Sphex is the colloquial name of a particular kind of digger wasp. Daniel Dennett effectively uses this wasp’s burrowing routine to show how, even basic examinations of animal behavior can lead us right to the doorstep of causal determinism: the belief that everything (ie: particle systems, wasp brains, human courtship rituals, the universe) can be explained as states of affairs, resulting from some previous state(s) of affairs in a purely mechanistic fashion.
When a causally deterministic outlook is applied to questions of agency, free will, and consciousness, the implications pile up fast. Some interesting explorations of this issue can be found in popular shows like Devs [FX] and West World [HBO].
All animals have default routines
If you’re the type of person who likes to read the source material, then… Elbow Room, The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. I’ve included an extended quote below.
“The wasp’s routine is to bring the paralyzed cricket to the burrow, leave it on the threshold, go inside to see that all is well, emerge, and then drag the cricket in. If the cricket is moved a few inches away while the wasp is inside making her preliminary inspection, the wasp, on emerging from the burrow, will bring the cricket back to the threshold, but not inside, and will then repeat the preparatory procedure of entering the burrow to see that everything is all right. If again the cricket is removed a few inches while the wasp in inside, once again she will move the cricket up to the threshold and re-enter the burrow for a final check. The wasp never thinks of pulling the cricket straight in. On one occasion this procedure was repeated forty times, always with the same result.”
Humans have routines too, that sometimes fail tragically
When my twin daughters were still babies, there was a steady stream of horrifying stories about parents who had left their infant children inside of hot cars – buckled into child seats inside vehicles that were above 120° – only to return hours later to find their children dead. Here are just two examples from 2009 and 2014. The parents of these children were almost always unaccompanied by their spouse, just running an errand. As a father, I wanted to react with anger and judgement toward these people; which is exactly the kind of reaction you saw in the communities of these parents. Their behavior was vilified and condemned – characterized as extreme criminal negligence. After all, how could any decent parent not place the health and welfare of their own child above… a trip to Costco?
What if the failings of human beings were examined with the same root cause analysis applied to failing dishwashers?
If you and I began talking about a dishwasher that failed to successfully clean the utensils on the top rack, we wouldn’t begin by launching an investigation into the morality of its circuits and capacitors. That would be insane.
Not long after the tragic stories of the dead infants began appearing, I noticed a greater availability of research (to ordinary people) around topics like context switching, decision fatigue, and perception blindness; all issues that are strikingly relevant to any person who spends long chunks of time doing “brain work”. Anecdotally, all of my friends in software development can attest to adaptations they’ve had to make professionally, in order to accommodate more information and less focus time. Even my friends who don’t work in engineering disciplines notice these changes. Things like:
Multi-tasking during meetings
Texting while driving
Answering emails in bed or checking Slack while on the toilet
Setting up complex automated reminders to get up and go to the bathroom
Losing the ability to understand highway maps, and simply relying on GPS to navigate
Self-managed routinization of behavior is a huge optimization, not a source of diminishment
Imagine if you had to exert effort at remembering how exactly to brush your teeth, or eat a slice of pizza, or clip your toenails. We can do these things (and more) with minimal effort because they are not worth the brain resources. Kind of like exchanging a greeting with someone on the sidewalk:
“Hey, how’s it goin’ today?”
“Great, great, how you doin’?”
☝🏽 is not an example of a question and answer session. It’s an optimization you see and participate in, every day. Our brains take up an enormous percentage of the calories we consume, and by implication, we need to parcel out its resources with the utmost prudence. Like sphex, we each come with built-in routines that help us operate in the world we find ourselves in. Unlike sphex, we are algorithm factories capable of peering into the guts of our firmware, and even rewriting our software. And that is a big deal.
I have nothing against dishwashers by the way
There are over 55 miles of canals inside a single human tooth. They all exist for a reason, and those reasons extend way way back, billions (not millions) of years; back to causes that were brought about by conditions that predated mouths. We’re at the tail end of an enormously long story arc written in the language of nucleotides. According to Richard Dawkins, we are just the containers/vessels for the genuine authors of this story: our genes. What we think of as “us” – our bodies, personalities, fears, and dreams – are really the macroscopic armor-plating and side effects of the true us: the individual genes that have persisted in unbroken continuity for billions of years.
However, if you’ve never had the misfortune of having to disassemble a dishwasher and replace its food chopper assembly, or even just taking the goddamn front door off its hinges, I can report to you that it is not what you’d call “straightforward”.
Further reading (if you like to ponder about stuff)
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari
Guns Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond
In Praise of Walking, by Shane O’Mara
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, by Joseph Henrich
“Even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by his curse alone he will attain his object—that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated—chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key! ”
