Farts, Boners and Free Will. Seriously
Yeah, thoughts, some unwelcome, pop into my head all the time. But I can control my thoughts, too, just as I can control farts, boners and other stuff my body does. Nikita Petrov did this sketch of me.
December 1, 2023. Neurobiologist and free-will denier Robert Sapolsky asserts in Determined that we lack self-control; genes, neurons and so on determine what we do. I grant that no one has total self-control, not even God, but most of us can exert at least a little control over even seemingly hard-wired biological functions.
Take farts. Heeding social taboos, I never fart aloud in earshot of others, like my students, colleagues or girlfriend, “Emily.” But I’ll let one rip when I’m alone, just because I can. [See Postscript.] Other examples of things we can control, sort of:
LIFE. Natural selection programmed us to cling to life even when we’re miserable. But I could, if I’ve had enough, jump off my 11th-floor balcony. Free will in action! I’d never do that, I love being alive, if only so I can grok the weirdness. My point is that living is a choice. To be or not to be, etc.
AGING AND DEATH. Aging and death are inevitable, but I can slow down and even reverse some effects of aging, albeit temporarily, by doing more jumping jacks and eating fewer Oreos. And advanced meditators can allegedly suppress their fear of death. See EMOTIONS.
HEARTBEAT. Hearts are hard to control, perhaps by design; suicide would be too easy if we could simply will our hearts to stop. But I can make my heart beat faster right… now by getting up from the couch and doing jumping jacks. I can slow it down by flopping back on the couch and murmuring D’oh over and over.
BREATH. You can’t end your life simply by not breathing. If you hold your breath until you pass out, your lungs automatically start breathing again—unless you put a plastic bag over your head. But we have more conscious control over our lungs than over our hearts. I can breathe faster or slower and hold my breath, which comes in handy when I’m underwater.
PEEING AND POOPING. We have more control over bladders and bowels than hearts and lungs. We learn as children to control peeing and pooping while awake and even while sleeping (which is amazing, if you think about it). But we may lose control when we are terrified (for example, because someone is bombing us), ill or old.
BONERS. Ah, the fickleness of male desire! The mind desires one person, the penis another. Some males struggle in vain to suppress boners; others can’t get one even with the help of Viagra and an eager partner. Men aren’t compelled to act on their desires, but many are clearly loathe to exert sexual self-control. Women seem to possess more self-control than men. That makes evolutionary sense, because females, far more than males, bear the consequences of sex. Speaking of which…
PROCREATION. For most of evolution, procreation was a consequence of copulation. Now condoms, diaphragms, pills, abortion and whatnot give us control (still subject, incredibly, to limits imposed by politicians and judges) over procreation. Some women nonetheless get pregnant unwillingly; others who want to bear children can’t, even with the help of fertility treatments. Men have less control over procreation than women. Having kids was the most momentous choice of my life, except it wasn’t really my choice; it was my ex-wife’s.
SENSORY ORGANS. Unpleasant sounds and smells are hard to block, because ears and noses don’t have off switches. But eyes do! If I don’t like what I’m seeing, I can simply close my eyes.
EATING. We can’t control our hunger, but we can control our eating. I could choose to stop gobbling Oreos and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream at night, albeit with difficulty (I’m a sugar junkie). You can also commit suicide by choosing not to eat--although others can override your choice by forcibly feeding you.
DREAMS. You can, with practice, learn to become conscious, or lucid, in your dreams, so you know you’re dreaming. Adept lucid dreamers can control their dreams in ways limited only by their imaginations. They can fly, defy their bosses, have sex with movie stars, yada yada. Advanced meditators claim they remain conscious throughout sleep. Good for them.
THOUGHTS. Neural activity is as ceaseless as cell division and metabolism; hence thoughts, some unwelcome, constantly pop into my head. I can nonetheless control my thoughts—when for example, I’m writing a column like this one. Advanced meditators claim they experience pure, thoughtless consciousness. Oh, come on.
SPEECH. Normal healthy adults control their utterances, but that control is never total. Years ago, my heart raced and my palms sweated when I faced an audience. Teaching has more or less cured me of stage fright; if anything, now I have a hard time shutting up. Silence, like celibacy and death, is always an option. In 2018 I stayed mum for a whole week, and I loved it.
WRITING. In a recent column, I fretted that I’m not really exercising free will when I write. But I have more control over what I publish now than I ever did before, because I’m self-publishing right here on my own website. Even my super-tolerant ex-editor Mike Lemonick of Scientific American would probably have nixed the headline “Farts, Boners and Free Will.”
EMOTIONS. Emotions are much harder to control than thoughts. Bad and good moods, for reasons I often can’t fathom, sweep through me like weather systems. I try to will myself to feel good by reminding myself how lucky I am to be alive. I even try to feel bad when the occasion calls for it—for example, when I hear about an especially brutal war crime. But is a willed emotion really an emotion? Advanced meditators claim they can suppress unwanted emotions, such as rage, grief and fear. Wouldn’t that be nice.
VIOLENCE. In War and Peace, which I’m re-reading, Tolstoy makes an even better case for fatalism than Robert Sapolsky does. Tolstoy depicts violence, ranging from a duel between two men to war between Russia and France, as the inevitable result of vanity, folly and custom. Actually, nonviolence is always an option. You don’t have to pull that trigger, drop that bomb, order that missile strike. Choosing not to kill, even in self-defense, might result in your death, but it’s still your choice. That’s why I cling to my frail hope that someday we’ll choose peace, for good. If we can choose not to fart aloud, surely we can choose not to kill each other.
Postscript: My fictionalized, stream-of-consciousness memoir Pay Attention starts with the narrator farting himself awake, after which he contemplates writing an essay headlined “I stink therefore I am.” When my editors objected that this opening would turn off readers, I retorted that James Joyce’s Ulysses resounds with farts. One day, I predicted, critics would acknowledge that the greatest literary opening of all time is not “Call me Ishmael” or “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” but “Who farted? Wait. I did.”
Further Reading:
Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science. I also brood over the mind-body problem in my free online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment.
You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s
Free Will and the Sapolsky Paradox