tortured Bruno and the imprisoned Galileo, was trying to save his ass if not his soul. Spinoza, who translated into Dutch one of Descartes’s works, was probably not as worried. He also may have been braver. By evening out the playing field, by removing the get-out-of-necessity-free card that Descartes (smoothing over potential problems with the church, by avowing an exceptional status to humans) reserved for people, Spinoza collapsed the Cartesian dualism that still affects us, between the res extensa and the res cogitans, material and cognitive reality. In doing so, he unified a world that had arguably been illicitly split. Which is why I think it’s fair to speak of him as a Cartesian monist. He was playing the same game as Descartes, but he got rid of the special rules, the anthropocentric cheating!

  Einstein loved Spinoza. He followed him in saying he believed in a God that was impersonal, unchangeable, unconcerned with human affairs. Einstein’s famous statement that the Old One (God) does not play dice, which he wrote to his physicist friend Max Born in a letter, also testifies to his Spinozism.

  Einstein was such a fan of Spinoza, whose library he visited on November 2, 1920, that in Einstein’s effects there is a partly crossed-out poem titled “To Spinoza’s Ethics,” which reads in part, “How I love that noble man / More than I can say with words,” and ends, “You think his example shows us / What human teaching has to give / Don’t trust the comforting mirage: / You have to be born to the heights.”3

  Maybe poetry is, as Robert Frost said, what gets lost in translation, but it does not seem to be a very good poem, not as poetic, certainly, as Spinoza’s view of an endless, purposeless, and uncreated universe, with infinite dimensions.

  Like Schrödinger, Spinoza had his own coincidentia oppositorum with regard to freedom. Born to Jewish parents in Amsterdam, Spinoza (1632–1677) came from a family who fled to Portugal from the Spanish Inquisition and then fled Portugal when the Inquisition came there. Spinoza’s grandfather Isaac brought the family to Nantes in France, and they were again expelled in 1615. Compounding these experiences of intolerance by the Catholics, Spinoza dealt with the intolerance of the Jews: he was excommunicated by the Amsterdam synagogue and declined an academic appointment at Heidelberg, which led him to live more humbly as a lens grinder, a job that afforded the luxury of the ironic privilege of thinking freely on the beautiful harmony of a universe that was limitless in its determinism. Spinoza’s Theologico-Philosophical Treatise, written during a hiatus in the writing of his philosophical masterwork, The Ethics, and precipitated by the death of an imprisoned friend, helped lay the political foundation for separation of church and state, as well as the freedom of speech and worship.

  John Locke, who was a big influence on America’s founding fathers, not only read all of Spinoza but, born in the same year as Spinoza and living for a time in the Netherlands, also read all the books Spinoza mentioned. I knew Spinoza was crucial for science and philosophy. He seems, for example, to be one of the only major philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche knew of and didn’t lay into. But I was not aware of Spinoza’s importance for politics. It seems to me remarkable that Spinoza, the high priest, if you will, of causality, who took such pains to disabuse us of our tendency to want to grant a special freedom to our thinking process, was also a great political defender of, you guessed it, freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religious worship, and freedom of assembly. On the one hand, Spinoza denies we are truly making our own motions. We do not control the motions that Schrödinger says make us gods.

  “Further conceive,” says Spinoza, “I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.” On the other hand, he was so committed to the cause of political freedom that he interrupted work on The Ethics to write the Theologico-Philosophical Treatise, a spirited defense of civil liberties that informed the founding documents of the United States.

  Spinoza seems to have managed the difficult defense of freedom and its opposite by reinterpreting freedom as a kind of purposeful acquisition of knowledge. We might not control it, but we feel we do and are genuinely changed—for the better—by its effects. Learning where and what and who and how—and now we might add (courtesy of paleobiology and nonequilibrium thermodynamics) when and why we are—is the very motor of our happiness. Happiness�
�s pursuit is the pursuit of knowledge. This is philosophy, from Greek words for “love” (philos) and “wisdom” (Sophia, its goddess).

  If the philosophical consistency of Spinoza and the scientific success of his fans like Einstein and my dad are enough to unsettle our conviction of being rare cosmic repositories for freedom, experimental evidence hasn’t helped matters much. Connecting brains to scans, scientists recorded when a person felt he or she had decided to move. In all cases, significant brain activity in the motor cortex was identified before the time participants thought they made a decision. On average they took 0.2 seconds between deciding to push a button and actually pushing it. Nonetheless, their subjective experience of detecting an urge to act in fact followed associated electrical signals in the secondary motor cortex by up to 0.3 milliseconds. To make a long story short—apparently a version of what we do when we think we think we are deciding—there is about a half-second delay between when we feel we’ve decided and when “our brain” decides. Half a second before “we” burst out the starting gate, the brain has already neurologically fired. We never jump the gun. The brain’s neurologically quicker, beating us to the punch, always.

  Other experiments show that lateralized brain hemisphere activity prior to hand movement allows for roughly 70 percent predictability as to whether a subject will later “decide” to raise his or her left or right hand. Still other experiments suggest that both subjective identification of a conscious intention to move and the movement itself follow preliminary movement and unconscious brain activity by about 2.8 seconds.4 As research continues, the suspicion is growing that our intention to move is not a cause but a sensation of bodily movements that have already taken place.