You're shopping at a grocery store, looking for toothpaste, and you come across a wide selection of brands. Which do you buy? You read in a respected journal that brand "A" cleans teeth the best, brand "B" is packaged in a way that grabs your attention the most, brand "C" comes in assorted, delicious flavors, brand "D" comes with a toothbrush, brand "E" is the cheapest, brand "F" is the most recognizable from advertisements, and brand "G" is the most conveniently located on the shelf.
Every single brand has a chance of being chosen by you, determined by your priorities at the time of purchase. Let's say this time you just want to limit the amount of time you spend shopping, so you grab the brand that's most convenient, brand "G". After using brand "G" for a couple weeks, you come to regret your hasty decision, and resolve yourself to purchasing a better tasting brand next time. But on your next occasion to buy toothpaste, you find yourself hurting for cash, and so you decide to buy the cheapest brand, brand "E", instead of the tasty brand "C". When you get home, you find a coupon in the newspaper for brand "C" that would have made it the cheapest, and you say to yourself "if only I had checked the paper before I went to the store, I would have bought the brand that I had originally resolved to get, brand "C", and saved more money in the process!"
Your homosexual life-partner hears your exclamation and quips that you must not have been as resolved as you thought you were, since a decision to buy brand "C" was apparently contingent on it being discounted. You're in an argumentative mood, so you answer that you have "free will", and thus you can change your mind on a whim if you so decide. Your partner looks at you skeptically and states "if whim is the basis of your decisions, how can you claim credit for their actuation?" You don't quite understand what your partner is getting at, and the message is communicated with celerity by your expression. Your partner sighs and says "why did you resolve to buy brand "C" in the first place?" You answer that it was because you wanted something that tasted better than the last brand you bought. Your partner notes that there is nothing whimsical about that determination.
"Let's try a thought experiment," says your partner. "Let's say there are two brands of toothpaste to choose from, and you want to buy one of them. Which do you choose? If there are reasons for your choosing one brand over the other, then your decision making is supervenient to those reasons. If there are no reasons for your choosing one brand over the other, then your decision making is supervenient to whim or chance. In either case, your decisions are supervenient to external forces, and thus you have as much control over your circumstance as a rock has over its."
You stare blankly for a bit, and then you venture "are you comparing me to a rock?" Your lover smiles and says "I don't love you for your intellect!"
3 comments:
I think you need to be sparing with your use of an ultra-precise (and obscure) term like "supervenient," but other than that detail, I think this was one of the most amusing-yet-sublime essays I've ever seen you write. It also has the virtue and flaw of being a little ambiguous as to what conclusion you wish the reader to draw. I prefer such essays, but from personal experience I find that many people will run exactly the wrong direction if one does not carefully delineate and explain implications. Depending on whether one places greater value on parsimonious elegance or incontrovertable clarity, one could go either way.
That's the way to end with a punch line. I'm glad you find each other so entertaining! I was entertained, anyway.
I have to say I don't give any particular thought to toothpaste brands. I dislike the ones with really strong minty tastes and go for a combination of cheapness and good cleaning. I'm afraid a lot of marketing money is wasted on me.
If I HAD to brood on toothpaste purchases, I'd say that my decisions as to which factors were important qualify as un-rocklike. I'd compare myself to a cow, given that I graze among the aisles looking for the best available option like a cow looking for a succulent clump of grass.
I think life forms choose which external factors will affect them. Even cows move from the shade to the sun, and will shield each other against the wind. I suppose that is reactive.
Dogs, however, seem to be able to strategize and have a real ability to plan based on their assessment of another's reaction to their actions. I once watched a German shepherd engage in a four-week course of behavior modification with a bulldog it did not want near its children.
This was a sudden course of action following an incident in which the bulldog was attempting to play with a child and accidentally knocked it down. (The bulldog was a neighbor and liked children - he had been coming over for several years.) The shepherd seemed to realize that it was an accident, because the shepherd did not attack the bulldog at the time - instead he went over and separated the bulldog and the child, much to the disappointment of both.
For the next week, the shepherd attempted to monitor both the boy and the bulldog and not let them play roughly together. The shepherd would bark and intervene whenever the bulldog chased the boy or attempted to jump up on him. The boy was reaching the age where he wanted to run and play hard, and the bulldog was excitable. I think the shepherd was worried about possible accidents in the future.
