Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (24 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.

In the 1990s, before he started dating the determinist redhead who admired my father and is mentioned above, my brother had an e-mail tag that ran, “I have a strong will and a weak won’t.” I’m not sure if he intended it as a lure to women or a warning, but apparently it did the trick. The experimental evidence strongly suggests that all of us have strong wills and weak won’ts, and are no match against the quick-draw of our ivory-handled brains. It strongly suggests that we cannot stop or deflect those bullets because we are those bullets.

And if free will is an illusion, there may be repercussions. Why do some behaviors land us in prison while others confine us to the hospital? Samuel Butler, in his strange morality novel
Erewhon,
tells of people who are imprisoned for typhoid fever, but who are coddled sympathetically by their friends when they come down with a propensity to commit a minor crime, for example, when a woman suffers an outbreak of shoplifting. Elsewhere Butler argues that microbes make little choices that, over time, become habits such that, for example, we no longer remember when our ancestors first decided to grow an eye. The historical background for these literary-philosophical experiments comes from his disenchantment, after great initial enthusiasm, with Charles Darwin’s portrayal of evolution as largely mechanical. Given that unconscious processes are so complex, how can we distinguish between when “we” decide to do something and when something happens automatically? Between what we can help and should be responsible for, and what we can’t help and is not our fault?

Trautteur, at the end of his essay on the double feel, wonders what his colleagues are thinking when, after adducing all sorts of good arguments against free will, announce that they believe in it anyway, or that they don’t but it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t it? Aren’t they tempted to rob a bank and take off for a South Seas island, given that they have no choice?

Further experimental evidence suggests that, irrespective of whether free will exists or not, consequences accrue to those who believe in it. Think about what you are thinking right now. Who is thinking it? Where is it coming from?

Consider the words and images that shadow forth and turn into water scenes as you doze. Are “you” the origin of them, or are you simply their observer? And where are you, who are you, if you are not those thoughts or words but just their observer?

It thinks, wrote Nietzsche. You are at a reality carnival, on a ride. No clown is moving the trapeze artists of your thoughts. They are just doing their own thing.

It has yet to be proved that anything could be otherwise. The wave function or sum over probabilities of quantum physics may suggest this, but that still does not seem enough to rescue the “last Ptolemeic.” Neither quantum probabilism nor garden-variety determinism, the complexities and algorithmic surprises of deterministic chaos that are neither predictable nor free, can save free will. Perhaps only a radical leap of faith can save free will. “I believe in free will because that is my choice.” Notice I said “because.” Free will exists because I say so. Free will exists because it has no choice.

Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the molecular structure of DNA, also became interested in free will. He suggested that our feeling of free will is based on a part of the brain, the anterior cingulate sulcus. I think it would be funny if we located, long after Descartes, the part of the brain that controls free will. It reminds me of a comedy skit. A great scientific discovery is made, and an even greater press conference is called. In dour tones in one of the studios of one the most popular television networks, an announcer interviews a scientist who announces that at long last the elusive human sense of humor has been located. After a commercial break for adult diapers, it is revealed that it resides in an amplified ionic pattern in the membrane of the endoplasmic reticulum.

In fairness, Crick postulated it was our sense of free will, not free will itself, that had been located. If free will doesn’t exist, it will be difficult to locate it.

What then?

The press conference is over, leaving us hanging, and now there is a show on the prehistory of muppetry. An expert discusses the German romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811). Kleist glossed the perplexing agency of puppets, which seem to come alive at the end of their strings, and whose mechanism, one of sensitivity to their surroundings combined with a kind of ease of movement, allowed them to dance as well as, if not better than, their handlers, their would-be puppeteer-controllers:

Sitting down—I will lower the textual marionette of Kleist now—the writer inquires further into his friend’s “remarkable assertion.”

“A group of four peasants dancing the rondo in quick time couldn’t have been painted more delicately by Teniers,” Kleist tells us, admitting to his friend the gracefulness of the dance movements of the puppets, “particularly the smaller ones.”

The Estonian-born biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term
Umwelt,
meaning life-world. All organisms have such worlds, he argues, and in his writings he imagines what it’s like to be a blind, deaf tick smelling the butyric acid of a succulent mammal, jumping onto a sweet patch of skin with blood beneath the surface on which to feed. He imagines (and in his essay, “A Foray into the Worlds of Humans and Animals,” depicts!) the view a scallop might see of a European street. Dogs, he points out, navigate differently through space, because their four legs carry them up inclines without missing a beat and see indoor objects primarily in terms of how they may sit on them. What’s it like to be a heron fishing with an iridescent beetle, a swarm of bees in a field of ultraviolet-patterned flowers? The Jesus lizard walking on water, the pebble toad,
Oreophrynella nigra,
ricocheting down a Venezuelan mountain, the queen bee laying a thousand eggs in her fragrant maze, the female mosquito finally draining blood from a host during a muggy dusk, and perhaps cells in that host, and perhaps water lilies in the pond where dives the fat bullfrog whose croak filled the sounds of the rustling forest the night before, and perhaps even the forest itself, in its slow chemically complex growth, its subterranean nuclei-trading networks of mycelial tendrils, its bacterially diverse metabolism, able to breathe arsenic and sulfur, to grow and merge, the biological world as a vast colossus of differentiable and merging sensitivities. . . . All of these and each of us, one might argue, to
whatever
extent we actually control our actions, are spectators at the greatest show on Earth. Each of us is, in a way, like an instrument in a billion-year-old symphony, making vibrations and emotions and Uexküllian music, for ourselves and one another if not, as the post-Kantian biologist may have thought, as localized beings in the perception of a multidimensional immanent being seeing itself, at least partly, through its manifold perceivers. Here
organism,
the word, returns to its root,
organon,
Greek for instrument. We play, or are played, by the manifold all.