Previous - 132. George Eliot
George Eliot (and George Henry Lewes)
p33 [Eliot's words, but Lehrer seems to think they express Lewes ideas] ...insisted that the brain would always be a mystery, "for too complex is its unity." Positivists may proselytize their bleak vision, Lewes wrote, but "not thinking man will imagine anything is explained by this. Life and being remain as inaccessible as ever." If nothing else, freedom is a necessary result of our ignorance...."Necessitarianism," [Footnote: a synonym for determinism... the theory holds that human actions are "necessitated" by antecedent causes over which we have no control.] Eliot wrote, "I hate the ugly word." Eliot had read Maxwell on molecules... and she knew that nothing in life could be perfectly predicted. To make her point, Eliot began Daniel Deronda with a depiction of human beings as imagined by Laplace. The setting is a hazy and dark casino full of sullen people... These gamblers are totally powerless, dependent on the dealer to mete out their random hands. They passively accept whichever cards they are dealt. Their fortune is determined by the callous laws of statistics.
p34 ...As soon as Eliot introduces this mechanical view of life, she begins deconstructing its silly simplicities... "Like dice in mid-air," Gwendolen is an unknown. Her mysteriousness immediately steals Daniel's attention; she transcends the depressing atmosphere of the casino. Unlike the gamblers, who do nothing but wait for chance to shape their fate, Gwendolen seems free...
Eliot creates Gwendolen to remind us that human freedom is innate, for we are the equation without a set answer. We solve ourselves. [Footnote: ...being free also makes us accountable for our behavior. One of Eliot's main problems with social physics was that it denied humanity moral agency... If social physics made us callus, then art might make us compassionate.]
Before we get into Darwin, I have to reflect on "Necessitarianism." I think there's a difference between a social physics that lets you calculate and predict the behavior of individuals, and the lack of cause and effect in our behavior. It's interesting that Eliot used a casino as a setting, as games of chance are one place where there is a kind of freedom. If you make your life decisions on the basis of flipping coins or rolling dice, then they would be free -- though you would not be, except insofar as you occasionally refused to follow the decisions of random chance.
Otherwise, your decisions are based on who you are and can't be other than what they are. You must make the decisions that are natural for you. What sense does it make to insist that you are free to make decisions that are not the decisions necessitated by your character?
I've now read ahead, and, sad to say, this chapter does not go to the quantum uncertainty place I was hoping for. You know what that means... One could view decisions as existing in superposition. Up until the instant you decide, a multitude of decisions exist as possibilities. You can either stay on the train, looking at Verona, or get off and experience Verona directly. The probability waveform (nonsense but it sounds interesting) only collapses when the train rolls out of the station. And yet there's a reason you stayed in your seat. Still (to reassert the position that Maxwell represents in this chapter and that Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation represents in quantum mechanics), even though there's a "reason" for Sebald staying in his seat, you could only have described the probability of his staying on or getting off the train, no matter how much information you had.
I may be having my cake and eating it too, but I think this position supports cause and effect (which tends to lead to Determinism) while leaving a quantum of freedom. Though maybe not "freewill."
...while positivists believed that the chaos of life was only a facade, that beneath everything lay the foundation of physical order, Darwinism said that randomness was a fact of nature. In many ways, randomness was the fact of nature... [Footnote: Darwin acknowledged the deep chanciness at the heart of natural selection... Darwin constantly asserts that variations are "undirected" and "occur in no determinate way."] Life progressed because of disorder, not despite it. The theologian's problem -- the question of why nature contained so much suffering and contingency -- became Darwin's solution. [So Voltaire wasn't a Darwinian.]
p35 The bracing embrace of chance was what attracted Eliot to Darwin. Here was a narrative that was itself unknowable, since it was guided by random variation... Unlike Herbert Spencer, who believed that Darwin's theory of evolution could solve every biological mystery (natural selection was the new social physics), Eliot believed that Darwin only deepened the mystery... Because evolution has no purpose or plan -- it is merely the sum of its accumulated mistakes -- our biology remains impenetrable...
...
p37 In her intricate plots, Eliot wanted to demonstrate how the outside and the inside, our will and our fate, are in fact inextricably entangled. "Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending," Eliot confesses in Middlemarch. Our situation provides the raw material out of which we make our way, and while it is important "never to beat and bruise one's wings against the inevitable," it is always possible "to throw the whole force of one's soul towards the achievement of some possible better." You can always change your life.
...
p42 ...The mind is never beyond redemption, for no environment can extinguish neurogenesis. As long as we are alive, important parts of the brain are dividing. The brain is not marble, it is clay, and our clay never hardens.
...
p43 ...while freedom remains an abstract idea, neurogenesis is celular evidence that we evolved to never stop evolving. Eliot was right; to be alive is to be ceaselessly beginning. As she wrote in Middlemarch, the "mind [is] as active as phosphorus." Since we each start every day with a slightly new brain, neurogenesis ensures that we are never done with our changes. In the constant turmoil of our cells -- in the irrepressible plasticity of our brains -- we find our freedom.
Voltaire - more English visitors to Ferney
John Moore and Douglas Hamilton (Eighth Duke of Hamilton), July 1772
The Duke, Mr. Mallet, and I am to sup and stay all night sometime this week with Voltaire, his vivacity and spirit is amazing; he is writing and publishing every day; and I do believe he is not without hopes that the Christian religion will die before him'.
...
The most piercing eyes I ever beheld are those of Voltaire, now in his eightieth year. His whole countenance is expressive of genius, observation, and extreme sensibility.
In the morning he has a look of anxiety and discontent; but this gradually wears off, and after dinner he seems cheerful...
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