Turtles all the way down
Do we deserve the spring?
Rufi Thorpe (The Girls of Corona del Mar)
The first time I came across the rather amusing phrase ‘turtles all the way down,’ was in a Richard Feynman book. I thought it was really funny, still do and for a number of reasons. It was completely unexpected and random. One of those things that are funny because they are actually an intellectual blindside, but when you sit with it a little bit more then you realize that there is much more to it, layers to it and it is hardly random. Let me explain what I mean by this. I absolutely love turtles. The author of Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta, made me fall in love with them. Besides living for hundreds of years (300 years is the longest record), turtles are everywhere. The only place that you can’t find turtles right now is Antarctica, but they used to be there, there are fossils.
I don’t know about you, but I think that is pretty impressive. It’s a creature that can be easily taken for granted but it has presence and according to Yunkaporta is a way that we humans can make sense of our world. The native people of Australia used to do this and Yunkaporta explains all of this in Sand Talk. It would therefore be fitting to use turtles in the phrase. They have earned their place in evolutionary time, if Darwin and his Galapagos adventures did not place them there already. Noah Olsen’s (google him) abs look like the carapace of a turtle and if turtles could talk, they would have the temperament of Olsen, through and through. Every time I watch Olsen online, I am reminded of turtles, and it always makes me smile. They may be on the verge of extinction, but metaphysically, they are very much alive in my heart. But I digress.
I recently learnt where the phrase actually comes from. William James was giving a lecture and afterwards an old woman approached James and said something along the lines of “Professor James, you have it wrong. Things aren’t like you said. The world is on the back of a gigantic turtle.” Intrigued, James proceeds to ask the lady what is beneath that gigantic turtle. The lady replies, “Another turtle.” James, “What is under that turtle?” “Another turtle.” To arrest the circular line of questioning, she says, “It’s no use, Professor James. It’s turtles all the way down.” Slam dunk. There is just no winning that kind of argument.
Free Will
In Determined, Robert Sapolsky uses this line of thinking as a way to show us that free will does not exist. I know. That is not where you thought I was going with all this cute turtle talk, but yes that is indeed where I am going. Interestingly, whenever free will comes to mind, our minds go to dark places. We think of crime, temptations, punishment etc. This may be because, in the Christian sense, exercising free will is linked closely to choosing to do the good thing over the bad, choosing to “not walk in sin.” The operative word when it comes to free will is “choosing.” Sapolsky argues that since everything that came before this present moment affects the decisions we make in this current moment, we cannot have free will. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment.” Sapolsky explains this best with a scenario involving a man pulling a trigger.
Suppose that a man pulls the trigger of a gun mechanistically, the muscles in his index finger contracted because they were stimulated by a neuron having an action potential (i.e. being in a particularly excited state.) That neuron in turn had its action potential because it was stimulated by the neuron just upstream which had its own action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before. Then show me that this neuron’s actions were not influenced by whether the man was tired, hungry, stressed, or in pain at the time. That nothing about this neuron’s function was altered by the sights, sounds, and so on, experienced by the man in the previous minutes, nor by the levels of any hormones marinating his brain in the previous hours to days, nor whether he had experienced a life changing event in recent months or years. And show me that this neuron’s supposedly freely willed functioning wasn’t affected by the man’s genes, or by the lifelong changes in regulation of those genes caused by experience during his childhood. Nor by levels he was exposed to as a fetus, when that brain was being constructed. Nor by the centuries of history and ecology that shaped the invention of the culture in which he was raised.
