Austin's Wisdom: Free will and Constraints and Canada

Reading again. About freedom. And free will.

Take Mr. Reasonable. A miscreant puts a gun to his head, and says, "Move your left foot." Mr. R., a sensible sort, moves his left foot.

Would we say that Mr. R. moved of his own free will? Well, no. We might say that the threat caused Mr. R. to wiggle the foot. We might say that he had to move the foot or get shot. We might say he moved the foot rather than get shot. We might say he was very highly motivated to move the foot rather than risk the bullet. Or a lot of other ways of saying pretty much -- but not exactly -- the same thing.

So, what of free will? Well, a lot of the talk of free will, or freedom, is based on the idea that neither is a "thing"; both are negatives, the absence of constraints. Mr. R., in this instance, certainly did not act freely. We would not talk about free will in this situation; it would make no sense. And all because of the gun to his head. The gun is the constraint. I think, in general, that this is the most sensible way to look at "freedom" talk; we talk about freedom only when we are not burdened by obligation or threat.

Who cares? In practical terms, losing freedom is, among other things, about health, economics, privacy, emotional state, relations with others, law -- we could all go on. There are an ocean of constraints on our freedoms. We take many of them for granted; there are a lot of constraints on robbing banks. Do I have the freedom to rob a bank? Sure. But we just don't talk that way.

If someone robs a bank, we don't say "Ah, free will at work". We say, "Yipes. He must have been desperate". The constraints on bank robbing are many and severe. It is not about free will. Bank robbery is an act of desperation, not an embrace of freedom.

Or, more difficult: A person with kidney failure, who has been on dialysis for years, abandons the treatment, facing imminent death. This is not uncommon for those who have suffered the rigors of dialysis over long term. What do we say? "How lovely is free will." More likely, we would say "He just couldn't take it any more". He has been constrained in truly awful ways.

Alert Reader (and there may be only one of you) will notice that once again I am talking about the way people really talk to each other, not the way we want them to talk, or the way we hallucinate that they do talk. My one source will be J.L. Austin, an old Brit -- well, long dead now -- who thought there was very strong wisdom in the ordinary language of ordinary people. He led us out of the dark ages by looking at that ordinary talk.

Talk of free will, and freedom, is rare outside of political contexts. Inside political contexts, the talk of freedom is ubiquitous and trivial. Dictators of the most repressive states boast of the freedom of their people.

My Canadian relatives experience less constraint -- hmm, maybe it should be fewer constraints -- in their lives than I do, for a lot of reasons, most of them related to governmental functions. They have more freedom. They also live longer, on average. Hard to imagine how freedom is related to life span, but there it is. Probably health care, maybe diet. They seem to think that they have a better standard of living in general. I don't know.

But I do know that I made a mistake that will probably cost me three years of life by not moving to Canada. But then, I had constraints, didn't I? Must have. Or I would have gone.

Next time: Woulda, coulda, shoulda. And, I guess, mighta, hadda, wanted to but -- well, we could (heh!) go on. Conditionals and their discontents.

Let be be finale of seem. I guess.

I was talking about bees over the weekend. We know really a lot about bees. The hive has a language, some of it chemical, that determines all sorts of things about bee behavior. If you take bees out of the hive, one by one, you reach a point at which there just aren't enough to communicate; they can't do bee stuff any more. There is a minimum number of bees that allows the survival of the hive.

I remember an old group facilitation exercise we did 40 years ago; six people sitting on the floor, forbidden to talk, each with an envelope containing cardboard shapes. The instruction was to make squares out of the shapes in our envelopes. We each started out trying to fit just the pieces in our own envelopes together to make the square. After a while, we noticed that it was impossible. We started trading pieces with the others. Impossible again. Finally, we understood: we threw all the pieces on the floor in the middle of the group, and were able to make the squares pretty quickly. I remember that after each square was completed we sat up straight and all smiled and clapped for ourselves for a few seconds. Very nice group dynamics lesson.

