The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

16. FREE WON'T

What is the biggest source of danger for any organism? Predators? Natural disasters? Fellow organisms of the same species, who constitute the most direct competition for everything?

Sibling rivals, who compete even in the same family, the same nest? No. The biggest danger is the future.

If you've survived until now, then your past and present offer no dangers, or at least no new dangers. That time you broke your leg and it didn't heal very well left you vulnerable to lions, but the attack is still going to come, if at all, in the future. You can't do anything to change your past -unless you're a wizard -but you can do something to change your future. In fact, everything you do changes your future, in the sense that the nebulous space of future possibilities starts to crystallise out into the one future that actually happens. If you are a wizard, able to visit the past and change that, too, you still have to think about how a range of possibilities crystallises out into just one. You still march forward into your own personal future along your own personal timeline; it's just that, when seen from the perspective of conventional history, that timeline zigzags a lot.

We are committed to a view of ourselves as creatures that exist in time, not just in an ever- changing present. That is why we are fascinated by stories of time travel. And by stories about the future. We have established elaborate methods to foretell the future, and find ourselves at the mercy of deep-seated concepts such as Destiny and Free Will, which relate to our place in time and our ability to change the future -or not. However, we have an ambivalent attitude to the future. In most respects, we think that it is pre-determined, usually by factors beyond our control.

Otherwise, how could it be predicted? Most scientific theories of the universe are deterministic: the laws give rise to only one possible future.

To be sure, quantum mechanics involves unavoidable elements of chance, at least according to the orthodox attitude of nearly all physicists, but quantum uncertainty fuzzes out and 'decoheres'

as we move from the microscopic world to the macroscopic one, so on a human scale nearly everything that matters is again deterministic from the physical point of view. That doesn't mean that we know ahead of time what's going to happen, though. We have seen that two features of the workings of natural laws, chaos and complexity, imply that deterministic systems need not be predictable in any practical sense. But when we start to think about ourselves, we are utterly certain that we are not deterministic at all. We have free will, we can make choices. We can choose when to get out of bed, what to eat for breakfast, whether or not to put the radio on and listen to the news.

We're not so certain that animals have free will. Do cats and dogs make choices? Or are they merely responding to innate and unchangeable 'drives'? When it comes to simpler organisms like amoebas, we find it difficult to conceive of them choosing between alternatives; though when we watch them through a microscope, we get a strong feeling that they know what they're doing.

We're happy to believe that this feeling is an illusion, a silly piece of anthropomorphism, investing human qualities in a tiny bag of biochemicals; no doubt the amoeba is responding, deterministically, to chemical gradients in its environment. But it doesn't look deterministic because of the aforementioned get-outs, chaos and complexity. In contrast, when we make a choice, we have the overwhelming impression that we could have chosen to do something else.

If that wasn't possible, then it wasn't really a choice.

We therefore model ourselves as free agents making choice after choice against the background of a complex and chaotic world. We are aware that any threat to our existence -or anything desirable -will come from the future, and that the free choices we make now can and will affect how that future turns out. If only we could foresee the future, we could work out the best choices, and make the future happen the way we would like, and not the way the lions would like. Our intelligence gives us the ability to construct mental models of the future, mostly simple extrapolations of patterns that we have noticed in the past. Our extelligence collects these models, and welds them together into religious prophecies, scientific laws, ideologies, social imperatives ... We are time-binding animals, whose every action is constrained not just by the past and present, but also by our own anticipations of the future. We know that we can't predict the future very accurately, but a prediction that works only some of the time is, we feel, better than none. So we tell ourselves and each other stories about the future, and we use those stories to run our lives.

Those stories form part of the extelligence, and they interact with other elements in it, such as science and religion, to create a strong emotional attachment to belief systems or technology that can help us navigate into that uncertain future. Or claim to do so, and can convince us that the claim is valid, even if it's not. In many religions, enormous respect is paid to prophets, people so wise, or so in tune with the deity, that they know what the future will bring. The priests gain respect by predicting eclipses and the turn of the seasons. Scientists gain rather less respect by predicting the movements of the planets, and (less effectively) tomorrow's weather. Whoever controls the future controls human destiny.

