FREE WILL — IN LAS VEGAS
SUNG TO THE TUNE OF ELVIS - VIVA LAS VEGAS
One Armed Bandit - three windows of chance. See also [Terzina]
Often my most pleasurable experiences in doing art occur when I look at the work after a period of intense activity and say "who done that?" The feeling that 'you' have been somewhere else, while some part of you continued in the real world, making marks on a physical surface. Most of the time you experience a feeling more akin to drifting in and out, but the important thing is you have created a record of that moment of self-forgetting. I have come to think that creation is the art of learning how to avoid the self — to weave and dodge as it stands facing you, arms outstretched, blocking your line of sight to future possibilities. Or…. 'letting go' of agency, and allowing other members of the self-committee to have a go.
How are we to understand this self-forgetting in terms of free will. Agency is usually associated with the ‘one’, the ego, the will, but neuroscience suggests that different systems of the body are running in parallel, often in conflict. In a stochastic system — like the body/brain — noise changes what is possible. This is known as stochastic neural fluctuations - remember that beautiful scientific/statistical term.
Las Vegas is a manufactured experience of glitz, with calculated odds, where the house always wins in the long run — and yet people play. Something about it feels like a choice. Maybe that's the point. A casino is a perfect stochastic system — "stochastic" means probabilistic, not arbitrary. The house can't predict any single spin of the wheel, but it can measure the distribution precisely enough to guarantee profit over thousands of spins. The odds are knowable even when the outcome isn't.
Painting is movement. Every brushstroke is a physical gesture — the hand, the arm, the whole body in motion. And movement is where the neuroscience gets interesting — to quote Dr. Michiko Kimura Bruno M.D., who specialises in movement:
"Movement emerges from probabilistic accumulation of neuronal activity, rather than a single deterministic 'decision signal.' Conscious intention interacts dynamically with these processes, modulating and shaping action."
Your brushstrokes — like your decisions — are the output of a stochastic system. Not determined but probabilistic. Which means genuinely open.
The ego acts as a noise dampener — its job is to keep the output consistent, predictable, recognisably 'you'. To let the noise through, you have to get out of your own way. The artist isn't abandoning control, they're bypassing the filter to get closer to the noise within the stochastic system, the probabilistic storm underneath the ego's tidy narrative. Which is why the work surprises even the person making it.
It also reframes what "skill" means in this context — it's not the ability to execute the expected mark perfectly, it's the ability to stay open to the noise long enough for something genuine to come through. Technique in the service of receptivity rather than control.
The question is, can you muster enough stochastic neural fluctuations to beat the calculated odds?