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Troy Camplin, Ph.D. Freedom Evolves A timeless light shines through the window, day Which makes electric atoms which are likely To bring each object now certain to move Into the life that feeds and breathes and breeds With slight intention over our organic Way that we see symbolic goals which we Have made into the concrete houses we Then turn over to history – or, no, True history precedes by far what makes The human what it is, the social found In all our ape ancestors – chimpanzees Have culture, ritual, and medicine, Which bring them closer to us socially, Since social history precedes the human, For each of us was us already, free And social like all other social mammals, And thankfully not like the deadly ants – We’ve built a very different house, one where True love can live, a bright electric light. There’s no such thing as love or freedom with Collective ants – there’s only found among Them murder and control through all their lives. Several years ago Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a book by the same title that in fact set out to prove the opposite thesis. His conclusion was that the world was in fact deterministic, but that we evolved in such a way as to delude ourselves that we are free. Had his title been more honest, it would have been “The Illusion of Freedom Evolved.” While he indeed posits that determinism and free will are compatible, he never in fact shows that this is the case. Specifically, he redefines the concept of freedom and free will to fit into his deterministic world view. The problem is that Dennett is tied to a 19th century understanding of the world (specifically, Pierre LaPlace’s understanding of the world); recent developments in physics, chemistry, biology and the social sciences – with information theory, chaos and bios theory, emergence, and self-organization – show instead a world where freedom does in fact evolve. Physical determinism is but one step on the ladder of freedom’s evolution. The universe is made of entities consisting of and giving rise to an emergent series of bottom-up self-organizing systems under decentralized cybernetic control. A human has a self-organizing brain and body made up of self-organizing cells made up of self-organizing chemicals made up of self-organizing atoms. As we move into greater complexity from quantum particle-waves to human beings, we move into greater expressions of freedom and individuality. One of the reasons for this is the fact that the more good rules a system has, the more complex it is, and the more degrees of freedom the system has to operate in. Rules are not the opposite of freedom. They in fact help define the limits which allow for freedom. Freedom is not license to do just anything. You are not free to murder, as that imposes on another’s freedom to live. If people were free to murder, that would result in a decrease in freedom overall, since a dead person has many fewer options than does a living one. What is at issue, then, is what kinds of rules result in greater freedom. Those naturally derived in a bottom-up fashion have proven to consistently result in greater freedom throughout the history of the universe. The models I am following to show the emergence of ever more freedom are the umwelt theory of emergent time of J.T. Fraser and the theory of psychosocial emergence of Clare Graves, as developed by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan in their book Spiral Dynamics. Each of these theories show that complexity and freedom emerge in the universe and in humans and their societies, respectively. With Fraser, we see in the moment of the Big Bang a ruleless universe of pure becoming, out of which emerged quantum physical entities, whose probabilistic behaviors added slightly more freedom of action to the universe in the fact that something may happen, something may interact. As the universe cooled and atoms crystallized out, and as larger atoms were created, and more complex chemical reactions could occur, quantum probability gave way to macrophysical determinism and causality. This was actually an increase in freedom, as the rules of interaction increased in number, meaning more kinds of things could happen, since more solid parameters were set. Still, as physicists have recently shown, quantum effects can still hold for large objects like atoms, though the probability of every part of large objects entering the wave-form simultaneously becomes vanishingly improbable. Too many scientists and philosophers stop at this level of reality and declare the world to be fundamentally unfree. The Naturalists accepted this idea completely and wrote some pretty dreary literature in light of that belief. Others, like Sartre, proposed radical acts of rebellion known as “gratuitous acts” that were somehow supposed to break us out of the deterministic universe, though they never really explained how that was possible – wouldn’t you be determined to perform the “gratuitous act” if the world is truly deterministic? The result was even more dreary literature, since the authors all had a sneaking suspicion that their actions (and those of their characters) were determined from the beginning of the universe. More drearily, the only gratuitous acts anyone could seem to think of were crimes (consider the protagonist of Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures, for example). It was much like the idea of fate in ancient Greece and Rome, but without the gods and without hope. Fortunately, recent developments in systems science and biology have shown us a different world. The interactions of biochemicals may be deterministic, but the system they create – the cell – has emergent properties with new rules and, thus, more