A puppet is free as long as he loves his strings.
Sam Harris
I was nearing the end of my bike ride when I arrived at an intersection. I needed to make a choice. I briefly considered turning left, which would involve a little more climbing and returning the way I came, or right, a downhill ride to the coast, which would be more scenic. I chose to go right. As I coasted home, I wondered if I had been in control of my choice. I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t even explain why, or exactly when, I had started to deliberate about left over right in the first place.
There’s smart people laying out persuasive arguments that we indeed have no choice, but it’s a confounding, unsettling concept to wrestle with. That’s why I decided (or did I?) to talk about it with someone else. The following (lightly edited) conversation touches on free will and related topics like dreams, consciousness, ego, suicide, law and religion.
S: Free will has been encoded into every philosophical approach, even religion. Our whole legal system hangs off of it. The idea that you had a choice to kill or not and therefore you choose heaven or hell or freedom or the gallows all by yourself. Capitalism depends on the idea that you have the choice of excelling in life and if you don’t you fail.
J: I think choices still happen, and choices have consequences that could really impact our lives and others.
S: How? If there is no free will how do we have choices? If my choice was determined, how could anything different have taken place?
J: Even if your choice was determined, there’s still a consequence to it. It’s impossible for us to know how our hand actually moves or a thought appears in our head. A decision to choose something might as well have come out of a black box. But I think we can hold our hand back from striking someone. I believe in determinism, but also that we must take responsibility for our actions.
S: How far do we have to work our way up the tree of life to get to animals that do have free will? Dinosaurs had tiny, tiny brains, do we have to wait for mammals? When did it turn up in humans? Did it just appear one day?
J: I think free will must be bundled together with our feeling of self-consciousness. We have this impression, for some reason, that we are in control of our destiny. This idea actually causes a lot of suffering. We get extremely upset when the cascade of events from the beginning of time (which couldn’t really be anything different), does not behave or create an outcome that we are happy with. I would guess that most animals don’t really suffer problems like existential angst or anxiety like we do. I think we are the only animals that think they have free will.
S: The notion of free-will must have popped into existence at the same moment of self-consciousness. Otherwise wouldn’t you feel trapped in a body doing stuff you feel you have no control over? “I have no idea what’s going to happen next! Will I attack the wooly mammoth or run away? Who knows? Hold on this is going to be scary!
J: I think that’s a likely explanation. It’s developed at some point fairly recently in the scheme of things. Along with the ability to see yourself as a separate person to other stuff. Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine if you have had no control over your life until this very moment. You get to wave a magic wand that gives you the power of agency and the power to make choices freely. What do you think of that? How do you feel?
S: I think that might have happened! One day, an early man got the sensation he could choose between two options and that he was in charge of that choice. That required self-consciousness. As a child you didn’t have the notion of self-consciousness for some time after you are born. It happened to you! The moment the thought “I am thinking something” comes into your head it includes the idea (or illusion) that you have some control. “I chose to think this and in a moment I will think of other things and I am doing this”. Without free will there is no “I”.
J: At some point in our lives we started to identify with an “I thought” (“I am thinking, I am free.”) and boom. Free will. It’s like the notion of free-will comes bundled with self-consciousness. It’s like the same software package. There is a parallel here with dreaming. In a regular dream, we are dead certain that a monster is chasing us and we are going to die. It feels so real, that we never question it, unless we recognize that we are dreaming.
S: If we truly don’t have free-will… now what?
J: Let’s say there’s a farmer, working in the fields. He’s never heard of free will. Robert Sapolsky rocks up and explains to him that he has no control over what he is doing, and science proves this without a doubt. What does he do? Does he lose his mind? Lie down? For his whole life, and before Robert showed up, the farmer had never heard of this idea and was doing his job perfectly fine. I wonder, that if the idea of free will or the self as an illusion makes you miserable, maybe it is better not to think about it.
S: I’m sure many people do kill themselves faced with this knowledge but our survival instincts are too powerful. Sam Harris believe embracing the notion of no free will makes life better. Camus argued that life is ultimately pointless and suicide seems reasonable yet the answer is to find some meaning to your futile endeavor. Maybe accepting the lack of free will helps. Life is pointless, but you don’t or can’t choose to search for some sort of meaning as you slide towards the void. You have to accept it.
J: Suicide is like the ultimate resistance to fate. When you commit suicide you’ve gone so far away from accepting your fate you’ve used your “free will” in the most extreme, final way you can to resist life.
Buddha Bike 