Free Thinking

Jerry Coyne on Why Evolution is True has been pondering the question of free will lately. It's a good question. An excellent question!

Is everything we do predetermined by the way things come together in our brains based on what's going on while we're still developing?

By the way things came together in our parents' brains before us? By the environment around them? Around us? Experiences that shuffle our mental chemistry?

If you could account for everything that might have an effect on how the dice fall, you know how they'll land, right? It's just the not being able to account for everything that makes it worth betting on the outcome.

It's a question extremely worthy of pondering, and I'm enjoying the posts on it, but I suppose in the end it's not something that makes a whole lot of practical difference in day to day life.

I mean, we presently have no way of accounting for every possible variable, for dice let alone for peoples' brains, so we may not have free will, but we can still make unpredictable decisions.

Whether or not we're technically responsible for those decisions, well, that's the real question. I vote for continued investigation.

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Pick Your Poison

Rough Type expresses enthusiasm for (or at least takes notice of: the enthusiasm may be mine) an idea-smackdown between seeing the internet as a putting aside of sedatives, or as a taking up of narcotics.

Upper or downer? Hmm....

The first reference is to a Clay Shirky post, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, that suggests that in times rapid social change, people will self-medicate in order to dull their natural inclination to run around shrieking and breaking things. During the Industrial Revolution, they drank a lot of gin: during the latter half of the last century, they watched a lot of television sitcoms.

Sitcoms dulled the anxiety of having so much free time, the argument goes, and only now, as we're getting accustomed to it, are we starting to figure out things to do with our spare mental energy besides zone out in front of the TV. 

Things like the internet, which is an expression of minds newly awakened from TV stupors.

The second reference is a recent post on What to Fix called Technology is Heroin. (I love a good punchy headline like that.) This one argues that we used to pay a lot more attention to things like music, socializing, and having fun in general (we had to, because these things took a lot of effort), and that technology, from phonographs to radios, televisions, video games and computers, has made being entertained easier and easier.

And much the way heroin made it easier to survive pain, but also caused some people to become withdrawn and socially unproductive addicts, technology's enhancement of entertainment, making it incredibly easy to be tapped into fun stuff anytime, means that we're getting sucked into spending more and more (fractured and half-focused) time and attention on it, at the expense of other things.

We're tech addicts, withdrawing from actual human contact in order to multi-task amusements online, on TV, in video games and through our MP3 players.

After thinking about both these well-written and interesting pieces, the choice really seems to be this: 

Do you want to not have gin, or do you want some heroin? 

If I had to pick one of these theories to back, I'd probably waffle and say there's likely to be aspects of truth in both. Things aren't that simple, you know. The internet (and technology) is stimulating and stupefying, depending on who's using it and what they're doing.

Also, I like waffles. Can someone write a piece about how the internet is like maple syrup?