Are we free? Part 1
According to Mazlish the third discontinuity was located in our heads. Freud began the on-going process of overcoming the specialism we attribute to the idea of “I.” Psychology and neurology discovered that the “I” is a handy fantasy constructed to facilitate daily life, but that there is no central decider at home; rather there are many “i”s operating in our mind, and those parts are not distinguishable from our physical body, or even at times from other minds. Our own consciousness has been dethroned from central emperor to a field of cognitive tricks. Within sentience, we are not set apart, but dwell in a continuum.
- Kevin Kelly’s “The Technium”
This will (hopefully) be the first post in a series examining the idea that we are free. Are we free to choose what we like? Do we choose how we act? Is there a way for us to be more free? Should we care? … The tone sounds like the end of Lupe’s album Food & Liquor… This was initially motivated by a BBC documentary I watched entitled, “How Art Made the World”. This series won’t be regular, but hopefully within a few short articles, there’ll be some interesting, thought provoking information
The first episode discussed the first human works of art. The first human figurine/statuette, entitled Venus of Willendorf, clearly has very exaggerated features.
One of the first discovered human made figurines
The question that the documentarians asked when seeing this was, “Why would the first recreations of the human body not look like a typical human body?” To find the answer, anthropologists looked towards neuroscience research done with herring gulls. The relationship between the two disparate fields was actually by pointed out by Professor VS Ramachandran, a professor of neuroscience at UCSD. He has a pretty interesting TED talk that’s worth it if you have a spare twenty-five minutes.
Scientist Niko Tinbergen discovered that Herring gull chicks habitually tap the red-striped beak of their mother to be fed. He further realized that the tapping response of the chicks could be triggered without any beak at all.
In place of the beak, the chicks responded to a yellow colored stick with a red strip painted on its side. Further, if the number of stripes were increased, from one strip to three stripes, the chick’s enthusiasm for tapping the stick and demanding food increased proportionally.
- How Art Made the World
So the idea that Ramachandran had was that as people gained the power to create, they created what they liked the most. And in doing so, they created what stimulated them the most. The artist in Willendorf made his beak with three stripes. But the relevant question for us is whether the artist chose what stimulated him the most, or whether it was a result of his nature or environment.
It seems as if the word “stimulated” is loaded with a connotation that seems a contrary to our traditional view of “liking” something. Almost mechanistic, like putting an electric current to a dead frog’s leg and watching it kick. Going to back to the blurb by Kevin Kelly, Bruce Mazlish believed that Freud started the collapse of the idea of “I”. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but his belief that most of adult personality could be traced back to childhood experiences would really appear to limit the freedom that individuals had to change their own personalities.
The traditional idea of the Self (no idea if this is really the traditional idea) seems to be rooted in some type of freedom of thought by an individual. And if the choice of what one likes, a freedom that is so central to our sense of Self, is not actually a choice at all, then what does that say about our self-view. Are we really capable of making “free” choices”? Maybe “the most important parts are the one that are unseen” and Lupe couldn’t help but like his Gold Watch, Guilty Brotherhood polos, and goyard bags. Sometimes it seems as if such airtight explanations of our nature leave no space for any personal choice. The explanations do make sense though. And if we don’t choose what we think, its conceivable that we might not choose how we act, or anything else. Maybe its true, “Our own consciousness has been dethroned from central emperor to a field of cognitive tricks.”
Kind of a pointless discussion, because i guess it wouldn’t necessarily change how you live. But it seems important to know. Not sure what I believe.
Tags: Freedom, Freedom of Thought, Random, Science, Sense of Self