Ludic Freedom

On vacation in the woods recently, I was inspired to contemplate the mosquito.  Required by the state we were vacationing in to quarantine (i.e., to vacation) for most of the time we were there, we decamped to a house deep in the forest which had been sealed since early winter well before the outbreak of COVID-19.  Consequently aside from spiders whose moth-littered webs trimmed every window it was devoid of life. Perfect! It being uncharacteristically hot and steamy for the region when we arrived and with no air conditioning at our disposal, we immediately set about putting screens in the windows, whereupon every mosquito in the woodsy vicinity proceeded to attempt to penetrate the membrane of screen to get at our virgin blood.  The inevitability of it was striking, inspiring me to instantly start crafting sentences in my head describing the algorithm that surely drove mosquitoes to descend upon us as soon as we showed up regardless of what they had been doing at the time or how they may have felt about it.  Indeed, mosquito ethologists describe the component of mosquito behavior called thermotaxis that impels the individual toward the source of any heat detected in the environment in the range of human body temperature.  The question of how such a complex behavioral framework is supported in such a small and frail package aside, the blunt simplicity of the result created a journalistic itch in me that wanted to be scratched.  Being cut off from the internet, and with only a limited supply of reference material at my disposal for the time being, I noted the questions that I wanted to explore to prepare for a short piece on the topic when I got back to civilization..

This was my plan.  And then, before I had a chance to write a word of it, I learned that David Graeber had died.  Graeber, an American anarchist anthropologist teaching at London School of Economics (since famously being fired without cause when he was up for tenure by Yale in 2006 probably for writing in support of a student expelled for activities organizing the Graduate Student Union at the university) had written iconoclastic books-- Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs among them-- and was credited with the genesis of the phrase "We are the 99%" that inspired and outlived Occupy Wall Street.  I'd read Debt which delivers the earth shattering news that the principle of debt upon which much of our social hierarchy and economic system has historically been based and which enriches so few (who alone are free to flout its obligations) and immiserates so many around the world is, in spite of the formidable state apparatus we've erected to enforce it, simply a moral choice we've made and as we've suspected all along, not a very good one. 

Reading about Graeber's influence and impact in an excellent appraisal by Nathan J Robinson of Current Affairs, I was alerted to a short almost speculative piece Graeber wrote for the Baffler in 2014 called What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun?  In the essay, Graeber discusses an alternative theory to the prevailing one on consciousness and cognition.  He takes philosopher Daniel Dennett as representative of the materialist point of view.  Less hard line on the question of free will than some of his more strident fellow "anti-choicers" (to coin a term), Dennett subscribes to the more forgiving variety, Compatibilism, which holds that free will is not incompatible with a materialistic determinism after all, granting that what we experience as choice may be at the core the product of mechanistic forces with a dose of quantum uncertainty thrown in, but that this does not discount our experience of it as choice (a state summarized by Arthur Schopenhauer with the phrase "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."). This state gives us what Dennett calls, "Free will worth wanting" and makes engagement in acts of moral persuasion worthwhile pursuits. Some philosophers have introduced an intermediary step between the purely mechanistic and the apparently conscious experience of free will, to wit "emergence"-- a threshold beyond which the less deterministic properties latent in the structures underlying pre-consciousness emerge to be experienced and exercised as will.  

Graeber rejects determinism even in its most palatable compatibilistic form, and takes issue with decreeing will emergent on the basis that it explains nothing.  He instead entertains as an alternative what is termed sometimes panpsychism, sometimes panexperientialism (for instance by the British philosopher Galen Strawson).  This is the surprising notion that everything in the universe to the most elemental level, far from being inert matter at the whim of whatever physical law might be operative in its locality at a given time might in fact itself be imbued with rudimentary  "will" or specifically a propensity to take whatever fork in the decision-tree of its circumstances that it fancies.  Choice for its own sake, which Graeber suggests might be the essence of what objective human observers might term "fun" might be at the heart of everything.  How else to explain how matter which tends to inertia and entropy might on its own team up with other matter in configurations of ever increasing complexity (culminating in the improbable configuration I like to call Myself).   The freedom at all levels of the universe to choose based on whim, pleasure, the pursuit of fun is what Graeber calls "ludic freedom" (from the latin ludus - sport, which is also the root of ludicrous-- itself perhaps a maligned word? Ok, let's not go crazy.).

For a pretty confirmed materialist, I have to admit that as cursory as my understanding of the concepts of ludic freedom are based merely on a speed reading of Graeber's essay, I was instantly prepared to drop my deterministic convictions to embrace this notion of freedom.  Recognizing that that might be a bit hasty, it suffices for me to say I take my readiness to jettison what was nearly a given for me to be an encouraging sign that the stakes have lowered for me, which I take to mean Graeber might have found an opening in me to yet new and unexpected truths-- illustrating a gift that characterizes much of Graeber's life work.

I once wrote a meditation (just for the hell of it) on how life might have arisen from conditions on earth however many billion years ago, and trying to jump the gap from inert matter to self-replicating life, I found myself wanting to use language not unlike what I encountered in Graeber's article, so perhaps I am receptive.  In any case, imagining how the universe might operate with this sort of physics invites new, exciting perspectives on chemistry, biology and human behavior.  Subatomic matter finds pleasure in the company of like matter, and decides to team up to create molecules which makes the universe suddenly a lot more interesting.  Molecules find solidarity in the composition of proteins; proteins collaborate on organisms (Graeber rhapsodizes on the liberating implications for the philosophical exemplar of dull robotic existence, the lobster).  Eventually, we get humans whose whimsical, creative wills thanks to ludic freedom have a framework for being capable of concocting surprises in perpetuity.

The implications for all kinds of ethologies previously considered inevitable, rote, mechanical, is endless.   Could the mosquito, for example,  just find the prospect of annoying giant hot hairy apes with its itchy saliva amusing as hell?  Maybe to mosquitoes, the pursuit of human flesh is an extreme sport. If even the lowly mosquito is capable of what Nietzsche calls the will to power, might thermotaxis be experienced not so much as an algorithm to which the mosquito is inexorably subject but  as a belief system to which it ecstatically subscribes?  Or is the prospect of writing about the tedious predictability of mosquitoes just no longer fun?

Host: "Helen, Ted, May I introduce Melania Victor."
Guest: "Zzwwrrrzzwwrrzzt!"
Host: "What's that?  Oh, I'm sorry, Malaria Vector!"
(Harry Bliss - New Yorker)