Destiny. That's a strange concept in a creature that believes it has free will. If you can control the future, then the future cannot be fixed. If it is not fixed, then there is no such thing as destiny.

Unless, perhaps, the future converges on the same events, whatever you do. There are many stories with this theme, of which the most famous is 'Appointment in Samara' (parodied in The Colour of Magic), when a man's efforts to escape Death only bring him to the very place where Death is waiting.

We entertain contradictory beliefs about the future. That's not such a surprise: we're not the most logically consistent of creatures. We tend to apply logic locally, within narrow limits, and when it suits us. We're very bad at applying it globally, setting one of our cherished beliefs up against another and looking for the inconsistencies. But we are especially inconsistent when it comes to dealing with the future.

Paradoxically, free will is the last thing you want if you're tribal. You're caught in the matrix of

'Everything that isn't mandatory is forbidden', and there is simply no room for free will. On the one hand, such an existence is very secure; but on the other, punishments and rewards are just as mandatory as everything else if your sins are found out. Your personal responsibility is only to obey the rules.

You can still tell yourself stories about the future, but they involve very narrow choices. 'Shall I attend the ritual meal tonight and leave early to say my evening prayers, or shall I stay for the communal prayers like everybody else?' Even in a tribal system, a lot of cheating goes on, because we're human. 'Well, now ... If I leave early, then I can drop by Fatima's tent, and my wives won't know about it ...'

Plenty of sins are possible, even in a tribal society, and in reality ones that survive allow a little flexibility. If, say, you forget to fast on the Holy Day and someone sees you eating, and you genuinely thought it was tomorrow, or an enemy told you that it was tomorrow, or you had been made to think it was tomorrow because an enemy had cast a curse upon you ... then some skilful pleading might mitigate your punishment.

The natural and attractive option is always to blame others; it is unbearable to know that you have brought the punishment upon yourself. If you can't see how anyone else can be blamed for material reasons, then blame them for cursing you. Blame Fatima for being attractive and willing, blame an enemy who lied to you. 'Luck' is not available as a concept in a tribal society, because Allah knows everything, Jehovah is omniscient: the natural response is fatalistic acceptance of whatever they throw your way[48]. If you are to attain heaven, so be it; if your fate is to be flung into the everlasting fires, then that is the Will of God, to which you are subservient.

The best you can do, as a peasant-level tribesman, is to find out what is in store for you, what is Written in the Book.

Maybe you don't really want to know what's in the Book, but monkey curiosity overcomes fear, and in any case you can't change what's Written and it might just be nice. So you go to the old lady in the forest who can read tealeaves, or (today) to the iridologist or the spiritualist medium.

And all of these alleged ways to foresee the future have a very revealing common feature. They interpret the small-and-contingent into the large-and-important.

Just like the Roman general spilling the guts of a ram on to the ground before the battle, so that the small-and-complicated can mirror a forthcoming battle that will be large-and-complicated, tealeaves and hand-lines are small-and-complicated, and 'must' therefore encode your complicated future. The kind of magic that is being invoked here is an unexpressed homology, which on some level we all believe in because we use it all the time. The stories that we construct in our minds are small-and-complicated, and they really do mirror the large-andcomplicated things that happen to us. The Concise Lexicon of the Occult lists 93 methods of divination, from aeromancy (divination by the shapes of clouds) to xylomancy (divination by the shapes of twigs). All but four of them employ the small-and-complicated to predict the largeand- complicated; their materials include salt, barley, wind, wax, lead, onion sprouts (that one's called 'cromniomancy'), laughter, blood, fish guts, flames, pearls, and the noises made by mice

('myomancy'). The other four involve invoking spirits, calling up demons, or talking to gods.

