On octopuses and family gatherings.

Recently, a dear friend sent me an article from Scientific American about the blanket octopus.

She and I had been discussing unusual animal mating, because that’s what you do, right? Global pandemic hits and you share freaky trivia with your friends.

Miniscule male anglerfish will merge with the body of a female if they find her, feeding off her blood. Deadbeat male clinginess at its worst.

Blanket octopuses also have extreme sexual dimorphism – a female’s tentacles can span seven feet wide, whereas the males are smaller than an inch.

But, wait, there’s more! In a 1963 article for Science magazine, marine biologist Everet Jones speculated that blanket octopuses might use jellyfish stingers as weapons.

While on a research cruise, Jones installed a night-light station to investigate the local fish.

“Among the frequent visitors to the submerged light were a number of immature female blanket octopuses. I dip-netted one of these from the water and lifted it by hand out of the net. I experienced sudden and severe pain and involuntarily threw the octopus back into the water.”

“To determine the mechanism responsible for this sensation, 10 or 12 small octopuses were captured and I purposely placed each one on the tender areas of my hands. The severe pain occurred each time, but careful observation indicated that I was not being bitten.

“The pain and resulting inflammation, which lasted several days, resembled the stings of the Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish, which was quite abundant in the area.”

tl;dr – “It really hurt! So I did it again.”

My spouse teaches high school biology. An important part of her class is addressing misconceptions about what science is.

Every so often, newspapers will send a reporter to interview my father about his research. Each time, they ask him to put on a lab coat and pipette something:

I mean, look at that – clearly, SCIENCE is happening here.

But it’s important to realize that this isn’t always what science looks like. Most of the time, academic researchers aren’t wearing lab coats. And most of the time, science isn’t done in a laboratory.

Careful observation of the natural world. Repeated tests to discover, if I do this, what will happen next? There are important parts of science, and these were practiced by our ancestors for thousands of years, long before anyone had laboratories. Indigenous people around the world have known so much about their local varieties of medicinal plants, and that’s knowledge that can only be acquired through scientific practice.

A nine month old who keeps pushing blocks off the edge of the high chair tray to see, will this block fall down, too? That’s science!

And this octopus article, published in the world’s most prestigious research journal? The experiment was to scoop up octopuses by hand and see how much it hurt.

It hurt a lot.

The article that I linked to earlier, the Scientific American blog post that my friend had sent me, includes a video clip at the bottom. Here’s a direct link to the video:

I should warn, you, though. The first section of the video shows a blanket octopus streaming gracefully through the ocean. She’s beautiful. But then the clip continues with footage of a huge school of fish.

Obviously, I was hoping that they’d show the octopus lurch forward, wielding those jellyfish stingers like electrified nun-chucks to incapacitate the fish. I mean, yes, I’m vegan. I don’t want the fish to die. But an octopus has to eat. And, if the octopus is going to practice wicked cool tool-using martial arts, then I obviously want to see it.

But I can’t. Our oceans are big, and deep, and dark. We’re still making new discoveries when we send cameras down there. So far, nobody has ever filmed a blanket octopus catching fish this way.

Every time I learn something new about octopuses, I think about family reunions.

About twenty years ago, I attended a family reunion in upstate New York. My grandparents were celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Many people were there whom I’d never met before, and whom I haven’t seen since. But most of us shared ancestors, often four or five or even six generations back.

And we all shared ancestors at some point, even the people who’d married in. From the beginning of life on Earth until 150,000 years ago, you could draw a single lineage – _____ begat ______ who begat ______ – that leads up to every single human alive today. We have an ancestor in common who lived 150,000 years ago, and so every lineage that leads to her will be shared by us all.

There’s also an ancestor that all humans alive today share with all octopuses alive today. So we could host a family reunion for all of her descendants – we humans would be invited, and blanket octopuses would be, too.

I would love to meet a blanket octopus. They’re brilliant creatures. If we could find a way to communicate, I’m sure there’d be lots to talk about.

But there’s a problem. You see, not everyone invited to this family reunion would be a scintillating conversationalist.

