Continued from:

Freewill or freedom? - Part 1

Introduction to freewill and freedom

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Introduction

The distribution of steam molecules in a room, how the molecules will change location and how long it will take for them to become water again are all potentially determinable. However, at the most fundamental scale of where each molecule is exactly and where it is moving from and to, it becomes increasingly difficult and fuzzy – in fact, at the sub-atomic level, certainty becomes impossible. [1] Certainty (determinism) at any scale is only approximate – the smaller the scale or the larger the field (including space-time) in question, the more difficult it becomes to measure and to calculate all the variables. [2]

So, blessed water does not appear to have freedom. Let us consider living things, starting with flowers and plants and see what happens with freedom. A plant will not choose to be alive and did not choose the space-time conditions in which it arose. It therefore starts its life entirely reliant on code, developed over billions of years and luck to give it a good chance of success (aliveness and the ability to perpetuate life).

The plant then has to interact with a specific factual landscape (which it also did not choose) and that will determine how well the code has done its job. So far, no freedom. The plant is coded to grow using light energy. The light nearly always comes from the sun. On Earth, we can talk about it as being above us during the day. The energy will generally be strongest around midday (wherever the plant is) and weakest at night.

Given these facts, we expect plants to grow upright and to face their leaves skyward to capture the sunlight. However, sometimes a plant will start its life in a place where the sun only shines down on it from an angle, or the plant may have rooted in a bank of earth or behind a wall or tree. A plant must therefore find the best path of growth given these variables (and many others) and limiting conditions.

Many plants are quite flexible and so can often take winding paths as they grow, even though they are ultimately immobile as they are rooted in the earth. The degrees of freedom and the freedom of action available to an individual plant, if it is to be successful, are quite limited given its starting constraints of finding and using light energy efficiently when not being truly mobile.

As a plant has no brain, we would expect that a plant that enacted bad decisions would be doing so as a result almost entirely of poor genetic code – that is, if we assume the soil, temperature and light are sufficient for that species. Such a plant would also not usually have as good a chance as others to pass on its code.

“Tell me the name of the flower that flies from bird to bird?” [3]

(Pablo Neruda)

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If freedom of action were to be represented graphically, we might say that a plant’s options and ability to choose a path to sunlight look something like the statistical images of likely distribution patterns based on normal distributions of data – that is, a bell-curve distribution.

A plant could grow other than perpendicular to the Earth, but it is much more likely to grow upright.

So, we must now decide whether by freedom for life-forms we instead mean: ‘the ability to substantially deviate from the mean of the average actions of the relevant local population on a probability bell curve’.

If a life-form’s set of decisions is placed on a probability distribution, free will might mean: ‘being able to choose arbitrarily to be located anywhere on that distribution curve’ (unlike height, colour or, in the case of plants, where it is rooted). However, even here things are not as simple as they first seem.

Plants have developed ingenious means to ensure their species can travel across nearly all of Earth. Plants and flowers use the wind and they ‘persuade’ animals (including insects and birds) to carry their seeds or pollen to new places and climes where conditions might be more favourable or fruitful. The first plants that developed this ability must have looked extraordinary on a bell curve showing distance from the normal actions of the surrounding population of plants. Pablo Neruda, as so often, with the fewest words and a striking imagination gets to the underlying reality and the way in which life-forms and freedom really works. Freedom quickly becomes a group function between interacting species and generations.

The Free Will Tyrant

All right, take it easy… we can do it that way, if you wish, but we must now carefully check all of our assumptions and definitions. If we are to exclude plants from having this quality of ‘free will’, it looks immediately like unfair discrimination, unless we redefine the term – unless by free will we mean the ability to consciously make choices. Although, the relevance of the choices being conscious decisions is unclear (i.e., is not justified objectively).