To many tribal innocents, other people sometimes seem to have access to different little stories that they can make relevant to your life, like 'Your fate is written on your hand' or 'The dead communicate with me and they know all'. So people of that inclination can convince you, with a bit of flummery, that they know your future, and they can produce convincing large stories which you interpret as your fate.

There is a deep paradox in our attitude to personal free will. We want to know what the future will be in order to make a free choice that protects us against it. So we think of the future of everything outside us as being deterministic, which is why the gypsy or the medium or the dead can know what it is going to be. Nevertheless, we think of our own future as involving free choices. Our free will lets us choose to consult the gypsy, who then convinces us that we have no choice: for example, that the life-line on our palm determines when we will die. So our actions betray a deep-seated belief that the laws of the universe apply to everything except us.

The biggest wholesale business that preys on our convictions and confusions about free will in a powerful and often cruel universe, is astrology. Astrologers claim authority from Ancient Egypt, from Paracelsus and Dee, from Ancient Wisdom of all kinds including the Hindu Vedas and other Eastern literature. Let us review the appeal of astrology in the light of narrativium.

Astrologers have an immense following, and they have managed to pick up on both tribal and barbarian stories. They have the counter-scientific story for the civilised culture, able to attract both the tribal and barbarian aspects of our foolishness. They really do believe that the future, for each of us, is influenced by our time of birth[49]. They time it to the second.

What seems to be important to them is against which starry background (the Zodiac) we view the planets in our own solar system. As we move from intra-uterine life to the hands of the midwife, doctor, partner, our lives are determined from then on by astral forces. This strange belief is supported by so many people, who turn to the 'Your Stars' pages first in their daily newspaper, that we should seek some explanation within our 'story' framework. What is the story of our futures that is implicit in the control of our lives by the positions of the stars? As opposed, say, to the medical staff who, at the time of our birth, probably had more gravitational influence upon us[50] than the planet Jupiter was having?

Well, the stars are obviously very numinous, powerful. They're up there wheeling over us. At least, they were when we were shepherds, staying out all night, but most civilised folk now don't know why the Moon changes its shape, let alone why or where the pole star is. Yes, all right, you do, and it's not surprising. Others don't, and don't think what they don't know is worth knowing.

They have a vague feel for a few of the constellations, especially the Big Dipper (or Great Bear), but they don't know that those stars are not near to each other, but merely appear to be in that formation when viewed from Earth, and then only for a short time, astronomically speaking.

Most people don't entertain astronomical thoughts, so why are the stars so heavily involved in our most potent stories? Perhaps because, in our nursery stories, the celestial sphere gives a context, a primitive animistic one in which Moon and Sun take protagonist parts? We don't find that persuasive. Perhaps it is because the power of the stars entered our cultural stories back in the time when everyone could see the clear night sky, and has hung on. Or perhaps it is the jargon of the Zodiac-mongers, with their gypsy fortune-teller use of language to give received certainty to the most nebulous of prophecies. We've never heard anyone say, after reading the newspaper's astrology columns, 'Right, then, they're totally wrong today, no more astrology for me!'

There are others playing the same card, from Pyramidologists to Ancient Astronaut promoters to Flying Saucers Will Save Us visionaries to Rosicrucians. Regular UFO enthusiasts and Loch Ness monster photographers are much less dangerous. We focus on the prophets: those who, like followers of Nostradamus's prophecies or astrology, must believe that all the little contingencies add up to a grand pattern of the human future and that Fate rules us all.

This is the tribal interpretation of the feeling of free will: it is an illusion, for God already knows our futures. Kismet (the word comes from the Turkish 'qismet' and Arabic 'qisma') rules.

Moreover -a neat twist that gives power over people as well as their money -whether you will be a beetle or a king in the next turn of the cosmic wheel is determined by the balance that you have achieved in this life. This is equally out of your control, in practice, but you can escape to an inner life, making it as far as possible irrelevant to the vicissitudes that attack your outer self, and thereby avoid beetlehood in your next incarnation.

