Countering Sapolsky’s “Free Will” Denialism with Damasio, Deacon, Deci, and Ryan

We don’t have “free will” in any way, shape, or form according to Robert Sapolsky’s argument for hard determinism in his book Determined. In his interview with Sean Illing, host of the podcast Gray Area, he uses the example of a court concerned with the question of what to do with a guilty man.*1* He frames his answer by claiming that the universal “free will” intuition requires us to ask three questions. “Did the guy intend to do what he did?” “Did he understand what the outcome was likely to be?” And “Did he realize he didn’t have to do it, there were alternatives available?” Sapolsky created an extensive multi-disciplinary perspective on the causes of behavior in his prior book Behave. In Determined he makes an extensive effort to counter every major prior defense of “free will” to conclude that it is impossible to attribute intentionality to anyone for anything and utterly futile to attribute to the criminal’s neural activity the causal power to affect outcomes such that he could “choose” amongst the alternatives that occurred to him. In another interview Sapolsky turned the tables on “free will” advocates by saying, “The onus is on people saying there is free will. This is what would falsify all of this; show me a neuron, or a network of neurons, or a brain that just did something and show me that it did that completely free of its history.”*2* By his own account, Sapolsky’s book Determined falls short because he has not figured out why people act the way they do when they are fully functioning moral human beings.*3* Thus, in the paperback, after he had gotten feedback from the release of the original hardback, he admitted his central failing (though he did not see it as such).

I agree with Sapolsky about determinism almost entirely. He’s right about nearly everything. But there are two things that force me to reach the opposite conclusion that he does. The first is that he missed a key point about what he calls chaoticism (although a footnote on page 150 suggests that he almost caught it) and the second is that he does not appear to have any knowledge of the robust account of human psycho-social functioning provided by the science of Self-Determination Theory, which is the area of my expertise. SDT provides the account of fully functioning human beings that he admitted he was missing. But before I get to SDT, have a little patience as I set the stage. Let’s consider Bobo’s beliefs about whirlpools. Suppose that Bobo claimed that whirlpools are not real. He claims they must be illusory because Bobo, who has extensive relevant scientific knowledge, could not identify exactly which water molecules had the whirlpool feature contained within them or would otherwise decisively indicate molecular potential for whirlpoolishness. He also says that the burden of proof is on those who claim whirlpools are real. Taking Bobo’s concern seriously I would start by checking on his belief in the reality of a center of gravity. Pointing to a hoop of uniform density I would definitively demonstrate that the point indicated as the “center of gravity” is clearly NOT located in the physical material of the hoop. Does Bobo believe that the fact that a center of gravity is immaterial negate its reality? I accept a center of gravity as a real entity in the world because the concept has extraordinary predictive power. I like to say that it is fictional, but not fantastical. It is real as a conceptual tool even if it is not real in the literal physical sense of being materially instantiated. If Bobo rejects this stance then I take his attitude to be a denial of a basic feature of being human since it must logically entail rejecting most forms of money, contracts, songs, opportunities, and, many other conceptual realities that make human lives rich and meaningful. 

Any reasonable person must admit that whirlpools involve water molecules but there is no way to attribute the phenomena of a whirlpool to any given water molecule. Thus, “whirlpools” are like a “center of gravity” in the sense that the word is not an indication of a static property of water such that it might be instantiated in some way in the individual molecules; it is a dynamic property that arises under very specific conditions. It is a real phenomenon in the world in the sense that it involves real physical water. However, it is an emergent dynamic property (a chaoticism in Sapolsky’s lexicon) of certain interactions between water and its surroundings. Bobo’s demand for evidence of whirlpools at the level of single molecules represents a confusion. 

Back to Sapolsky, I would like to ask him about epilepsy. Is there evidence of epilepsy at the level of individual neurons? Isn’t epilepsy fundamentally a network disorder? If I claim that epilepsy is an illusion because I can’t find evidence of it in individual neurons, wouldn’t I be confused? Isn’t epilepsy, like a whirlpool, an emergent dynamic phenomenon? 

Let’s get one thing clear before I continue, the term “free will” is problematic. I will allow Daniel Dennett to explain how our manifest and scientific images of the world interact: 

The manifest image is the world as it seems to us in everyday life, full of solid objects, colors and smells and tastes, voices and shadows, plants and animals, and people and all their stuff: not only tables and chairs, bridges and churches, dollars and contracts, but also such intangible things as songs, poems, opportunities, and free will. Think of all the puzzling questions that arise when we try to line up all those things with the things in the scientific image: molecules, atoms, electrons, and quarks and their ilk. Is anything really solid? The physicist Sir Arthur Eddington wrote, early in the twentieth century; about the "two tables," the solid one of everyday experience and the one composed of atoms, widely separated in mainly empty space, more like a galaxy than a piece of wood. Some people said that what science showed was that nothing was really solid, solidity was an illusion, but Eddington knew better than to go that far. Some people have said that color is an illusion. Is it? Electromagnetic radiation in the narrow range that accounts for human vision (the range in between infrared and ultraviolet) is not made of little colored things, and atoms, even gold atoms, aren't colored. But still, color is not an illusion in the sense that matters: nobody thinks Sony is lying when it says that its color televisions really show the world of color, or that Sherwin-Williams should be sued for fraud for selling us many different colors in the form of paint. How about dollars? These days the vast majority of them aren't made of silver or even paper. They are virtual, made of information, not material, just like poems and promises. Does that mean that they are an illusion? No, but don't hunt for them among the molecules. 

from Chapter 16 of Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, 2013

It is pointless to debate “free will” as if the term is clear in a scientific sense. I use quotes around the phrase as a declaration that it cannot possibly be taken at face value due to the cultural baggage that has accrued upon it. When its use is inescapable it should be defined with reference to more precise terms that are scientifically useful. The scientifically pertinent questions regarding “free will” are about 1) the value of having a sense that we are able to control ourselves in the relevant moral way, 2) a sense of control being causally related to the patterns of behavior that are objectively observed, and 3) the idea that social processes of holding each other accountable can change patterns of behavior that are morally problematic. I propose that a “free will” worth having (per Daniel Dennett) can be derived from the primary psychological needs for autonomy and competence as used in Self-Determination Theory, founded by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, but I’ll come back to that in a moment. 