We can choose to use this definition, but we must then agree that this is the free will we are talking about when we talk about ‘free will’. Let’s call it ‘Free Will C’. I also have some concerns about such an approach, much as I have concerns about us thinking that unconscious processes and codes are not examples of great systemic intelligence. Life, manifesting in collections of different life-forms, is very intelligent, even if evolution is not conscious. [4] Any intelligence humans have is embedded in their communal code and culture (all of which are group properties). Under this new restrictive and allegedly improved definition of ‘Free Will C’, we must now only look at life-forms that have consciousness. To which the first question must be:

What are we talking about when we use the word ‘conscious’?

Sometimes consciousness is defined as being aware of and responsive to the surroundings. Any plant would meet that definition. At this point one might become a free will tyrant and suggest that it is only valid to consider life-forms with a brain and a nervous system. Assuming we are willing to agree, for the sake of continuing this imaginary discussion, then we must give this very narrow class of free will a name: ‘Free Will T’. For simplicity and to keep our free will tyrant happy, let us focus on mammals and Free Will T.

“I can, therefore I am” [5]

(Simone Weil)

Free Will T: Mammals, Non-human

The bell-curve distribution graph and analysis above can be used for any physical properties of a set that have nothing to do with free will, such as the height of an animal population. So, it looks like we still need to say a little more to get closer to this elusive notion of free will.

Free will must then in principle be ‘the ability of an individual life-form to choose arbitrarily where it is located on a bell-curve distribution in respect of any action; however, in practice it can only be the extent to which the life-form actually deviates from the mean when taking such action’. For it to be a potential example of freedom of action, the specific action must be measurably deviated from the statistically expected distribution for such actions, and it should also have some risks or costs.

Taken together the population of life-forms in question may each think they are acting freely but, taken as a whole, the distribution may be the same as if they had no choice (e.g., height).[6] A life-form believing it is free is not proof of free will and, depending on the property in question, may go far towards proving that it is delusional. Note the striking similarity in the definitions (think of them as having similar shapes) of negative entropy, which measures distance from surrounding normality, and my proposed definition of the closest approximation of free will – that is, freedom of action. This is not surprising; life-forms evolve based on the benefits of unusualness.

Height may deviate due to code, culture and specific local conditions but it is not an individually willed attribute, whereas the location of a life-form may deviate from the distribution of its local population, which might be a choice or an enacted decision (i.e., it may or may not be the result of a ‘decision’ and that may or may not be freely chosen).

Does a polar bear have freedom? How much freedom of action and free will can we evidence in a polar bear and what would that evidence look like?

Like all mammals, polar bears cannot choose the colour of their skin, fur or eyes, nor can they choose their natural height or weight. They can exercise freedom in movement mostly (i.e., by changing location) and sometimes in their choice of mate.

Bears might exercise some freedom in their choice of food, but the constraints in that respect are very strong. Their ability to survive will likely depend on them having very particular and rich sources of protein and fat, given their physiology.

Exercising a lot of deviation in respect of food may be deadly to a polar bear; the genetic coding for food choice will be very strong and will reduce the amount of freedom of action in this respect. In fact, polar bears are cousins of grizzly bears, which apparently evolved along a different path around 500,000 years ago. [7] These different bears can still mate [8] and have fertile young and can thus be considered the same species on the basis that their code can be re-combined and then perpetuated (unlike the donkey-horse hybrid, the mule).

We can speculate that, at some point, a pregnant female (or at least one female within a group of grizzly bears) moved north and became separated from their kin or sleuth. Over time the sleuth developed specialised adaptations for the colder, whiter climate where they would also need to be in very cold water for long periods of time. The polar bear is considered a marine mammal for this reason. Size matters when it comes to hypothermic resistance, so they tended to get bigger over generations. [9]

“Is it the train

That falls like meteorite

Backward into space, to alight

Never again?

Or is it the illusory world

That falls from reality

As we look? Or are we

Like a thunderbolt hurled?

One or another

Is lost, since we fall apart

Endlessly, in one motion depart

From each other.”