That ancestor we share? Here’s a drawing of her from Jian Han et al.’s Nature article.

She was about the size of a grain of rice.

And, yes, some of her descendants are brilliant. Octopuses. Dolphins. Crows. Chimpanzees. Us.

But this family reunion would also include a bunch of worms, moles, snails, and bugs. A lot of bugs. Almost every animals would’ve been invited, excluding only jellyfish and sponges. Many of the guests would want to lay eggs in the potato salad.

So, sure, it’d be cool to get to meet up with the octopuses, our long-lost undersea cousins. But we might end up seated next to an earthworm instead.

I’m sure that worms are very nice. Charles Darwin was fascinated by the intelligence of earthworms. Still, it’s hard to have a conversation with somebody when you don’t have a lot of common interests.

On bowerbirds, process, and happiness.

We recently read Donika Kelly’s “Bower” in jail.

I love this poem. There’s a undercurrent of darkness as the bird constructs his pleasure dome. “Here, the iron smell of blood.” But he is undeterred. “And there, the bowerbird. Watch as he manicures his lawn.”

This bowerbird has themed his edifice around sparkling bits of blue. Bower birds incorporate all manner of found objects: berries, beetles (which must be repeatedly returned to their places as they attempt to crawl away), plastic scraps. A bowerbird has a clear vision, a dream of which colors will go where, and scours the forest to find the treasures he needs.

*Will high-contrast white in front of the brown bower bedazzle guests? Our artist can only hope. Image by davidfntau on Flickr.*

Female bowerbirds raise children alone, so she doesn’t need a helpful partner.. Instead, she’ll choose someone who can show her a good time. And her pleasure will be enhanced by a beautiful dome, a splendid arch beneath which several seconds of intercourse can transpire.

A mother-to-be typically visits several bowers before choosing her favorite. During each inspection, the male will hop and flutter during her evaluation … and then slump, dejected, if she flies away.

Kelly closes her poem with the experience of a crestfallen artist: “And then, / how the female finds him, / lacking. All that blue for nothing.”

I especially love the wry irony of that final sentence. We create art hoping to be fawned over; it’d feel nice to know that readers enjoyed a poem so much that they responded with a flush of desire for the author.

But this is rare. No piece of writing will appeal to all readers; an author is lucky if it appeals to any. The same holds true for painting, music, and bowers. A bowerbird hopes that his magnificent edifice will soon be the site of his acrobatic, if brief, bouts of copulation. But his life will miserable if he can’t also take pleasure in the sheer act of creation.

Female tropical birds are free to select whichever male they want. Their flirtations are unlikely to be turned down. And because each intimate encounter is vanishingly brief, a single male might service every female in an area. The other males, having assembled less glorious bowers, will die without ever experiencing erotic delights.

And so a bowerbird needs to enjoy his own arch. To endure, to thole, even if no one wants to fool around with him. Even if no one looks. He needs to feel pleasure as he assembles those beautiful hues. Every visiting female might quickly fly away, but all that blue will have served a purpose.

I love the poem “Bower,” but I also hope that Kelly enjoyed writing her poem enough that my opinion doesn’t matter.

After reading “Bower,” our class got sidetracked into a wide-ranging conversation about birds. At first, we did talk about bowerbirds. Most of the guys had no idea that birds like that existed – that an animal might make art – but one guy had seen a television show about them years ago, and the program made such a deep impression on him that he still remembered much of it. “They really do,” he said. “I’ve seen it. And they showed the people nearby, somebody who was eating breakfast cereal with like a plastic spoon, and this bird flew right over and took it. Later they found bits of it all broken up, in this weird ring around the bird’s nest.”

And then this man started talking about crows.

He gesticulated profusely as he talked, which was rather distracting. One of his hands had about 1.3 fingers; his ring finger was missing entirely, and the others, including his thumb, ended after the first knuckle. I wouldn’t have felt so puzzled – stuff happens, after all – except that one of his stories involved chasing somebody with a steak knife, and this was the hand he brandished.