One of the key features of this conceptual move is shifting the definition of “free will” from an objective feature of the external world to a perception that is meaningful to a subjective self. This makes it obvious that it is a fool’s errand to “hunt for [it] among the molecules.” *4* 

My claim that “free will” exists is based on taking the self that monitors the social environment for opportunities to gain well-being to be a real, fictional, but not fantastical, phenomena based on the book Self Comes to Mind by Antonio Damasio (for the physiological forms and functions evidence and arguments) and my knowledge of the literature on Self-Determination Theory (for more of the practical evidence of real world applicability to behavioral prediction). 

To better understand how this applies I will ask you to consider a few questions. At what level of analysis does “driving” occur? Is the “driving” happening in the car or in the driver? Driving is an inherent property of neither the car nor the person sitting in the driver’s seat. “Driving” is an emergent phenomena. But it is not the same kind of emergence that arises from water in the bathtub becoming a whirlpool. Terrence Deacon has distinguished the emergence of a whirlpool from the more complex type of emergence that happened when life arose from non-living matter in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. 

Deacon calls the whirlpool-type non-living emergence homeodynamics. What was required for life was a different level of complexity made up of more than one type of homeodynamic system that ended up interacting in ways that preserved the higher level of order that each individual system achieved on its own. Thus, this highly complex set of systems are all far from equilibrium (same as the whirlpool) yet collectively it also preserves itself through a loop of system interactions that keep all the component systems going as a single higher order system, such as a living cell or an organism. What a cell does individually and the cells in an organism do collectively is preserve the conditions for each homeodynamic subsystem to continue to exist, because it has emerged into what Deacon calls a teleodynamic system.

Teleodynamics is the level we need to talk about in order to understand driving. Teleodynamics arise out of the complex interactions among homeodynamic systems. A convergence of complex systems came together in a special way that enables the living homeostatic subsystems to preserve the arrangement of being alive, which is something we recognize as a form of purpose, though the system is not aware of having such a thing. 

Let’s take a moment to be clear that mind is a consequence of teleodynamic systems according to Deacon. While Deacon did not define the term mind, I believe that Dr. Daniel Siegel’s definition of the mind as an embodied and relational process that monitors and manages flows of energy and information is consistent with Deacon’s work. Having this definition in place allows us to bring in Damasio’s idea of the self.

Damasio’s idea of the self has three parts: the proto-self, the core self, and the autobiographical self. The most basic form of self, the proto-self, is shared by almost all organisms with a nervous system that maps the body's internal state to maintain homeostasis, e.g. fish and reptiles. The core self is a transient, conscious sense of self in the "here and now" that arises when the brain maps the interaction between the organism and an object (or the world), e.g. dogs, cats, and monkeys. The autobiographical self is the most complex, language-enriched self, involving a stable sense of identity across time (past, present, and future) through extensive memory and reasoning, e.g. humans.

The self that emerged from the body-mind drives a car through the process of willing the body-car to do its bidding. The “body-car” is the relevant functional unit in anyone with more than minimal experience driving. One of the features of the self is the capability of achieving functional integration with many things that the body interacts with on a regular basis.*5*  Those body-car actions are caused by a complex dynamic interaction that implicates vast networks of physical phenomena both within and beyond the body, as Sapolsky explained using different examples in his book Behave. As far as I am concerned there is no meaningful difference in explaining the causal network in a driver than there is in an insect or an amoeba, except that the driver has a consciousness that emerged out of the complexity of the feedback and feed forward loops that govern its behavior. The function of feedback and feedforward loops in all organisms is prediction and behavioral regulation based on taking that prediction function seriously. Referring to Antonio Damasio’s account of different kinds of selves, ours happens to be the kind that represents, not only the world it encounters, but also itself as a component in the world that it is simulating. This is where the notion of “free will” arises. The mind of all beings with a neurological self are prediction machines. The whole point of having a self is to make better predictions. “Free will” is our sense that our mind’s predictions matter and our choice-making is an integral part of the system of causality that determines the course of our life.

When complex systems are analyzed one of the mathematical tools for that process is the graphing of state spaces. When two or more relevant variables are portrayed as dimensions that can be graphed the result is a state space diagram. What is observed when complex systems are depicted in this way is that the system tends to fall into basins of attraction which are distinct regions within the state space. Over time the system may exhibit stable patterns within one basin but sometimes the system wanders into the far reaches of that region and becomes unstable. If the system wanders far enough, the system may tip into a different region of the state space and enter into a new pattern of stability for awhile. 

What makes our minds capable of “free will” is the autobiographical self that has the added feature of representing itself in its predictions. As it monitors and modifies flows of energy and information it conceives of possibilities (different basins of attraction that the system might occupy) and makes a “choice” to favor one basin of attraction over others. In systems terms the self maps multiple basins of attraction and destabilizes the system in the hope of tipping the system into a different, more favorable, basin. If you want to find evidence of “free will” you have to be able to identify basins of attraction that the living, willing system can occupy and then figure out how the system ends up in one basin versus another. If you can identify the causal factors that determine which basin it ends up occupying then you can figure out whether “free will” is plausibly making a difference in the system. But the task of accurate prediction of complex systems is problematic, as I will discuss later.

We can directly observe the bodily interactions with the car that we call “driving.” We cannot directly observe the “willing” that directs the bodily actions. At what level of analysis does “willing” occur? Is the “willing” happening in the brain or in the mind? I believe the “willing” is an effect of the mind which is a teleodynamic emergence from brains of a certain type of complexity. According to cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, “The mind is what thinks, perceives, believes, reasons, imagines, and wills” (p. 266, Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999). The mind is a dynamic emergent phenomena of the whole bodily assemblage embedded in a world, not just the brain. The mind has to be understood and analyzed at its own level in the same way that a whirlpool and epilepsy do. The self is a component of a certain kind of mind. The mind is the totality of processes that make predictions about itself, other minded things, and the environment. In the human environment there are extensions of the mind that exist beyond our bodies, e.g. cars, computers, currencies, etc. All the tools of human culture are extensions of our minds in one way or another. They extend the capabilities of our minds; those who know how to use them well are better prediction machines than those who do not know how to use them well. 

What about determinism? The mind is a purely biological system that has the inherent purpose of keeping itself alive and, ideally, reproducing itself. The chemistry and physics that make up the mind are deterministic systems. The mind is an emergent property of those physical, chemical, and biological subsystems. A mind is not privy to causal information that determines what will happen in itself, nor in the environment in which it is trying to survive and thrive. If it had access to that information it might  become a perfect prediction machine and it could ensure survival and reproduction perfectly. Obviously that is not what is happening in the real world. 

