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Video Description
Every civilisation has asked whether free will exists, and each has answered using whatever it had most recently learned to build. This video from the Conscious Radical channel walks the full chronology: sky-gods, clockwork, steam pressure, brain signals, and now algorithms.
The question has not changed in four thousand years, only the machinery people borrowed to answer it. The journey begins with the oldest surviving horoscope, a Babylonian clay tablet from 410 BCE, and ends with a table of behavioural levers still in use today. The point is not to settle the old argument but to notice how the answer is always built.
Full Video Transcript
The oldest surviving horoscope in the world is a Babylonian clay tablet dated 410 BCE.
It records where the planet stood on the night a child was born.
And the people who cast it believe those positions decided what kind of person that child was going to be.
Two and a half thousand years later a British government department published a table of nine
methods for changing what a person does without changing their mind and one of those methods
is called defaults. Now I have spent years advising organizations and culture supporting
them to create better environments to work in which also includes how to engage and influence
people and part of what I do is to look at how people behave and why they behave the way they do
When reading older texts you might think that you’ll just find metaphors but what
I have found instead is a 4,000 year old question and argument that still hasn’t
been settled. Whether free will or self-will exists. Every era I looked at
asked this question and every era answers it differently but they do have
one thing in common. They believe there is a controlling force but its location
depends heavily on what they’ve just learnt to build. When the most sophisticated thing humans
understood was the movement of the sky, the controller was in the sky. It was in the planets,
the stars and the alignments. Mechanical clocks appear in European towns in the late 13th century
and within a few hundred years the universe has become one. In 1605 Kepler writes that his aim
is to show that the celestial machine is like a clockwork rather than a divine organism and
Descartes extended this thinking treating living things as mechanisms. In the late 19th century in
the age of steam, pressure and hydraulics, Freud describes a mind where psychological energy builds
up, gets blocked and has to release. Then the mind becomes the wiring and the circuits and now it’s
code and the answer is algorithms. What started out as a controller in the sky becomes a controller
hidden within our wants and our fears. The Sumerians established the earliest foundations
of cosmic order in 3500 BCE. Their noun for fate or destiny is Nam. When the gods cut a fate,
Namtar, they were assigning an immutable purpose, a structure, an operational slot to a component
for the universe. Nam was mechanical and structural and it couldn’t be bargained with.
The Akkadians conquered the Sumerian city-states in around 2334 BCE and they kept the cuneiform
and wrote it in their own language. Nam became shimtu from the verb shamu meaning to decree
or determined and that word is also used to describe a thing’s essential nature. So fate
was no longer a passive accident it was decreed by a higher order destiny
shifted from abstract law into something closer to a written contract and it was
managed through the tablet of destinies a physical bureaucratic document stamped
with official seals and because it was a decree issued by the supreme divine king
Enlil or Marduk it was absolute to challenge your shimtu was to commit
treason against the palace of the gods the epic of atrahasis was written down around 1700 bce
it describes a world before humans existed and the universe was divided between the elite ruling
gods the anunnaki and the working class lesser gods the igiji now the igiji were made to do all
the heavy manual labor of maintaining the cosmic order and they bore it for three thousand six
hundred years then they reached a breaking point and staged a coordinated rebellion
and lil the chief god was terrified and he wanted all of the leaders of the mutiny to be executed
but enki the god of wisdom intervened and suggested that a workforce be created
instead by slaying a rebel god named Wiyilu and mixing his blood with clay what is mixed
in with him according to the text is his timu which translators suggest means his intelligence
his plan or his animating spirits and from that mixture the goddess Mami shaped 14 pieces
of clay seven male seven female and placed them in a womb-like chamber after nine months
the clay figures emerged as the first human beings. Later in the same poem the gods send a plague
then famine then a flood. They want to destroy humanity because humans have become too noisy
and are keeping a little awake. So humans were made from the blood of a murdered god
for the god’s convenience and then nearly wiped out for being inconvenient. But notice what this
isn’t. Nobody in Babylon is saying your desires are counterfeit. Fate is decreed from the outside
and it stays outside and it feels more like a political complaint about being governed by powers
that have their own interests. And at this stage you’re still able to argue with fate and destiny
because the older omen texts treat the sky as a warning system and you can enact the
Namburbi ritual which means you can alter destiny and fate but then natal horoscopes arrive and I
think this is possibly the most consequential change in the whole history. Once you cast a
chart from the moment of birth fate stops being a warning about a future event and becomes a
description of a person. It’s not something that might happen to you it’s what you are fixed before
you could form a memory, something that you had no part in deciding. The Nam-Burbi ritual to avert
your fate has disappeared. You can’t escape your destiny. Then Plato gives us the myth of Ur,
where at the end of the Republic, the souls waiting to be born choose their next life.
