ON THE MATTER OF FREE WILL

The following is the abstraction  of a  topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman :

            “Will - so is the emancipator and joy-bringer called: thus have I taught you, my friends! But now learn this likewise: the Will itself is still a prisoner.”

Nietzsche 

                If mind is a property of the brain, and human behaviour a result of cultural conditioning, can there be such a thing as free will?

          If physical reality can only be predicted by invoking the mathematics of probability, it is a strange but undeniable fact that human behaviour, too, permits categorical statements of probability. Like it or not, randomness and unpredictability on the scale of individual activities give rise to a predictable, collective formula. As noted elsewhere, because spontaneous nuclear disintegration is a wholly arbitrary process, there is no criterion for deciding which atom, on an unprompted impulse, is going to decay. And admittedly, on the basis of mere supposition, this aimlessness hardly seems true of the individual human activity. No collective rule or pattern seems quite to apply. We may speak of a baby-boom, a fashion-trend or a crime-wave, but only by the deliberate resort to free will, the reasoned determination of persons pursuing their own fate, can one define individuality.

          This may seem indisputable, but it is clear that  the supposition is flawed. Albeit that people behave in  fundamentally random ways, one can nonetheless make accurate predictions of their collective actions. Collective behaviour, in other words, displays symmetry with a rate of conformity proportional to numbers. Indeed, one may talk of crime waves in the same sense that the physicist talks of electron waves. In their aggregate capacity, when large collections of people are considered, free will plays none but a statistical role. If electron waves are a measure of probability, human behaviour, too, is fundamentally pattern-forming. Therefore, to say that a city suburb is hit by a crime wave actually

indicates that there is an increasing likelihood that a robbery, for example, will take place in that  particular area or district. In real predictive policing, first used in America, the idea is not to anticipate an individual’s state of mind but to employ computer algorithms that locate the areas at the greatest risk of future crime. Particle physics, likewise,  accounts for each electron as waves of an amplitude whose probability is determined by its position in space. And since the wave may equally be interpreted as a representation of our information, it becomes possible to say that the greater the amplitude, the higher the probability of finding the ‘event’ in that particular place.

          As soon as one begins to look into the subject, one is confronted with the idea of co-ordination of human activity by means of systems of virtual or collective patterns within which alone spontaneous fluctuations may arise. In fact, the correlation is such that social behaviour becomes a commodity charted in financial institutions. Common factors are provided by data-collection and online market research firms using complex computer algorithms in order to distil information on millions of individuals based on public records, marketing surveys, and social networking profiles. This provides a deceptively accurate method of obtaining information about an entire population from relatively small representative patterns. Indeed, that representative patterns are

the foundation of corporate profitability and the rationalization of commercial law, is an accepted doctrine of financial establishments sanctioned by Marx and Adam Smith alike. For Marx indeed, there were no individuals; history was formed by the relationship between material forces and the social means of production. They are the keystone of the social notion of Positivism, modern quantitative statistical analysis, and business decision making. Beyond that, the question of free will does not admit of a single exception. And once this is realised, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that single events, by the inevitable pressure of numbers, must occur with a predictability so close to certainty as to appear an inevitability. 

          Nor must we fall into the trap of supposing that a greater number of alternatives in any way affects the distribution of individual events. Where issues of principle are concerned, free will perishes in the finite and predetermined confines of a closed system. The obvious failing of the idealist is a concern for individuals rather than principles. But, in his rendering of a sanguine and wonderful faith, neither he nor any

possible choice or event can ever succeed in seriously embarrassing statistical method and contextual constraint. Even to assume it may, is utopian. The measure of the volitional freedom of human society is to be found at the core - against all his own intentions - in the limitations of the individual himself.   

          To be human is to live in the country of the blind, the land of sealed and closed perceptions. What intrigues is not so much its apparent determinism as the air it seems to possess of being both, finite and unbounded, indicating claims to a personal freedom which is deprived of significance by limiting the conceptual context in a way which conditions individual responses and entails actions that are always predictable en masse.

          Understood thus, as a point of reference, the individual type of event determines the configuration of the whole. A pattern emerges as the data of a context become more and more uniform. The greater the number, the more predictable the behaviour. In fact, individual events are just part of a probability distribution. Nothing you do is original. You are trapped in circumstances. Quantities and numbers come to hold a sovereign significance, pertaining to life in a way that a metric unit pertains to a poem and are probably amounting to the greatest single sociological force.

          The cat’s out of the bag:  The People never come of age! Because they represent quantity, mass, the infinite amorphous, free will is just a numbers game, a myth contrived in scholastic institutions. Schopenhauer summed it up: “We can will, but we cannot will what we will!” 

Facebook's war on Free Will...