During last winter’s World Cup (remember when they held the World Cup in the winter?), the Washington Post ran a piece prosaically titled “Soccer Players React In Milliseconds In Penalty Kicks. How Do They Do That?” 

The obvious answer was: Because there is no such thing as a continuous Self.

To say the least, I was very disappointed that the piece never did get around to noting that fact. 

Let’s redress that glaring omission now.

KICKING A BALL AND PRETENDING TO BE HURT

The Post piece, part of its Brain Matters strand, was by Richard Sima, a Hopkins- and Harvard-trained PhD in neuroscience who has also written very memorably about the neurological basis for the stickiness of fake news. Sima wrote that “penalty kicks at the professional level strain the limits of human reaction time,” describing the process in physiological terms:

(Goalkeepers) need to defend a goal that is 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall against a kick from just 12 yards away. That kick is also fast—traveling, on average, at 70 mph. From the time the kicker’s foot makes contact, the ball takes about 400 milliseconds to reach the goal—roughly the amount of time it takes to blink….

The human eye needs time to register visual information, which the brain’s visual areas then need to process. This visual information needs to be relayed to the brain’s motor cortex which then tells the muscles how to move. Adding up the time from each of these biological relays, humans have a visual reaction time of about 200 milliseconds.

Then—the dive. The movement itself can take 500 milliseconds if the goalkeeper wants to cover the post….

As a result, roughly 80 percent of penalty kicks score.

That percentage only makes sense, since a penalty kick is given when the defending team has committed a foul so egregious that, absent it, a goal would likely have resulted. “There’s no pressure on the goalkeeper,” Sima quotes Greg Wood, a sport and exercise psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University Institute of Sport. “If they save one, they are ‘a hero,’ since they weren’t expected to save it.”

I was a goalkeeper myself in my schoolboy days, and I loved playing that position, though at 5’10” I didn’t have a long term future in the sport. But the theater of the penalty kick has stayed with me. (Bonus points for fans of Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter—“The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick”—the 1970 novella by Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke, and the film adaptation by Wim Wenders.) A regular one-off penalty is dramatic enough; a match that is level at the end of 120 minutes of play, including extra time, and has to be decided by penalty kicks is even more nailbiting.

And don’t even get me started on the Panenka.

But here’s where it starts to get really interesting (I promise).

Sima reports that professional goalkeepers typically dive before the ball is even struck—about 220 milliseconds before, according to one analysis of 330 PKs. They do so based on microscopic cues they pick up by watching the penalty taker as he or she prepares to shoot, as well as research done before the fact regarding the patterns of where a given player likes to put the ball. (Some keepers, like the perennially angry English international Jordan Pickford, who plays his club football for Everton in the Premier League, keep crib notes on the water bottle they are allowed to have in the goal. In a 2006 World Cup quarterfinal, Germany’s goalie, Jens Lehmann saved two penalties against Argentina after consulting notes he kept in his sock.)

But Sima’s recent piece focuses exclusively on physiology, which is indeed interesting. But as a neuroscientist, he surely knows that that is really just a sideshow.

EASY TO BE HARD

The point is that the goalkeeper’s decision is actually made so fast that it precedes any conscious knowledge of it, in the same way that you don’t “decide” to pull your hand off a hot stove, or to slam on the brakes when a deer runs in front of your car, or to move your head when a flying mallet is coming at it. (Happens to me all the time.) All that decision-making happens under the hood, and we are aware of those “decisions” only after the fact, with the illusion that we consciously made them.

Let’s take this further. It’s not just “hand on the hot stove” decisions that are made this way. All our decisions are. What shirt to wear today, where to go to college, who to vote for, who to marry, what to name our children, whether or not to trade the cow for that handful of magic beans. So to be precise, yes, a “decision” has been indeed made—it’s just that what we think of as our “self” did not make it. It was a subconscious response resulting from the activity among the 100 billion neurons in the human brain.