Many of the people in jail have suffered severe physical injuries. When we were discussing personality manipulation and mind control, someone told me that he’d been hit by a truck and that everything in his life had felt flat and emotionless ever since. He showed me the thick scar at the top of his head: “When it happened, I guess I was out for almost a week, and it took another month before I really remembered my name. Even then, for that first year I felt like I was back in eighth grade again.” He was twenty-something when it happened.

Another time, I asked a man if he wanted to read the next poem and he said he couldn’t, that he was disabled, then thumped his leg onto the table. He had a rounded stump where most people’s foot would be. I didn’t quite see the connection between his injury and the poem, and it’s not as though we ever force people to read. We have a lot of guys with dyslexia, and I go in with the goal of making their Fridays a little more pleasant; no reason for somebody to suffer unnecessarily.

“I was working in a saw mill,” he said. “Planer caught me and, zzooomp. Didn’t even feel anything, at first.”

He got a legal settlement – a few guys muttered that they’d trade a foot for that kind of money – but his pain script led to more opiates and eventually the money was gone and he was in jail and the only help he was getting was from a PD.

But, right, back to the man gesticulating wildly as he talked about birds. “Real smart animals,” he said. “Especially crows.”

I nodded. Crows can use tools – they’ll craft hooks out of wire, cut twigs into the length they need for various tasks. Their brains are structured differently from primates’, which lets them cram just as many neurons into a much smaller volume.

The guy went on: “See, I was living in a tent, and cops kept coming by, harassing me. Cause there’d always be all this trash on the ground. They’d say, ‘look, we know that you’re sleeping here, but you can’t just leave all this shit everywhere.’ And they’d make me clean it up. I’d do it, but then a day or two later, there’d be trash scattered everywhere again. I thought it must be some homeless guys or something that was doing it.”

“But it turned out these crows – they knew I was drinking, that I’d never be up before about noon – and they were raiding the dumpster out behind McDonalds. I only found out because I actually woke up one morning to piss. And I looked up and these crows in the tree above me, they carried tied-off garbage bags way up into that tree and were tearing them apart, looking for things to eat. And that’s how all that trash was getting everywhere. I’d thought it was homeless guys, and it was crows!”

Male bowerbirds can afford to be such terrible parents because they live in tropical forests where there’s an abundance of food to eat. Crows, though, need ingenuity to survive. Sometimes they pick apart the leavings of hairless apes below.

Because crows raise their young in much harsher environs than bowerbirds, males contribute more than just DNA. While a mother roosts, the father will gather food. And so he’ll try to impress a potential mate, beforehand, with his gathering prowess. He won’t build, paint, or compose poetry, but he’ll scour the land below for tasty treats and shiny things, then leave these gifts at his beloved’s feet.

As with bowerbirds, some crows are helpful without reaping the benefits of a dalliance. When a female crow begins to build a nest, five other crows might bring sticks and twigs. These five won’t all be rewarded with the chance to sire her young.

With luck, the crows enjoy the sheer act of helping.

Neither birds nor humans will be lauded for everything we do. If we measure success based solely upon the rewards we reap, many of our lives will feel bleak. In a world full of pyramids – bowerbird mating, corporate finance, the attention economy of social media – not everyone can be at the top.

No matter the outcome, we can all feel fulfilled if we focus on the process of what we’re doing.

Admittedly, it’s hard to find the zen in a lot of the shitty jobs out there in the world. But I did enjoy typing this essay. And I will try to enjoy the irritating parts of parenting today. Someday, my children will learn to ask for cereal politely.

On animals that speak, including humans.

When prairie dogs speak, they seem to use nouns – hawk, human, wooden cut-out – adjectives – red, blue – and adverbs – moving quickly, slowly. They might use other parts of speech as well. Prairie dogs chitter at each other constantly, making many sounds that no humans have yet decoded.

Ever wonder about the evolutionary origin of human intelligence? The leading theory is that, over many generations, our ancestors became brilliant … in order to gossip better. It takes a lot of working memory to keep track of the plot of a good soap opera, and our ancestors’ lives were soap operas. But Carl knows that Shelly doesn’t know that Terrance and Uma are sleeping together, so …

Tool use is pretty cool. So’s a symbolic understanding of the world – who doesn’t love cave art? But gossip probably made us who we are. All those juicy stories begged for a language to be shared.