(D. H. Lawrence) [10]

Even in respect of this event, which started a new subspecies of bear in a new location (and so is very statistically unusual), we cannot know whether the bears that departed chose to separate permanently. We would expect that they could not have known the consequences on the day of departure: that their action would cause future offspring to evolve adaptations for a different climate. Most of a bear’s freedom is in choosing paths along which to journey and locations in which to live, but statistically most bears will likely live in places where they were brought up. Any exercising of freedom, being a deviation from the normal distribution in respect of location, represents significant risk-taking given the various uncertainties (including about food sources).

Perhaps the polar bear’s ancestors were risk-takers, living in a location that had food shortages. [11] Maybe they were just unlucky in somehow being separated from their sleuth and then made the best of it in new locations. We cannot say for sure that they freely willed to change their habitat location, just that over time and generations that population migrated – behaviour that was some distance from the ordinary behaviour of the pre-existing local bear population. We can say that, in principle, each bear can choose to live in an entirely new and different location to its sleuth or mother, but in practice we do not expect them to exercise this freedom very often. Most of their choices will be within a narrower location range favoured by their group, such as choosing to hunt at this part of the river or that part of the shore (where some limited freedom of action could still be exhibited).

Free Will T: Mammals, Human

So, what does this all mean for humans?

Humans are mammals that can currently make many more choices of action than other mammals. This means we are more likely to have the opportunity to exercise greater freedom of action. However, while that freedom is something we might exercise, by definition we rarely do so.

Freedom of action is relative. It is also a group quality that takes place over time (generations) in both code and culture. Each step away from the normal is taken from a different normality, which is based on the actions of previous outliers. The extent of freedom of action available then increases more than the sum of the unusual actions of any individuals. [13]

“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work ... So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.” [14]

(Henry Ford)

Think about how molecules of H2O work collectively. Water can transform into steam and ice. When water boils to become steam, the individual molecules do not break up into hydrogen and oxygen gas (which would require a much greater amount of energy than heating to approx. 100ºC). It is the hydrogen bonds between the molecules that change and that is how each molecule can be rearranged as flowing water, steam or ice. [15]

Our self-centredness and excessive individualism have misled us about the way the world works and what we are in control of – that is, absolute or individual ‘free will’. Interestingly, the current obsession with what people do, wear, look like (the glamourisation of the individual) is in fact a group dynamic – people are asking for their specialness to be affirmed by others. We are all “standing on the shoulders of giants” and each new step forward or sideways (away from mediocrity) is a cumulative step for all. Each unique step is a step beyond all previous steps – going back to the beginning of our culture and code; in fact, it goes back even further, to the life-form from which all life-forms on Earth have evolved.

“In the Mind there is no absolute, or free, will, but the Mind is determined to will this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity … What is true of the will (and, of course, of our bodies) is true of all the phenomena of our psychological lives. Spinoza believes that this is something that has not been sufficiently understood by previous thinkers, who seem to have wanted to place the human being on a pedestal outside of (or above) nature.” [16]

At an individual level, freedom of action must represent the ability to do something that is a real outlier from the activities of our family, friends or socio-economic groups. It may be, or seem, arbitrary. It therefore often involves perceived risk and might even result in loneliness, ostracisation, economic failure or early death. Freedom sounds quite brave or foolhardy (and which one it is depends on what happens next, which is often out of the individual’s control).

“Like Edison, Thom Hartmann is a visionary who uses history to illuminate the potential cost to society of shackling unique minds aching to soar. He questions the cultural imperative that compels us to label what is outside the bell curve as pathological rather than extraordinary. In this new edition, Hartmann urges us to nurture the fearlessly innovative child and celebrate their differences. Our futures will ultimately be shaped by those undaunted by the spectra of the impossible – because they have been taught to believe in their own self-worth.” [17]

Perhaps the first groups of Homo sapiens that radiated out of Africa were real risk-takers. They decided to seek new opportunities elsewhere, and this helps to explain both the migratory nature of humans and the strong tendency towards gambling across human societies. This bravery and risk-taking ability (and in some cases compulsion) may even go some way towards explaining the violence in our species. Any greater tendency to exercise freedom of action and take risks, if more successful, then becomes part of our common code and our cultures. Once the outlier or small group of outliers succeeds, freedom of action is a cumulative group property.