The gods don’t hand you a pre-written contract, you pick your own. Then the souls travel to the
plain of forgetting, and they camp beside the river Lethe, and they drink, and they are born
knowing nothing about the choice they just made and everything that follows will feel like a
character to them. In the Timaeus Plato sets out how the universe was manufactured by a rational
craftsman the Demiurge. Now Plato’s Demiurge is benevolent which is the opposite of what the
Gnostics will do with the same figure and he delicates the making of the mortal parts of the
soul the appetites and the passions to the lesser gods associated with the planets so the structure
the gnostics are later condemned for is sitting in a text that was taught openly in the schools
now the orphics introduced the pivot that changes western philosophy soma sima the body is a tomb
to them human life wasn’t a gift or a civic duty owed to the gods instead they saw the physical
body as a prison cell holding a divine soul. Living an ordinary unpurified life meant your
soul was forced back onto a continuous wheel of rebirth, waking up inside new bodies including
animals. So to break the cycle and free the divine spark the Orphics lived an aesthetic
anti-establishment life. They believed humans were made from the remains of the titans who
were destroyed after killing and eating the child Dionysus so in their view we
carry something divine inside something criminal now it’s very tempting to run a
straight line from Atrahasis to that with humanity manufactured from the
remains of a god featuring in both Mesopotamian and Greek ideas were
certainly moving around the same Mediterranean religious beliefs could
have easily crossed over but it is also possible that two cultures arrived at a
similar idea. The Orphics did leave something physical behind and it’s
something I find genuinely intriguing and also very specific. Archaeologists
found tiny leaf-shaped gold tablets across Greece and southern Italy and it
was buried in the hands or around the necks of dead initiates and these gave
instructions to the soul by a type of underworld passports so when the
deceased arrives in the underworld he’s expected to confront obstacles the soul
is told to pass by the first spring it comes to on the left because that one is
forgetfulness and to go instead to the cool water flowing from the pool of
memory and when the Guardians challenge it the dead person must recite the
passphrase which is written on the tablet saying something along the lines
of I am a child of earth in starry heaven but my race is heavenly or I am
the son of earth and starry sky I am parched with thirst and I’m dying but
quickly grant me cold water from the lake of memory to drink there are other
gold leaves offering various instructions for addressing the rulers
of the underworld so you get instructions and a password to get past
a gatekeeper so that you’re not put back through the wearisome cycle to the
Stoics, destiny, which they called high harmony, was an unbreakable, continuous, interlocking web
of cause and effect. The Gnostics picked up the word high harmony 500 years later. In the third
century BCE, Chrysippus argues that if you push a cylinder, it rolls. The push came from outside of
you and the rolling comes from the shape of the cylinder itself. So external causes can trigger
you and it’s your own nature that determines what happens next so that argument is two and a half
thousand years old and i think it’s still the best argument against everything else in this video
but so far every force we’ve looked at is outside the person and you’ll notice what’s happened to
the word all the way through the babylonians said shimtu the thing that is allotted allotted
not chosen or earned but issued to you before you were in any position to have an opinion about it
by the second or first century bce the forces start moving inside the person in the community
rule a hebrew text founder kumran god allots two spirits to every human being the spirit of truth
which is light and the spirit of falsehood which is darkness every person carries both and the
the exact ratio of how much light and darkness you receive was set before you were born then of
course we have pistis sophia the coptic text from the third or fourth century where mary asked jesus
who is it that compels a man to sin and the answer names the archons of the hymene the rulers of fate
and as that they install a counter spirit which is attached to the soul before birth and travels
with you your whole life and whose entire job is to make the ruler’s preferences live inside you
as though they were your own and when the text names the archons of the hymen the deacons and
the discs of the sun and the moon it’s naming the scientific model of its day hellenistic astrology
which was codified by ptolemy in alexandria in the second century and he held that a soul descending
into a body picked up qualities from each planetary sphere it passed through
and that was the mainstream educated cosmology
the gnostics took the science of their era and they called it
a prison and there is one more thing in the text which is the reason
this video is called what it’s called the power
who engineers sapphires fall the whole disaster who sets it
all in motion is called orthodes which translates to the self-willed
now he never forces anyone he builds the light he puts it where sophia will see it and he waits for
her to walk towards it under her own steam so every step of the descent is her decision so
the tradition that produced the most precise account of manufactured desire in the ancient
world took the phrase self-will and gave it to the villain over 2 000 years suma said the decree
comes from outside. Babylon dated it to your birth, Plato dropped it below your memory,
Qumran put it inside the person and the Gnostics put it inside your wants and needs. Everything
I’ve talked about so far has had some form of contact with something else. So what about the
teachings which were seemingly unconnected? Now the Bhagavad Gita is a Hindu scripture about how
to live a purposeful life it was probably composed over 800 years between 400 bce and 400 ce and it
would have been carried by word of mouth for generations before it was ever written down
chapter 3 verse 27 says that actions are done by forces of material nature your physical body your
brain tissue your nervous system your biological impulses are all part of this material system
and nature moves itself the hand moves the heart beats and the brain processes thought
automatically through physical laws and that the one deluded by ahamkara the ego construct which
is a mental function sits quietly until after an action or thought occurs and then it immediately
says i chose to do that the gita calls this a delusion where we mistake a post-processing label
for the actual cause of the action. So the action of doing something and the sense of having done
something are two separate systems. And then there is the argument that stops this whole subject
collapsing into fatalism and it happens in the 5th century BCE. Now the Buddha had a named opponent
called Gosala. Gosala taught absolute determinism, niyati, destiny decides everything, your own effort
achieves nothing and your soul will be released after a fixed number of lifetimes regardless of
what you do. Now the Buddha considered that to be the most dangerous of all the teachings going
because it denies human agency and morality completely. Around 411 CE a monk called Pelagius
was teaching that people can choose to be good by their own efforts. He believed humans didn’t
inherit sin, that we possess free will and we can choose to sin or not and that the grace of God was
the tools that God provided, moral law and the human capacity to reason. Augustine opposed this
view and became the most influential thinker in the history of western Christianity. He argued
that humans are spiritually crippled by original sin and that human free will alone is powerless
to choose good without god’s unearned divine grace now his writing laid the foundation for
both the medieval catholic church and the protestant reformation pelagius was condemned
as a heretic in 418 in 1524 erasmus argues for human free will against the early protestant
reformers on the grounds that god gave humans a rational mind and the capacity to choose
luther answers the following year taking a position close to augustine’s that humans are
entirely enslaved to sin now erasmus was eventually added to rome’s index of forbidden books
meanwhile in islamic theology the mutazila argued from the 8th century that human reason must work
alongside divine revelation and that people must be the author of their own acts or god’s justice
just won’t make sense the ashari’s answered in the 10th century with cusp which translates to
acquisition god creates the act and the human acquires it and thereby owns it a theology built
specifically to explain how something authored elsewhere still counts as yours and in judaism
in chapter 3 mishnah 15 of the ethics of the fathers rabbi akiva states it in one line
everything is foreseen yet free will is granted then we come into the machine era where science
gradually pushes human consciousness out of the driver’s seat newton’s laws work so in 1814 pierre
simon laplace takes newtonian physics to its absolute mathematical conclusion and describes
a universe of strict unyielding determinism with no room left for divine intervention
and intelligence knowing the position and momentum of every particle could compute the whole future
the future is already in the present in the same way the answer is already in the arithmetic
darwin then puts humans inside nature rather than above it freud invents a mind that runs on drives
pressure and repression and says the ego is not master in its own house so now the controller
is inside the skull but it’s not the part of you that talks. Then Benjamin Liebert continues to
move the argument out of religion and physics and puts it in the brain. His experiment tracked three
moments. He used EEG to detect the electrical build-up in the brain that precedes a movement
and he called it the readiness potential. He asked people to note the position of a spot on a clock
face at the exact moment they became aware of deciding to flex their wrist and he measured the
muscle itself. It was the order of the process which stunned people. The brain began preparing
the action roughly 350 milliseconds before the person reported consciously deciding to do it
and to hardline determinists this was proof that free will is an illusion. Your unconscious brain
makes the decision and your conscious mind takes the credit afterwards. However the case against
this is strong. Aaron Scherger’s work argues that the readiness potential is just ordinary