Many types of birds, such as parrots and crows, spend their lives gossiping. These busybodies also happen to be some of the smartest species (according to human metrics). Each seems to have a unique name – through speech, the birds can reference particular individuals. They clearly remember and can probably describe past events. Crows can learn about dangerous humans from their fellows.

When I walk around town, squirrels sometimes tsk angrily at me. But I’ve definitively observed only a single species using its capacity for speech to denounce all other animals. From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech:

There is a cardinal distinction between man and animal, a sheerly dividing line as abrupt and immovable as a cliff: namely, speech.

Without speech the human beast couldn’t have created any other artifacts, not the crudest club or the simplest hoe, not the wheel or the Atlas rocket, not dance, not music, not even hummed tunes, in fact not tunes at all, not even drumbeats, not rhythm of any kind, not even keeping time with his hands.

This claim is obviously false. Several different species do create artifacts – either speech is unnecessary for this task, or else other species of animals can speak. Or both. In any case, this claim is so easily rebutted – all you’d need is an example of chimpanzees drumming, let along cooking – that it seems a strange conclusion for Wolfe to make.

Don’t get me wrong: humans are pretty great at thinking. I’m more impressed by mathematical than emotional intelligence, which makes it easy for me to think that the average human is way brighter than the average elephant.

In all likelihood, though, humans have been pretty great at thinking for hundreds of thousands of years. The cultural evolution that produced the Atlas rocket and skyscrapers was a very sudden development. For most of the time that humans have been on the planet, our behavior probably didn’t look so different from the behavior of orcas, chimps, or parrots.

Throughout The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe mocks the various theories about human language presented by Noam Chomsky. (I’m ignoring Wolfe’s claims about evolution, which he says can’t be tested, replicated, or used to elucidate otherwise inexplicable phenomena – in his words, “sincere, but sheer, literature.” Here and here are two of many recent experiments tracking evolution in progress.)

I often found myself nodding in agreement with Wolfe. For instance, I’d hope that a linguist making broad claims about human language would learn as many languages as possible. I think that contradictory evidence from the real world holds more weight than pretty theories. From Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech:

In the heading of the [2007 New Yorker] article [“The Interpreter: Has a Remote Amazonian Tribe Upended Our Understanding of Language?”] was a photograph, reprinted many times since, of [Dan] Everett submerged up to his neck in the Maici River. Only his smiling face is visible. Right near him but above him is a thirty-five-or-so-year-old Piraha sitting in a canoe in his gym shorts. It became the image that distinguished Everett from Chomsky. Immersed! – up to his very neck, Everett is … immersed in the lives of a tribe of hitherto unknown na – er – indigenous peoples in the Amazon’s uncivilized northwest. No linguist could help but contrast that with everybody’s mental picture of Chomsky sitting up high, very high, in an armchair in an air-conditioned office at MIT, spic-and-span … he never looks down, only inward. He never leaves the building except to go to the airport to fly to other campuses to receive honorary degrees … more than forty at last count … and remain unmuddied by the Maici or any of the other muck of life down below.

But Chomsky being wrong doesn’t make Wolfe right.

In Why Only Us, authors Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky make some suspicious claims. They argue that human language stems from an innate neurological process that they’ve dubbed “merge,” akin to the combination of two sets to produce a single, indivisible result. {A} merged to {B} yields {C}, where {C} contains all the elements of {A} and {B}.

This sounds pretty abstract, so an example might help. Berwick & Chomsky think that a verb and a direct object would be combined into a single “verb phrase” that is treated as a single unit by our brain. Or, even more complexly, the word “that” leading into a subordinate clause would produce a whole slew of words that is treated as a single unit by our brain. (In the preceding sentence, the phrase “that is treated as a single unit by our brain” would be one object.)

