Free Will , Art, Degrowth (Robert Sapolsky vs Samuel Alexander) | DEGROWTHIFY #2
Can we survive our existential polycrisis? And, what is a potential solution to the polycrisis? The answers may have to do with how our brains work and the importance of art.
I summoned the help of two great thinkers, both in the possession of magnificent beards. Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery, and is the author of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023). Samuel Alexander is the co-director of the Simplicity Institute and the author of SMPLCTY: Ecological Civilisation and the Will to Art (2023). Why these two specific intellectuals? On one hand Sapolsky shows how us humans do not have free will to choose what to think and how to behave. The choices we are making, from lifestyle to how we interact in society are illusions. The brain does what it does, deterministically, but also unpredictably. This means, we do not have much choice to change our predicament. Things change outside of our control. Humans can only react to whatever is happening around them, and even that reaction does not contain free will, but is a result of how the brain operates. Meanwhile, Alexander suggests that humans should refocus on a simple lifestyle, and the use of the so-called Will to Art to create meaning and satisfaction, for a much better quality of life than what the consumer society can ever offer. The Will to Art is “the aesthetic impulse, the creative drive at the base of reality, a primordial art-force from which everything follows”. As primordial art, the cosmos seems to be unfolding in order to experience itself; to experience its underlying creative spirit through the genesis and evolution of life. Evolution is unpredictably creative, not merely mechanistic, and when complex systems become alive, they become more creative.
On one hand we have hard science, namely the science of behaviour and the brain. On the other hand, we have a philosophical description of what humans are and can do. They seem to be in contradiction. No choice vs choice. Deterministic creativity versus emergent creativity. What are we then supposed to do with our lives?
Let’s look at the science first in more detail and how it relates to our questions from the beginning.
HARD DETERMINISM. THERE IS NO FREE WILL. ROBERT SAPOLSKY.
Free will can mean different things. One is agency, when people can control their actions and behave with intent. Another is when people know there are alternatives to their behavior. Another is about how you choose not to do something. Determinism is the entire chain of causes that makes possible your behavior, over which with you have no control whatsoever. This is a hard pill to swallow, but Sapolsky argues it is not a bad pill, and if we get used to it, our life can become better. The chain of causes starts from a few milliseconds before we act, to seconds and minutes before, to days and weeks, to adolescence, to the womb, and even centuries before birth.
“Even evolution has something say about how we act at a specific time. Neurons in the hippocampus that code for a specific episodic memory activate one to two seconds before the person becomes aware of freely recalling that memory.” (Sapolsky, Determined)
If you stimulate the pre-supplementary motor area of the brain in the lab, people will move their finger while claiming that they hadn’t. The SMA links intent to action. There is no free choice to override it. A study showed that lying by voicemail increases preference for mouthwash. Lying by email increases the appeal of hand sanitizers. A different part of the sensory cortex activates in this case. These are neurons literally saying that your mouth and hand are dirty.
“Oxytocin enhances mother-infant bonding in mammals (and enhances human-dog bonding). The related hormone vasopressin makes males more paternal in the rare species where males help with parenting.“ (Sapolsky, Determined)
The parenting you received affects your behavior as an adult. The level of stress in your early childhood affects how your brain functions. Your genes can affect the production of hormones, if genes are activated by your environment. If you grew up in an individualistic culture you will be predisposed towards autonomy, personal achievement, being unique. If you grew up in a collectivist culture, you will be predisposed towards harmony with other humans, interdependence, conformity, and the needs of the community. For free will to exist, for us to have a choice in what we intend, in what we decide, there must be at least a sizable chunk of neurons that can have an action potential without a cause of any kind, all the way to the beginning of your life and before that. Yet, we can live our lives with the impression that we freely decide to want a bigger house, or another car, or another phone, or a higher social status that comes from whatever lame job title and so on. We are not really free to have this impression, nor are we free to earn merit or to deserve punishment.
We are now ready to sprinkle improbability in this hard determinism. Have you seen the game of life? The rules are simple.
For a space that is populated: each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by solitude. Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation. Each cell with two or three neighbors survives. For a space that is empty or unpopulated: Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated. You get patterns that shoot bombs, or create cells. Patterns that catch and throw. An electric fence or a synapse. A factory of… something. A blobby agitation. A moving swarm. Maybe even thoughts.
This is chaos theory in two dimensions. The point here is, you can arrive at a certain iteration starting from 2 or more very different initial patterns. The game is deterministic but not predictable. Determinism and predictability are very different things. Even if chaoticism is unpredictable, it is still deterministic. Determinism allows you to explain why something happened. Predictability allows you to say what happens next. Determinism is about ontology, about what is going on. Predictability is about epistemology, about what is knowable.
