But given this current state of the art, one of the more indigestible nuggets Echopraxia asks you to swallow is that eight decades from now, people will still buy into such an incoherent premise—that as we close on the twenty-second century, we will continue to act as though we have Free Will.
In fact, we might behave that way. It’s not that you can’t convince people that they’re automatons; that’s easy enough to pull off, intellectually at least. Folks will even change their attitudes and behavior in the wake of those insights[136]—be more likely to cheat or less likely to hold people responsible for unlawful acts, for example.[137],[138] But eventually our attitudes drift back to pre-enlightenment baselines; even most of those who accept determinism somehow manage to believe in personal culpability.[139],[140] Over tens of thousands of years we just got used to cruising at one-twenty; without constant conscious intervention, we tend to ease back on the pedal to that place we feel most comfortable.
Echopraxia makes the same token concessions that society is likely to. You may have noticed the occasional reference to the concept of personal culpability having been weeded out of justice systems the world over, that those dark-ages throwbacks still adhering to the notion are subject to Human Rights sanctions by the rest of the civilized world. Brüks and Moore squabble over “the old no-free-will shtick” back at the monastery. Adherents to those Eastern religions who never really took free will all that seriously anyway have buggered off into a hive-minded state of (as far as anyone can tell) deep catatonia. The rest of us continue to act pretty much the way we always have.
Turns out we don’t have much choice in the matter.
About the Author
PETER WATTS is the Hugo and Nebula nominated author of Blindsight and has been called “a hard science fiction writer through and through and one of the very best alive” by The Globe and Mail and whose work the New York Times called “seriously paranoid.”
TOR BOOKS BY PETER WATTS
Starfish
Maelstrom
ßehemoth: ß-Max
ßehemoth: Seppuku
Blindsight
Echopraxia
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ECHOPRAXIA
Copyright © 2014 by Peter Watts
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
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ISBN 978-0-7653-2802-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4299-4806-7 (e-book)
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First Edition: August 2014
Printed in the United States of America
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136
Davide Rigoni et al., “Inducing Disbelief in Free Will Alters Brain Correlates of Preconscious Motor Preparation: The Brain Minds Whether We Believe in Free Will or Not,”
137
Roy F. Baumeister, E. J. Masicampo, and C. Nathan DeWall, “Prosocial Benefits of Feeling Free: Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness,”
138
Kathleen D. Vohs and Jonathan W. Schooler, “The Value of Believing in Free Will Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating,”
139
Hagop Sarkissian et al., “Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?,”
140
Wasn’t it Joss Whedon, in one of his X-Men comics, who stated that “Contradiction is the seed of consciousness”?