background fluctuation rather than a decision being formed. The method depends on people
accurately reporting an internal moment against a moving clock and Libert himself kept a veto in
his model. He noticed a gap of around 200 milliseconds between the conscious awareness
of the urge and the muscle actually moving and argued that within that window a person can
consciously cancel the action. So regardless of what the brain suggests the conscious mind can
still say no. What has held up better over time is a bit duller and that is that situation matters
far more than we like to think. If you put ordinary people in certain rooms under certain pressures
then behavior shifts in ways that personality tests don’t always predict which brings us back
to our own answer in 2010 the cabinet office published mind space which was written by the
institute for government and in it it lists nine reliable ways to change what a person does
and they are messenger, incentives, norms, defaults, salience, priming, effect, commitments
and ego. The report states that these operate on what it calls the automatic system and the aim
is changing behaviour without changing minds. Now the authors raise an objection to their own work
by asking whether a person can resist an influence they’re not aware of and they quote
philosopher susan hurley to the effect that someone whose automatic system is being worked
on in ways they would ordinarily reject does not meet the conditions we normally need for
responsibility the authors of this report later led the cabinet office behavioral insights team
which is also known as the nudge unit and 15 years later the behavioral insights team is a global
consultancy and has published a report on ai and human behavior containing a table of enablers for
getting staff to adopt ai tools choice architecture defaults reducing effort timely prompts messenger
effects social norms loss aversion these are the same levers within the mindspace report
that’s been used to affect AI take up.
So a table of nine levers is still behavioural design,
which is not the thing most people mean when they say we’re being run by algorithms.
And I agree, the algorithmic version adds something
that never existed before in this entire history.
Everything before was based on the individual.
Babylonian assigned one fate per person, and so did every system after it.
The documents created were public, you knew the workings of it, you could have it read
out loud to you.
The algorithmic model’s version of you is not available to you because it’s proprietary
information.
You can’t see it or challenge it or conduct a ritual to change it.
It also measures you and I’m not sure anyone who has signed a fate in 4,000 years ever
checked in as to whether it worked or not.
The gods didn’t run a control group but large platforms run thousands of experiments at
once showing different versions to different people and keeping whatever engaged them.
So the programming behind algorithms which chooses what you see can work out what changed
your behaviour and it can adjust and it does this constantly and it updates using you.
one last point on algorithms it’s a program with the outcome as optimizing engagement i don’t
believe it was ever instructed to make anybody angrier or more anxious or more uncertain although
that is entirely possible it was just given a number to raise the outrage is a byproduct of
the arithmetic discovered by a machine that has no conscious view about it so we have ended up in a
genuinely peculiar position the gnostics looked at what they believed was an impersonal cosmos
planets and mechanics and nobody’s decision and insisted it must have an author with a grudge
now that was perhaps an imaginative leap but i think we’ve built it over 4 000 years we have
asked the question with each era providing a different answer based on the most advanced thing
its own civilization knew how to make and this should give us pause about ours because there’s
no reason to think that we’re the first generation to stand outside that pattern our answer is going
to look era-shaped to somebody too that’s the argument for not taking any of this too literally
but i do wonder whether we will ever stop asking the question this is a question as old as time
and it sits alongside the question of why are we here at all? I think we keep asking because we
need it to come out both ways on different days. We need self-will to exist because without it
nobody deserves anything, no praise, no blame, no justice, no reason to have tried and we need it
not to exist because of all the things we do that we can’t account for, that lost temper, that habit
that we can’t break, the version of ourselves that showed up somewhere and behaved in a way
we can’t defend. Every age has tried to answer this and I’m not sure we’ve arrived anywhere yet.
The people in history that I trust most are the ones who refuse to settle it. As I keep saying,
I’m becoming more comfortable with being uncertain. To know something with absolute
certainty means you’ve stopped questioning it, you’ve stopped evaluating it, you’ve stopped
been open to new information and I would rather stay curious. What I do think matters is noticing.
Noticing when a want for something arrives in you. Did it arrive fully formed and can you remember
choosing it? Noticing is available to you whatever the explanation of free will turns out to be.
Source: The Conscious Radical