How does this relate to our original questions? Can we survive our existential crisis? What is a potential solution to the crisis?
If we listen to hard determinism we can say, yes, we can, if we change our behaviour collectively, meaning if we overhaul our economic system. But do we have a choice to change our behavior?
Persuasion doesn’t work if you don’t know all prior causes, the entire life of each individual. Nobody can convince you to drop capitalism and switch to degrowth. The solution would be to accept determinism, recognize in yourself all your prior causes, remember that change is improbable but it’s always determined, and change is always inevitable because that is how society and the universe work. Once you recognize in yourself that you are predisposed for simplicity, and you dislike how the economic system is setup, you are more ready to change, but not by choice, rather by flow of causality. You will just go with the flow. Notice that there is no choice foisted on you.
The flow grows when more humans will be exposed to these ideas just like it happened to you now. Think about the game of life. Deterministic but improbable. So, if I say go with the flow of change or find the flow of change, there is no persuasion needed if you are already pre-ready to do it. Now that you know these things, you cannot unknow them, and if you are the kind of human that wants the continuation of life on this planet, you will spread these ideas on your own, while changing your life, because, as we now know, you had no choice.
If enough humans change their lives before it is too late, over the next 5 to 20 years from now, then we will survive as a species. If not, at least we will know why we failed.
Time now to check out philosophy and the arts and see how they relate to our questions.
THE WILL TO ART. BEAUTY. EMOTIONS. SENSES. SAMUEL ALEXANDER.
Samuel Alexander insists that humans must voluntarily simplify their lifestyles in order to avoid environmental and civilisational collapse. This means “choosing a form of life in which the overall consumption of energy and resources is progressively reduced and eventually stabilised at a level that is sufficient for a good life and which lies within the planet’s sustainable carrying capacity.” (Alexander, SMPLCTY)
Voluntary simplification may not be widely adopted but it is the only alternative to collapse. We should do our very best to adopt it, no matter our prospects of success. However, to get there, humans must develop a taste, a desire, a sensibility for voluntary simplification. How can art1 help with this?
Here, in contrast to determinism, we have a lot of free will, and ability to decide. The Will to Art is a pleasurable experience of art and nature, meaningful interaction with self and other humans. It is about doing and observing aesthetic activities. This can be anything that stimulates the senses and the sensibilities from cooking to playing, crafts, hobbies, with as little material footprint as possible, all with the aim to give meaning to your life.
And what is this meaning? It is the bouquet of emotions, states of mind, that make you want to live more, and give reasons for the choices you make. I would say that any definitions for the meaning of life should be written or said in words. By using language, you construct the bridge between conscious thought and the underlying ocean of emotions. So, go ahead, write down your own meaning of life, then use your Will to Art to walk the path towards beauty.
We have two guiding principles from Samuel Alexander: material sufficiency is all that is needed for human beings to live rich, meaningful, and artful lives; and second, material sufficiency is all that is possible, over the long term, on a finite planet in an age of environmental limits. This kind of ecological civilisation is called SMPLCTY, with the I, the me, removed.
The obstacle for this transformation is that we lack an aesthetic understanding, and imagination. We do not feel yet, as a society, a desire to change, and we cannot imagine yet what would come after the change. Therefore, it is a matter of developing our taste for degrowth, not a matter of shouting more and more climate crisis reports and inequality reports. And when it comes to politics:
“[…] consumerist cultures that seek and expect ever-rising material living standards will not desire a politics or macroeconomics of degrowth, and politicians will never campaign for degrowth if it is clear there is no social mandate for it. Accordingly, the emergence of a culture of voluntary simplicity seems to be a prerequisite to any degrowth transition, and the first step in this cultural shift involves transforming our subjectivities beyond the consumerist default setting. Among other things, this will involve taking seriously the questions, “how much is enough?” and “enough for what?”, and reshaping our relationships to material culture in line with the aesthetic values of balance and harmony. Through a new aesthetic education, we can resist capitalism and usher in an ecological civilisation by learning to find different things beautiful and different things ugly. Revolt is a matter of taste.” (Alexander, SMPLCTY)
A taste which is lacking. We look around us and see a lot of humans agitating for change, blocking roads, spraying evil banks with fake orange paint, while the vast masses of other humans are at work, or at home, or doing chores, waiting for the collapse to happen. A spark for a mass revolt is not there yet. There are not enough humans with added salt on their wounds, added insults to existing injuries. The critical mass is not there yet, and may not be there before we reach collapse.
Can we survive our existential crisis? Yes, with adopting a lifestyle based on simplicity around the world.
What is a potential solution to the crisis? Grow our aesthetic sensibilities so desire simplicity, while increasing our life satisfaction with a much lower material footprint.