Berwick & Chomsky’s idea is that complex sentences can be built either by listing the final units in a row or using that hierarchical “merge” operation again, i.e. putting a verb phrase inside a subordinate clause, or one subordinate clause inside another. Leading eventually to the tangled, twisty syntax of Marcel Proust.

But as far as I could tell (their book has a lot of jargon, and I read it while walking laps of the YMCA track with a sleeping baby strapped to my chest, so it’s possible I missed something), they don’t discuss the difference between two ideas being placed at the same level of interpretation, such as two independent clauses joined by an “and” or “or,” versus a dependent clause adjoined to an independent clause with “but,” “which,” “that,” or what have you. I couldn’t identify a feature of their argument that suggested why some adjacent words would be processed by a human brain is this special way but others would not. I could certainly address the way this happens in English, but an evolutionary argument ought to apply to all human language, and I know so little about most others that my opinions seem unhelpful here.

Some of Berwick & Chomsky’s ideas don’t seem to hold even in English, though. For instance, they claim that:

… there is no room in this picture for any precursors to language – say a language-like system with only short sentences. There is no rationale for positing such a system: to go from seven-word sentences to the discrete infinity of human language requires emergence of the same recursive procedure as to go from zero to infinity, and there is of course no direct evidence for such “protolanguages.” Similar observations hold for language acquisition, despite appearances, a matter that we put to the side here.

But we’re very confidant that spoken language arose long before written language, and the process they describe isn’t how many humans interact with spoken language. There are definite limits to how many clauses most people can keep in mind at any one time – indeed, much of Why Only Us would sound incomprehensible if read aloud.

Is it reasonable to compare human written language with the spoken language of other animals? The former is decidedly more complex. Sure. But the language actually used by most humans, most of the time, seems much simpler.

When I write, I can strangle syntax as well as any other pedant. But when I actually talk with people, most of what I say is pretty straightforward. I get confused if somebody says something to me with too many embedded clauses, or if words intended to operate together on a “structural” level aren’t in close proximity – Berwick & Chomsky spend a while writing about the phrase “instinctively birds that fly swim,” which sounds like gibberish to me. Just say either “birds that fly instinctively can swim” or “birds that fly can swim instinctively” and you won’t get as many funny looks. Except for the fact that I don’t think this is true, in either phrasing. Syntactically, though, you’d be all set!

In any case, all you’d need to show to demonstrate a linguistically equivalent behavior in other animals would be two parrots discussing the beliefs of a third. This would be the same recursion that Berwick & Chomsky claim produces the “infinity of human language.”

Given that other social animals understand the (false) beliefs of their compatriots, I’d be shocked if they didn’t talk about it. We just haven’t learned how to listen.

Humans are great. We’ve accomplished a lot, especially in these last few thousand years (which is incredibly fast compared to evolutionary timescales). The world has changed even in the short time that I’ve been alive. But the unfounded claims in both The Kingdom of Speech and Why Only Us made me feel sad: with so much to be proud of, why should we humans also strive to distinguish ourselves with supremacist arrogance?

On elephants.

During springtime each year, my spouse tells a lot of people that high school prom is a blast … as long as you’re not a high schooler. Many teachers attend, nominally as chaperones, and they don’t have to worry about who they’ll leave with or what they’ll be doing afterward. (Shucking earplugs and going to sleep.)

We go to the local high school prom most years. My spouse greets her students and compliments their attire: you clean up well! The boys on the cross country and track teams shake my hand and compliment my attire: you clean up well, coach!

unnamed — The most magical night of our lives … every year.

At times, briefly, I am allowed to dance. (My only formal dance training was in preparation for the South Asian Students’ Association spring show during college – I was part of a Dandiya Raas set to “Chale Chalo” from Lagaan – and my preferred style of dancing still involves a lot of leaping.)

Each year’s prom is themed, with decorations prepared by junior members of the student council. My favorite was 2012’s “prom-apocalypse,” with fake flames and wreckage. Coincidentally, I prepared the same style of decoration for a fundraiser when I was my high school’s National Honor Society president. The kids here were inspired by the end of the Mayan calendar; our dance was held in December, 1999, when the newspapers were rife with reports of people hoarding cans or turning blue-ish from ingesting too much anti-microbial silver.