If every decision you ever make is predicated on all these things, including the conditions of your mother’s uterus, how are we then able to say that we freely choose anything? Sapolsky provides concrete examples of how the culture you are born and raised into has a huge effect on the decisions that you make. For example, studies show that people from rice regions accommodate and avoid obstacles. You place two chairs in front of them and they move around the chairs. People from wheat regions, however, remove obstacles. When two chairs are placed in front of them, they move the chairs apart and walk through them. Cultures born in arid, desert-like places are inclined to believe in one God and those born in forests are likely to be polytheists. In Stranger in the Mirror, Robert Levine also goes through a litany of ways that culture informs your decisions. You aren’t who you are because you chose to be, but you are who you because you are who you are. Levine also advises us to hold loosely to the idea that we know who we are. Since there are environmental and biological factors always influencing us, unknowingly most of the time, we cannot be too sure we are who we think we are.
On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage was leading a work team that was blasting rock to prepare the ground for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, South of the Vermont settlement of Cavendish. In order to set off a blast, one had to drill a deep hole into a rock outcrop, add blast powder and a fuse, and then pack (or "tamp") sand, clay, or another inert material into the hole above the powder to distribute the blast's energy onto the surrounding rock.
About 4:30 p.m., Gage's attention was drawn to his men who were working behind him. Glancing over his right shoulder, Gage unintentionally aligned his head with the blast hole and tamping iron. As he opened his lips to speak, the tamping iron ignited against the rock, and the powder burst (maybe due to the missing sand). The tamping iron shot out of the hole, measuring 1+1/4 inches (3.2 cm) in diameter, 3 feet 7 inches (1.1 m) in length, and weighing 13+1/4 pounds (6.0 kg). It penetrated Gage's face from the left, angled forward, directly in front of the lower jaw's angle. It went behind the left eye, through the left side of the brain, and out the top of the skull through the frontal bone, continuing upward outside the upper jaw and perhaps breaking the cheekbone.
If you know anything about Gage’s story, you know that like any good story there was good news and bad news. The good news was that Gage lived. The bad news was that he was not the same Gage that he was before the accident. The part of his brain that we all have, and which inhibits our behaviour was destroyed. Which meant that there was no mechanism in his brain that kept him civil and socially nice. It’s the part in your own brain that stopped you from yelling at the guy who cut you off in traffic or unwisely replying “yes” to your wife’s “do I look fat in these jeans?” question. Our prefrontal cortex helps us to play nice with the people around us.
All the social norms of Gage’s time flew out the window when that rod went through his head, and he became rude and a difficult person to be around. The inability for his brain to function properly completely altered his personality. Which personality was the real Phineas Gage, (please stand up)? What happens to his personality when something else in his brain stops working the way it should? Identity is but a fragile thing.
In one of his lectures, Jordan Peterson said that most of us behave the way we do because everything is as it should be. The AC is working, and we have food in our fridge. Let’s say we, I don’t know, find ourselves smack bang in the middle of a pandemic. Would we become selfish and stingy and try to buy all the toilet paper in the store so that no one else could get any? Or we found ourselves in Solzhenitsyn’s gulags? Are we still the same person or do we eat our neighbour? I am not even the same person before my morning Americano and after. I probably go through 5 personality changes before noon every day. There is also the hungry-me which is different from the I-didn’t-sleep-well-last-night me or the Stage 5 (groooooaaaan) load shedding me. These are small changes in my environment, and yet they have an impact on my personality.
I am a morning person, I relish going to gym at 4:00 in the morning, but I am also an introvert (see above) which means I hate speaking to people first thing in the morning. I am not alone in this. Comedian Ali Siddiq has a bid in his special Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover about how he doesn’t leave his house until 10am because he just cannot deal with the “good morning neighbour” thing that white people do. Can’t do it either. I can’t. After my morning workout and I’ve found my manners at the bottom of a Grande cup of coffee, you may approach.