There are four relevant ideas that help us understand our relationship to the information in the universe and how our mental concepts relate to it for predictive purposes.

• Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in physics,
• Gödel’s incompleteness theorem in mathematics,
• the unpredictability of deterministic and simple iterative mathematical equations discovered by Gaston Julia and further developed by Benoit Mandelbrot, and
• Poincaré’s discovery that complex systems are so extraordinarily sensitive to initial conditions that they are effectively unpredictable (popularized later by Edward Lorentz as the Butterfly Effect).

I take these four findings to imply that the infamous demon with complete knowledge of the universe in a single moment still cannot know everything about it in the past and/or the future. That is not because the universe is not deterministic, but what we now know is that even a deterministic universe is unpredictable beyond some small window of time. 

Sapolsky calls all this chaoticism. He has conceded that the universe is fundamentally unpredictable at some levels. I agree with Sapolsky that the mind is causally constrained by its constituent physical, chemical, and biological elements. I also agree with Sapolsky that the universe is nonetheless determined. I agree that the component parts of the mind cannot be fundamentally altered by the mind in itself, but those component parts are, crucially, capable of being constrained by the mind. There are states of those component systems that are prevented from occurring in the healthy functioning of the system. A substantial portion of energy in the form of information processing is invested in this. That kind of top down constraint is fundamental to life itself, according to Deacon. The system properties that result from that kind of constraint is what he calls absential properties.

Sapolsky also claims that if our current ignorance could be alleviated then “free will” is negated and, therefore, is merely a delusion. But I am making the point that the ignorance cannot be alleviated and, more importantly, it doesn’t matter if “free will” could, in principle, be negated by more complete information. In order to make his point Sapolsky constructs a narrative of a man who does the same wrong thing in 1922 and 2022. In the past his actions would have been attributed to “free will,” but in 2022 they would be attributed to a gene. What I suspect is wrong here is that the 2022 attribution is in error, as well. As he pointed out in a footnote, “[I]t is very rare for a single gene to be deterministic in this way. To reiterate, almost all genes are about potential and vulnerability, rather than inevitability, interacting in nonlinear ways with environment and other genes.” It may be that one person has the gene he specifies but has he accounted for the social conditions in which that person was operating? Was our criminal missing the psychological supports that might have reinforced more appropriate behavior that could mitigate against his genetic disposition? An anecdote is not data and the story of a single instance as a thought experiment does not generate an account that should be generalized to a population. Sapolsky’s story is interesting but I doubt that any gene can be as deterministic as he claims. What if we have a hundred people with that genetic disposition in a society that neglects or actively thwarts psychological needs? Through the SDT lens I would predict that more than the one deviant would be likely in a society that is pervasively unsupportive of psychological needs. In almost the same society where reform has achieved pervasive psychological need support can we expect that fewer of those genetically predisposed people would go criminally rogue? The lower rate would be caused by the way the genetic disposition interacts with psychological need supports that reinforce a "free will” worth having. 

Is this story plausible? I don’t have the requisite knowledge to know whether my account of the gene-society interaction is more accurate than Sapolsky’s. One way to find out if my account is plausible is to find someone with the gene Sapolsky was referring to but did not become a criminal. If there is even one who did not, that proves the idea that the gene generates a probability, not a certainty, of criminality. The next question is whether a pervasive pattern of supporting psychological needs in the life of those with that gene is a relevant factor in its expression. My hypothesis from the SDT perspective is that more need support leads to less criminality, not just in those with that gene, but in everyone all the time. 

The minds of all animals are doing their level best to be good prediction machines, but their informational limitations were determined by evolutionary processes that are not capable of tapping directly into causality. The four ideas from Heisenberg, Gödel, Julia, Mandelbrot, Poincaré, and Lorentz make it clear that we can never have the complete information necessary for making the best possible predictions. Minds, and the selves that have developed in many of those minds, are doing the best they can with the evolved mishmash of biases, heuristics, and other cobbled together neurological tricks that enabled their ancestors to survive and reproduce. The lack of causal information is an inherent limitation. Our sciences and philosophies are our best collective efforts to overcome that limitation, but they will never provide a complete understanding of the universe. They will provide enough of an understanding to accomplish many of our purposes, but the models can never be completed.

What Self-Determination Theory has revealed about our nature as humans is that our well-being is contingent upon having certain types of senses about the world and our place in it. Specifically, we have primary psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence. We cannot have well-being without these needs being fulfilled. If we agree to take “free will” to be a sloppy, imprecise way of referring to something real and important then I take it to be about autonomy and competence. 

As I’ve said before, the mind is a fiction, though not a fantastical one. It is a convenient way to recognize a very specific feature of especially complex biological mechanisms. If we want to account for “free will” as a product of the mind, we need to look for evidence of it at the level of the mind. We can be confident that there is no evidence of the mind in any individual neuron, in the same way we can be confident that there is no evidence of a whirlpool in single water molecules and no evidence of epilepsy in individual neurons. In order to show evidence of “free will” we must concern ourselves with what difference it makes in behavior, since the concept is predicated on the idea that minds cause behavior. What would count as evidence in favor of having a mind with causal influence over the body? How can we account for the diversity of behavior without resorting to any magical “mind” stuff?

Let’s go back to the formation of Self-Determination Theory in the 1970s. SDT was a key component in the cognitive revolution that displaced behaviorism as the dominant explanatory framework in psychology. The fundamental assumption of behaviorism is that behaviors that get reinforced (lay people usually say “rewarded”) increase in frequency. B.F. Skinner, considered to have been one of the founders of behaviorism, was adamant that psychology adhere strictly to the scientific assumption that systematic “objective” observation be the basis for clear explanations. He insisted that the mind is a “black box” that we cannot observe directly, therefore we should not refer to anything inside that black box, such as a process like motivation or an entity like a self. Unless, of course, we have eliminated all the explanations that are more satisfying for being more objective. There are plenty of subtle nuances in behaviorism but external reinforcement is the core of behavioral research and theorizing. 

Research from that time on preschool children examined what happens if you reinforce behaviors that the children do spontaneously, in the absence of prior reinforcement; behaviors such as drawing, painting, and other creative expressions (e.g. Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett,1973). The children’s artistic behaviors under reinforcement should have increased according to the central tenet of behaviorism, but what was observed was a decrease. 

This was a big deal because it went against the model. There were a variety of other findings along the same lines with different populations and different activities but the crucial point is that external reinforcement alone was found to be an inadequate explanation of some specific human behaviors.