I also convinced a d.j. buddy to put together some music for the event, like a track splicing Britney Spears’s “…Baby One More Time” with Marilyn Manson’s “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”

Despite having hated being in high school, I love the corny tropes involved. Like, okay, film noir about drug deals gone bad? Eh, seen it. But set that same noir in high school, you get Brick, with charming lines like “She knows where I eat lunch.”

This year, though, prom is circus-themed.

“Oh, cool,” I said. “Like Cirque du Soleil?”

“No. Like, elephants in cages.”

We won’t attend. It seems an especially bizarre choice of theme now, when even Ringling Brothers, after 145 years of torturing elephants, has announced that they’ll stop. They will, of course, continue to torture other species.

As humans have learned more about animal cognition, we have steadily revised our claims as to the features of our brains that make us special. Once upon a time, we claimed that our superiority came simply from our very large brains; we contrasted ourselves to dinosaurs, whom we claimed (erroneously) had brains no bigger than walnuts.

Elephants have the largest brains of any land animal.

Later, we realized that sheer brain bulk does not equate with intelligence – actual neuron counts would be far more informative.

Elephants have three times as many neurons as humans.

We once posited that “tool use” separated humans from other animals, until we learned that chimpanzees, crows, and others use tools too.

We claimed that only humans understand death. Touting that no other species buries their dead, we claimed that only Homo sapiens have the emotional intelligence necessary to understand narrative. Other animals are trapped inside an eternal now.

This, too, is false.

In elephants, the hippocampus – the brain region implicated in processing narrative emotional memory – is enlarged relative to humans. They routinely visit sites where friends or relatives died. They caress the bones of their lost. After violent encounters with a brutal species of hairless ape, elephants can suffer post-traumatic stress disorder for years. Their children require the guidance of elders to learn behavioral norms.

Like human children, young elephant males who grow in broken communities run wild.

We humans have treated elephants abysmally, not in spite of their magnificence, but because of it. When a small, flamboyantly-dressed circus tamer can break an elephant’s will so completely that the creature will perform in the center of a jeering crowd, we receive proof just how powerful humans are.

Elena Passarello writes of our dominance over nature in her essay “Jumbo II,” which interlaces two histories: that of elephants brought to the United States, and our ability to harness electricity.

From the beginning, the elephants were tortured: placed in small zoo enclosures (Passarello: They gave “Old Chief” to the Cincinnati Zoo, which shot him by the end of the decade. Two days after, Cincinnati’s Palace Restaurant added “elephant loin” to its dinner menu.), beaten by circus trainers until they learned to do “tricks,” condemned to death for unexpectedly dangerous behavior during musth.

As our technological prowess grew, electricity was put to ever new uses. Electricity could light our streets! It could power our factories! It could execute the condemned!

The histories of elephants and electricity in America merge in 1903. In Passarello’s words:

[Electrocuting an Elephant] is a minute-long, live short of the first elephant – and the second female of any species on the planet – to be condemned to electrocution for her crimes.

In the yards around Coney Island’s Luna Park, the condemned elephant places each foot onto a copper plate. Once ignited with over 6,000 volts of alternating current, they smoke beneath her planted feet. The smoke rises around her body, her trunk goes rigid, and all five tons of her list forward.

And, from Ciaran Berry’s poem, “Electrocuting an Elephant:”

…though it changes nothing,
I want to explain how, when the elephant falls, she falls
like a cropped elm. First the shudder, then the toppling
as the surge ripples through each nerve and vein,
and she drops in silence and a fit of steam to lie there
prone, one eye opened that I wish I could close.

I could not bring myself to watch the video footage to verify this description, but I am glad her eye was open. We humans behave better when we believe we are watched. And our behavior, in the past, was not good enough.

Even now, we make mistakes. If we want a world with elephants, the money from ecotourism is not enough. Those who have been born to wealthy nations – beneficiaries of a long history of exploitation and violence – should devote funds to repairing some of the damage we’ve inherited.