The group developed a language: gestures, odd grunts and that delightful clapping, which allowed useful cognition to exist. There was just no other way to get it done. We had all been "cogitating" unsuccessfully. I don't want to say that the problem solving was done in some weird groupthink. Not at all. What was done was the emergence of mind, an implementation of informal rules in which we guided ourselves toward useful problem-solving, out-of-the-box activities. "Mind" is not a place or a thing; "mind" is a set of utterance used to shape, define and control the behaviors that allow -- and require -- us to be human.

What of those who can't communicate -- the comatose, the demented, the brain dead? What of their minds? Do we say that they have minds, even though their brains are either dead or terribly compromised? I've never heard anyone talk about "minds" in that way. We do talk, ordinarily, in these cases, about brains and their dysfunctions. But, what of those who have seizures, or less extensive damage to the brain? Obviously different; those with seizure disorders still have language. Do we say that their minds are disordered? Or just their brains? I think brains. In all the discussions I've had with neurologists, nobody has said anything about my mind. Brain, sure. What is up with that? Don't they think that a mind can be damaged by a stroke? Maybe they're on to something. Ordinarily language seeps over into specialized language. Ack. I'm getting too abstract; how about some concrete examples?

The most confounding and interesting, for me, are the folks with the various language disabilities: the various aphasias, on the expressive end, and the decoding disorders on the receptive end. This is the arena in which the folks with the damaged brains often have some problems with mind, too. Stories of extensive brain injury with no apparent mind disorders are many, and, I'm sure, are sometimes apocryphal; still, the lesson is clear. An injury to the brain does not have to be an injury to the mind.

More: I once evaluated a young man who had shot himself in the head. He recovered all his physical abilities, but his cognitive functions were very strangely impaired. He could communicate only by telling jokes, or stories, or singing songs. His "talk", in that form, was precise and complex; however, it took a long time and a lot of patience and effort to listen in the right way. I also found it difficult, even with all my own capabilities, to help other people learn how to listen to him, and recognized after a while that my own problems mirrored his, at a much less severe level.

I also evaluated stroke patients, who were disabled and unable to function on their own physically, but whose thinking and language were just fine.

Well? Who is worse off? I think the first man; talking to him is so difficult that he was, ultimately, dismissed from the tribe, and banished to a unit in a chronic care facility. Brain and mind the same, in this instance, both damaged terribly. The stroke folks? Bad, but clear brain injury with no mind injury; rehabbed, back to work, back to family.

And what of my own brain and mind? I think it is not so much the physical changes that bother me since I had the stroke six years ago; those are pretty minor. Some loss of coordination, middling pain in the extremities. But the recent TLE stuff: yipes! It threatens my ability to be part of the tribe, and that is scary. The hallucinated smells, compusive talking, occasional misspeaking -- am I more like my first example, or the second? Hard to tell.

Right now, I don't have any way to pull it all together. The philosophers are off in Middle Earth, having fun arguing. No joy there. The neurologists are looking at scans. No joy there, either. I am between them somewhere. I still have a sense that there is something important that no one is exploring, something about minds and groups and tribes and social facts.

Contributions not just welcome, but demanded!!!! Maybe that will work. How about I up the ante just a little??? A $10 iTunes Store card for whoever recognizes the quote first. What quote? Part of the puzzle.

Miles the Cat is ineligible, but everybody else, relatives included, is welcome to guess.

Addendum: The prize has been claimed. It was claimed by a treacherous snake who used Google. Shame.

Suicides....dogs and cats....hermits. Oh, my.

This one was really difficult to put together, so please struggle with it. I have let it ripen for a couple of weeks. That seems to help.

The number of suicides, in any country, is remarkably similar year-to-year. How can this possibly be??? If there are not enough suicides by December 15, is there a rush to the noose, or overdose, or Golden Gate Bridge? Suicide, in so many ways the ultimate act of self-centered individualism, turns out to be a form of social compliance. Who knew???