degrees of freedom. Groups of cells interacting together as a single system – an organism – give rise to even more emergent properties, with even more rules and, thus, even more degrees of freedom. The human brain is made of special kinds of cells which are themselves highly plastic and adaptable, with even more rules of interactions than are most other cells. The result is the emergence of the mind. Interacting minds, mediated through our bodies, have given rise to complex ecosystems, economies, societies, cultures, and governments. In laying out this model of emergence, I may have inadvertently suggested a world of one-way causality, which would in fact be deterministic in structure, and nothing could be further from the truth. Interacting embodied minds do give rise to certain kinds of societies, for example, but those societies in turn affect those embodied minds. Affect, but do not control. In complex systems, the parts of the system influence each other cybernetically – the system is thus steered through the currents it finds itself in, but is not rigidly controlled. There is no central authority making everything work well together. The interacting parts of a system work to create the emergent system and the emergent properties of the system in turn affect the elements of the system and their interactions. The society/culture affects the mind, the mind affects and causes changes in the brain’s connections and chemistry, the cell affects the biochemistry, chemistry affects atomic structures, and atomic structures affect quantum physical interactions. If it were only bottom-up causality, we would be determined and unfree – but the fact is that we are a nested set of bottom-up, followed by top-down, interacting causalities, a set of bipolar feedback loops which are creative and, thus, creative of freedom. More rules results in more complexity and more freedom. Bipolar feedback seems to be at the center of freedom. Attraction alone gives you a solid; repulsion alone gives you a gas. Both are simple. But a combination of attraction and repulsion will give you a complex system on the edge of order and disorder, organized around strange attractors (which attract and repulse simultaneously, unlike point attractors like gravity in relation to a pendulum, which just attract). Negative feedback suppresses a system; positive feedback can make a system run out of control. But a combination of the two results in creativity, termed bios by its discoverer Hector Sabelli. Feedforward communicates information from source to target (brain to environment; biochemicals to cell); feedback communicates information from target to source (environment to brain; cell to biochemicals). But a combination of the two results in complex systems with emergent properties – through the eyes, it results in sight; the brain’s minding makes the mind, which in turn can affect the brain. Imagining practicing the piano alters the brain in the same way and in the same locations as actually practicing the piano. This is the mind acting on the brain. It is no illusion. Opposites working together in complementary and paradoxical fashion create freedom. They also create beauty. Beauty is not the merely pretty. Beauty is the affirmation of paradox. We could begin with Francis Hutcheson’s definition of beauty as being unity in diversity and diversity in unity, but we certainly should not end there. Ernst Fischer observes that all beauty has inherent in it an agonal unification of opposites. Each is complementary; one is not above another, they are equal in importance, and each requires the other for existence. Thus, Fisher lists the following agonally unified opposites as constituting beauty. I would argue further that the more of these elements present in something, the more beautiful it is: Native – Foreign Light – Shadow Logos – Eros Emotion – Intellect (Reason) Conscious – Unconscious Soul – Technology Feeling – Thinking General – Specific Universal – Particular In addition to this list, I add the following: Complexity within Simplicity Digital-Analog Emergent from Conflict Evolutionary (changes over time) and Timelessness/Permanence Generative and Creative Hierarchical Organization Play (a nonserious thing done seriously) Reflexivity or Feedback Rhythmicity Rule-Based Scalar Self-Similarity Time-Bound Unity in Multiplicity These are also features of the universe as a whole – and thus describe a (meta)physics. These also describe a way to come to know the world – and thus describe an epistemology. Christian Fuchs lists the following features as aspects of self-organization: Emergence Complexity Cohesion (digital-analog) Openness Bottom-up-Emergence Downward Causation Non-linearity Feedback Loops, Circular Causality Information Relative Chance Hierarchy Globalization and Localization Unity in Plurality (Generality and Specificity) And for Emergence, he lists the following aspects: Synergism (productive interaction between parts) Novelty Irreducibility Unpredictability Coherence/Correlation Historicity If we compare the lists, we can see there is a correlation between self-organizing complex systems and beauty. Each have the same attributes. “Cognition, co-operation and communication are phenomena that can be found in different forms in all self-organizing systems. All self-organizing systems are information-generating systems. Information is a relationship that exists as a relationship between specific organisational units of matter” (Fuchs). All beautiful objects are information-generating systems. And to the extent that something is a self-organizing system, it is beautiful – which means, beauty is found from quantum particle-waves all the way up through art, literature, philosophy, and religion. Thus we see the deep