In that context Edward Deci (who did some of that research, see Deci, 1971) partnered up with Richard Ryan and they started to formulate Self-Determination Theory by synthesizing a vast literature on related ideas. Importantly, they did not reject the fundamental premise of behaviorism. They merely posited the existence of one single entity inside the black box, a self that serves as a nexus around which motivational processes are organized. The self is used to explain the oddity of how those children behaved, given how powerfully the behavioral model had successfully predicted behavior in many types of situations. 

The child’s self takes in situational information outside of consciousness and based on that information alters how the child will respond to reinforcement. When the activity that is being done by the child is endorsed by the self (as spontaneous artistic expressions are expected to be), then there is maximum investment of psychic energy in that activity. The extreme version of this is known as intrinsic motivation, but in current usage within the SDT community the broader category of motivations that have positive effects on well-being are called autonomous motivations. When the activity is not endorsed by the self then there will be less investment. 

The broad category of motivations that have negative effects on well-being are called controlled motivations. The key evaluative criteria that the self uses to judge situations is whether or not supports for the individual’s psychological needs are expected to be available. 

The more the self expects needs to be satisfied, the more psychic energy is invested; when those needs are actually satisfied the activity is reinforced and the self is even more willing to endorse participation in that activity. It’s a positive feedback loop. When needs are thwarted then the inverse happens, forming a negative feedback loop.

Today, in SDT we understand the self-system to be responsible for the generation of psychic energy through satisfaction of needs, the transformation of energy into psychic power through motivation, and the application of psychic power to work through engagement. This is “psychic power” in an entirely non-magical biological sense. The human psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, competence, and beneficence are presumed to be universal since cross-cultural research has been done across many societies, though more remains to be done. The first three needs are called primary since they cause well-being to be boosted when they are satisfied and diminished when they are thwarted; plus, there are about eight other criteria to establish a need as primary. The fourth need, beneficence, is secondary because it boosts well-being when satisfied, but there is no effect on well-being when it is thwarted (Martela & Ryan, 2016). 

Derivative needs are a mixture of primary and secondary needs. The first need to be clearly established as derivative was meaningfulness (Martela, Ryan, & Steger, 2017). There are also particular needs that are unique to an individual, group, or culture. For example, if I were hit by a car and put on life support in the hospital I would have a whole set of needs that are based on my particular constellation of injuries. 

The self takes what it expects to happen with regard to the needs and uses the energy it produces to generate some psychic power. If the needs are expected to be neglected or thwarted then the psychic power will be applied to psychological defenses. That psychologically defensive attitude exacts a cost to psychological well-being. The motivations that result are called controlled. When the needs are expected to be satisfied then the psychic power will be devoted to investing in either improving the mental maps of this type of situation, taking effective action in that situation, or most likely both. The motivations that result are called autonomous. 

In the scientific SDT literature motivation is usually presented as a six part spectrum, though its details are not important here. Recently it has become more common to simplify it based on effects on well-being to a dichotomy of autonomous versus controlled motivations. Motivation has also recently been suggested to include the constructs of emotion and cognition that were previously studied as forms of engagement (Reeve, Cheon, & Jang, 2020). 

So, returning to Sapolsky’s table turn on defenders of the concept of “free will” I suggest that the predictive efficacy of Self-Determination Theory provides the basis to prove that "free will,” properly understood, is a fictional, but not fantastical, means of explaining behavior. Though we do need to abandon ideas of “free will” that are not worth having, ala Daniel Dennett. I propose that we take “free will” to be a sloppy layman’s term for what the science of SDT has revealed to be our psychological needs. Sapolsky’s hard determinism is fine as far as it goes, but it has thus far failed to account for the necessity of positing the self as SDT did and the subsequent uncovering of the needs as causal factors in human well-being and behavior. There is no magic in the SDT account of how our minds use needs as predictive functions that influence behavioral choices. We can make more accurate predictions about human behavior when we take psychological needs into account as significant causal influences on human functioning.

Is holding people accountable a fool’s errand, as Sapolsky claims? According to SDT we can predict that reduced satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are going to have negative effects on how people function. We can understand how a certain environment would lead someone to behave in dysfunctional ways. But we can also predict that in an environment properly structured to support their needs that person can use reflective tools to change their minds and the behavioral patterns that their mind leads them into. They must have senses of autonomy and competence, what might be called “free will” by some, in order to be a fully functioning human being. If we can be more technically precise than the phrase “free will” allows, we can shape our systems of education, law, and politics to produce far better outcomes than they do now. However, denying the reality of “free will” would be a grave mistake if it leads to structuring society in ways that will tend to thwart psychological needs rather than support them. We need to reframe that term as a sloppy version of what has been revealed by science about the psychological needs. 

Let’s be clear that we are ultimately concerned with the predictability of behavior in the sense that we want to create conditions in which people can effectively will themselves to do good. Our fundamental worry is that people are sometimes ineffectively willing good and accidentally doing bad instead, or worse that they will themselves to do bad things. 

The key is that we are all assuming that behavior is both predictable and changeable. We just need to know how to set up the environment to get the kinds of good behavior that we want. I agree with Sapolsky that no one deserves anything— we are not god, so we have to be extremely careful when we assign god-like powers of judgment to some people. Unfortunately, we know that external contingencies in the behaviorist mold are not as effective as we would like them to be. SDT has shown that mere external contingency operations are ineffective because they fail to account for the human self that alters the effects of reinforcement. We can do much better by abandoning the sloppy layman’s term “free will” and using the technical understanding that has been developed since the 1970s under the SDT banner to better understand the mind’s influence on behavior. In the sense that the physical universe is deterministic we must understand that our minds, selves, and “free will” are all fictional, but not fantastical entities. We all have minds with a self that is looking out for us. They do that important work by attending to our needs. The mind has been attuned by evolution to keep track of how it might be manipulated by others in ways that could undermine our well-being. Ultimately, we need to recreate our institutions of learning and behavioral accountability to reflect this technical understanding of our nature as human beings with the needs for relatedness, autonomy, competence, and beneficence.  

Resources

Blakesley, S. and Blakesley, M. (2007) The body has a mind of its own. Random House, Inc.

Damasio, A. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

Deacon, T. W. (2011). Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. W. W. Norton & Company.

Deci, E. L. (1971). Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 18(1), 105–115. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0030644 

Dennett, D. (2014) Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. W.W. Norton & Company. 

