Whether Systems

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference.

A myriad of diverging roads I might choose to take at this juncture. I could go on about how no three lines of verse have been more misinterpreted. I could go on about Heidegger's holzwege and wegmarken. I could go on about how the tidal tug of poetry has waxed and waned in my own life. I could go on about event ontology or on how we tell our stories ages and ages after-the-fact. But, knowing how way leads on to way, I choose to go on about choice.

Much noise has lately been made about choice. Some scientists have revived the old, old story that free will is an illusion.* They advance the claim that choice is mechanistic, having material (natural) and environmental (cultural) causes: genetics and electro-chemistry, memetics and socio-psychology. The lay of the land have raised alarum, concerned that science now threatens to profane the sacred. Before we jump, let us step back. Is this not precisely what science does? The heavens, the earth, invisible forces, life--all once-sacred, all prodded and probed, analyzed and demythologized by the sciences. Should it alarm us that, in the fullness of time, science should turn its prods and probes on our inner lives, our souls, the holies of holies?

The final frontier, intentional consciousness itself, the consciousness which makes scientific inquiry possible, is the mother of all dynamic systems.^ If a butterfly flapping its wings can change weather patterns on the other side of the globe, consider the multitude of factors which contribute to the whether patterns of human choice, the engine of (r)evolution on so many planes. The equation has so many variables and relations it is beyond comprehension. For equations of this type uncertainty is the rule. Even with first-person, first-hand experience of our own lives, we cannot predict all of our choices all of the time. From time to time our choices surprise even us.

A majority of our deeds we do on auto-pilot. We do not memorialize these in stories. We do not pretend these have made all the difference. For some reason we would not feel quite so violated were scientists to account for these deeds mechanistically. For that is how we remember (and forget) them. At some point all of us have been intoxicated with strange brews or drunk with love or rage, and we have made choices we otherwise would not have made. At some point all of us have lived through seasons of mania or phobia or depression or disinhibition and found ourselves led as it were to behave out of character. In many cases we would welcome scientific excuses for choices we made while "not ourselves." Why not when we feel especially courageous or passionate, ambitious or inspired?

It is when we feel most authentically ourselves that we take life by the horns, that we the man the helm and pilot manually, intentionally, deliberately, considering the possible. We pause before a full closet to deliberate what to wear, before a full menu to consider what to order, before a fork in the road to determine which to take. This is particularly true of long-willed projections, like when we choose our homes, our life-partners, our careers, our ideological affiliations. In short it is when we use our imaginations that we feel most autonomous, most irreducibly ourselves.

What is it about imagination that we find so sacred, so inviolable, so irreducible? Why do we find scientific description of our whether systems such a serious threat? If human imagination turns out to be an illusion--an effect of our common physiology owing to our common ancestry--it is an illusion universal to all humans, scientists included; and no amount of description is going to cause it magically to disappear. It is this universal function which drives scientific inquiry itself.

Has any amount of methodological demythologizing ever impoverished human experience? Has it enriched? Has scientific description diminished the splendor of a sunrise? The majesty of a waterfall? The awe of a thunderbolt? The ecstasy of sex? The wonder of childbirth? What threat does it pose to the sublimity of love? The glory of achievement? The thrill of exploration? The autonomy of choice? When we, ages and ages hence, shall be telling this, will it be with a sigh or with a laugh?

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately... and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

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* In particular, proponents of cognitive sciences and evolutionary psychology, assisted by emergent and generative philosophy, suggest that we experience an illusion of free will due to the generation of infinite behaviors from the interaction of finite, deterministic set of rules and parameters. Thus the unpredictability of the emerging behavior from deterministic processes leads to a perception of free will, even though free will as an ontological entity does not exist.
^ Philosophers have observed how a limited set of chess pieces with a limited set of rules moving on a board with limited set of spaces can produce a limitless set of possible games. This is equally true of the much larger set of linguistic signs with its much larger set of syntactic rules. Speaking and playing chess are but two of a truly enormous set of games humans choose to play.