FREE WON'T
What is the biggest source of danger for any organism? Predators? Natural disasters? Fellow organisms of the same species, who constitute the most direct competition for everything?
Sibling rivals, who compete even in the same family, the same nest? No. The biggest danger is the future.
If you've survived until now, then your past and present offer no dangers, or at least no new dangers. That time you broke your leg and it didn't heal very well left you vulnerable to lions, but the attack is still going to come, if at all, in the future. You can't do anything to change your past -unless you're a wizard -but you can do something to change your future. In fact, everything you do changes your future, in the sense that the nebulous space of future possibilities starts to crystallise out into the one future that actually happens. If you are a wizard, able to visit the past and change that, too, you still have to think about how a range of possibilities crystallises out into just one. You still march forward into your own personal future along your own personal timeline; it's just that, when seen from the perspective of conventional history, that timeline zigzags a lot.
We are committed to a view of ourselves as creatures that exist in time, not just in an ever- changing present. That is why we are fascinated by stories of time travel. And by stories about the future. We have established elaborate methods to foretell the future, and find ourselves at the mercy of deep-seated concepts such as Destiny and Free Will, which relate to our place in time and our ability to change the future -or not. However, we have an ambivalent attitude to the future. In most respects, we think that it is pre-determined, usually by factors beyond our control.
Otherwise, how could it be predicted? Most scientific theories of the universe are deterministic: the laws give rise to only one possible future.
To be sure, quantum mechanics involves unavoidable elements of chance, at least according to the orthodox attitude of nearly all physicists, but quantum uncertainty fuzzes out and 'decoheres'
as we move from the microscopic world to the macroscopic one, so on a human scale nearly everything that matters is again deterministic from the physical point of view. That doesn't mean that we know ahead of time what's going to happen, though. We have seen that two features of the workings of natural laws, chaos and complexity, imply that deterministic systems need not be predictable in any practical sense. But when we start to think about ourselves, we are utterly certain that we are not deterministic at all. We have free will, we can make choices. We can choose when to get out of bed, what to eat for breakfast, whether or not to put the radio on and listen to the news.
We're not so certain that animals have free will. Do cats and dogs make choices? Or are they merely responding to innate and unchangeable 'drives'? When it comes to simpler organisms like amoebas, we find it difficult to conceive of them choosing between alternatives; though when we watch them through a microscope, we get a strong feeling that they know what they're doing.
We're happy to believe that this feeling is an illusion, a silly piece of anthropomorphism, investing human qualities in a tiny bag of biochemicals; no doubt the amoeba is responding, deterministically, to chemical gradients in its environment. But it doesn't look deterministic because of the aforementioned get-outs, chaos and complexity. In contrast, when we make a choice, we have the overwhelming impression that we could have chosen to do something else.
If that wasn't possible, then it wasn't really a choice.
We therefore model ourselves as free agents making choice after choice against the background of a complex and chaotic world. We are aware that any threat to our existence -or anything desirable -will come from the future, and that the free choices we make now can and will affect how that future turns out. If only we could foresee the future, we could work out the best choices, and make the future happen the way we would like, and not the way the lions would like. Our intelligence gives us the ability to construct mental models of the future, mostly simple extrapolations of patterns that we have noticed in the past. Our extelligence collects these models, and welds them together into religious prophecies, scientific laws, ideologies, social imperatives ... We are time-binding animals, whose every action is constrained not just by the past and present, but also by our own anticipations of the future. We know that we can't predict the future very accurately, but a prediction that works only some of the time is, we feel, better than none. So we tell ourselves and each other stories about the future, and we use those stories to run our lives.
Those stories form part of the extelligence, and they interact with other elements in it, such as science and religion, to create a strong emotional attachment to belief systems or technology that can help us navigate into that uncertain future. Or claim to do so, and can convince us that the claim is valid, even if it's not. In many religions, enormous respect is paid to prophets, people so wise, or so in tune with the deity, that they know what the future will bring. The priests gain respect by predicting eclipses and the turn of the seasons. Scientists gain rather less respect by predicting the movements of the planets, and (less effectively) tomorrow's weather. Whoever controls the future controls human destiny.
Destiny. That's a strange concept in a creature that believes it has free will. If you can control the future, then the future cannot be fixed. If it is not fixed, then there is no such thing as destiny.
Unless, perhaps, the future converges on the same events, whatever you do. There are many stories with this theme, of which the most famous is 'Appointment in Samara' (parodied in The Colour of Magic), when a man's efforts to escape Death only bring him to the very place where Death is waiting.
We entertain contradictory beliefs about the future. That's not such a surprise: we're not the most logically consistent of creatures. We tend to apply logic locally, within narrow limits, and when it suits us. We're very bad at applying it globally, setting one of our cherished beliefs up against another and looking for the inconsistencies. But we are especially inconsistent when it comes to dealing with the future.
Paradoxically, free will is the last thing you want if you're tribal. You're caught in the matrix of
'Everything that isn't mandatory is forbidden', and there is simply no room for free will. On the one hand, such an existence is very secure; but on the other, punishments and rewards are just as mandatory as everything else if your sins are found out. Your personal responsibility is only to obey the rules.
You can still tell yourself stories about the future, but they involve very narrow choices. 'Shall I attend the ritual meal tonight and leave early to say my evening prayers, or shall I stay for the communal prayers like everybody else?' Even in a tribal system, a lot of cheating goes on, because we're human. 'Well, now ... If I leave early, then I can drop by Fatima's tent, and my wives won't know about it ...'
Plenty of sins are possible, even in a tribal society, and in reality ones that survive allow a little flexibility. If, say, you forget to fast on the Holy Day and someone sees you eating, and you genuinely thought it was tomorrow, or an enemy told you that it was tomorrow, or you had been made to think it was tomorrow because an enemy had cast a curse upon you ... then some skilful pleading might mitigate your punishment.
The natural and attractive option is always to blame others; it is unbearable to know that you have brought the punishment upon yourself. If you can't see how anyone else can be blamed for material reasons, then blame them for cursing you. Blame Fatima for being attractive and willing, blame an enemy who lied to you. 'Luck' is not available as a concept in a tribal society, because Allah knows everything, Jehovah is omniscient: the natural response is fatalistic acceptance of whatever they throw your way.48 If you are to attain heaven, so be it; if your fate is to be flung into the everlasting fires, then that is the Will of God, to which you are subservient.