What Makes Us Us?

Chapter 8: Reason, Free Will, and Infinity

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) (2.2) (2.3) | Chapter 3 (3.1) (3.2) (3.3) (3.4) (3.5) (3.6)
PART 2
Chapter 4 (4.1) (4.2) (4.3) (4.4) (4.5) | Chapter 5 (5.1) (5.2) (5.3) (5.4) (5.5) (5.6) (5.7) (5.8) (5.9)
Chapter 6 (6.1) (6.2) (6.3) (6.4) (6.5)
PART 3
Chapter 7 (7.1) (7.2) (7.3) (7.4) (7.5) (7.6)
Chapter 8 (8.1)
Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14
PART 4
Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 |
PART 5
Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Conclusion
Appendix | Works Cited

---

Chapter 8
What Makes Us Us?

• Reason

  • From surviving to thriving

• Free Will

  • Objections

    • What about God’s plan?

    • What if what seems like choice is actually just stimulus response?

    • Nature, nurture, and choice

  • The Choice Is Yours

  • Why does this matter?

  • A final proof

• Infinity

  • The boundaries of our infinity

---

Note: This is an installment of The Freedom Scale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right. See here for installments of The Distributed Nation: A Plan for Human Independence.

This installment is free for all subscribers. To read the rest of this book, upgrade your subscription here:

8.1 — What Makes Us Us?

• Reason

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

—Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

Is Hamlet being sincere or sarcastic in his famous musing on the nature of man? He describes creatures of limitless potential, yet bound by the finitude of death. He describes us in soaring terms, and yet surely he knows—compassed 'round as he was with machination and murder—how rarely we live up to this rosy depiction.

In these few words, Shakespeare raises one of our most passionately debated questions: what is the nature of man? Ultimate answers are, of course, elusive, and even broaching the topic can take one out on a limb.  But we do at least need to climb up into the tree in order to get a better view, and from this vantage point, there are a number of things we can establish with clarity.

We are all individuals. We have many things in common, but we all have independent thoughts, hopes, and dreams. And yet we are members of the most social species on the planet. How should we treat each other, and what should be done about people who don’t treat others well? How do we divide scarce resources, and who gets what? What sort of government, if any, is best? What should our political spectrum look like? In order to approach some answers, we first need to take a deeper dive into the nature of the individual human person. How do we live? What are our limits? What sets us apart? What makes us us?

Reason

❝Then, moreover, hasn’t man’s reason penetrated even to the sky? We alone of living creatures know the risings and settings and the courses of the stars, the human race has set limits to the day, the month and the year, and has learnt the eclipses of the sun and moon and foretold for all future time their occurrence, their extent and their dates. And contemplating the heavenly bodies the mind arrives at a knowledge of the gods, from which arises piety, with its comrades justice and the rest of the virtues, the sources of a life of happiness that vies with and resembles the divine existence. […] The most excellent of all things is reason.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero

We will never know the identity of the first person ever to look at the world and contemplate just how different he was from the rest of the animals. No doubt it was a very long time ago.

What was it that first caught his attention? Was it that he walked upright, whereas the animals proceeded on all fours (or sixes or eights, or by wings, fins, or slithering)? Was it that he was able to manipulate the environment in sophisticated ways to better suit his wants? Was it that he made tools? That he and his fellows laughed and cried? That they sang songs, created art, or buried their dead?

Or did he realize that this very act of contemplation set him apart?

We share a great deal in common with the biological world. We share DNA with plants and animals, in a long chain of rising complexity that sets each species apart, yet unites us all. We share biological urges and chemical triggers with the rest of the animal kingdom. Numerous structures of our brain and nervous system are common to all vertebrates. 

We’ve learned a great deal about animals since the days of that first “contemplative man.” We are coming to understand just how sophisticated many animal behaviors truly are, and how they are even capable of emotions that seem very similar to our own. All of this has challenging and fascinating implications, which we will be discussing at the end of this chapter. But the gap between us and the rest of the biological world nonetheless remains quite large, and of all the traits that make the difference, reason stands as one of the largest. 

We plan. We analyze and study. We take the future into account and pass knowledge to future generations. We develop hypotheses about why things are this way or that, and we test them by gathering more information. We devise syllogisms and sophisticated trains of logic. We dive deep into our own thoughts and create imaginative works from what we discover therein. We invent. We contrive. We ruminate on the very nature of existence. Even the most sophisticated of our animal friends do not do these things, or only do a few of them to a very rudimentary degree.

But animals do have something important that we lack: They have instincts that tell them how to be what they are and how to do what they need to do. Yes, some animal parents train their offspring to do certain things, but many things just come naturally to them. Many offspring get no instruction at all; they simply go out into the world knowing what they need to do to survive.

By contrast, we have very few instincts at all. We don’t come naturally to the knowledge of what is good to eat and what is poison. We don’t move in tandem like schools of fish or engage in specialized activity like a colony of ants. We see our prey and have no inborn knowledge of how to catch it. Our young are utterly helpless and remain so for a very, very long time.

The animals have senses finely attuned to survival. They are naturally adapted to the environment in which they live. Our senses and adaptations are, on their own, inadequate to the task at hand. And so we must use reason.

More than 250 years ago, Professor Adam Smith observed much the same in a lecture to his students: 

Man has received from the bounty of nature reason and ingenuity, art, contrivance, and capacity of improvement far superior to that which she has bestowed on any of the other animals, but is at the same time in a much more helpless and destitute condition with regard to the support and comfort of his life. All other animals find their food in the state they desire it and that which is best suited to their several natures, and few other necessaries do they stand in need of. But man, of a more delicate frame and more feeble constitution, meets with nothing so adapted to his use that it does not stand in need of improvement and preparation to fit for his own use.

And it is not just what we gather from the environment—we change the environment itself:

The natural temperature of the air is altogether adapted to the condition of the other animals, who seem to feel very little inconvenience from the several vicissitudes of the weather. But even this soft and subtle fluid is too severe for his tender and delicate frame… . He even forms to himself around his body a sort of new atmosphere, more soft, warm and comfortable than that of the common circumambient air. For this purpose he furnishes himself with cloaths which he wraps round his body, and builds himself a house to extend this atmosphere to some greater distance around him.¹

From the relative comfort of an eighteenth-century Glasgow University lecture hall, Smith explains in academic language what our ancestors understood out of necessity. Man must use his reason to bend the natural world to his own survival needs. If he doesn’t, he will die. Reason is not just the most salient characteristic that sets us apart from the animals—it is absolutely essential to our survival.

---

1.  Smith, Adam. Lectures on Jurisprudence, 334 (first quote), 334–335 (second quote)