Martela, F., & Ryan, R. M. (2016). “The Benefits of Benevolence: Basic Psychological Needs, Beneficence, and the Enhancement of Well-Being.” Journal of Personality, 84(6), 750–764. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12215. Note: This paper does not present the evidence that downgraded beneficence to a secondary need; I heard the news when Richard Ryan announced it from the stage at the 6th International Self-Determination Theory Conference in 2019.

Martela, F., Ryan, R. M., & Steger, M. F. (2017) “Meaningfulness as Satisfaction of Autonomy, Competence, Relatedness, and Beneficence: Comparing the Four Satisfactions and Positive Affect as Predictors of Meaning in Life.” Journal of Happiness Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-017-9869-7.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The cognitive unconscious and the embodied mind: How the embodied mind creates philosophy. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973). Undermining children's intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward: A test of the "overjustification" hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28(1), 129–137. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0035519

Paul, A. M. (2021). The extended mind: The power of thinking outside the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Reeve, J., Cheon, S. H., & Hang, H. (2020). Reconceptualizing the student engagement construct to increase its explanatory power. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 62, 101899. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2020.101899

Sapolsky, R. (2017) Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Books.

Sapolsky, R. (2023) Determined: A science of life without free will. Penguin Books.

*1* URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shcrc8fF-V8

*2* @~21:53 on the Star Talk episode entitled Do We Have Free Will? with Robert Sapolsky & Neil deGrasse Tyson URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFg1ysJ1oUs

*3* His admission is on pages 407-8 of the paperback edition in a chapter he added to lament his mistakes from the original hardback edition and to voice his regrets.

*4* If you are concerned about this move because of the notorious unreliability of subjective reports, I ask that you look up and aim your criticism at the reliability and validity studies, mostly done between the 1970s and 1990s, that show the constructs in this area of psychology are reasonable. Those are the shoulders on which this field within psychology stands, myself included.

*5* Two good books by science journalists on this property of the mind are The Body Has A Mind Of Its Own by Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee, 2007 and The Extended Mind by Annie Paul Murphy, 2021

Writing is not Transcribing Thoughts

If we thought with words then writing would be easy since we would just have to transcribe our thoughts. Maybe I’m weird but that is not what my writing process is like. I have thoughts that I have to translate into words and then I have to extensively edit the words to convey more of the thoughts than the first translation did. Plus, some thoughts evolve throughout the writing and editing process. And when I am engaged in a feedback process with editors who are not me I have to contend with what they are taking from my writing and projecting back at me both through their words and any other channels of communication to which I have access. 

If you hold the opinion that you think in words, does that mean that you have never had a thought that you couldn’t put into words?

Does it mean that you have never felt a magnitude of awe that made you speechless?

If there are people who think entirely in words I pity the limitations of their world. I also fear for the real world consequences of their thought processes. 

Are there advocates of the 3Rs version of Back-to-Basics that are assuming that teaching the 3Rs is the ultimate form of education because that is, practically speaking, complete access to the their entire world? 

On second thought, maybe that explains a lot of bad things in the world. If people in power are limited to thinking and acting based on words alone then they are living in such an impoverished world that they are an order of magnitude more delusional that those of us whose thinking transcends words. 

Our education system is a failure to every child who leaves childhood without having experiences that transcend the 3Rs. 

I wrote about a similar topic recently: magical thinking about language

(While I was writing this I found that there is very limited information about the modes of people's thoughts. Linda Kreger Silverman estimates 25% of people think only in words, but there appears to be some other source that estimates a range of zero to one percent. My biases and the fact that I could find no corroboration of Silverman's claim have me suspect that none to one percent might be more right.)

Words are NOT violence: Jumping on the bandwagon to reflect on Charlie Kirk’s death

Before I address the status of words, please give me a moment to clarify my understanding of the category of violence, specifically the categories of violence that should properly be regarded as criminal, or at least immoral. I accept that common usage differs from technical usage, but we need to be careful that the common sloppy usage of the word “violence” does not contaminate the technical applications or we risk doing great harm. 

Martial arts are not violent in the technical sense that I am concerned with here, even though in common usage they are. Consent is the distinguishing factor. I trained in martial arts for about five years in my youth. My training involved hitting, kicking, and otherwise doing things to other people that could, and sometimes did, result in them being injured. I was also injured from time to time by others. Injury is a central prototype of harm and  the “common sense” category of violence is often applied when harm results from one person hitting or kicking another person independent of taking consent into account. However, I do not regard my martial arts training as violence in the criminal sense nor even in the milder immoral sense, even though obvious harms were done from time to time. The active decision I and my sparring partners made to participate in that type of training removed those activities from the category of violence. 

Taking another example, if you accept that consent changes one of two identical sex acts from a violent criminal offense into a nonviolent, noncriminal one, I assert that consent has the same power in martial arts. This applies to any instance of an inherently dangerous nonsexual voluntary physical interaction between two people. The mutual understanding that makes consensual sexual activity nonviolent is equivalent to the mutual understanding that martial arts practitioners have with regards to those dangerous activities. What may be called “violent” in casual conversation, as martial arts and other combat sports routinely are, does not rise to the level of a crime nor does it even rise to the level of being immoral, nor should it when consent has been established. Sex and martial arts are both activities that can only be evaluated for the presence of violence through understanding the experiences of those involved; the directly observable features of neither of those activities are reliable guides to the presence nor absence of violence. Judging violence to be either criminal or immoral requires both the presence of harms and the absence of consent.

Removing the issue of consent for a moment, what harms are being done by words such that they are labelled as violence? This whole reflection on violence has arisen in the wake of the murder of the conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk. In a social media post I equated Charlie Kirk’s death with the deaths of eleven Venezuelan folks that were summarily executed by the US Navy on the orders of the President, children killed in Gaza, and children killed in school shootings. All of which reflect events that had been reported in close succession. In response to that post an acquaintance pushed back on my claim that words are NOT violence. I assume that the pushback was based on taking Charlie Kirk’s words to be violence. The logic being that if he chose to legitimate violence as a political tool, then perhaps we should be less alarmed by his being violently murdered in public. 

“Stochastic terrorism” was the particular phrase that was used in the pushback to my post. I was not yet familiar with that phrase, but a trivial surface reading intuitively led me to the idea that this was probably a categorical error. It sounded to me like a term to describe the strategy of known terrorist organizations, like the now defunct Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who would train people in the ways of terror then have them set up unremarkable lives in the capital city with orders to wait until some insult to their ideals or an assault on their organization occurs and then enact their righteous violence against the enemy. This is called a “sleeper cell.” Since there is no coordination amongst the “sleeper cells” and the main terrorist organization they usually go undetected and sometimes successfully carry out their spontaneous plans for retribution (often killing themselves in the process). 