That apparent escape again depends on our ability to construct stories about our future. Here, our future divides, with the soul taking one direction under our own control and freed from the control of powerful others, while the body is manifestly bowed by slavery, starvation, or torture.

Hundreds of millions have found comfort in that apparent control of their futures, following the story of their spiritual selves and denying the pains of the material self.

In the Buddhist literature and practice, something close to that transcendence seems to be achievable. If you believe in fate, or the nearby concept of karma, then wisdom can consist only in foreseeing events, training your spiritual self to accept what happens, and teaching others to do the same. Some authority will provide your map of material events, but your destiny cannot be avoided by fighting it. Your only option is to lead a disciplined spiritual life, guided by stories of previous successes in this quest, notably the Buddha, and to entertain hopes of leaving the Wheel of Life altogether, to exist as a spiritual presence with all ties to the material severed.

This nirvanic view of heaven is not for those who enjoy the material ride too much to want to get off the bus. And the paradoxical nature of the prophetic predictions -of all prophetic predictions

-is disturbing. There is no way at all that a deterministic Earth can be accommodated by today's view of what planets are like, and most of today's more sophisticated religions have no room for an immanent God, tinkering with each life, and its context, to achieve its destiny. Those that do have room for immanence encounter real problems with modern technology, whose basis lies in ways-of-the-universe modelled by science, not by djinns or the whim of a deity or deities. And although we may, with Fredric Brown, be amused that when the djinni that worked the electric light and the radio came out on strike, the steam-power genies came out in sympathy, we enjoy this animistic fantasy as fuel for Murphy's Law and nice Disneyesque animations. We don't buy any of it for real causality.

Joseph Needham brought light to this kind of confusion. He pointed out, in the introduction to his truly gigantic History of Science in China, that the reason why China never developed science as the West knows it is that they never espoused monotheism. In polytheistic philosophies, it isn't very sensible to search for the cause of something, like a thunderstorm, say: you're liable to get a very contingent answer involving several incidents in the love lives of the gods, and an explanation of the provenance of thunderbolts that verges on the ridiculous[51].

Monotheists, however, by which we mean someone like Abraham, to whom we shall return later, reckon that God had a consistent set of ideas and causalities in mind when he set the universe up.

One set of ideas. If you expect your one God to be consistent, then it's worth asking how those causalities relate to each other: for example, 'black clouds and rain will be associated with thunderstorms when ..." whatever. The monotheist can predict the weather, even if rather badly.

But the polytheist needs a theopsychologist and a precise account of what the gods are up to at the moment. She needs to know whether a tiff between two gods will result in a thunderstorm.

So scientific causality is compatible with God-causality, but not with gods-causality.

Monotheists, moreover, have a built-in intolerance. The position that there is only one truth, only one avenue to the one God, sets each monotheistic religion in opposition to all others. There is no room for manoeuvre, no way to tolerate the manifest errors of people who believe in some other god. So monotheism laid the foundation for the Inquisition, and for intemperate Christianity through the ages from the crusades through to African and Polynesian missionaries.

'I have the story, and it is the only one' is characteristic of many cults, all of them intolerant.

Faiths, of course, do get along. But they get along because of the hammering they have taken at the hands of science, material development and better education. They get along because of wise people within them who recognise the commonality of humanity. Where there are too few wise people, you get Northern Ireland. If you are lucky.

If the future is not fixed, but malleable, and we can predict the effects of our present behaviour, however badly, then predicting the future can be self-defeating. And that can even be the reason for predicting it.

Most of the Biblical prophets seem, like many science-fiction authors today, to be warning against what might happen if we go on as we are doing. So they succeed when their prophecy is not correct, because people heed it and change their actions. We can understand that; even though the prophecy didn't come true, we can all see that it might have done: it has given us a better idea of the phase space that the future of our culture lives in.

What about the gypsy who prophesies that a tall dark man will come into your life, thus making you receptive to all those future tall dark men? (if tall dark men interest you, of course; it's up to you.) This could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, the opposite of the stories told by Biblical prophets. It's a story that the recipient is sympathetic to, wants to happen.