connection between beauty and freedom. We see too that information, which requires the simultaneous presence of certainty and uncertainty, is related to each of these ideas in the same fashion. Information is thus a vital element to and for freedom and to having a free society. The arts, when they are beautiful and information-rich, are thus vital to a free society. Elaine Scarry further draws these parallels in On Beauty and Being Just, where she shows the connection between beauty and justice. Beauty, justice, and freedom. More Information = More Complexity = More Beauty = More Justice = More Freedom As Frederick Turner observes in Shakespeare’s Twenty-First Century Economics, justice (what is earned) requires its opposite in mercy (what is given) to continue being justice – it must contain its own opposite to avoid becoming injustice (as three-strike laws can sometimes do, when a man gets life in prison for stealing a slice of pizza). What also connects beauty, freedom, and justice is the existence of good rules. It is important to first differentiate rules from laws. Rules can be bent; laws are always broken (except the laws of nature, which cannot be). If you break the rules, you are simply no longer playing the same game, but are now playing another one; if you break the laws, you’re punished before you’re allowed to participate again. The laws of nature, for example, prohibit people from flying by flapping their arms – if you try to violate that law, you will be punished with broken bones or even death. Law-breaking is thus a much more serious thing than rule-breaking – and that is why there should be very few laws in life. Good rules, however, give us much more freedom. Chess has more rules than checkers and, thus, has more degrees of freedom, resulting in more games one can play. Recently checkers was solved as a game, using computers. No such solution for chess appears anywhere on the horizon. As rules solidify into laws, we find ourselves less free. As complementary opposites turn into irreconcilable ones, new levels of complexity emerge to reconcile the paradoxes at the new level. We see this both in physical emergence, in J.T. Fraser’s model, and in psychosocial emergence as well. Humans are most comfortable in groups of about a hundred and fifty. Larger than that, and we split up. However, once the population of a region reaches a certain density, splitting off into groups doesn’t work any longer. We can either go to war with everyone (the default choice) or learn to get along in larger groups. While we evolved to be xenophobic, racist, and to engage in war to eliminate those not us (which includes those who were formerly considered to be us), we also have plastic, adaptable brains. We can learn to apply the way we treat family members (do not kill, steal from, or rape them) to others. Thus, humans developed more complex psychologies in response to new social situations. But this is a set of feedback/feedforward loops that also drive complexity. A group’s psychology creates its society as the members interact, and the society in turn affects each member’s psychology. People and societies develop in certain ways which have been identified by the psychologist Clare Graves, the story of which is what humans and their societies can develop ever-greater freedom. This doesn’t preclude setbacks, and it doesn’t mean you have everyone at the same psychological level in the same society, in the same way that biochemical systems emerging into living cells certainly doesn’t preclude death under certain conditions – but at the same time, the trend line does point to greater complexity over the long run. Thus human psychologies and societies can evolve in response to more complex life conditions to make people and those societies ever-freer. So it seems that freedom does in fact evolve. More, we have seen that universal evolution seems to be trending toward ever-greater complexity and freedom. The world is, thus, deeply and fundamentally free. Our art needs to reflect this fact. It will do so not by embracing anarchy, nihilism, and randomness – which are not expressions of freedom, but rather of the least free level of the universe – but by embracing the kinds of rules that result in the generation of new things. In other words, the arts will free themselves by embracing beauty. For the poet, the sonnet does not restrict expression, but rather allows for greater expression than the poet is otherwise capable of. The sonnet is the engine which contains the author’s explosion of feelings, turning it into something which can drive us to new places, having given us the freedom to do so. An art which follows good rules to create works of beauty is an art of freedom. Bibliography Beck, Don and Christopher Cowan. Spiral Dynamics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1996 Dennett, Daniel C. Freedom Evolves. New York: Viking. 2003 Fischer, Ernst Peter. Beauty and the Beast: The Aesthetic Moment in Science. New York and London: Plenum Trade. 1999 Fraser, J. T. Time, Conflict, and Human Values. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1999 Fraser, J. T. Time: the Familiar Stranger. Redmond: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press. 1987 Fuchs, Christian. “Co-Operation and Self-Organization” tripleC 1(1) 2003 <http://tripleC.uti.at> Gide, André. Lafcadio’s Adventures. Cambridge: Robert Bentley. 1980 (1914) Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Idea of Beauty and Virtue. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 2004 Sabelli, Héctor. Bios. New Jersey: World Scientific. 2005 Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 1999 Turner, Frederick. Shakespeare’s Twenty-First-Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999 |