My intuition about the phrase was at least partly wrong; it turns out that it refers to rhetorical strategies attributed to political leaders who are implied to be using the sleeper cell strategy except without the step of training the terrorist. They use their rhetoric to demonize their political enemies and sometimes an ideologically aligned person perpetrates violence against that enemy. The idea is that the politicos just have to talk dirty and dirty deeds will be the result, so on the surface it seems logical and morally correct to hold the politicos responsible.

Here’s the problem. This relies on a chain of justification that falls into several of the traps of the three great untruths that were explained in the book The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukanioff. Here they are:

The Untruth of Fragility: The belief that people are fragile and that exposure to challenges makes them weaker, rather than stronger. 

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: The idea that one should always trust their feelings, even when they may be distorted or misleading. 

The Untruth of Us Versus Them: The tendency to view life as a simplistic battle between good and evil, leading to polarization and a lack of nuance. 

One of the key steps in the justification for taking words to be inherently violent is the second untruth. In the wake of tragic events it is easier to allow our emotionally tinged  thoughts to short circuit our analysis. If we identify ourselves with the people in the events, either victims or perpetrators, we automatically, outside of conscious awareness, seek out a story of the events that will protect our identity from being associated with guilt for perpetrating the crime and/or being associated with any righteous justifications for targeting that particular victim. When Charlie Kirk died both his fans and his detractors quickly stoked the fires that would get a justification train rolling in their favored direction. They were acting in accordance with a combination of the untruth of us versus them and emotional reasoning. 

Let’s be clear that I am stoking the fires of justification with this piece. Justification can be a reasonable and desirable process. But instead of taking sides for or against Charlie Kirk I am trying to stoke the fires of a justification train against perpetuating violence in and of itself. Specifically, I want to make the case that equating words with violence is actually a capitulation to the forces that favor the use of violence in all forms. In short, when you conflate words with violent acts you have surrendered the field of play to players that want violence (that is, immoral and/or criminal violence) to be an acceptable ploy in political gamesmanship. 

The causal connection between the words of one person and the actions of another are extremely difficult to establish, though not impossible. Let’s suppose that we go along with the idea that words are violence. What stops our political opposition from picking out our words as being violent when they precede some act of violence? What standards of evidence or principles of reasoning do we use to make an accurate and reliable causal attribution to one set of words and not another set? If we make a passionate speech in which we use words that suggest vigorous opposition to our political enemies and in some short amount of time later one of our prominent political opponents is violently assassinated, why aren’t we guilty? Should there be a window of time in which we prosecute the speech of every public figure who opposes the dead person because they surely incited the violence against that person? Do you seriously believe that you can control which words get labeled as being violence such that your side will get the benefits without suffering oppressive drawbacks from the other side wielding the same tools? 

This is a slippery slope argument. I believe that there is a slippery slope towards the perpetuation of violence if some words are taken to be violent. If you claim words are violence there is no principle to distinguish between the words you and your opposition used in the lead up to any given act of violence. If we had access to an omniscient truth teller who could accurately and reliably distinguish which words led to which acts of violence AND could discern whether or not there were violent intentions behind those words, then we would not need freedom of speech. But, in the real world we have access to neither accurate causal information nor reliable means of detecting intentions. Thus, freedom of speech is required to ensure a fair playing field (regardless of whether or not we can ultimately achieve it.) The crux of freedom of speech is that either all words can be freely spoken (within strict limitations on when words are causally implicated in violent acts) or no one is safe from being prosecuted for their words. 

Harm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to rise into the category of violence. Even if we accept that the words incited violence that resulted in harm, that fact does not mean that the words should be included in the category of “violence.” Rape is violent not because of the physical violations of bodily integrity; it is made violent by the psychological violations of the primary human needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence. Consent is crucial because the exact same physical “violations” of bodily integrity can become ecstatic celebrations of bodily pleasure. Consent is the transformative element.

What are the conditions of consent that are necessary for harmful words to be transformed from violent to nonviolent? Consent requires a state of mind in which the choice being made is a legitimate one. Psychological harm occurs when a perpetrator thwarts plans, blocks paths, and/or creates a situation in which the plans and paths are exclusively attainable by capitulating to the perpetrator’s demands. This is also known as coercion. My field of expertise is in psychology, specifically Self-Determination Theory (SDT). SDT has empirically demonstrated that all humans must have their primary psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence satisfied in order to have well-being. Harm results from the thwarting of those needs. This makes sense of how emotional manipulation that forces a victim to sacrifice one of their needs in order to satisfy another is harmful. The words that were used were the tools of the manipulation, but if there was no physical action against the victim there was no violence even though there was harm. If the perpetrator used only gestures without words, there is still harm and still no violence. We need to recognize that the harms are being caused by the way that the perpetrator arranged the situation, including through the use of words to manipulate the victim’s perceptions of the situation, the victim’s ability to think clearly about the situation, and their ability to act effectively on their goals and aspirations. The harms are real and reprehensible, but the words the perpetrator used do not belong in the category of violence. They are the tools of violence in this example and words are not as amenable to policing as cars, guns, and other physically manifested tools.  

But are all harms inherently the result of violence? Or can some harms be the result of non-violent activities? If I flip a woman off and she takes it to be threat which causes emotional trauma, did I do violence to her? If I say, “fuck you” to a woman and she takes it to be a threat which then causes her to have an emotionally traumatizing experience, did I do violence to her? If I use my middle finger to sexually assault her and she is emotionally traumatized, did I do violence to her? I hope we agree that in every one of these cases harm was done, but in the third instance the harms were the result of violence in the criminal sense. The first and second are less clear, but, crucially, in the third case it was not the action I took that created the violence, it was the lack of consent. 

The nature of the situation is important to notice. Let’s imagine that this event occurs in a public venue in which I am a performer and it is a type of theater in which bawdy dialogue and rude gestures are expected. In the first and second instances her consent was implied by her choice to participate as an audience member. It was a clearly a poor choice on her part, but I, as a performer, should not be held responsible for her reaction to a normal activity expected to happen within the context of that art form. (Sidenote: I have contempt for trigger warnings in theater because I believe it is a defining feature of theatrical performances that transgression of social norms is to be expected. If you don’t want to be triggered, either don’t patronize theatrical content or take responsibility for your fragility by actively inquiring within your community to help you make better judgments about what performances would be appropriate for you. Building a community that cares that much about your vulnerabilities will be much better for you than being anonymously “protected” by generic trigger warnings.)