Entitlement
If we haven’t chosen who we are, then there are certain conclusions that we have to come to terms with. Most of us think that we deserve the lives we live; the 7 series BMW, the corner office (if you are that type), and a beautiful house in Birnam. We think that it is the culmination of all our hard work, the late nights and early mornings, the sacrifices and copious amounts of caffeine that got us where we are when that is just not the case. I mean, I am sure the coffee helped, a lot, but the thing is luck played such a huge role in that. Like monumental. I don’t need to look too far with this. If I was born to a different mother, then things could have easily turned out differently for me. I wouldn’t be tall (God forbid), or have the IQ I have, be left-handed or be athletic. I would not have gone to the schools I went to and had the peers I had. I wouldn't have been exposed to books and subsequently writing which I am able to make a living from etc… its turtles all the way down. Because of fortune, both ways, I can even say that if I wasn’t born to the mother I had, I would not be an introvert (sixteen years as an only child can do that to a person) or raised without a dad which has a lot of its own implications. Regardless, I am pretty psyched to be where I am, but I am also grateful because I know how much of it was out of my hands. I also know that while I work hard and as Eric Thomas says, “conduct my business,” I am under no illusions of feeling that I deserve my life. I don’t not deserve it either. It just is what it is.
We don’t deserve the spring, it just arrives. This also means that we don’t deserve the winter. I was watching reruns of Being Mary Jane and in one of the episodes, it's revealed that the eldest brother’s, Patrick Patterson, biological father struggles with substance abuse. Patrick had struggled with a drug problem most of his adult life and the fact that there was a hereditary component to it, made him more compassionate to himself. He understood why it had been so difficult for him to have a healthier relationship with substances.
In Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money, he shares a letter he wrote his son before he was born:
Some people are born into families that encourage education; others are against it. Some are born into flourishing economies encouraging of entrepreneurship; others are born into war and destitution. I want you to be successful, and I want you to earn it. But realize that not all success is due to hard work, and not all poverty is due to laziness. Keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself.
I would even say that most poverty is not due to laziness, there are well-designed systemic structures that have ensured that people remain trapped in Sisyphean poverty cycles. Just as Sisyphus could not outwork the curse placed upon his shoulders, there are people, good kind people unlike the tyrannical murderer Sisyphus, who also cannot outwork poverty.
South Africa was built on the hard work of black people, and it continues to run because this labour is plenty and cheap. This hard work has not gotten most black people anywhere, it has kept them right in place. Therefore, it is clearly not a question of laziness, and most of us know this. It’s just easier to pretend otherwise so that we abdicate ourselves from any culpability and can remain on our soap boxes preaching to poor black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Punishment
Now things get a little bit interesting. Sapolsky argues that if we are to come to terms with the fact that there is no free will, then we also have to come to terms with the fact that it doesn’t make sense to punish people for their actions. He says that when a car does not work as it should, then it should be removed from the streets, placed in a garage until it is fixed, then put back on the road again. He says that we should take the same approach when it comes to people. If someone is in danger of themselves or other people, then they should be removed from other people and given the help that they need. Once they are ok, they should then be placed back into society. They are not removed from society as a means of punishment, which is what modern-day incarceration is, but they are removed to primarily help them get the help they need so that they are not a danger to themselves and others.
Earlier this year a boy who was seventeen at the time, Brendan Depa, beat up a teacher’s aid to the point of unconsciousness when she grabbed his Nintendo Switch from his hands. The video was harrowing but the events that followed even more so. In one of his interviews, psychologist Dr. Umar provides a number of compelling reasons why Depa should not have been arrested for his behaviour. In Dr. Umar’s opinion, Depa should not have been in that school to begin with. Depa has mental issues, is taking a bunch of medication, has been through the foster care system and has a lot of developmental problems. His Individualized Education Plan (IEP) explicitly stated that nothing should be grabbed from Depa’s hands because this triggers a fit of rage in him. Yet, the teacher’s assistant disregarded the IEP and was unfortunately almost killed in the process. Depa was tried as an adult, and not as a juvenile, and could have received a jail sentence of up to 30 years. Judge Perkins sentenced him to two years in jail, but Dr. Umar expresses that Depa should not go to jail at all. He should be taken to a school that can cater to his needs.
