This is a (Spotify) video excerpt from episode 332 with Clayton Aldern, Senior Data Reporter at Grist and author of The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains.
In this video clip, we discuss how we hold people accountable when the heat has a statistically relevant negative impact on decision-making, impulsivity, etc. If we are so embodied as to predictably make worse conditions under stress, what does that mean for a world that will likely encounter more stress as a result of climate change? At what point should we focus less on responsibility, blame, and agency and begin to focus more on background conditions and our physical natures? Or is this even the right question?
Tune in now to learn more, and listen to the rest of the show on audio wherever you listen to podcasts.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: It makes me think thoughts about how justice will be administered. I don’t think we want a future in which people do terrible things and say it was three degrees hotter than it was ten years ago, and that’s why I did the terrible act. But it does make me wonder just how in control of our emotions and behaviors that we are, and how much is actually environmentally determined. I’m very agent-oriented. I do not like seeing others as merely a set of forces that are acting upon us and driving us around. Basically determinism, essentially. I don’t like thinking that.
And even if it’s true — and it might ultimately be true — that determinism is to some degree the fact of how decisions and choices and outcomes happen, I don’t know that it’s good for us to believe that. I certainly don’t want to believe that about myself. I want to believe that my choices are my responsibility and I have to live with them, although that might be delusional in some cases. I’m just wondering, how do I even operationalize what you’re talking about in that future where we might have increased environmental stressors, and maybe that is a more fair way of understanding human behavior?
Clayton Aldern: Yeah, I mean, I think that — I mean, first of all, you know, my handle on all social media is compatibilism, which is the vein of philosophy that would suggest even if you accept the premise of determinism, you don’t get to immediately default to nihilism. You don’t immediately get to default to hedonism, right? It’s the one that says, yeah, sure, maybe physically this universe is deterministic. And also that’s not our experience. It doesn’t feel that way. And the feeling of agency is enough to recapture moral responsibility.
So first, I would say even if our behavior were 100% environmentally determined, that to me doesn’t bear on the extent to which we ought to be exercising compassion in the world. It doesn’t bear on the extent to which we can understand ourselves as operating as free agents, in the sense that we feel as if we are in control of our behavior. Now, that said, we do know that there’s a probably less than 100%, but somewhat significant influence of the environment on our decision-making, as I demonstrate left and right in this book.
So what do we do with that, right? Is somebody going to end up in a courtroom in 30 years arguing, you know, temporary thermogenic delirium and getting off because it was three degrees hotter that day when they stabbed their friend? I think for me, the answer’s no, we’re probably not going to end up there. And I agree that that’s probably not the outcome that we want. What I do think is that as we come to understand the significance of environmental influence on decision-making, we can use that understanding to shore up the types of biological resilience that I think folks like Dr. Nomura are advocating for, right?
What might that look like in practice? If you are aware of the fact that extreme heat — exposure to extreme heat — makes it more likely for you to commit a violent act, which is true, then the next time it’s really hot out and you’re feeling somewhat aggravated, you might, in a mindful manner, be more prone to think about the fact that it’s hot out and that that is why you might be feeling a little more aggravated, and therefore you might be a little less quick to the trigger. So I think there’s something about this understanding, there’s something about the awareness of these vectors, that’s actually very useful in terms of modifying our future responses to them.
Ross Kenyon: Does the research that you’ve conducted and compiled in this book make you more forgiving of human frailty? No one’s asked you that before, it sounds like.
Clayton Aldern: Well, I’m considering whether or not I accept the premise. Are humans frail?
Ross Kenyon: Are humans frail? Insofar as they make ethically dubious decisions, they put themselves first in ways that are not compatible with justice — questions like that.
Clayton Aldern: I find myself to be ever more forgiving of the human experience and the manners in which that manifests by way of decisions we make, the more I learn about the degree to which it is environmentally influenced. But I do think that there’s a fine line between empathy for that type of frailty, as it were, and again, the, you know, legal or litigatory — or, right, any of the manifestations of the justice component that may arise in some theoretical future where we are assigning blame and responsibility as a function of these factors, right? I think there’s a line to be drawn between empathy and the implications for responsibility, because I suppose what I’m saying —
Ross Kenyon: It’s a tough question. Reflecting on the things that your book had to teach me, I’m already somewhat sympathetic, and I might actually be a compatibilist if I had read more of that literature and thought a little bit more about it. I’m at least sympathetic, given that I essentially summed it up without actually meaning to. But it does make me feel a bit more — recognizing how much I am a brain in a physical body that responds to stresses in ways that are autonomic and that I’m just, like, not even aware of. Makes me more forgiving of myself, and also more understanding of others, in ways that I think are really useful.
The downside of me thinking so agentically about ethics is that it puts a lot of pressure on oneself, where these are all things that should be in your control. And in actuality, they might not be that way. I might be falling into the vice of assuming so much responsibility for action that it’s almost aspiring to God-like status, really. Do I actually have this much control over myself or not? Am I a body or am I a mind or both? I have a lot to say and a lot to ask about that, but I’ll just let you start.
Clayton Aldern: Well, I think actually those are the essential questions here. You know, I think there’s a lot of room to explore them because I think they’re big. And you’ve touched on a really important distinction, which is that between the mind and the body — if we can call it a distinction, which of course I would argue we can’t, that there is no mind without the body, right? I think the other line of inquiry that you see in this book is around embodied cognition, the fact that brains don’t make sense outside of the context of a body, right?
And that’s because, again, if you buy Karl Friston’s argument, the function of the brain is to model the environment, right? Everything outside itself. Well, okay, what is outside of the brain? What is outside of the organism? Those are slightly different questions, because the body encases the brain, but the body inherently includes all of the sensory organs that the brain uses to navigate the world. And so, again, without that body, the brain is incapable of sensing anything. And in fact, there’s no measure of success at living, right?
What do feelings do? What are emotions for, right? As an agent with conscious access to your generative model, feelings are these suggestions to your consciousness as to whether or not you’re doing a good job at living. And what are feelings? They are embodied, right? When you’re hungry, when you’re feeling pain, again, even happiness, sadness — these are physical things that are happening in your body that are modulated by things like your endocrine system, right? And various neurotransmitters and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so without those embodied experiences, your brain has nothing to model, right? In fact — or rather, it doesn’t have an input or a suite of inputs to its model. And so the notion of modeling the environment kind of collapses, because you don’t have a set of expectations against which to compare it. You don’t have the other terms of the model.
So, you know, this is a long way of saying, when I’m thinking about the collapse of agency that is so readily read in deterministic worlds, I don’t really get that bothered by it. Because I guess my read is that if the point of organisms is to model their environment, if the loop that we’re talking about is sensory information comes in and actions go out, and you can draw this difference between an entity and the world by drawing some border between the two — it’s just as true that your actions are the world’s sensations, and it’s just as true that the world’s actions are your sensations.
Which is another way of saying that every time we’re acting, we are indeed acting, because everything outside of yourself is perceiving you, right? The generative model of the world is perceiving you. And so, I don’t know. I mean, again, this is kind of highfalutin territory here. But I think this is a really critical point, because when I think about determinism kind of stripping us of our free will, I’m like, well, yeah, maybe it does. But at the same time, that’s only if you consider all these arrows flowing in one direction. And existence isn’t about a unidirectional street, right? It’s relational. Existence is necessarily relational, because it’s an act of modeling, right? There are loops involved. And so we don’t lose agency in a deterministic world. It just looks a little bit different.
