How Do Determinists Read Fiction?

and, why do they bother?

The Middlebrow loves a physics podcast called Why This Universe? produced by the University of Chicago. A popular episode tackles the notion of free will and it turns out the host, theoretical physicist Dan Hooper doesn’t believe that physics allows for it. His view is ultimately reductionist determinism. The quantum states of our constituents produce our thoughts and actions.  The classic view of free will involves a consciousness making unconstrained choices that guide our lives – a ghost in the machine.

Our oldest stories show humans wrestling with this. The pithiest expression of the dilemma is “The Appointment in Samarra” as retold by W. Somerset Maugham. A man encounters death in a marketplace in Baghdad and flees to Samarra, hoping his fate will miss him. Death reveals that she’d never planned to take the man in Baghdad and had previously scheduled the event for Samarra that evening. The man’s attempts to escape his fate seal it.

But this story, like Oedipus, assumes free will. It’s just that the exercise of that will leads to irony. The man in the Baghdad market, on seeing Death, might have accepted the inevitable and killed himself right there. This would have thwarted fate, though our man wouldn’t be able to celebrate it.

Oedipus, on being told by an oracle that he would kill his father, marry his mother, and bring ruin to his kingdom, tries to avoid fate by never returning to his home city. What he doesn’t know is that as he flees Corinth, his real parents are the King and Queen of Thebes. Leaving the city in response to the prophecy was a good first step, but if Oedipus took his oracle seriously, he also should have never married. Or, at the very least, he should have only married a woman he could verify as younger than he is (though even that seems too big a risk).

The Middlebrow assumes all attempts to outwit fate are driven by will. The suspense of these stories is that maybe destiny isn’t absolute and that our heroes can change things.  In The Odyssey, even the gods try to bargain with, cheat or outright defy prophecies.

The contemporary novel, often rendered as an inner monologue of one character, relies on an understanding of human psychology and will that seems at odds with our scientific understanding of cognition and action. In most fiction, thought and emotion function as prime movers for the characters and we readers sympathize (or not) based on the quality of their thoughts and motivations.

The neuroscience consensus is that consciousness arises from brain activity, which itself is influenced, if not controlled by, unconscious physical conditions such as heart rate, breathing and body temperature. From Science Daily:

“In the early 1980s, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet further tested the relationship between the RP [readiness potential] and conscious awareness or intention of voluntary action. His highly influential results showed that approximately 200ms before his subjects pressed the button, they were aware of an urge or the intention to act, something Libet referred to as the W time, and yet the RP consistently preceded W time.

Libet suggested that these findings showed that even before we make a conscious decision of voluntary action, the brain was already unconsciously activated and involved in planning the action.”

It’s important to our collective storytelling that Macbeth kills Duncan after weighing the risks against his ambitions and that the dagger plunges with intention rather than a post hoc justification. There’s no tragedy in the story of a Scottish nobleman who is driven to murder his king and usurp the throne by some unaccountable function of his digestion.

The choices made by imaginary character are the heart of everything interesting in fiction and drama. We also look to such creative works to improve our own decision-making. We use the actions of these characters to hone our reasoning and develop empathy. All of this implies agency, or what’s the point?

The determinist argument is deeply reductionist and never ending. Why do we experience free will if we don’t really have it? Because we must, is the answer. That’s how the atoms assembled. If there’s no free will, why do we punish people for crimes? Because we have no choice but to act that way. Then why do we agonize about it? Again, no choice. Everything is as it must be, and this includes the evolution of our own thinking over time. We are all the most wonderful practitioners of Stanislavsky.

Put another way:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

**

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash