“We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.”
–Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
1. The darkness that comes before
Your life is shaped by a billion moments and processes and experiences. All of these lead up this current moment, where you are sitting or standing or lying, reading these lines on your phone, tablet, laptop, or computer. There are sounds around you, smells, perhaps people. This is the moment t.
Suppose you’re standing in a vast and empty space, nothing to see in any direction. There are arrows on the floor, all parallel, all pointing in one direction: the future. Time only flows one way. You are standing in the middle of the space, at timepoint t. What is in front of you, in the direction the arrows are pointing, is your future: what is to come. Behind you is your past, where the arrows come from: all the ways that have led up to this moment in time, t.
Your current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are the product of the interactions among trillions of things, involving all levels of organization: quarks and atoms, molecules and enzymes, cells and organs. Your thoughts and feelings are shaped by your genetic predispositions, your family history, personality, experiences you’ve made in life. Lessons you’ve learned, people you have loved and left behind. Interactions among these processes include direct causal links, complex and nonlinear mechanisms, moderations and mediations, emergence, supervenience, and so much more. Your current state is the result of a vast network of processes, biopsychosocialenvironmental, intervowen with so many other people and mechanisms around you.
But you don’t understand how.
You haven’t slightest idea what processes and relations between processes actually determine your current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at this moment in time. This is what R. Scott Bakker calls ‘The Darkness That Comes Before’.
Take sleep as an example, and look back against time in this vast space where you stand. All the nights you slept over your lifetime. Suppose each night of sleep is a domino block of a certain color, going back against the arrows of time all the way to the beginning. Each night of sleep has been influenced by numerous causal chains of domino blocks that have fallen over, all resulting in the sleep length and quality you experienced. Some of these nights will be linked together causally as well, in different ways. Sometimes sleeping badly one night will have led to bad sleep the next night as well, because you were more vulnerable to worries, and lay awake with anxiety of not being able to sleep and failing an important exam or interview the next day. You can see the causal chain clearly, looking back at millions of dominos scattered on the floor behind you. Sometimes sleeping badly will have done the opposite, because you were too tired to stay awake.
We make up stories to explain our own lives. I slept badly because it is a full moon. I like this color, or that person, because of things that sound plausible to me. We give meaning to our own lives by telling us and other people supposed reasons for things we think and feel and do.
But we do not really know. You, at time t, are the result of processes you have for the most part no empirical access to. They are unkonwn and unknowable.
2. Complex dynamical systems
Now, the above isn’t necessarily my own view, and my view doesn’t really matter for this blog post. But I was trying to think of a concept to express the difficulty I am grappling with in my academic work (1, 2, 3, 4): trying to understand people as complex, causal systems whose experiences are constituted by the relations among biological, psychological, social, and environmental processes. We only have very limited insights into these processes, because we are not the people we study. Additionally, people themselves have arguably limited insight into many processes governing their lives.
And during a meeting last week, I all of a sudden remembered Bakker’s Prince of Nothing fantasy book series I had read around 20 years ago, in which he termed this concept ‘The Darkness That Comes Before’. Bakker expresses this idea several times in the books:
- “The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?”
- “I am my thoughts, but the sources of my thoughts exceed me. I do not own myself, because the darkness comes before me.”
- “If we’re nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us.”
One of the main characters in the books then is someone who is trained to understand the movements of his own soul, via conditioning and training, and therefore, can understand the movements of other souls as well. This causal understanding, being able to see the past and processes of others, then gives him power over them. Not completely unlike us trying to figure out in our work whether a better understanding of a person’s mental health system can help us improve interventions.
Bakker also extends this concept to other people:
- “No soul moves alone through the world. Our every thought stems from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of world spoken before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another should to carry our own…No one’s soul moves alone, Leweth.”
I’m sharing this here as some food for thought. I’d be curious if you know about similar concepts in philosophy, fantasy, religious texts, or other sources (I suspect there are concepts like this in buddhism, for instance). The general idea reminds me a little of Schopenhauer who was quite interested in the concept of freedom and free will, and who famously said that a man is only free when he can decide what he wants, not merely decide what he does.
PS: Jamie posted a related B. F. Skinner quote that fits so well I’ll share it here:
Hi Eiko, thanks for this interesting blog post. This topic is something I’ve been thinking about since I read “Being You: A new science of consciousness” by Anil Seth. I believe he wrote about a kind of soup of reasons that we can’t identify, in the context of consciousness.
And a movie that slightly relates to this is “Mr Nobody”!
Thanks, I have seen Mr Nobody and heard about the book but haven’t read it yet. Will check it out
Thank you for the very interesting post. What you describe sounds to me a bit to the Buddhist concept of “dependent arising” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da). I read the book “Cracking the Walnut” by Thich Nhat Hahn in which he gives commentary on the writings by the ancient Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna on this concept (as well as others), which I recommend though I do not claim to understand most of it.
Thanks for the pointer!