This is what Emile Durkheim, a 19th century French All-Star utility intellectual, called a "social fact". Alert Reader will have caught on already. But, surprise, I will somehow force myself to go on about it at great length.*

"Mind" is a social fact of the Durkheim sort. It exists outside the individual, just as suicide does. Mind-type stuff lives in language. We speak of people "making up their minds" about suicide. I just don't think it works this way. "Making up our minds" is a social fact, not an event located inside an individual. Someone may experience making a decision; however, like all mind-type facts, the net spreads far wider, and has to do with judgments by self and others, by the social reality of a person in a group. Removing oneself from the tribe is just that, and speaks to participating in the language of the group. Tricky stuff; we are not used to locating such things in a broad context.

Or, how about this: I don't rob banks. But, I have never decided not to rob a bank. Bank robbing is not part of my life, or my talk. Neither is suicide. And, if someone asked me why I don't rob banks, I would just shrug. I would probably say something about bank robbery being wrong. But, really,I don't know why I don't rob banks. Non-bank-robbery, for me is a social fact, not individual decision. Same way I don't kill myself. Social fact. I also never lived in a setting in which bank robber was discussed. But I have seen, as we all have, how something becomes a fad, even a dreadful fad. iPods were a benevolent fad. Drug overdoses, in some places, a malevolent fad. You can bet, though, that both iPods and drug overdoses started with one act, and the next step was talk. And so on.

There are certainly "group values" which live independent of any individual. In the US, typically we think of the first amendment rights as group values. Any particular person might disagree about any particular instance, but, this is what Durkheim would call social fact. I am always charmed by atomic individualists who apparently think that all social values begin and end with them...that there is no group life independent of each individual life. Just silly, but very American.

Where do social facts live? In my head? Nope -- if I am dead and gone, the social facts still exist.

Once again, we bump into a fundamental problem in thinking about "mind". We still want "mind" to be inside us, not part of social facts. I continue to think that social fact, and "my" mind, are located in our group utterances. I don't want to limit myself; any communication between entities is language. But let's limit ourselves to humans.

The minute we speak a language, say ma-ma or da-da, or, before that, howl or coo, we are declaring that we are a part of social fact. Language is where to find social fact; it exists only between people, in the same way that the first amendment does. And, so it is with mind.

But, let's backtrack. I'm thinking a lot about the suicide rate of dogs and cats. Suicide is apparently not part of the language between cats and dogs, not the way it is for us. Even terribly depressed dogs don't sit in the corner trying to decide whether to end it all. But, as any dog owner will attest, dogs often sit in the corner planning how to get the next meal. The meal is part of the language of the dog, then. Dog "minds" are severely limited; dog language, too. Odd coincidence.

I remember sitting at dinner with a group of friends. For some silly reason, I said that I would like the conversation to consist only of facts -- no judgments or opinions allowed. There was silence until someone told me to stuff it, and then the conversation went on, blissfully fact-free. They were right, I was wrong. And now, finally, I get it: people talk to hear and express judgments, not facts. They talk to place themselves in the tribe, in some place or other. When I requested a judgment free discussion, I was suggesting we dissolve the tribe. Not a good thing to do at a dinner party. I could have jumped up, denounced all their beliefs -- fine, I was just placing myself in a particular place in the tribe.

Not so easy to go out in the desert for 40 days.

Now, all we have to do is figure out how social fact relates to individual fact.

Probably the best way is to think of languages, and how some languages are shared by very, very small groups, and some very large groups. And how, when someone dies, what remains of them is the conversations they had with others. Social facts. We may live on, but we are not eternal.

But more later.....


*Durkheim also talked a lot about being alienated from social life, and the resulting state, which he called "anomie". This word was widely popular in the intellectual circles in the US in the 50s and 60s. And, also led to a very good joke:

"Remember, the last part of 'autonomy' is "anomie". Works better if read out loud. Well, I think it's funny. Really. Philosophy joke. Another one next time. Much funnier.