If words are violence, advertising is violent. Any random communicative effort might become an instance of violence. The practical question is, how can we sensibly deploy consent as a meaningful boundary? First, there has to be a meaningful distinction between voluntarily participating in an activity or not. Public discourse must be put in the realm of implied consent. Semi-public discourse that is mediated by something akin to a social media platform should help folks discern the public from the private (though the opposite seems to be the case on most platforms today.) 

In summary, words are not violence for both practical and technical reasons. Technically, there must be both the presence of harms and the absence of consent for anything to rise into the category of criminal violence. The context of public discourse implies the consent of those who are consuming it in the media or attending to it in the public square. The harms might be real, but the consent makes all the difference. We need to do better about the assessment of consent, but it does not bode well for us if we abandon the standard of consent as a defining feature of the forms of risky interaction that we will judge to be either immoral or criminal.  

I will specifically point out that we need to be careful not to assume that our fellow citizens are morally fragile. Utilizing government to relieve fellow citizens from the burden of making moral decisions is not realistic nor is it desirable. If anything we need to encourage more moral deliberation, not less. The champions of using the powers of our local, state, and national governments to police speech are infantilizing our citizenry, not protecting them. 

Part 2: Regarding Criminal Bosses and Free Speech

Removing words from the category of violence does not mean that criminal bosses can hide behind free speech. The legal system has carved out reasonable means of prosecuting the instigators of criminal acts by others. Admittedly, it is difficult to accumulate sufficient evidence, deliver persuasive arguments, and amass the political will to prove the causal link between a crime boss and the actions of his cronies, but that difficulty is fully justified if you are morally committed to justice for all. Unfortunately, we now have a criminal head of state who has convinced his cronies on the Supreme Court to carve out an exception for him. So, in this one instance we do have a crime boss who appears to have immunity from prosecution for the crimes he is asking others to commit. He is so assured of his immunity that he does not even have to hide his murderous intentions.

That crime boss labeled a boat with eleven people on it as a “drug runner” which placed it in the category of a “terrorist threat” which is claimed to be reasonable justification for a summary execution of everyone on board. What is to stop him from labeling a man speaking Spanish as “possibly illegal” who might be a “drug mule” or a “drug dealer” therefore a “terrorist threat” who can be summarily executed by ICE agents? What about a “leftist” supporter of “Palestinians in Gaza” who must also be a “terrorist threat” that can be summarily executed by any federal officer? In principle I believe that no one is safe anywhere in the world as long as this crime boss and his Supreme Court cronies remain in positions of power. The crime boss has repeatedly stated his concern for this country’s decline and how it is failing; the longer he holds power the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

My religious faith community supports me in taking the dignity and worth of every individual person to be endowed by God. The routine violation of that dignity by this administration is immoral. It does not matter what policy objective they are pursuing, the dignity and worth of each and every person is meant to be protected by the constitution and by our obligations as a member of the United Nations and other international groups. 

I take the sanctity of human dignity to be a universal aspiration. Those who oppose or deny it are under the influence of nefarious forces that have confused, distracted, or emotionally manipulated them. Nefarious forces of perceptual distortion, cognitive confusion, emotional chaos, and materialist (anti-spiritual) values have achieved a level of systemic influence recently that is alarming. The people who are acting out this agenda are not evil, though all of their actions against the dignity of men, women, and children are. Some of them will be so intractably convinced of the righteousness of their cause that they may well fight to the death for their beliefs. We should not oblige them with lethal opposition because that gives them the win. It makes their prophesy of an American hellscape on earth self-fulfilling. 

In any case, I regard the present federal administration of the United States of America to be criminally violent. Not because of their words, but because of their actions. They have summarily executed people against our laws and in violation of international laws and treaties as well. I regard our current Supreme Court to be complicit in those crimes because they have abandoned logic and their moral sensibilities. They have placed the President’s official acts above the law. They have supported the administration’s criminal violence against people who speak Spanish, take low paying jobs, congregate in certain areas, and on other utterly trivial pretexts. This despite saying that similar kinds of discrimination are unacceptable in college admissions. I sadly conclude that the protections of human dignity that are stated in our constitution as the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights can no longer be expected to be upheld by any of the three branches of our federal government.  

The Science of Freedom, Oppression, Liberation, and Equity

The nature of being human must be inherently determined by what we require in order to have well-being. This means that the rigorous model for distinguishing primary human needs provided by Self-Determination Theory (SDT) necessarily gives us insights into human nature. This is a link to a 15 minute video that explains the science of needs in the context of education.

Humans are universally recognized as yearning to be free. Having a precise model of how that yearning occurs in human experience through the lens of the well-established psychological model of SDT means we can more precisely define freedom. Freedom is proximately about having our needs satisfied, but freedom is ultimately about enabling each and every individual person to contribute productively to the collectives that make that individual freedom possible. 

Oppression is proximately the neglect and/or thwarting of needs, but ultimately the use of collective powers to prevent some people’s needs from being satisfied either through direct acts against those people’s efforts to satisfy their needs or systematically preventing them from having access to whatever resources would enable them to satisfy their needs (a.k.a. structural oppression). 

Liberation from oppression requires both the removal of barriers to need satisfying resources and actively educating the oppressed folks about their restored freedoms. An educated person is one who perceives accurately, thinks clearly and acts effectively on self-selected goals and aspiration that are appropriate to their situation without necessarily being aware that any of those things are happening. Education is centrally about the agency to act in community; it is only peripherally concerned with the tools of our culture, such as academics. The centrality of agency follows from the fact that it is an unwavering necessity across all time and space while the choice of which tools to use in any given situation will vary according to accidents of history and society.

Equity is ownership of the collective in which we are embedded. Ownership means that we have the power to contribute to the governance of the collective, to participate in making the decisions that will affect us, and to participate in resolving the conflicts that we experience as a consequence of collective decisions and of the behavior of others. Achieving equity requires four elements: 1) define needs scientifically (SDT), 2) distribute resources fairly to satisfy needs, 3) remove structural barriers to need satisfaction, and 4) satisfy needs with parity across groups. 

