I Am a Strange Loop

independent of physics, it amounts to dualism (something we already knew, in effect, since belief in Cartesian Egos is a kind of dualism).

Violets Are Red, Roses Are Blue

Why is it that those who postulate the inverted spectrum always do so only for experiences that lie along a one-dimensional numerical scale? It seems like a great paucity of imagination to limit oneself to swapping red and blue. If you think it’s coherent to say to someone else, “Maybe your private inner experience of red is the same as my private inner experience of blue”, then why would it not be just as coherent to say, “Maybe your private inner experience of looking at a red rose is the same as my private inner experience of looking at a blue violet”?

What is sacrosanct about the idea of shuffling colors inside a spectrum? Why not shuffle all sorts of experiences arbitrarily? Maybe your private inner experience of redness is the same as my private inner experience of hearing very low notes on a piano. Or maybe your private inner experience of going to a baseball game is the same as my private inner experience of going to a football game. Then again, maybe your private inner experience of going to a baseball game is the same as my private inner experience of going on a roller-coaster ride. Or maybe it’s the same as my private inner experience of wrapping Christmas presents.

I hope that these sound ridiculously incoherent to you, and that you can move step by step backwards from these variations on the inverted-spectrum theme to the original inverted-spectrum riddle without losing the sense of ridiculousness. That would be most gratifying to me, because I see no fundamental difference between the original riddle and the patently silly caricatures of it just offered.

A Scarlet Sardine

The inverted-spectrum riddle depends on the idea that we are all born with a range of certain “pure experiences” that have no physical basis but that can get attached, as we grow, to certain external stimuli, and thus specific experiences and specific stimuli get married and from then on they are intimately tied together for a lifetime. But these “pure experiences” are supposedly not physical states of the brain. They are, rather, subjective feelings that one simply “has”, without there being any physical explanation for them. Your brain state and mine could look as identical as anyone could ever imagine (using ultra-fine-grained brain- scanning devices), but whereas I would be feeling blueness, you would be feeling redness.

The inverted-spectrum fairy tale is a feeble mixture of bravado and timidity. While it boldly denies the physical world’s relevance to what we feel inside, it meekly limits itself to a one-dimensional spectrum, and to the electromagnetic one, to boot. The sonic spectrum is too tied to objective physical events like shaking and vibrating for us to imagine it as being inverted, and if one tries to carry the idea beyond the realm of one-dimensional spectra, it becomes far too absurd to give any credence to.

Yes, People Want Things

There’s something else in the philosophical literature on consciousness that gives me the willies, and that is the so-called “problem of free will”. Let me describe this second sacred cow, and then try to dispatch it, too, as quickly as possible. (It, too, suffers from sacred mad cow disease.)

When people decide to do something, they often say, “I did it of my own free will.” I think what they mean by this is usually, in essence, “I did it because I wanted to, not because someone else forced me to do it.” Although I am uncomfortable with the phrase “I did it of my own free will”, the paraphrase I’ve suggested sounds completely unobjectionable to me. We do indeed have wants, and our wants do indeed cause us to do things (at least to the extent that 641’s primeness can cause a domino in a domino chain to fall).

The Hedge Maze of Life

Sometimes our desires bang up against obstacles. Somebody else drank that last soft drink in the refrigerator; the formerly all-night grocery store now closes at midnight; my friend’s car has a flat tire; the dog ate my homework; the plane just pulled out of the gate thirty seconds ago; the flight has been canceled because of a snowstorm in Saskatoon; we’re having computer troubles and we can’t seem to make PowerPoint work in here; I left my wallet in my other pair of pants; you misread the final deadline; the reviewer was someone who hates us; she didn’t hear about the job until too late; the runner in the next lane is faster than I am; and so on and so forth.

In such cases our will alone, though it pushes us, does not get us what we want. It pushes us in a certain direction, but we are maneuvering inside a hedge maze whose available paths were dictated by the rest of the world, not by our wants. And so we move willy-nilly, but not freewilly-nilly, inside the maze. A combination of pressures, some internal and some external, collectively dictates our pathway in this crazy hedge maze called “life”.

There’s nothing too puzzling about this. And I repeat, there is nothing puzzling about the idea that some of the pressures are our wants. What makes no sense is to maintain, over and above that, that our wants are somehow “free” or that our decisions are somehow “free”. They are the outcomes of physical events inside our heads! How is that free?

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Will

When a male dog gets a whiff of a female dog in heat, it has certain extremely intense desires, which it will try extremely hard to satisfy. We see the intensity only too clearly, and when the desire is thwarted (for instance, by a fence or a leash), it pains us to identify with that poor animal, trapped by its innate drives, pushed by an abstract force that it doesn’t in the least understand. This poignant sight clearly exemplifies will, but is it free will?

How do we humans have anything that transcends that dog-like kind of yearning? We have intense yearnings, too — some of them in the sexual arena, some in more exalted arenas of life — and when our yearnings are satisfied, we attain some kind of happy state, but when they are thwarted, we are forlorn, like that dog on a tight leash.

What, then, is all the fuss about “free will” about? Why do so many people insist on the grandiose adjective, often even finding in it humanity’s crowning glory? What does it gain us, or rather, what would it gain us, if the word “free” were accurate? I honestly do not know. I don’t see any room in this complex world for my will to be “free”.

I am pleased to have a will, or at least I’m pleased to have one when it is not too terribly frustrated by the hedge maze I am constrained by, but I don’t know what it would feel like if my will were free. What on earth would that mean? That I didn’t follow my will sometimes? Well, why would I do that? In order to frustrate myself? I guess that if I wanted to frustrate myself, I might make such a choice — but then it would be because I wanted to frustrate myself, and because my meta-level desire was stronger than my plain-old desire. Thus I might choose not to take a second helping of noodles even though I — or rather, part of me — would still like some, because there’s another part of me that wants me not to gain weight, and the weight-watching part happens (this evening) to have more votes than the gluttonous part does. If it didn’t, then it would lose and my inner glutton would win, and that would be fine — but in either case, my non-free will would win out and I’d follow the dominant desire in my brain.

Yes, certainly, I’ll make a decision, and I’ll do so by conducting a kind of inner vote. The count of votes will yield a result, and by George, one side will come out the winner. But where’s any “freeness” in all this?

Speaking of George, the analogy to our electoral process is such a blatant elephant in the room that I should spell it out. It’s not as if, in a brain, there is some kind of “neural suffrage” (“one neuron, one vote”); however, on a higher level of organization, there is some kind of “desirelevel suffrage” in the brain. Since our understanding of