Beggars can't be choosers....

Alert Reader knows that the energy behind the blog comes from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. I have a minor case, subsequent to a minor stroke long ago. How do we know?

Several ways. I have a slightly unusual EEG. Most of all, though, I have the telltale "soft" signs: Hallucinated smells. Unexplainable and rapid shifts in mood. In my case, sudden and uncontrolled episodes of despair, which last maybe 15 minutes or so. Supposedly, and this is disputed by some neurologists, there are traits associated with TLE, which are constant between true seizure episodes: hyperrelgiosity, fainting, deja vu, jamais vu, pedantism (moi?), and, for me, pressure of speech. A lot of times, I just can't stop talking.

And, surprise, hypergraphia -- the need to write stuff, really a lot. Dostoevsky had TLE; yessir, me and Dosty, scribbling away.

TLE people turn up often as shamans. Perhaps a new career path for my later years.

Over the last months, I have become very suspicious of the sources of my own behavior. If I start yapping while having lunch with someone, I often look back later and say to myself: "You bozo. What was all that? Just shut up. Please!"

And, I am open to questions by others. If someone says to me, "Why did you talk so much?", I can say "Well, this TLE thing....". And at the same time, I think, "There is no other way to be". I understand the question. I am being asked "Why are you acting so goofy?" And, again, there is no other way to be.

If someone asks me "Why did you choose to talk so much?", I just have no possible response. None. I didn't choose to talk so much. I just did. In this situation, as in so much of neurology, there is the ambiguous space for doubt. Maybe I did choose. Maybe, going into the discussion, I thought "Well, it would be fun to just let it rip here and not let anybody else talk". In that case, if someone asked why I chose to yap, I might very well say "Nyeh, just wanted to see what it was like."

But I would not. I could not "just want to see what it was like". Not with the hovering TLE. The humiliation of being so out of control of my physical process is profound. I would never choose it, nor choose to imitate it. Neurology meets ordinary language. How about an analogy to confuse things?

Take a child who wets the bed. The child is desperately upset by the event; the surrounding adults jump between a benign attitude and a blaming attitude. The idea that the child would deliberately make such a choice is actually malevolent. And, yet, I've heard, "Oh, he just wants the attention", and "He's got us all running around all night". Uh oh. Blame.

I think that "choice" is inextricably bound to "blame". There can be no blame if there is not choice.

And we like to blame. Blame is second only to baseball as the national sport. We blame for everything. We blame people for being sick. We blame them for being stupid. We blame them for being tall, or short. We blame them for being gay. Our penchant for blame is well documented, going back hundreds of years. Slaves were blamed for being slaves. Natives were blamed for being, well, natives. We invaded countries, and then blamed them for it.

But I want to stay focused on sickness, and on neurological disease, as blame-makers. Is it somehow my fault for talking too much at lunch? Sure. I didn't have to go to lunch; I know very well that "lunchy" situations make me prone to yap a lot. So, it is my choice, and my fault, after all.

We can see where that all leads. Stay out of sight until you get it fixed. We'll talk to you then. Disappear. And I have felt some of that, in some conversations. I can think of all the times I've seen it happen to others: The inept player on a Little League team, the stumbling reader in class, the nervous speaker at a meeting, the drooling oldster in the wheelchair. We want them, basically, to just disappear. I am quite surprised to be on the wrong end of that transaction, though.

I'm just not quite sure yet if we can blame me for for talking too much, or for having TLE, or for dreadful blogs. On the one hand, it makes sense, particularly in the context of loving to blame. Hey, nobody said he should do that damn blog. On the other, it makes no sense at all. I know it wasn't a choice. I know there is no blame waiting to catch up to me.

There is a lot more here, a lot more language to be explored. The neurological stuff sends me off course. But don't worry, I'll get to it. Hypergraphia will triumph!!!