Inspired by Dover, M. A. (2019) A Needs-based Partial Theory of Human Injustice: Oppression, Dehumanization, Exploitation, and Systematic Inequality in Opportunities to Address Human Needs. Humanity & Society, 43(4) pp. 442-483. DOI: 10.1177/0160597619832623

Against Magical Beliefs About Language and Schools

I periodically run into claims about the role of language in thinking that are dangerously close to assuming that language has magical powers over the human mind. One recent example is from an article defending the need for classical liberal education by a philosophy professor named Chris Nadon in an article entitled “Against Lived Experience.”  In a paragraph that is constructing the straw man version of “student-centered” schools that he so valiantly slays with his argument, he said, “We cannot think without language.” 

If we decide to take this statement at face value we have to assume that deaf children who have not yet learned sign language are not thinking. We have to assume that all pre-verbal children are not yet thinking, either. We also have to assume that all animals are unthinking, as well. I live at a llama ranch and train llamas. The idea that they don’t think is utterly absurd. Or to be more precise, due to having a substantial basis in lived experience with pre-verbal children and other non-verbal animals, I can’t take seriously any definition of thinking that could be used to support that claim. 

An important question we need to ask is, What do we really know about thinking? For simplicity I will rely on probably the most famous authority on thinking today: the late Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In 2011 he wrote the best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow, which is his review of how one conclusion about thinking has become pervasively accepted within psychology: we have two types of thought, a fast intuitive type of thinking and a slow deliberative type of thinking. It might be plausible to posit the idea that our slow deliberative type of thinking involves the substantial use of language; however the fast intuitive type of thinking is plainly not dependent on language. In order to take Nadon’s statement to be true either means that, because an estimated 90 to 99% of what occurs in our brains is in the fast intuitive category, we have to ignore the majority of our thoughts or we have to redefine the word “thinking” so radically that we reject the possibility that pre-verbal children and all animals even think at all. 

Why should we care about claims about the role of language in thinking? The problem is that when we misunderstand the role of language in thinking we put our focus on language; which usually leads us to ignore the more subtle aspects of thought that do most of the real work in determining our actions in the real world. 

In the case of someone like professor Nadon, he might be deceiving himself about the importance of language in educating children and as a consequence of being a school leader may be imposing requirements upon students and teachers that do psychological harm. His straw man argument against “student-centered classrooms” is premised on language having the magical property of restraining thought. Continuing from the prior quote, he said, “With limited words come limited thoughts.” This is a version of linguistic determinism which is typically stated as the idea that if Eskimos have more words for snow and we-who-are-not-Eskimos have less words for snow, we are unable to think the same kinds of thoughts about snow that the Eskimos have. A similar example is that if a language has terms for colors but does not include a word for, say purple, then the people who speak that language might not perceive that color. This hypothesis has been proven false. The ability to perceive gradations of color and properties of snow are not magically limited by the language that people speak and/or think with. The linguistically limited repertoire of words might make reasoning slower and communicating more difficult, but it does not limit the thinking that is possible. 

Language does influence thought. However, those influences are subtle and difficult to tease out. For a deeper understanding of how language is influenced by how our bodies exist in the world, I rely primarily on the works of cognitive linguist George Lakoff and his collaborations with philosopher Mark Johnson. Their main work together is book called Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. The idea is that there are universal perceptual experiences that are wired into our brains starting in our pre-verbal younger lives and they determine some key aspects of how we construct our linguistic abilities and patterns of reasoning. A whole lot of thinking, shaped by bodily experiences of taking action and other perceptions, determines the development of language. This is the opposite of linguistic determinism. It is important to take this into account when we are thinking deeply about how language works in our minds and how our minds shape our actions. 

Nadon singles out in quotation marks the word “agency” which he implies is “[a]n immediate cause of our failure … [to] … demonstrate the tangible benefits of reading and writing about difficult books.” This is of personal interest because I have written a book called The Agentic Schools Manifesto which is about the importance of agency in educating children. Unfortunately, he must have relied on claims about agency and definitions of agency that are imprecise and poorly articulated given his portrayal of what he thinks it means and how it would be implemented. His portrayal of “student-centered” schooling seems like a cartoon version of how such schools are written about. Most writers who criticize that kind of school also create cartoon versions, therefore his version appears to me to be a cartoon of a cartoon with no basis in or connection to reality. 

Here’s the crux of the issue for me: taking language as the be all and end all of educating children has led to global systems of schooling that value the 3Rs of symbol manipulation (a.k.a. academics) to be their central defining feature. In the course of delivering all the knowledge, skills, and information out of the teachers heads into the heads of the children they have taken up institutional forms, policies, and practices that do psychological harm to children. But Nadon claims the classical academy approach would, rather than merely transfer information, “[turn] around … the whole soul.” I don’t buy his assertion because decades of research into the psychological needs, motivations, and engagement of schoolchildren in academically focused schools all over the world has consistently shown that they have their needs neglected (sometimes actively thwarted), their motivations are more controlled than autonomous, and their engagement is usually behavioral, not agentic. I mention the motivation and engagement to be thorough, but the most important causal piece is the needs. I know of no basis for claiming that the classical academies approach to academic schooling satisfies psychological needs any better than any other kind of academic approach. However, in my books I have presented an abundance of arguments and evidence to support the claim that schools that take agency as their focus do a better job of routinely satisfying psychological needs. 

You would not send your child to a school that starves, dehydrates, suffocates, or recklessly exposes your child to the elements. School personnel that did those things, or even allowed them, would be criminally prosecuted for negligence at the very least. That is because those are all physiological needs that can kill someone when they are neglected or thwarted. It is utterly mystifying to me that schools that routinely neglect the primary psychological needs of children and their teachers still dominate the industry. 

I don’t care if a school calls itself a classical academy, claims to be student-centered, or applies any other label to their school; what I do care about is that every school meets their obligation to provide the kind of psychological conditions that satisfy the needs of all the humans in the school. When they do anything less they are undermining their own educative goals and causing harm, too. The children and their teachers don’t usually die from this kind of neglect, but they are harmed, nonetheless. All schools can do better on this account. The words we apply to schools do not have the magical power of educating students. Words don’t limit our ability to think and act on behalf of children and their teachers.

Independent of the words we apply to schools, they need to be places where children are nurtured, where every child and every teacher has their primary psychological needs satisfied on a routine basis. School leaders can’t control whether or not their students’ and teachers' needs are satisfied in other places and times, but they can ensure that needs are met in their space and in their time. That is the least we should expect of them.