MERGING SCIENCE AND ART.
Can we survive our existential crisis?
If we look at both science and art, the answer is yes. Science describes how our brain and behavior works. Art shows why life worth living for. Perhaps we have a choice in what we decide to do, perhaps we do not. In any case, the world is a real place, and we will react to what is happening in our lives, to what we see in the news, whether we are conscious of it, or not. If we continue business-as-usual and attitude-as-usual we are virtually guaranteed to destroy the conditions for human life on Earth.
What is a potential solution to the crisis?
Science says understand yourself, find out what triggers you, and especially how it triggers you. This knowledge will prepare you better for change. Art says how you can nurture your soul, and how you can find much more joy in life if you do not seek material accomplishments, but rather development of your emotions and sensibilities. In the end, even material possessions are all about emotions, so you can replace them with a non-material enrichment of your emotional life.
REALITY CHECK
Recently this paper by James Hansen and his team came out. Its conclusions are very bleak. “Equilibrium global warming for today’s green house gases amount is 10°C, which is reduced to 8°C by today’s human-made aerosols.” Equilibrium warming is not committed warming; rapid phaseout of GHG emissions would prevent most equilibrium warming from occurring.” Needless to say, 8- or 10-degrees heating is catastrophic for all life.
This recent paper shows that the emission reductions that high-income countries achieved through absolute decoupling of emissions from economic activity, fall far short of the rates decided in Paris in 2015. At the achieved rates, rich countries would on average take more than 220 years to reduce their emissions by 95%, emitting 27 times their remaining 1.5 degrees fair-shares in the process.
So, we are not doing what we are supposed to do. How do these reality checks modify the answers to our two questions. They don’t. But maybe, just maybe, the flow of change will reach critical mass soon enough.
CONCLUSION: WHAT IS A SIMPLE LIFE? WHAT DO I DO NOW?
Degrowth or voluntary simplification, requires a democratic process to be implemented. If we end up in a climate catastrophe which will lead to economic and social collapse, degrowth may still be implemented after the world burns, to rebuild civilization. If there is anything left to rebuild. This is called degrowth by disaster.
Seven final points
1. A return to affordability is impossible with market solutions, with monetary policy, or fiscal policy.
2. Involuntary simplification is likely to happen first, and will hit the unprepared humans really hard.
3. Fundamental systems-change must address the links between property, power, capital, and the growth imperative.
4. Business-as-usual and attitude-as-usual, namely capitalism, will accelerate the crisis.
5. We may not have a choice in how we behave as individuals but we can be changed by the social flow.
6. Simple lifestyles and imagination can build resilience in the face of critical change.
7. Freedom is only achieved when real boundaries are understood, and attitude is changed.
*Originally published as a video essay here. Subscribe for more.
Check out these thoughtful definitions for art. Denis Dutton’s proposes that art typically:
provides immediate experiential pleasure not utility;
displays skill and virtuosity;
exhibits style;
has novelty and demonstrates creativity;
is subject to critical judgements and appreciation;
involves representation;
attracts special focus and is bracketed off from the everyday;
expresses individuality;
is emotionally saturated;
offers intellectual challenges;
is associated with art traditions and institutions;
evokes imaginative experience.
Bery Gaut’s cluster definition of art is:
possessing positive aesthetic properties;
being expressive of emotion;
being intellectually challenging;
being formally complex and coherent;
having a capacity to convey complex meanings;
exhibiting an individual point of view;
being an exercise of creative imagination;
(viii) being an artifact or performance that is the product of high skill;
(ix) belong to an established art form;
(x) being the product of an intention to make a work of art.
Elle Dissanayake makes a list of qualities and characteristics that pervade ideas about art, including:
artifice (something contrived, ‘artificial’ rather than natural);
beauty and pleasure (admiration and enjoyment);
the sensual quality of things (colour, shape, sound);
the immediate fullness of sense experience (as contrasted with habituated, unregulated experience);
order or harmony (shaping, pattern-making, achieving unity or wholeness);
innovation (exploration, originality, creativity, invention, seeing things a new way, surprise);
adornment (decoration, display);
self-expression (presenting one’s personal view of the world);
a special kind of communication (conveying information in a special kind of language, symbolising);
nonutilitarian (made for its own sake, having no function);
serious and important concerns (significance, meaning);
make-believe (fantasy, play, wish-fulfilment, illusion, imagination);
heightened existence (exalted emotion, ecstasy, self-transcendence)
Stephen Davies, who adopts a different and more concise approach, contends that something is art:
if it falls under an established, publicly recognised category of art or within an established art tradition;
if it is intended by its maker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is necessary and appropriate to realising that intention;
if it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realising significant aesthetic or artistic goals.