If freedom to deviate is coded into mammals, what does that mean to the persistent idea of free will?

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” [18]

(Jean-Paul Sartre)

The ‘Edison gene’ is apparently a human-specific expression of this encoded capacity of all life-forms to deviate. The image above, an illustration of an electromagnetic wave, can be compared to how life survives through the evolution of life-forms. Life moves, like light, by way of deviations from the norm (x axis) by life-forms. In addition, each deviation is a move from a baseline that has moved forward – permitting a new deviation from a different relative starting point.

It seems that when we speak of freedom (and I am no longer interacting with our free will tyrant) we now must mean something like: ‘the capability and tendency, contained in code and potentially in culture, for life-forms to take actions that are an unusual distance from the mean of the expected distribution of actions of the local population and that is evidenced when enacted’.

Our freedom looks like an equivalent description of evolution in action. Using Occam’s razor, [19] we have no need to bring in a hypothetical metaphysical property like free will to try to explain the behaviour of any life-form. For sapients, we might add that any such action will likely involve perceived risk or unusualness – particularly as perceived by the rest of the population in question. However, the outlier may not see the risks in the same way or may think that the action is valuable despite the risks.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know

to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” [20]

(Steve Jobs)

In this essay there are references to the value of the ‘heart’ in helping us to make decisions. At first glance this may appear incongruous with the wider purpose, which is to find ways to reduce our dependence on the ‘passions’ to make ethical decisions – or, rather, in respect of the individual, to transform passion into compassion (wise action). Noah Yuval Harari says:

“For instance, the most cherished desires of present-day Westerners are shaped by romantic, nationalist, capitalist and humanist myths that have been around for centuries. Friends giving advice often tell each other, ‘Follow your heart.’ But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day.” [21]

(Noah Yuval Harari)

Harari is right to warn about the dangers of the heart – it is the danger of passion as the only guide. However, on this point Steve Jobs uses the word in a different, more specific and more interesting way. Interestingly, the notion of the heart as the seat of judgment (and not the brain or mind) has the deepest roots and makes its way to us from ancient Egypt, through Hebrew connotations of heart as ‘Mind’ to the Latin term cordatus meaning heart-shaped, judicious and sagacious.

We might avoid misunderstanding if, when seeing reference to ‘heart’ in this article, it is interpreted as a reference to decision-making that is not driven purely by probability or the expectation of gain. It is what is missing in the robot that fails to try to save the young girl in the film I, Robot.

The heart can make decisions that have an extremely low chance of success but a very high payoff, allowing for extraordinarily useful and unlikely freedom of action. The heart can be a source of courage, when used as a balancing or weighing tool for wisdom, notwithstanding the risks and probabilities. It can help us to know what to do even when the information is too complicated for a simple computation or when the conclusion of that process is frightening. The heart is not a fail-safe, but it can be a source of great strength – courage to do the difficult even, in extremis, if the price is life itself.

When our hearts take us on a journey that leads to failure, that failure (if not fatal [22] or pure folly) also has within it the possible seeds of success.

“He was seated at this bench testing, figuring, and planning. I then learned that he had thus made over nine thousand experiments in trying to devise this new type of storage battery, but had not produced a single thing that promised to solve the question. In view of this immense amount of thought and labor, my sympathy got the better of my judgment, and I said: ‘Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done you haven’t been able to get any results?’ Edison turned on me like a flash, and with a smile replied: ‘Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.’” [23]

Of course, good intentions and warm feelings are not sufficient just in themselves. In fact, many actions undertaken ostensibly to help someone find ‘truth’, ‘God’, ‘purity’ or some other potentially inter-subjective ‘goods’ have been the cause of very great harm and suffering.

“Just cause you feel it

Doesn’t mean it’s there” [24]

(Radiohead)

The true test of ethics must be in action that is measurable in its initial impact and longer-term effects. There is no great mystery to be unravelled here. We do best with a good mindset and an evidence-based approach to assessing the actions that flow from this approach. In a universe that is not entirely pre-deterministic or capable of truthful representation, we must accept that there are no guarantees about the effects of our actions – probabilities may be all we ever have.

