Credit: Skedonk, via Flikr
In a post last year I discussed how our intuitive, human understanding of causality appears to conflict with but does not disprove the concept of “free will”. Rather, we can accept the causal nature of reality on the one hand (or, at least, what appears for all intents and purposes to be predominantly causal, given no clear evidence of macro-indeterminacy), whereas on the other we can dispute free will on it’s own merits.
Since my last post I have had the chance to see Sam Harris’ rather impressive rendition of the rationale for why free will is just a bad idea. I don’t consider myself a Sam Harris acolyte or anything. He has some good ideas which he tends to present clearly and humorously in a way that I quite enjoy. Other ideas are not so great. (I mean come on Sam, philosophers have discussed for years how scientific evidence can be employed to answer philosophical questions, but not as a means to framing the questions themselves!) This comment of course is just as a caveat: some of the specific points that Harris makes in his free will tirade I completely disagree with, such as, the Libet experiments, which are cool, but not actually a very strong argument against the idea of free will.
Much better examples are the radical changes in thoughts and behaviour which have been meticulously documented following brain injury, neurodegenerative damage and various other insults. Similarly, brain stimulation studies going back to Wilder Penfield, clearly illustrate how sensory and motor representations in the brain can directly translate into physical sensations and movements. These small pieces of evidence don’t disprove free will, they simply indicate that the brain performs some critical function that is required for our conscious experience.
With this frame in mind, we can now ask what free will actually is. I mean the first step, after all, should be to come up with a valid definition. And yet, I cannot for the life of me, determine what this definition ought to look like. I’ve spoken to people who try to argue that free will exists and they do not seem to have definitions that make any sense to me. For this reason, I think the confusion is that we are talking about very different things.
You see, I think of free will as a more than just a vague concept that, “Hey, I experience a conscious reality and I can influence this reality.” In a sense, this concept is perfectly sensible. But then we need to define what “I” am. This essence of me that has the ability to influence external reality needs a definable locus. One proposition is that I exist in the pineal gland, reflecting on the world from the prime seats of the Cartesian theatre.
But the implication of this concept, that I exist as a unitary entity or soul, doesn’t fit very well with the evidence from brain damage, or indeed with the evidence from developmental disorders. If I am born with a developmental abnormality, severe mental retardation or if I develop brain damage later in life, does this simply limit the ability of my soul to transmit its essence through my body? Is a person with late-stage Alzheimer’s truly experiencing immense suffering from loss of memory, control of thoughts and behaviours, while all this time his soul is laying back on the beach in another reality, having a jolly good time?
I think we must, at a minimum, accept that the all apparent aspects of the mind rely critically on the brain, which implies that the “I” which we recognize as “self” is somehow produced out of the constantly recurring processes of this brain.
Once we accept this, we can start to build a picture of how our wills are engaged by the realities of the world. When we do this, it becomes very implausible to talk about any sort of human will being “free”. Indeed, what should a will be free from? Clearly not the physical constraints of the brain. It also doesn’t follow that I can simply will to win a lot of money or to escape the basic laws of causality which we all intuit quite naturally.
Some might point out that at any given point in time, humans have the ability to choose one path or another. That is, I could choose to step out into the middle of traffic or stay safely on the sidewalk as I run after the bus in the morning. But this notion represents either a prospective or a retrospective fallacy. If we refer to events which occurred in the past, it does not make sense to point out that we could have behaved differently, given what we know now. The entire point is that you didn’t walk into the middle of traffic in the past, and there were legitimate reasons for not doing so. Stating that “Well, I could have, if I had wanted to”, ignores the fact that you didn’t want to walk into the middle of traffic.
The same holds for events which could occur in the future. In fact, for the vast majority of people in this world, jumping in front of a moving car is a very hard thing to make oneself accomplish, even to prove a point. And this fact should should point us in the right direction on this topic.
Our thoughts and actions are constantly bounded by constraints. A good example of a constraint might be, for example, the wall of the pen which surrounds a group of pigs. The pigs cannot leave, no matter how enticing a pool of water on the other side of the pen might look.
For humans, our constraints are quite a bit more varied than this. They include social and financial pressures; family pressures; personal pressures; and even neurological or other inherently “physical pressures”. What’s more, the constraints on our reality don’t just emerge in the present moment. They first arise prior to our birth and continue until we die. At birth some of these constraints include the decisions of our parents, the events which occur prior to and during conception. The developmental processes which move forward in our mothers’ wombs and the genes and structures surrounding those genes that are instantiated in the developing embryo which will eventually form that “I” or self we are now so familiar with.
These sorts of constraints don’t ease up with time: children are still constantly limited by their parents’ supervision, not to mention the presence of siblings, cultural expectations and, quite consistently, the effects of the biological processes which occur inside their bodies.
It becomes apparent when we look at the world this way that at no time in your life does the “freedom” of will start to peek through. The sense that we have control over our lives may wax and wane with time. As a child, this sense is probably quite muted, but for most adults it is potent and omnipresent. But the constraints are always there, and never leave you.
Actually, there is an old metaphor about a man walking along the beach of life who always noticed a second pair of feet walking behind his own. When times were difficult, however, the feet disappeared, which caused him to question his religious devotion: where did Christ go? Well, according to the tale, this man’s religious partner was carrying him (and it was his own feet which disappeared). But in our story it is not an omnipotent and benevolent being which is following along beside us, but the vicissitudes of reality. And, often when times get tough, we feel the noose tighten around our narrow neck of freedom, as our own feelings of motivation and self-control begin to wane. But as it turns out, freedom in these cases is no less present than it was before, simply the constraints become more apparent and so appear to choke off our ever-present sense of personal volition. When the will to go on disappears life will continue as before, whether or not there is a God on the other side to place a strong hand on the reins.
But given the central role of “free will” in Western society, if this concept is in fact untrue, then we will need to replace it, which is why I will use later posts to get into the practical implications of the concept. For one, there are obvious issues when it comes to important concepts such as justice and personal empowerment. I think that both of these concepts remain integral components in the function of a healthy society and for a healthy individual, despite the fact that I believe they are both illusions of our societies and our minds. The difficulty then is developing a new mindset which can accommodate the functions these concepts serve even accepting that they are not fundamental properties of reality, but tools which humans use to meet their ends.