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I wanted to do a thread on this piece by Sarah Constantin discussing a dichotomy in how people view freedom.
Is it optimization (studiously pursuing a single goal) or indifference (when all things are equal to me I am free to choose whatever)? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nd6XGxCiYrm2qJdh6/degrees-of-freedom?fbclid=IwAR3lYyBYBScypSPK0csCjVaZMuLYL2_OHNSEzetqgq_fDATSc50yjQ9r4RA
Is it optimization (studiously pursuing a single goal) or indifference (when all things are equal to me I am free to choose whatever)? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Nd6XGxCiYrm2qJdh6/degrees-of-freedom?fbclid=IwAR3lYyBYBScypSPK0csCjVaZMuLYL2_OHNSEzetqgq_fDATSc50yjQ9r4RA
If anarchism is the sort of something-maximizing struggle that many treat it as then there is no "good enough" and one is strictly constrained by the desires, values, or ideals one has. There is in any given situation, however trivial, only one truly correct path.
Your strong desires/values completely and utterly determine your actions. All that an anarchist can do is struggle to better approach the ideal, the ethical path. But for a lot of people the idea of a single path doesn't fit what they mean by "freedom."
The egoist takes a different approach to freedom -- something that the nihilist more fully embraces. Fuck having values. Fuck even having coherent desires. That shit would just make you micromanage every aspect of your life. How would that provide freedom inside your own head?
This second track of people want freedom as effectively a kind of brain liquefaction. Consistent desires or values make you predictable, and isn't predictability the opposite of wildness? In this lens you often get people talking about instinct and impulse as freedom.
This dichotomy Sarah points out arguably reflects a longstanding deep chasm in anarchism. One person even called it "unbridgeable."
On one side the dreary scolds who would in the name of anarchy police literally everything. On the other side the incoherent & unprincipled sociopaths who would both abandon vigilant struggle & license domination.
I'm a strong partisan of team Dreary Scolds. But with a twist.
I'm a strong partisan of team Dreary Scolds. But with a twist.
The trick is to sidestep and examine the concept of *agency*.
Some people define "agency" as "any unit that functions enough like a black box to us" -- thus they assign agency to social groupings, even to objects. But this eludes the character of agency for those who have it.
Some people define "agency" as "any unit that functions enough like a black box to us" -- thus they assign agency to social groupings, even to objects. But this eludes the character of agency for those who have it.
The act of making a decision is a process of information integration. We chew through a variety of considerations & come to a conclusion. If we didn't *evaluate*, if we just operated on instinct or followed the lowest random impulse that happened to arrive we wouldn't be agents.
It is the internal churn and the breadth of what we take as prompts that makes us agents.
A ball rolls down the slope immediately in front of it. An agent goes more meta. An "agential ball" will sometimes go uphill in order to get over to a deeper valley just beyond.
A ball rolls down the slope immediately in front of it. An agent goes more meta. An "agential ball" will sometimes go uphill in order to get over to a deeper valley just beyond.
It has frequently been pointed out that intelligence -- agency -- is a tunneling phenomenon. Whereas evolution just takes us down immediate slopes, intelligence allows us to model the landscape, to invent solutions that would never be arrived at through incremental change.
This process involves pulling in information from a wider scope and doing more complex internal feedback loops with it. You cannot be said to have agency in a choice if you do not have accurate models about the context in which you are making it.
Someone acting in ignorance or without consideration is not free. And indeed in complete ignorance and with zero consideration they are not really even being a person.
We can also talk about *physical* requirements for agency. The scope of the impact of your actions. You can have an accurate model of the jail you are confined within but still have no real agency if the extent of your impact on the universe is how you can move in a small cell.
There is a spectrum of agency, and thus an arrow to it. One can optimize for having more agency. But you'll note that this optimization process necessitates increased breadth of possibility in two ways.
1) To optimize one needs to search a space of the possible, investigate more dimensions, and because there is never a conclusion to such in an infinite universe, one must cultivate many-dimensional complexities internally, the churn more meta and thus less easily predictable.
2) By taking in more lines of influence to churn on and expanding one's scope of possible impact we knit together the world. *This makes more things possible.*
One way to think of possibility is "how much can happen as the result of very little perturbation." A ball perched above forking chutes can travel down very different paths from a small amount of change. What if the thing to be optimized is having more paths available?
Consider a world where we are intertwined in a mesh, every single person is capable of changing the world. A piece of art or science, a new way of looking at things, can rapidly spread. Influence and impact are thus non-rivalrous. The entire world can churn like our minds.
Maximizing *agency* is an optimization problem, but one that doesn't collapse to the grey uniform worlds or heroin vats of so many other flavors of utilitarianism. It *also* avoids the shoals of incoherence and indifference that are indiscernible from brain death.