So, coming back to free will. It would be better described as courageous and costly will, given the likely social and financial costs and risks of exercising freedom. That cost may also give us potential circumstantial evidence that there is some freedom of choice – since the more likely action is less costly on the face of it. Yet we still cannot be sure whether the life-form making the decision is making it freely, or whether they are just responding to their history, culture and space-time in a statistically unusual manner based on their code.

Given a greater number of life-forms and species, the ability to have more diverse outliers increases. In addition, a group can make decisions for action that are not available to any individual alone.

“… if a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and [interested in it], would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.” [25]

(Benedictus de Spinoza)

History is led by the outliers

Under this analysis the history of life-forms is a history of some fortunate outliers finding success one way or another (though it can of course be great failures too). They then pass on those benefits in code or culture. However each deviant step they take is from an ever changing base-line of normalcy.

Diversity is a configuration with the ability to have more possible arrangements and more outliers. Human history, like all evolution, is led by the outliers and given our culture, we call them crazy, reckless, wonderful, brave, malicious, smart and, rarest of all, wise. However, they do not act alone.

Freedom is not free; it’s usually costly. It is also not free in the sense of action starting from a blank page. The extent to which a life-form’s subjective beliefs are relevant to its freedom of action is difficult or impossible to verify or quantify and it is not possible to determine all the causes of a life-form’s beliefs. Freedom of action is different, being the capacity (that is coded into life-forms) to act in a statistically unusual way. As Auden said: “We live in freedom by necessity”[26].

Freedom to deviate begets more freedom to deviate. It is measurable. Let us stop using the term free will and focus on this quality of freedom in the universe – freedom of action, or the freedom to act differently.

Impact of the lack of free will on concepts like justice

Under this approach we must consider carefully what freedom means for ideas of justice, punishment and reform.

“It is customary to talk about man as an individual who moves freely about our planet, and freely constructs his own history. Hitherto, neither historians, scientists in the humanities, nor, to a certain extent, even biologists, have consciously taken into account the laws of the nature of the biosphere – the envelope of Earth, which is the only place where life can exist. Man is elementally indivisible from the biosphere. And this inseparability is only now beginning to become precisely clear to us. In reality, no living organism exists in a free state on Earth. All of these organisms are inseparably and continuously connected” [27]

(Vladimir I. Vernadsky)

Is a person acting badly or unskilfully different to a failing flower or tree?

Do we look at a failing plant and wistfully or angrily declaim that if only it had greater moral purpose, it could flower appropriately? If only it wanted to be better or good…

Is it perhaps not kinder and more honest to wonder what soil, weather, water availability, actions of others and code led to (helped cause) the behaviour?

Are people so different to molecules of water in the sea, rising and falling, pushed and jolted by others and doing the same to others whilst largely moving nowhere in a circular motion?

Or are we like molecules in the river, pulled down to the sea by gravity, believing that we are free when we are in free-fall?

The critic will respond that I am suggesting people have no responsibility for their actions. That is not the case. The point is that it is as meaningless to isolate a person from their surroundings and history and attribute all their actions to free will as it is for an atom, water molecule, plant or bear.

People are usually coded to grow towards the light; we must therefore focus our efforts on how to help them to do so, to give them the right ground for growth. If it was all a matter of free will, we would not have depression, mental illness, suicide, suffering – we would not need wisdom and compassion.

If the believer in free will is so concerned about personal responsibility, then they must ask themselves what they wish to do with their freedom to improve conditions for all.

It is necessary to help life-forms that have lost their way and are failing, so that those life-forms can grow and develop better. We must help create the conditions for the exercise of better judgement and the better use of freedom of action. On this basis, it is largely irrelevant whether one believes in free will or freedom of action; it is always what we do next that counts. Since causes and precedent conditions are probabilistically determinative, it is not equitable to point to an outlier (a person with a difficult background that overcomes their starting conditions) to justify damning the rest of that population for failing to be unusual. [28]

The interplay of individual and collective freedom

To find out your thoughts on some of these questions, meditate for a moment on the figure of Adolf Hitler. Ask yourself if he was the freak bolt of lightning that set fire to the world or a lightning rod (or tuning fork) for all of that pent-up dark energy: the hatred, the self-loathing of weakness and the fury and the desire to blame (sacrifice) someone else or a group for the suffering in the world.