There are said to be only seven basic story plots, so perhaps our minds are much less varied than we think, so that the newspaper astrologer and the fortune-teller are navigating a much smaller phase space of human experience than we thought. This would account for so many people feeling that the predictions show deep insight.

But when astronomers predict the future, and get it right, people are, paradoxically, much less impressed. When they predict eclipses correctly, every time, this seems less meaningful than the astrologers nearly getting many people right, sometimes. Remember Y2K, the prophecy that planes would fall out of the sky soon after the year 2000 dawned and your toaster wouldn't work? That prophecy cost the world several billion dollars in work to avert the problem -and it didn't happen. A waste of time, then? Not at all. It didn't happen because people took precautions. If they hadn't done, the cost would have been much higher. It was a Biblical prophecy: 'If this goes on ...' And, lo, the multitude heeded.

This recursive dependence of prophecy upon people's responses to it, unlike most of the other kinds of thing that we say, relates back to our facility with our own made-up little futures, the stories that we tell ourselves. They confirm us in our identities. It is no wonder that when someone -an astrologer or Nostradamus, say -pokes his finger into this mental place where we live, and inserts some of his own stories, we want to believe him. His stories are more exciting than ours. We wouldn't have thought, going down the stairs to get a train to work, 'I wonder if I'm going to meet a tall dark guy today?' But once it's been put into our minds, we smile at all the dark men, even some quite short ones. And so our lives are changed (perhaps in quite major ways, if you are a man doing the smiling) as are the stories that we ourselves proposed for our futures.

This way that we react, fairly predictably, to what the world throws at us, casts doubt on our otherwise unshakeable belief that we get to choose what we do. Do we truly possess free will? Or are we like the amoeba, drifting this way and that, propelled by the dynamic of a phase space that cannot be perceived from outside?

In Figments of Reality we included a chapter with the title 'We wanted to have a chapter on free will but we decided not to, so here it is'. There we examined such issues as whether, in a world without genuine free will, it would be fair to blame a person for their actions. We conclude that in a world without genuine free will, there might not be any choice: they would get blamed anyway because the possibility of them not being blamed did not exist.

We won't go over that ground in detail, but we do want to summarise the main thrust of the argument. We start by observing that there is no effective scientific test for free will. You can't run the universe again, with everything exactly as it was, and see if a different choice can be made second time round. Moreover, there seems to be no room in the laws of physics for genuine free will. Quantum indeterminacy, seized on so readily by many philosophers and scientists as a catch-all explanation of 'consciousness', is the wrong kind of thing altogether: random unpredictability is not the same as choosing between clear alternatives.

There are many ways in which the known laws of physics could offer an illusion of free will, for example by exploiting chaos or emergence, but there is no way to set up a system that could make different choices even though every particle in the universe, including those making up the system, is in the same state on both occasions.

Add to this one rather interesting aspect of human social behaviour: although we feel as if we have free will, we don't act as if we believe that anybody else has. When somebody does something uncharacteristic, 'not like them', we don't say 'Oh, Fred is exercising his free will. He's been a lot happier since he smiled at the tall, dark stranger.' We say 'What the devil has got into Fred?' Only when we find a reason for his actions, an explanation not involving the exercise of free will (like drunkenness, or 'doing it for a bet') do we feel satisfied.

All of this suggests that our minds do not actually make choices: they make judgements. Those judgements reveal not what we have chosen, but what kind of mind we possess. 'Well, I never would have guessed,' we say, and feel we've learned something that we can use in future dealings with that person.

So what about that strong feeling that we get, of making a choice? That's not what we're doing, it's what it feels like to us when we're doing it, just as that vivid grey quale of the visual system is not actually out there on the elephant, but an added decoration that exists in our heads.

'Choosing' is what our minds feel like from inside when they're judging between alternatives.

Free will is not a real attribute of human beings at all: it is merely the quale of judgement.