But the shepherd apparently concluded that the dog/boy combination could not be controlled, so on about the sixth day he started to throw the bulldog whenever he saw it on the property. Bulldogs are incredibly willful and stubborn, but eventually it stopped moving whenever it saw the shepherd. The shepherd got it to the point where he could freeze it in place for five minutes at a time by approaching it as if he were going to throw it.
At that point the shepherd began to spend nearly 8 hours a day monitoring the property boundaries. Whenever the bulldog reached the shepherd's Maginot line (apparently picked because it had several natural obstacles that narrowed likely routes - it was not the property boundary), the shepherd would throw it. Eventually, after trying all possible passing points over more than a week, the bulldog started to hesitate at the line.
The shepherd changed his tactics yet again. When the bulldog would get within ten feet of the shepherd's line, the shepherd would go over and lie down opposite him. If the bulldog began to advance, the shepherd would get up. If the bulldog continued to come nearer, the shepherd would begin to move toward it, which caused the bulldog to freeze. If the dog backed off, the shepherd lay down. That continued for nearly two weeks, until the shepherd finally got the bulldog trained not to pass the line. After that there was a refresher lesson when needed, but not many of them were needed, nor did the shepherd ever throw the bulldog again.
What was really interesting was that the shepherd would still allow the bulldog to cross the line if he were accompanying his owner. In those cases, the shepherd would watch the boy and not let him run or play with the bulldog, although he would allow him to go over and pat the bulldog or sit down with the bulldog. I think the shepherd might have felt that the bulldog had the right to protect his owner, and that the boy was the one violating the bulldog's territory by going over to the bulldog when the bulldog was with his owner.
I would call this both a recognition of possible future risks and the development and execution of a plan to alleviate those risks by changing the behavior of others.
Reacting to reality doesn't make us unthinking or unchoosing beings. We all adapt to external realities, and we control our lives when we do so purposefully. We can recognize the external reality and react to it purposefully whether by ignoring it, avoiding it, or developing some plan to cope with it. We probably fail to exercise free will only when we don't recognize realities and are therefore passive victims of outward circumstances or manipulation.
But note I'm not claiming this ability as a dividing line between human and animal, and to tell the truth I have known a few people who seemed to like the idea of being a passive victim of circumstances. I think you should tell your lover that you have at least as much free will as a high-class canine and manipulate him to prove it! When you know someone well it's always possible to manipulate them.
Congratulations! If you had given me more notice, I might have been able to make it. But as it is now, I have prior commitments, which an acceptance of your invitation is supervenient to. What I mean is that accepting your invitation is contigent upon changes in my prior commitments (which is highly unlikely).
I would like to discuss "free will" and other topics in greater detail, but that would involve a time commitment that I just can't justify. I will just point out that the claim that choice is inherently (or using the made-up adverb of your word, foundationally) determined by free fill does not offer us any additional powers of explanation; it moves the impetus from the deterministics of choice, to the deterministics of free will. We agree that choice is deterministic: I believe it is determined entirely by physical correlations, and you believe it is determined by free will and the factors that influence free will. Now, what determines free will? Is free will physically causative, or is free will self-actuating, an uncaused causer like God?
I could leave the argument at that, but I'd like to introduce a further thought experiment, and see what you think. For people like us who live in a society where choices seem limitless, it is easy to think that they are. Let's take a volunteer and put him into a sensory deprivation chamber indefinitely, where his choices are severely limited. What will he do? What choices will he make? He most certainly will not decide to turn into a pumpkin at midnight and fly away into the sunset. He can struggle within the realms of his confinement. He can think and imagine introspectively, using all of the experiences and mental tools he acquired before his incarceration. Can he do anything else? What if we made him a quadriplegic? Now he can't physically do anything besides twitch his facial muscles maybe. What choices will he make? He can only decide to twitch and think and that's it. What will he think about? He can't think about the new movie that just came out because he doesn't know about it. He can't work out the solution to chess, because that's computationally intractible. So all he can do is think about his past experiences, and reason within his limited abilities to reason. If we make him an amnesiac through brain surgury, then all he has is reason, with little to no physical stimulus. I contend that the ability to choose is contigent on choices being available, and not the other way around. A choice is supervenient to the options available and the reasons for choosing it over the other available options.
I hope that clears up "supervenience" for you. Congratulations again!
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