It is very human to want to respond to pain with punishment. When your husband cheats on you, you take his children away from him. When women reject you, you trash them online. There are many ways that we punish others in the face of our pain. Hurt people hurt people as the saying goes. The answer to my pain is your pain. We also know that the other person’s pain is only a temporary solution to the new reality. Take the husband who cheats, the new reality is the dissolution of a marriage. Punishing the husband does not change the new reality. It is what it is. I too have struggled hard with this need for “justice.” I’ve also felt the need to make other people pay for the pain they’ve inflicted on me, but I know that won’t erase the new reality. I have to deal with the new reality.
The Depa video is actually painful to watch, he is 6ft, 270Ibs, and male; this poor woman just did not stand a fighting chance of making it out of the incident without serious damage. Like I wrote, it is painful, but pain does not justify punishment.
When I was in high school, a buddy of mine and I were just meandering about in the streets of the township, chewing the fat of one thing or another. Out of nowhere, she was slapped hard by a guy whom we all know has mental issues. Like five fingers, ears ringing hard. No one did anything, because it was widely accepted that he was mentally ill. We all understood that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, he did not even know who she was. He just carried on walking as if nothing had happened. We learnt two important lessons that day. When we saw him approaching, we would walk on the other side of the street. The other lesson we learnt was to keep our eyes open so he wouldn’t creep up on us like he had done before. Never again, we vowed, and never again did it happen. We knew that it was not personal though, which is why we kept it moving. It was painful but it would not have made any sense to punish him in any way.
But what if it is personal? What then?
Intention
We ask, “what if the person had bad intentions?” Our bearded and ponytailed neuroendocrinologist would, in true sage fashion, respond to a question with another question. “But where do intentions (bad or otherwise) come from?” You know there is a “turtles all the way down” response to that. Think about it this way. All serial killers had an abusive past. From what can be gleaned from documentaries, it seemed that Ted Bundy came from a loving family. He was a psychopath which has a genetic element to it.
Even something like infidelity seems to have a hereditary component to it. Reading The State of Affairs by Esther Perel shows that the cultures we are born and raised into have a huge impact on whether we cheat on our spouses or not and what meaning we assign to those infidelities. Proclivities and idiosyncrasies don’t just come from nowhere, they can be traced all the way to the turtle at the very bottom.
By now you should have heard that Judges are likely to grant parole when they’ve eaten and less likely when they are hungry. The intention of the judge is to be fair in these legal proceedings and yet the presence or absence of ghrelin in his stomach is a deciding factor. I bet you that most judges don’t even know what ghrelin is. In a similar vein, attractive people get lighter sentences in general. As Sapolsky puts it, “Thus, all sorts of things often out of your control- stress, pain, hunger, fatigue, whose sweat you are smelling, who's in your peripheral vision- can modulate how effectively your PFC does its job. Usually without you knowing it's happening.”
So when I wake up in the morning, I set the intention to not eat Maynard Wine Gums.” Everything goes well, until about three in the afternoon. I’ve just spent the morning writing essays that involve a lot of reading and research. When three pm arrives, it finds me compromised. Cognitively, I am spent. Like an automaton, I leave the coffee shop, cross the street and make my way into the local spaza shop where the friendly Malawian who has made sure that the wine gum shelf is stocked, greets me with a smile. Home is where Maynard Wine Gums are. And just like that, my intention has been crushed into a ball and slam dunked into the bin, tongue-out Michael Jordan style. I’ve had to employ psychological and practical tactics to make sure that I keep my intention. I don’t carry money with me and use my Starbucks app instead and I stay away from Clicks, as a general principle, because 3-for-2 is great when I am buying shower gel but not so great when it comes to keeping my intention. When we are tired, we make poor decisions. When we are stressed, we make poor decisions. Hell, when it’s our birthday, we make poor decisions. Emeli Sande has a song called Heaven where she sings about how she wakes up with good intentions, but the day lasts too long. She beseeches heaven to interfere, and I think this makes for a great segue into the next paragraph.
