“We have art so that we may not perish by the truth” --- Friedrich Nietzsche
No agency. I will illustrate my point this way: at one time (and still in many cultures today) the natural world was perceived as being filled with spirits. A violent thunderstorm moves in and the mind projects agency onto the storm: Storm God is angry and demands a sacrifice! But we know that that is not the case. The storm's behavior is the consequence of complex atmospheric conditions. The brain evolved to subconsciously project agency onto sufficiently animated behavior, especially inexplicable behavior (and other conditions)[1]. Watch the high-tech machine robots in action, some remarkably human-like in stance and manner, and try to deny your unsettling sense of their agency. And if you have ever played sock-puppet with a three-year-old, you’ve probably witnessed the wide-eyed joy in their thorough suspension of disbelief. Today, we so-called sophisticated thinker types understand that science has de-personified the storm: the storm has no self-agency. (Some still argue for storm spirits; you may be one who does—but I doubt it.) Perhaps someday, ages hence, sophisticated people will look back, bemused, at how we primitive types attributed agency to ourselves, and to each other! (In a seemingly unshakable, though not usually “wide-eyed” suspension of disbelief.) We project agency on to human behavior which is also nothing more than staggeringly complex biological and mental processes.
This, of course, leads us to notions of Free Will. A storm does not have free will, and neither do we. I agree with theoretical physicist Brian Greene that free will is a “sensation in the brain”.[2] There is no experiencer behind the experience, no intender behind the intention. What would it mean to act totally outside of the conditions of its environment? What kind of act would that be? Surrealist painter Salvatore Dali, in an angry whim, once shoved a bathtub through a storefront window in Manhattan. Free will? The whole notion is preposterous. The ego will go kicking and screaming to defend the notion of free will because it knows that its own existence is very much a slight-of-hand contrived by this specious notion. Studies show that decision making is easily befuddled by simply adding more possible options. That's why the ego likes simple either/or logic, codes, laws, rules and Commandments, etc., to obey. It can use these to define and empower itself. The existentialists say we create ourselves through owning our decisions. This is probably true. But there is no decider behind the decision. The decider is an illusion—a sensation in the brain.
Freud, as I understand it, was inspired to develop his ideas on the subconscious after witnessing experiments in hypnotism. Though it was clear to the experimenters that the behavior of the clients was a result of the experimenter’s suggestions, the clients would create narratives to rationalize the behavior. Freud observed that hypnotized patients carrying out post-hypnotic suggestions with amnesia would “feel compelled to improvise some obviously unsatisfactory reason” to explain their real motive, of which they were unaware.[i] Yes, the mind is a story-making machine. Its job is to rationalize behavior that is pre-determined (by “decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse” - Eliot) in the brain[3]. Well-adjusted, happily socialized people do this easily, as their behavior has been conditioned to integrate into their social and cultural environments, but a certain type of mental dysfunction, or even insanity, becomes apparent when behavior becomes so irrational that the individual must confabulate increasingly absurd stories to rationalize the behavior. “I am the King of Prussia!” echos the tormented voice through the abysmal asylum. And I am reminded of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, in which a young boy projects an alternative narrative (that he is in a boat with stranded zoo animals) onto a reality too horrifying to accept (the animals are actually people, one of which is a sailor and another his mother, whom the sailor kills before the boy’s eyes). Life of Pi. Brilliant. Yes, life is inherently irrational; we live in a meaningless, hostile, and indifferent universe, so nature, thankfully, evolved in the human brain the capacity (much like Freud's hypnotized patients) to superimpose narratives over the hostile meaninglessness so that we might try and make meaning of it. And this is why we as well have the fantastic myths of religions, and a rich body of literature; oh, and a semiotic, subjective self—and, as suggested earlier, profane history.
[1] In hindsight, I think that the “something in the brain” in this sentence is an evolutionary adaptation. Clearly, the adaptation allows us to project agency on the otherwise physical processes of the “other”, and gives us the empathy necessary allow human bonding.
[2] Brian Greene made this statement on the radio show On Being with Krista Tippett, January, 20, 2014.
[3] See: Austin, James (2000), Zen and the Brain, MIT Press: NY, New York.
[i] Freud, S. (1953). The interpretation of dreams. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 4, pp.1-338). London: Hogarth Press (Original work published in 1900) p. 158.
--- From my essay "Zen, Free Will, and the Authentic Moral Non-Self."
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