Linehan’s use of dialectical philosophy emphasizes that everything is caused. And that everything, can then “make sense” in a way even when something profoundly awful happens that seems to make no sense. An example is a car runs a red light and kills an innocent pedestrian. This doesn’t make sense because there was a stop sign and this shouldn’t have happened to this innocent person person. On the other hand, this makes perfect sense as running the stoplight caused the death – an outcome very causally linked to ignoring red lights. If everything is caused, then also ultimately everything is connected. This gets then into the dialectic of everything is whole and not-part and since all wholes consist of parts, thus everything is also part and not-whole.
There is also the Buddhist teaching of “not self”, with some teachings I’ve heard on it here: https://zenstudiespodcast.com/studytheself/. This also seems to relate to the concept in ACT called “self-as-context” (versus our typical understanding of self-as-content) – as a frame through which things are experienced, but not the experiences (or narratives of the experiences) themselves.
:)
Thanks, I’ll read up on both concepts (I’m more familiar with Linehan’s ideas than Buddhism)
I very much like these musings.
Psychotherapeutically, they appear to reflect both Butler who states that “there is no need to assume a ‘correct’ fomulation” – i.e emphasizing that our psychotherapeutic work is narrative-based and operates in the knowledge of “uncertainty of truth”. Our goal is to shape more benign narratives amidst the relativity of stories we tell ourselves and others to make sense of ourselves and the world.
They also appear to reflect Yalom who, towrds the end of his life and career, increasingly stated that the operates in the emotional-here-and-now and uses the interpersonal dynamics and assumed emotional states of both patient and therapist as a basis for psychotherapeuit work and emotion-regulation at the point of the arrow pointing forward, as it were
Was teaching an intro to clinical psych class yesterday and also stressed this — that in my view, one of the goals is to try to find a shared narrative that works for everybody in the room, so to speak.
by “trying to understand people as complex, causal systems whose experiences are constituted by the relations among biological, psychological, social, and environmental processes” you already invest an assumption, i.e. that we are fully determined and that there is no “free will”. But if there is need to follow Schopenhauer.
See for example: G. Keil (2008), Naturgesetze, Handlungsvermögen & Anders können; in: P. Janich: Naturalismus und Menschenbild (2008); my translation and shortened:
“Not natural laws of any kind are suitable to support determinism, but only those that make or imply statements about empirical sequences of events. In the absence of another source of modality, determinism stands or falls on the assumption that the course of the world is subject to laws of succession without exception
Physics does not seem to know any laws governing empirical processes that apply without exception. The fundamental laws of nature are of a different kind.
First the world comes, the course of the world contains, among other things, us and our actions, then we try to state which legal statements are true in this world, i.e. accurately describe what is happening. And if we don’t find true succession laws, we can’t simply postulate that there must be some because Laplace’s determinism is true.
Natural laws… are statements that do not prescribe what has to happen, but describe in a systematized form what always happens. Whether they describe this correctly clearly depends on what actually happens, not the other way around. In summary: There are always limitations based on natural laws, but »these constraints from physics are only partial constraints. There is much freedom left after they are satisfied«. There is not just “a lot” of freedom left, but all that is desirable.”
See also Dirk Hartmann: WILLENSFREIHEIT UND DIE AUTONOMIE DER KULTURWISSENSCHAFTEN
Dirk Hartmann:Neurophysiology and freedom of the will; Poiesis Prax (2004)
Human agency entails the notion that humans do in fact make decisions and enact them on the world. Free will is the capacity or ability to choose between different possible courses of action
Being able to do things differently & the possibility of omitting an action are analytical components of the concept of action/agency
In a deterministic world, there are just causes and natural behaviour, but not: freedom of will; reasons (Gründe); reason (Vernunft); actions (Handlungen), moral, agency.
AND THERE IS NO SCIENCE!!! Note that the theoretical models – that one may use to reason that there is no free will -cannot be justified depicting anything if there was no free will. You enter a paradox.
Thus, why should we not rather state that Laplace’s determinism is absurd and start with the insights of KANT, ARISTOTELES and others from the position that humans possess the ability to make choices that are not already predetermined?
Further literature:
Dirk Hartmann (2020): Neues System der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss. Band I: Erkenntnistheorie
Dirk Hartmann (2023): Neues System der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss. Band IV: Biologie, Naturgeschichte, Neurowissenschaft
Dirk Hartmann (2024): Neues System der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundriss. Band V: Psychologie und Geisteswissenschaft
Geert Keil (2018): Willensfreiheit und Determinismus
Somogy Varga (2015): Naturalism, Interpretation, and Mental Disorder
Sanja Dembic (2024): Philosophy of Mental Disorder
Peter Hacker Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience
Thanks — haven’t seen Hartmann’s work which sounds of interest in particular. I don’t think of the topic much from the perspectice of free will honestly, Schopenhauer just came to mind at the end. Lost interest in that topic in my undergraduate time. But will read up on this, thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts.