Virginia Postrel: Oh my god. People who are a lot smarter than me have thought about this. I don’t think . . . What do you mean by free will, I guess is the question. Randomness is not free will. I’m not a dualist, although we all are instinctively from childhood dualists. We think there’s a little man in our head or a little woman in my case. And that person is acting and choosing. And if there’s not really a little person in your head, then you don’t have free will. But how can that be? That doesn’t make any sense to me either. So I think you just kind of . . . however, what . . . I’m not a philosopher as I say. And people much smarter than I am have dealt with this. But the way I think about it is you just . . . it may be your biology is telling you to do these things or whatever; but you act as if you have free will. And then the real interesting question is then when do you come to modify the biochemical processes that direct your behavior? And I have both sort of a professional interest in this question, and also a personal interest because I have suffered from depression. And I . . . to me . . . and I’ve had a happy childhood. I have no traumas in my life. You know, if we were back in the days where we understood depression in some Freudian way, there would be nothing . . . I couldn’t account for it. Why should I have this depression? It’s like the flu. I would be perfectly fine one day and then terribly, terribly, depressed the next day. And I do take, not so much anymore . . . but not so much _________ anymore. I have taken Prozac and it helps. And it makes me what I think of as the normal me. Sort of like Claritin D cures your allergies. It’s the same. To me, I experience it in the same way as I would experience any other kind of medication. But that does raise . . . People love to think about these issues. Well is the real Virginia the despairing, depressed Virginia? Or is it the happy-go-lucky Virginia? Most people who know me would say it’s sort of the cheerful one, and actually people tend to be surprised that I’ve been depressed. But that’s an interesting question of “Who is the real you?” And when you’re in an era when you can sort of modify the real you, I would argue that the choice to modify or not is a sort of self-fashioning choice. You’re deciding what kind of person you want to be and who is the you . . . It’s very deep. Far too deep for me. Far too deep for me.
Recorded on: 7/4/07
Discuss
Angel Jimenez on April 15, 2009, 7:53 PM
Randomness may just be an essential component of our thought processes. When you brainstorm, are the thoughts you come up with not nonsense, non sequiturs, silly, etc.? I don’t think that any mathematician working on new concepts, goes from step A to step B in an absolutely logical manner. Ideas come from left field. It is an evolutionary device to ensure our survival when our brain just may not have the best answer to a dilemma.
You see it in the movement of animals as they search for food. If they can’t tune into it with their senses, they go about at random like Scoopy, our neighborhood squirrel. He comes looking for handouts and I see him searching our yard in a random manner. Sure, he’s attracted to something that may look like a nut but those objects are randomly dispersed and he finds them using a random search pattern.
I guess the reason I believe in this is because of the random nature of evolution. If evolution functions by reason of its randomness and I’m convinced it does, then there is a good chance that brain processes would also have a random component.
You are not aware of randomness because the brain has evolved to diminish the random input when it recognizes beneficial patterns of behavior which should be repeated. Now that Scoopy recognizes me as a sucker, he comes directly to my window as do the starlings, crows, pigeons, and whatnot that I’ve befriended with my uncooked rice handouts. Interestingly, the starlings begin their meal from the perimeter of the strewn rice and work their way inward while the pigeons land randomly and start eating in whatever direction they were facing when they landed.
Today, the Starlings exibited a random behavior. I stood by my window and gave them an Italian derogatory hand sign (because I had already fed them), two of them proceeded to fly close to my window and momentarily flew like hummingbirds as if to tell me that what I had to do next was open the window and give them food—creatures! You can’t live with them . . .
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