Grace
I’ve always leaned towards the Christian idea of grace more than that of free will. Live long enough and you lean hard on grace. Like Sande, you ask Heaven to intervene because even your best intentions are not enough, you wind up where you don’t want to be. Grace accommodates it all and therefore frees us from the condemnation as we try to do things differently.
In Chaos Theory, there is a phenomenon called Convergence where two different pathways could each separately determine the progressions to the same outcome. I think Grace and Determinism converge. Determinism says “alas, turtles” and Grace says, “it's all good, you are free from the punishment and condemnation that the behaviour those turtles elicit.” They weren’t studying gene modulation and expression 2000 years ago, but Grace as a practice bridged the ignorance gap. Grace has released many people from the need to punish the behaviour of others or self-flagellate. What if when Jesus was saying “they know not what they do,” he actually meant it. They had an intention to kill him but with these words Jesus was putting this intention into question. Jesus was crucified within a context. Most of those who jeered at and insulted him were products of the culture they lived and were brought up in, of which they did not choose. In Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson writes:
As parents are to children, cultures are to adults: we do not know how the patterns we act out (or the concepts we utilize) originated, or what precise “purposes” (what long-term “goals”) they currently serve. Such patterns are in fact “emergent properties” of long-term social interactions. Furthermore, we cannot describe such patterns well, abstractly (explicitly, semantically), even though we duplicate them accurately (and unconsciously) in our behaviour (and can represent them, episodically, in our literary endeavours). We do not know why we do what we do, or, to say the same thing, what it is that we are (all ideological theories to the contrary). We watch ourselves, and wonder; our wonder takes the shape of the story or, more fundamentally, the myth. Myths describing the known, explored territory, constitute what we know about our knowing how, before we can state, explicitly, what it is that we know how. Myth is, in part, the image of our adaptive action, as formulated by imagination, before its explicit containment in abstract language; myth is the intermediary between action and abstract linguistic representation of that action. Myth is the distilled essence of the stories we tell ourselves about the patterns of our own behaviour, as they play themselves out in the social and impersonal worlds of experience. We learn the story, which we do not understand (which is to say, cannot make explicit), by watching. We represent the action patterns we encounter in action (that is ritual), image and word: we act, then represent our behaviour, ever more abstractly, ever more explicitly, “consciously.”
We are hardly aware of the driving forces behind our behaviours which means that our behaviours cannot be of our own choosing. As human beings, with our geocentric view of ourselves, we think that every time we carry out a behaviour, we have chosen it. Rather, the behaviour has chosen us. Heliocentrism sobered us once and we can always count on nature to sober us again. Ants have as much free will as we do, which is to say none. Ants are not automata; they mill about and are driven by their biology and environment as we are. This does not mean that they can’t do incredible complex stuff like build the most jaw-dropping anthills like we have the pyramids. Just because things are deterministic, it does not mean that they are predictable. We humans still get to do great stuff and marvel at the wonder of the works of our hands.
The sobering part of all of this is that most of us are getting through life the best way we can. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t consequences, good or otherwise, to our behaviours but it does mean that we should seriously reconsider how we react to other people when they behave in ways that we do not approve of. It also does not mean that we can’t take any action because we can, in the way primates with a developed PFC can.
“I am put into a detached, professorial, egg heady sort of rage by the idea that you can assess someone’s behaviour outside the context of what brought them to that moment of intent, that their history doesn’t matter. Or that even if a behaviour seems determined, free will lurks wherever you’re not looking. And by the conclusion that righteous judgment of others is okay because while life is tough and we’re unfairly gifted or cursed with our attributes, what we freely choose to do with them is the measure of our worth. These instances have fuelled a profound amount of undeserved pain and unearned entitlement.” Robert Sapolsky
