I Am a Strange Loop

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