We will never know, but the idea that it definitely would seems naive. Although individual deviancy can be extreme (e.g., Alexander the Great) and must not be underestimated, the overwhelming probability is that, by the time of Hitler’s arrival, those forces were ready to be unleashed and they channelled themselves through him and his cohorts. [29] If we could go back in time, to try to avoid the horrors of Nazism and WWII, removing Hitler might be like removing a molecule of water in the sea and hoping the wave still does not strike the shore. To have a better chance of success, we should wish to go back and minimise the collective energies that caused the various destructive waves.

The idea here is that when conditions exist within a population for extreme behaviour to occur more easily then often – or usually – members of the population can be found to act out those extremes. It is a probabilistic assumption about behaviour and of the constraints on free will. Anti-Semitism, newly industrialised mass murder, new forms of mass communication control and great anger and shame at the WWI reparations [30] are all the greater forces that were resonated by the raving Hitler.

“Recognition of the fact of suffering as one of three basic characteristics of existence – along with impermanence (anichcha) and the absence of a self (anatta) – constitutes the ‘right knowledge’” [31]

We do not need to try to get into the subjective perception of any life-form to understand or measure freedom, to know whether or why a life-form thinks they chose a course of action (which will always be too subjective to be determinative, as in most cases it could not possibly know). Freedom of action involves identifying and measuring a quantity and quality of unusual (diverse) acts that exist in a population. In ethics, positive deviancy also gives rise to maximal diversity and freedom of action for as many life-forms and species as possible. It gives valuable new information. It may even give rise to an entirely new human (Homo) species one day.

“It is only with the heart that one can see clearly.

What is essential is invisible to the eye.” [32]

(Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

Under this analysis of freedom, when the twin space travel scenario is enacted and visibly shows the relativity of time in the different ages of the faces of the twins, it will represent an extraordinary new example of life’s freedom of action. [33]

For a life-form to leave Earth on a spaceship to journey far away to another part of the galaxy and then return is such a great distance from the normal – from the average behaviour of life-forms. It is so obviously not an act of ‘free will’ of an individual, a nation or even that of a species – though an individual life-form, group or nation may be the catalyst. It is a product of all our human history and knowledge, all of the experiments with energy made by all life-forms on Earth.

Yet, it is more. It is life itself exercising the greatest freedom of action so far – in this case manifested in its human life-forms.

What need we of this misguided and petty concept of individual ‘free will’ in such a wonderful life and universe?

Just, for a moment, meditate on the extraordinary improbability: a raw and tiny rock, hurtling through the heavens whilst growing a fragile, living skin; and that skin deciphering how to join the fiery firmament, how to leap between the stars … reaching out towards infinity … ∞

If we must talk of freedom, let us talk about that world.

For that is the world we live in, if we could but see it.

"Then such greatness and truth descended

As over a new grave, when the mourners have gone

And the stars come out

And the earth, bristling and raw, tiny and lost

Resumes its search

Rushing through the vast astonishment."

(Ted Hughes - from 'His Legs Ran About')

Footnotes:

[1] Wikipedia, “Uncertainty principle”.

[2] I am not suggesting quantum uncertainty is the same as the difficulty of macroscopic calculation and chaos theory (such as in the ‘three body problem’) – merely that we find it hard to perceive at very large and very small scales and we never have perfect continuous information from perfect tools.

[3] The Book of Questions, 1974

[4] I have discovered, though I should not be too surprised, since writing much of this article that my logical and ethical approach here accords very strongly with that of Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics, published posthumously in 1677; i.e., life itself is an intelligence (one substance) without extension in space-time and life-forms are a collective body with extension (see Proposition 5).

[5] Science and Perception in Descartes, 2009.

