The Mind as a Pair of Scissors

Jonah Lehrer, author of the delightful neuroscience blog The Frontal Cortex, posted an entry today about his new book How We Decide. This entry explains that the book examines the various factors that go into producing the various kinds of decisions we make including everything from choosing which flavor of Cheerios to buy at the supermarket to whether to take out a subprime mortgage.

In a Q&A section extracted from Amazon, Lehrer likens the mind to a pair of scissors. In this metaphor borrowed from Nobel Prize winning psychologist Herbert Simon, one blade of the scissors represents the brain and the other represents the brain's environment, and, just as we can't understand the operation of the scissors without understanding the simultaneous movement of both blades, so we can't understand the choices the mind makes without understanding the interaction of brain and environment.

In the comments section, this is what I wrote:

Jonah--
I look forward to reading your book, and, judging from Publisher's Weekly's starred review, you have nothing to be nervous about.

No doubt you address the free will vs determinism issue in your book. Herbert Simon's delightful metaphor of the brain and environment as the two blades of a pair of scissors reinforces my view that brain and environment are what the philosopher Alan Watts called a "unified field" and that the choices issuing from this field are the inevitable products of the conditions within it.

In other words, there is no freedom to choose other than what the conditions within the field produce, and there is also no determinism of something outside the field causing it to choose as it does, because, ultimately, the field encompasses everything of which there is nothing outside.

I do look forward to reading this book and to reviewing it here someday.

Wise Discrimination

The Buddha, the most practical of teachers, defined the wise man or woman in a thoroughly practical way: "One who will gladly give up a smaller pleasure to gain a greater joy." That is discrimination, the precious capacity to see life clearly and choose wisely. When it is understood, every choice becomes an opportunity for training the mind.
--Eknath Easwaran, Conquest of Mind, p. 66

Easwaran has written that he loves great symphonies, novels, and other works of art but that what he loves most is the "perfectly crafted life." That to him, and to me, is the supreme work of art, more beautiful and inspiring even than Michelangelo's David. Indeed, it seems to me, we can look at how we live our lives as a process of sculpting. Every choice we make chips away a piece of the precious stone we've been given. Every bad choice makes it that much harder to craft a great work of living art; every good choice fosters our effort. Sooner or later, we will run out of stone, and the potential we once had to sculpt a moving, breathing David will have crumbled into dust. Why waste time when we don't know how much we have left? Why make bad choices that undermine the most important project of a lifetime?

I have made countless bad choices, and I'll be fifty-five in March. I don't know how much stone I have left, and I have many, many mistakes to overcome to forge my modest masterpiece from what raw material remains.

More on Free Will

I've posted previous entries here about free will. Here is what I posted to a message board yesterday in reponse to someone asking if we have free will:

Most people will probably say that they believe in free will. But have they ever given serious thought to what it is? I've done some thinking about it over the years, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that it's an illusion. Why? Because it seems to me that free will means the capacity to choose otherwise. That is, if we look at any choice a person has made, we see that he could have made a different choice under the same exact circumstances and with the same conscious and unconscious motivations. I don't see how this can be the case.

A simplified example I've often used to illustrate this is as follows. Suppose it's a very hot day and you have a craving for ice cream when you happen upon an ice cream stand that offers only two flavors--chocolate and vanilla. You love chocolate ice cream and hate vanilla. You have no motivation not to fulfill your craving for ice cream or to forsake your love for chocolate and choose the vanilla ice cream you hate instead. It seems obvious to me that in this situation and with these motivations, you're going to choose chocolate ice cream and not vanilla, that there's no way you could choose otherwise under those circumstances, and, therefore, you are NOT free to chose or will otherwise.

To my way of thinking, every choice we make is a more or less complex variation of this scenario, and all our choices are equally unfree.