May 2013 Atmospheric CO2 Concentration 399.89 ppm; May 2012 396.87; May 2011 394.29

[GliderGuider]

21. "You" don't, of course.

Individual choices and decisions have very little impact on collective events. The two exist at different levels and are subject to different rules. Population decline, like all forms of degrowth, can't come about through individual action, because so few people are able to make decisions like that.

What I think is that we probably have “free will” as individuals, but that as our collectivities become larger, the collective behaviour becomes statistically deterministic. We have something in common with gas molecules that way. An individual gas molecule doesn’t have a temperature or a pressure, it has a position and a velocity. When you put a large number of molecules together, each of them still has a position and a velocity, but the aggregate now has a temperature and a pressure, as a result of all those positions and velocities adding up statistically.

Temperature and pressure are statistically deterministic, and depend on the number of gas molecules, the size of the space they’re confined in, and the energy fed into the gas. Similarly, the behaviour of human civilization is statistically deterministic, and depends on the number of people (7 billion, and the more people there are the more deterministic the behavior becomes), the finite space we’re confined in (i.e. the surface of the planet) and the amount of energy flowing into the system (~18 terawatts at last estimate).

One reason we’re susceptible to statistically deterministic behaviour is that we don’t realize that most of our brain power is devoted to removing limits. we have a very hard time placing inits on ourselves – the exact situation one would expect from an organism that evolved to be a very effective gradient dissipator.

So it’s not strict determinism, but like anything else in the universe our free will has limits. It’s just that we evolved to be blind to those limits in order to become better thermodynamically dissipative structures. Degrowth of any sort can only happen on a global basis as the result of hitting a limit we can't figure out a way to defeat.