On a guaranteed basic income.

For several months, a friend and I have volleyed emails about a sprawling essay on consciousness, free will, and literature.

The essay will explore the idea that humans feel we have free will because our conscious mind grafts narrative explanations (“I did this because…”) onto our actions. It seems quite clear that our conscious minds do not originate all the choices that we then take credit for. With an electroencephalogram, you could predict when someone is about to raise an arm, for instance, before the person has even consciously decided to do so.

Which is still free will, of course. If we are choosing an action, it hardly matters whether our conscious or subconscious mind makes the choice. But then again, we might not be “free.” If an outside observer were able to scan a person’s brain to sufficient detail, all of that person’s future choices could probably be predicted (as long as our poor study subject is imprisoned in an isolation chamber). Our brains dictate our thoughts and choices, but these brains are composed of salts and such that follow the same laws of physics as all other matter.

That’s okay. It is almost certainly impossible that any outside observer could (non-destructively) scan a brain to sufficient detail. If quantum mechanical detail is implicated in the workings of our brains, it is definitely impossible: quantum mechanical information can’t be duplicated. Wikipedia has a proof of this “no cloning theorem” involving lots of bras and kets, but this is probably unreadable for anyone who hasn’t done much matrix math. An easier way to reason through it might be this: if you agree with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the idea that certain pairs of variables cannot be simultaneously measured to arbitrary precision, the no cloning theorem has to be true. Otherwise you could simply make many copies of a system and measure one variable precisely for each copy.

So, no one will ever be able to prove to me that I am not free. But let’s just postulate, for a moment, that the laws of physics that, so far, have correctly described the behavior of all matter outside my brain also correctly describe the movement of matter inside my brain. In which case, those inviolable laws of physics are dictating my actions as I type this essay. And yet, I feel free. Each word I type feels like a choice. My brain is constantly concocting a story that explains why I am choosing each word.

Does the same neural circuitry that deludes me into feeling free – that has evolved, it seems, to constantly sculpt narratives that make sense of our actions, the same way our dreams often burgeon to include details like a too hot room or a ringing telephone – also give me the ability to write fiction?

In other words, did free will spawn The Iliad?

The essay is obviously rather speculative. I’m incorporating relevant findings from neuroscience, but, as I’ve mentioned, it’s quite likely that no feasible experiments could ever test some of these ideas.

The essay is also unfinished. No laws of physics forbid me from finishing it. I’m just slow because K & I have two young kids. At the end of each day, once our 2.5 year old and our 3 month old are finally asleep, we exhaustedly glance at each other and murmur, “Where did the time go?”

But I am very fortunate to have a collaborator always ready to nudge me back into action. My friend recently sent me an article by Tim Christiaens on the philosophy of financial markets. He sent it because the author argues – correctly, in my opinion – that for many stock market actions it’s sensible to consider the Homo sapiens trader + the nearby multi-monitor computer as a single decision-making entity. Tool-wielding is known to change our brains – even something as simple as a pointing stick alters our self-perception of our reach. And the algorithms churned through by stock traders’ computers are incredibly complex. There’s not a good way for the human to check a computer’s results; the numbers it spits out have to be trusted. So it seems reasonable to consider the two together as a single super-entity that collaborates in choosing when to buy or sell. If something in the room has free will, it would be the tools & trader together.

Which isn’t as weird as it might initially sound. After all, each Homo sapiens shell is already a multi-species super-entity. As I type this essay, the choice of which word to write next is made inside my brain, then signals are sent through my nervous system to my hands and fingers commanding them to tap the appropriate keys. The choice is influenced by all the hormones and signaling molecules inside my brain. It so happens that bacteria and other organisms living in my body excrete signaling molecules that can cross the blood-brain barrier and influence my choice.

The milieu of intestinal bacteria living inside each of us gets to vote on our moods and actions. People with depression seem to harbor noticeably different sets of bacteria than people without. And it seems quite possible that parasites like Toxoplasma gondii can have major influences on our personalities.

