“We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.” –Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
1. The darkness that comes before
Your life is shaped by a billion moments and processes and experiences. All of these lead up this current moment, where you are sitting or standing or lying, reading these lines on your phone, tablet, laptop, or computer. There are sounds around you, smells, perhaps people. This is the moment t.
Suppose you’re standing in a vast and empty space, nothing to see in any direction. There are arrows on the floor, all parallel, all pointing in one direction: the future. Time only flows one way. You are standing in the middle of the space, at timepoint t. What is in front of you, in the direction the arrows are pointing to, is your future: what is to come. Behind you is your past, where the arrows come from: all the ways that have led up to this moment in time, t.
Your current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are the product of the interactions among trillions of things, involving all levels of organization: quarks and atoms, molecules and enzymes, cells and organs. Your thoughts and feelings are shaped by your genetic predispositions, your family history, personality, experiences you’ve made in life. Lessons you’ve learned, people you have loved and left behind. Interactions among these processes include direct causal links, complex and nonlinear mechanisms, moderations and mediations, emergence, supervenience, and so much more. Your current state is the result of a vast network of processes, biopsychosocialenvironmental, intervowen with so many other people and mechanisms around you.
But you don’t understand how.
You haven’t slightest idea what processes and relations between processes actually determine your current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors at this moment in time. This is what R. Scott Bakker calls ‘The Darkness That Comes Before’.
Take sleep as an example, and look back against time in this vast space where you stand. All the nights you slept over your lifetime. Suppose each night of sleep is a domino block of a certain color, going back against the arrows of time all the way to the beginning. Each night of sleep has been influenced by numerous causal chains of domino blocks that have fallen over, all resulting in the sleep length and quality you experienced. Some of these nights will be linked together causally as well, in different ways. Sometimes sleeping badly one night will have led to bad sleep the next night as well, because you were more vulnerable to worries, and lay awake with anxiety of not being able to sleep and failing an important exam or interview the next day. You can see the causal chain clearly, looking back at millions of dominos scattered on the floor behind you. Sometimes sleeping badly will have done the opposite, because you were too tired to stay awake.
We make up stories to explain our own lives. I slept badly because it is a full moon. I like this color, or that person, because of things that sound plausible to me. We give meaning to our own lives by telling us and other people supposed reasons for things we think and feel and do.
But we do not really know. You, at time t, are the result of processes you have for the most part no empirical access to. They are unkonwn and unknowable.
2. Complex dynamical systems
Now, the above isn’t necessarily my own view, and my view doesn’t really matter for this blog post. But I was trying to think of a concept to express the difficulty I am grappling with in my academic work (1, 2, 3, 4): trying to understand people as complex, causal systems whose experiences are constituted by the relations among biological, psychological, social, and environmental processes. We only have very limited insights into these processes, because we are not the people we study. Additionally, people themselves have arguably limited insight into many processes governing their lives.
And during a meeting last week, I all of a sudden remembered Bakker’s Prince of Nothing fantasy book series I had read around 20 years ago, in which he termed this concept ‘The Darkness That Comes Before’. Bakker expresses this idea several times in the books:
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“The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?”
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“I am my thoughts, but the sources of my thoughts exceed me. I do not own myself, because the darkness comes before me.”
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“If we’re nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us.”
One of the main characters in the books then is someone who is trained to understand the movements of his own soul, via conditioning and training, and therefore, can understand the movements of other souls as well. This causal understanding, being able to see the past and processes of others, then gives him power over them. Not completely unlike us trying to figure out in our work whether a better understanding of a person’s mental health system can help us improve interventions.
Bakker also extends this concept to other people:
- “No soul moves alone through the world. Our every thought stems from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of world spoken before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another should to carry our own…No one’s soul moves alone, Leweth.”
I’m sharing this here as some food for thought. I’d be curious if you know about similar concepts in philosophy, fantasy, religious texts, or other sources (I suspect there are concepts like this in buddhism, for instance). The general idea reminds me a little of Schopenhauer who was quite interested in the concept of freedom and free will, and who famously said that a man is only free when he can decide what he wants, not merely decide what he does.
PS: Jamie posted a related B. F. Skinner quote that fits so well I’ll share it here:
