Hey guys,

Just landed back in London after a few days in Dubai on my way back from Melbourne (first time out of the airport, interesting place!).

Time to face the reality of my life after 10ish weeks of mostly gallivanting...

But first, I thought it would be fun to ponder the question of free will & whether there is such a thing... (For now assuming that there isn't so I can just let my life unfold and not be too concerned about what the future holds.

...just kidding only said that to annoy / alarm my parents who may be reading... :))

If biology is destiny, as Freud once told us, what becomes of free will? It is tempting to think that deep within the brain lives a soul, a free agent that takes account of the body's experience but travels around the cranium on its own accord, reflecting, planning, and pulling the levers of the neuromotor machinery. The great paradox of determinism and free will, which has held the attention of the wisest of philosophers and psychologists for generations, can be phrased in more biological terms as follows: if our genes are inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment. It would appear that our freedom is only a self-delusion.​
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​This is from On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson which I was given as a gift for my (2021) graduation (thanks Neil) and I'm finally reading as part of my ban on buying new books until I get through most of my bookshelf (especially the half read non-fiction category...)

E.O. Wilson was an American biologist, naturalist, ecologist, and entomologist known for developing the field of sociobiology. He was a Harvard professor for 46 years and passed away a couple of years ago. This book, published in 1978 won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and in it he explores the biological basis of human behaviour.

Okay here is Wilson's thought experiment for you, a challenge to our free will assumption...

Consider the flip of a coin and the extent of the coin's freedom. On first thought nothing could seem less subject to determinism; coin flipping is the classic textbook example of a random process. But suppose that for some reason we decided to bring all the resources of modern science to bear on a single toss. The coin's physical properties are measured to the nearest picogram and micron, the muscle physiology and exact contours of the flipper's thumb are analysed, the air currents of the room charted, the microtopography and resiliency of the floor surface mapped. At the moment of release, all of this information, plus the instantaneously recorded force and angle of the flip, are fed into a computer. Before the coin has spun through more than a few revolutions, the computer reports the expected full trajectory of the coin and its final resting position at heads or tails. The method is not perfect, and tiny errors in the initial conditions of the flip can be blown up during computation into an error concerning the out-come. Nevertheless, a series of computer-aided predictions will probably be more accurate than a series of guesses. To a limited extent, we can know the destiny of the coin.

An interesting exercise, one can reply, but not entirely relevant, because the coin has no mind. This deficiency can be remedied step-wise, by first selecting a circumstance of intermediate complexity. Let the object propelled into the air be an insect, say a honeybee. The bee has a memory. It can think in a very limited way. During its very short life it will die of old age at fifty days-it has learned the time of day, the location of its hive, the odor of its nestmates, and the location and quality of up to five flower fields. It will respond vigorously and erratically to the flick of the scientist's hand that knocks it loose. The bee appears to be a free agent to the uninformed human observer, but again if we were to concentrate all we know about the physical properties of thimble-sized objects, the nervous system of insects, the behavioral peculiarities of honeybees, and the personal history of this particular bee, and if the most advanced computational techniques were again brought to bear, we might predict the flight path of the bee with an accuracy that exceeds pure chance. To the circle of human observers watching the computer read-out, the future of the bee is determined to some extent. But in her own "mind" the bee, who is isolated permanently from such human knowledge, will always have free will.

Okay then he explains why it's slightly different for us vs. the coin or the honeybee.

When human beings ponder their own central nervous systems, they appear at first to be in the same position as the honeybee. Even though human behavior is enormously more complicated and variable than that of insects, theoretically it can be specified. Genetic constraints and the restricted number of environments in which human beings can live limit the array of possible outcomes substantially. But only techniques beyond our present imagining could hope to achieve even the short-term prediction of the detailed behavior of an individual human being, and such an accomplishment might be beyond the capacity of any conceivable intelligence. There are hundreds or thousands of variables to consider, and minute degrees of imprecision in any one of them might casily be magnified to alter the action of part or all of the mind. Furthermore, an analog of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in subatomic physics is at work here on a grander scale: the more deeply the observer probes the behavior, the more the behavior is altered by the act of probing and the more its very meaning depends on the kinds of measurements chosen. The will and destiny of the watcher is linked to that of the person watched. Only the most sophisticated imaginable monitoring devices, capable of recording vast numbers of internal nervous processes simultaneously and from a distance, could reduce the interaction to an acceptably low level. Thus because of mathematical indeterminacy and the uncertainty principle, it may be a law of nature that no nervous system is capable of acquiring enough knowledge to significantly predict the future of any other intelligent system in detail. Nor can intelligent minds gain enough self-knowledge to know their own future, capture fate and in this sense eliminate free will.

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The mind is too complicated a structure, and human social relations affect its decisions in too intricate and variable a manner, for the detailed histories of individual human beings to be predicted in advance by the individuals affected or by other human beings. You and I are consequently free and responsible persons in this fundamental sense.

Damn back to being responsible for my life I guess...
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​This week on Growing Up with Delia Burgess​
Ep. 93 – Silba Staffler: out of body experience & healing her relationship with food
​​Silba works at the intersection between behavioural economics, design, creative storytelling, mindset coaching, presence training, embodiment practices & community building.

insta: @silbastaffler / www.silbastaffler.com/whatscooking​

Enjoy xx delia
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