Here we go into the so-called “hard problem,” a term memorably coined by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers. The expression distinguishes the relatively “easy” problem of understanding the mechanics of how the brain works (yes, so easy!) from the harder, indeed almost unfathomable problem of understanding how a mass of gray tissue can make us feel jealousy, or love, or righteous anger, why we swell with pride at watching our kid in the school play, laugh at Richard Pryor’s 1982 concert film Live on the Sunset Strip, or cry when we hear “Let It Be,” or any other aspect of the human condition. And also, more broadly, how we come to carry around this conception of a unified, continuous persona that constitutes the being each of us thinks of as Me.

In other words, what is the nature of consciousness itself?  

Philosophers, neuroscientists, and Buddhist monks spend their entire lives trying to sort this topic out, and even as longwinded as this blog generally is, I can’t possibly summarize it all in just a few pages. So please excuse this cursory survey.   

Most people instinctively think of “themselves” as an immutable entity, often distinct from our physical selves. In religious terms, that continuous essence is often thought of as “the soul.” Even non-religious people very often have this idea of themselves as some sort of metaphysical being, even if they don’t use the spiritual term. We often hear people speak dismissively of the corporeal body as just “a suit of clothes” that this Self (or whatever you want to call it) walks around in. The place you most frequently hear that trope is at funerals, since a central part of that comforting delusion is the belief that this non-physical essence survives after death, be it through ascent to heaven, or reincarnation, or some other sort of afterlife. It’s also the source of a belief in ghosts.

In fact, it is so common to think of this “me” that directs the physical actions of the body that we usually don’t even question it. (The novelist Julian Barnes described it as the notion of “the submarine captain in his turret.”) But any such explanation inevitably leads us into the infinite regress of what that abstract entity is constructed from. Turtles all the way down and all that.

Counterintuitive though it may be, when you begin to tease it apart, this conventional idea of Self begins to crumble, especially if you’ve downed a couple of ayahuasca-and-Red-Bulls.

Don’t believe me? Famously, in 1983, the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments in what he called “readiness potential,” measured by the pressing of a buzzer, that proved that our sense of conscious decision-making actually comes milliseconds after a given physical movement has been initiated. In other words, our sense of a conscious, continuous Me is just an illusion floating on top of a subterranean, autopilot-like series of decisions made by this meatsack of flesh that comprises our body, the brain very much included.

Plenty of folks have come along since then to dispute the implications of Libet‘s findings, with varying degrees of credibility of their own. But his study remains a striking affront to the conventional concept of a conscious, decision-making Self.

In other words, the most famous maxim in all of philosophy, Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum”—“I think, therefore I am”—is dead wrong. If I may offer a suggestion, it would be more accurate to say, “I think, therefore I think I am.”

FREE WILLY

Once the myth of the Cartesian theater is obliterated, on the other side you will find materialism, in the philosophical sense, which dispenses with all that mumbo jumbo and asserts that consciousness derives only from purely physiological phenomena.

Per Chalmers, we just can’t begin to explain how.  

But once you (“You”—ha!) accept materialism, it’s but a short hop to the realization that there’s no such thing as free will.

The New York Times recently published an interview with Robert Sapolsky, the esteemed Stanford biologist, neuroscientist, and Robert Plant doppelgänger, who is an adamant disbeliever in free will. (He’s also a MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner. But Plant can hit a C♯6 and looks fetching in a half shirt.) Sapolsky has a new book out on the topic called, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, which I confess I have not yet read. (The neuroscientist Sam Harris explored this same issue in his own slim but fascinating 2012 book Free Will. I do recommend that.)

Speaking to the Times, Sapolsky called free will “a completely useless definition,” but acknowledged that rejecting it is a very hard thing for humans to do, as it “completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy and where we get meaning from.”

“Every living organism is just a biological machine,” he told the Times’ interviewer. “But we’re the only ones that know that we’re biological machines; we are trying to make sense of the fact that we feel as if our feelings are real.”

