cracks in the labyrinth
In the episode “Where There Is a Will” of This American Life, producer David Kestenbaum wrestles with the possibility that free will does not exist. When we think we are making a decision, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky tells Kestenbaum, what is really happening is that “there’s just a whole bunch of neuronal fulcra and some sort of Rube Goldberg sort of stretch of things that teeter this way or that and as a result, bounce something else in another direction.” Meanwhile, says Harvard physics professor Melissa Franklin, “operationally, we appear to have free will” and that since it seems that we do, “why not just go with the flow?”
I agree with Franklin. In fact, the existence or nonexistence of free will doesn’t trouble me at all; everything that I experience, including myself, is to some degree a story or a projection. I’ve only recently become acquainted with the work of Jorge Luis Borges, who used the metaphor of the labyrinth to represent the mental constructs we build to make sense of the world. But in my experience these mental constructs are not impenetrable. From time to time the labyrinth shifts, cracks, or breaks open. These episodes can be thrilling, or they can be horrifying.
I’ve been slowly reading In the Dust of this Planet by Eugene Thacker, a book about the horror of philosophy that I find thrilling. Thacker gives us a term for the 4.5 billion years before human consciousness arrived on Earth—years and years and years when things just happened and nobody knew what was going on: the world-without-us. He writes that
the world-without-us is the subtraction of the human from the world. To say that the world-without-us is antagonistic to the human is to attempt to put things in human terms, in the terms of the world-for-us. To say that the world-without-us is neutral with respect to the human, is to attempt to put things in the terms of the world-in-itself. The world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is as once impersonal and horrific.
What thrills me most of all is Thacker’s proposal that thought itself “is not human.” He writes, “In a sense, the world-without-us is not to be found in a ‘great beyond’ that is exterior to the World (the world-for-us) or the Earth (the world-in-itself); rather, it is in the very fissures, lapses, or lacunae in the World and the Earth.” And, perhaps, also, even within the “neuronal fulcra and some sort of Rube Goldberg sort of stretch of things” that creates our sense of free will, or self.