Indeed, in his article on stock markets, Christiaens mentions the influence of small molecules on financial behavior, reporting that “some researchers study the trader’s body through the prism of testosterone levels as an indicator of performance. It turns out that traders who regularly visit prostitutes consequently have higher testosterone levels and outperform other traders.”

Now, I could harp on the fact that we designed these markets. That they could have been designed in many different ways. And that it seems pretty rotten to have designed a system in which higher testosterone (and the attendant impulsiveness and risky decision-making) would correlate with success. Indeed, a better, more equitable market design would probably quell the performance boost of testosterone.

I could rant about all that. But I won’t. Instead I’ll simply mention that Toxoplasma seems to boost testosterone. Instead of popping into brothels after work, traders could snack on cat shit.

On the topic of market design, Christiaens also includes a lovely description of the interplay between the structure of our economy and the ways that people are compelled to live:

The reason why financial markets are able to determine the viability of lifestyles is because most individuals and governments are indebted and therefore need a ‘creditworthy’ reputation. As the [U.S.] welfare state declined during the 1980s, access to credit was facilitated in order to sustain high consumption, avoid overproduction and stimulate economic growth. For Lazzarato [a referenced writer], debt is not an obligation emerging from a contract between free and equal individuals, but is from the start an unequal power relation where the creditor can assert his force over the debtor. As long as he is indebted, the latter’s rights are virtually suspended. For instance, a debtor’s property rights can be superseded when he fails to reimburse the creditor by evicting him from his home or selling his property at a public auction. State violence is called upon to force non-creditworthy individuals to comply. We [need] not even jump to these extreme cases of state enforcement to see that debt entails a disequilibrium of power. Even the peaceful house loan harbors a concentration of risk on the side of the debtor. When I take a $100,000 loan for a house that, during an economic crisis, loses its value, I still have to pay $100,000 plus interests to the bank. The risk of a housing crash is shifted to the debtor’s side of the bargain. During a financial crisis this risk concentration makes it possible for the creditors to demand a change of lifestyle from the debtor, without the former having to reform themselves.

Several of my prior essays have touched upon the benefits of a guaranteed basic income for all people, but I think this paragraph is a good lead-in for a reprise. As Christiaens implies, there is violence behind all loans – both the violence that led to initial ownership claims and the threat of state violence that compels repayment. Not that I’m against the threat of state violence to compel people to follow rules in general – without this threat we would have anarchy, in which case actual violence tends to predominate over the threat of incipient enforcement.

We all need wealth to live. After all, land holdings are wealth, and at the very least each human needs access to a place to collect fresh water, a place to grow food, a place to stand and sleep. But no one is born wealthy. A fortunate few people receive gifts of wealth soon after birth, but many people foolishly choose to be born to less well-off parents.

The need for wealth curtails the choices people can make. They need to maintain their “creditworthiness,” as in Christiaens’s passage, or their hire-ability. Wealth has to come from somewhere, and, starting from zero, we rely on others choosing to give it to us. Yes, often in recompense for labor, but just because you are willing and able to do a form of work does not mean that anyone will pay you for it.

Unless people are already wealthy enough to survive, they are at the mercy of others choosing to give them things. Employers are not forced to trade money for salaried working hours. And there isn’t wealth simply waiting around to be claimed. It all starts from something – I’d argue that all wealth stems originally from land holdings – but the world’s finite allotment of land was claimed long ago through violence.

A guaranteed basic income would serve to acknowledge the brutal baselessness of those initial land grabs. It is an imperfect solution, I know. It doesn’t make sense to me that everyone’s expenses should rise whenever a new child is born. But a world where people received a guaranteed basic income would be better than one without. The unluckily-born populace would be less compelled to enter into subjugating financial arrangements. We’d have less misery – feeling poor causes a lot of stress. We’d presumably have less crime and drug abuse, too, for similar reasons.

And, of course, less hypocrisy. It’s worth acknowledging that our good fortune comes from somewhere. No one among us created the world.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: tool use

On octopuses and family gatherings.

On animals that speak, including humans.

On elephants.