“If you have myths about free will,” Sapolsky quipped, “keep it to how you’re flossing your teeth.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting there is some sort of external determinism, driven by an almighty deity or anything else, and neither are Sapolsky or Harris. There is indeed an entity coming to such decisions independent of any kind of predestination, supernatural activity, or silliness such as fate. But that entity is a hive mind consisting of billions of neurons firing at a subconscious level, the result of an unknowable combination of genetics, of hormones, of environment, of conditioning—but most definitely not the thing that you generally think of as “You.” Even how those billions of neurons combine to create those decisions is a mystery—part of the “hard problem”—but the one thing we can say for certain is that there is no unifying consciousness at its core directing it. No beret-and-jodhpurs-clad director sitting in the theater issuing instructions to our fingers and toes and eyes and mouth. No submarine captain gazing through the periscope in the conning tower.

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

I know Woody Allen is canceled, but let me tell you an anecdote that Christopher Walken told me. (It’s in my forthcoming book, Groucho Marx and Other Namedroppers I’ve Discussed with Dick Cavett.) According to Walken, when they were making Annie Hall, he and Woody were riding in a car on the way to the set and Walken was carrying a paperback book that was on the bestseller lists at the time. Woody saw the book and asked what it was about. (Imagine Christopher Walken’s famous cadence, imitating Woody Allen’s famous one.) Walken answered, “Reincarnation,” and Woody replied, deadpan: “Yes, reincarnation would be good news for all of us.”

The desire to cheat death, to cling to a belief in an eternal life in one form or another, and an attachment to a sense of one’s being that will endure into that eternity, is at the heart of the delusion of Self. But another pathway into that immortality is to dispense altogether with the need to separate ourselves into discrete “things” engaged in a Darwinian, every-soul-for-itself existential struggle. One can go much further down this rabbit hole, into the question of where artificial boundaries between one human being and another—or among any physical objects—begin and end, and into quantum physics, where those boundaries start to disappear altogether. (Another round of ayahuasca Red Bulls, please.)

In addition to reincarnation, Walken apparently has an abiding interest in such matters. On a movie I made with him a few years ago, he ad-libbed a joke, which actually made it into the finished film. It goes like this:

“What did the Dalai Lama say to the hot dog vendor?”

“Make me one with everything.”

(Think about it.)

Accepting and embracing the reality of materialism, the finality of death, and a Buddhist-like rejection of the existence of the Self as it is usually understood is an incredibly liberating experience. The closest thing it can be compared to is the hackneyed but still profound feeling of staring up at the stars and understanding that each of us is so incredibly, infinitesimally small in the vastness of the universe. In fact, it’s even more powerful than that, as it involves not just a recognition of our smallness, but of our non-existence full stop.

If consciousness is merely an illusion, if there is no continuous Self but only an ever-changing dream of one, if there is no ego that requires ruthless defense and advancement, if the universe will eventually disappear up its own anus and there will be no trace of any of us left to be remembered by anyone or anything, what remains but the present moment and the experience of being here now, illusory though that is? Far from creating a moral anarchy where we can’t be held responsible for our actions, that is a world where there is only empathy and a sense of oneness and the imperative to live as justly and decently as humanly possible, not in futile pursuit of some eternal theological reward, but simply for its own sake.

In other words, the age-old puzzle of whether there is such a thing as free will is simply the wrong question. 

It’s not a matter of whether or not you have free will—it’s that there’s no such thing as “You” to have it in the first place.

And that’s how goalkeepers decide which way to dive.

**********

Photo: Brazilian goalkeeper Alisson Becker of Liverpool, making a crucial PK save against Chelsea’s Mason Mount in the 2022 FA Cup final. Which the Reds went on to win. #YNWA

Dick Cavett joke stolen from David Letterman and the NBC Bookmobile. But Chris Walken did tell me that anecdote.