[6] evolutiontheorist: “Highly intelligent people and criminals are both outliers; very short and very tall people are outliers… Outliers can be good, bad, or totally neutral. They’re just not normal, and normal people think that being normal is morally good, because they’re normal, and people default to thinking that they and people like them are good” “On overlapping bell curves and the irony of being an outsider”, 24 May 2016.

[7] University of Massachusetts Amherst, “How Did the Polar Bear Evolve From It’s Grizzly Relative?”, Technology Networks, 18 June 2019.

[8] The first wild hybrid to be discovered was a bear shot by polar bear hunter Jim Martell in 2006; Associated Press, “Wild find: Half grizzly, half polar bear”, MSNBC, 11 May 2006.

[9] One World One Ocean, “The School: Polar Bear Adaptations for Extreme Cold”, 2012.

[10] “Tommies in the Train”, 1919.

[11] How could Homo Sapiens have dreamed, when they drifted out of Africa, of all that would follow?

[12] Many thanks to Inger for permitting use of this image. This image is not in the public domain or creative commons-licensed.

[13] Similar to Metcalfe’s law; see Wikipedia, “Metcalfe’s law”.

[14] Quoted in Andrew Hargadon, Retooling R&D: Technology Brokering and the Pursuit of Innovation, 2003.

[15] “The relation of part to whole is seldom so straightforward, anyway. An H2O molecule is not just a little piece of water. Consider what liquid water does: it flows, forms droplets, carries ripples and waves, and freezes and boils. An individual H2O molecule does none of that: those are collective behaviors” (George Musser, “What Is Spacetime?”, Scientific American, 1 June 2018).

[16] Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, “Baruch Spinoza”, 2020.

[17] Ellen Littman, PhD, co-author of Understanding Girls with ADHD, reviewing Thom Hartmann, The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child, 2003. I must confess to have not yet read Hartmann’s book since hearing about it from a friend whilst I was writing this – I can almost hear you shout, ‘the shame of it’. See also Simon Baron-Cohen, “Why autism and invention are intimately related”, New Scientist, 2 December 2020.

[18] Being and Nothingness, 1943.

[19] William of Ockham, “Plurality must never be posited without necessity”, 1287–1347. For a good article on this point, see: Tom Chivers, “What can Occam’s razor tell us about God?”, unherd.com, 17 September 2018. William of Ockham was an admirable empiricist and theologian – “[He was] convinced that belief in God is a matter of faith alone” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “William of Ockham (Occam, c. 1280–1349”).

[20] Text of Steve Jobs’ commencement address, Stanford University, 2005 or as Clive James said: “Stop worrying, no one gets out of this world alive” (unknown).

[21] Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, 2011.

[22] And even fatal actions, if not pure folly, can sow the seeds of success for others and impact the reputation of the dead: “the hero lives on; even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving his final birth”, Rainer Maria Rilke, “First Elegy”, 1923, from Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, 2009.

[23] Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, Edison, His Life and Inventions, 1910.

[24] “There, There”, Hail to the Thief, 2003.

[25] Spinoza to G. H. Schaller, “Letter 62”, 1674.

[26] W. H. Auden, “XXVII”, In Time of War, 1938.

[27] “The Biosphere and the Noösphere”, 1943.

[28] Bruce Western, “Violent offenders, often victims themselves, need more compassion and less punishment”, USA Today, 2018. There is diverse evidence supporting the notion that people “to whom evil is done / Do evil in return”.

[29] I could be more minded to grant greater influence to Hitler if we did not also have the equally monstrous Stalin in the USSR at the same time. This is the darker side of ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’.

[30] bbc.com, “Why has Germany taken so long to pay off its WWI debt?”, 2010.

[31] Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Dukkha | Buddhism”.

[32] The Little Prince, 1943. Image: The Little Prince, directed by Mark Osborne, 2015, fair use assertion.

[33] Of course, it has already been enacted to a lesser extent with our wonderful exploration of space – particularly our ‘Moon Shot’ (see Wikipedia, “Apollo Program”).