The Captive Mind
In the chapter of Logic that deals with the law of causality, John Stuart Mill argues that the state of the universe at any given moment is a consequence of its state at the moment immediately preceding. From perfect knowledge of a single moment, therefore, an infinite intelligence would be able to extrapolate the entire past and future of the universe. It is interesting to dwell on the implications of this conjecture; in particular, on that hypothetical being who is able to read the whirring cogs and fulcrums of the clockwork world in order to obtain a perfect understanding of it—including (it is logical) a perfect foreknowledge of its own thoughts, actions and even death. It is impossible to know what the conscious experience of such a mind would be, but in a footnote to his monogram on synchronicity, Carl Jung mentions a hypothesis that suggests to me one rather unsettling possibility. The hypothesis was invoked by the Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx in an attempt to resolve the logical antinomy between free will and divine provenance. Geulincx asserts that, “Our will has no effect of any kind on our movement,” and yet, “if we examine our thoughts carefully, we can find in ourselves no idea or concept of determination.” How is this to be explained? Geulincx proposes that it is because God, “arranges and orders movement and freely coordinates it with our will.” According to this strange theory, when I walk across the room there is no casual connection between my desire to do so and the act itself and I only imagine there is one because my volition coincides, point by point, with the movement of a body that is being manipulated from afar by God. Mind and body do not interact at all. They mirror one another like two synchronized clocks. It may be objected that this theory does not abolish free will but simply imposes a divine (and quite superfluous) element of intermediation upon conscious control of the body. And of course it makes no difference at all so long as God does not grow tired of his painstaking task and one find themselves immobilized. But what would happen if he chose instead to countermand your every conscious impulse? One afternoon you would decide to take a nap but instead find yourself putting on your coat and leaving the house. You would walk down the street with no idea where you were going, a prisoner to a body that has broken free from conscious control and is operating with a will of its own. You would try to scream in horror but perhaps instead hear yourself greet a friend who happens to be passing by and during the conversation that took place he would not be aware that there was anything the matter with you. Everyone would think that it was still you. No one would ever discover the deposition of your consciousness. No one would ever suspect that your mind, paralyzed and helpless, gazed out from a body over which it had no control. I imagine that the conscious experience of the hypothetical being postulated by Mills would be similar; that it would be similarly paradoxical and horrifying: The moment it recognizes the universe as a closed deterministic system and succeeds in extrapolating its entire past and future, all sense of freedom and spontaneity will be exposed as illusory and vanish forever. What remains in its place will be an awareness of the rigid predetermination of its every movement, thought and perception, including, of course, its predetermined perception of that predetermination.[1] Every sudden impulse and every careless change of heart will be foreseen decades in advance. It will perceive its own life like a static strip of video on a timeline. Time itself, like a graphical lozenge in a digital progress bar, moves through the series frame by frame. But its mind is always equally conscious of every frame in the series. To fully appreciate the predicament it is helpful to imagine a man on the day he dies in a horrible accident. He knows what is coming but (it follows from the existence of such knowledge that the universe is rigorously deterministic) there is nothing he can do about it. Every step he takes and every decision he makes, together with his paradoxical awareness of his own ignorance, are so many meshing gears in the inexorable machine that manufactures his death. That machine extends to the boundary of the finite universe or else the machine and the universe are infinite. We might say that in this sense he participates in his own demise, that he conspires against himself as he steps onto the street and into the path of an oncoming bus. But the truth is that he has no choice in what he chooses. A mind, developed to the point of exploding its own free will, becomes the silent helpless witness to its own deterministic manipulation. [1] As well as its predetermined perception of its predetermined perception of that predetermination—and so on in a dizzying regressus ad infinitum.
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