Free will is a fiction (and that's fine)

Over the years I've had many deep, as well as shallow, discussions with friends and acquaintances about free will. It's a fascinating subject, in no small part because substance and process are intimately related.

Meaning, if someone disagrees with me and argues, "I'm free to do what I want," I can always respond with "That's just what I expected you to say."

Reading about all the philosophical hair-splitting in the area of free will can overheat the cerebral cortex quickly. That's why I like to focus on Albert Einstein's simple viewpoint (in part 1 of his credo): 

I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.

Here's another similar Einstein quote:

Honestly I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom?

What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said, "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."…When you mention people who speak of such a thing as free will in nature it is difficult for me to find a suitable reply. The idea is of course preposterous.

Indeed, it is. Yet the fact remains that we feel like we have free will.

For example, at this very moment it seems like I can write whatever I want after I finish this sentence. Yet as someone who has been an avid writer since my pre-teen years (I'm now 61), I frequently have had the feeling that what I'm composing already has been written somewhere within my psyche, and I'm just transcribing it.

I'm not implying that some sort of supernatural, mystical, or fateful power is at work here -- destiny, karma, God's plan, or whatever. Just that whatever I decide to do seems to flow from a source deeper than my conscious volitional awareness.

How all this relates to religiosity and churchlessness is too big a subject to address in any detail right now. Here's my brief take on that question:

Becoming free from "ties that bind" is an important aspect of most religious, spiritual, and mystical teachings, whether they be of the Eastern or Western variety. The soul and/or mind often is considered to be imprisoned by this physical domain of existence. Theologies speak of the necessity to become free of earthly ties/attachments, whether through one's own efforts or with the aid of a savior, master, guru, spiritual guide, or whoever.

Nice idea. Undeniably appealing. A notion that I liked a lot for the thirty-five years or so when I seriously pursued a meditational practice aimed at what often was called the "liberation of the soul."

But now the idea of breaking free from earthly bounds seems both extremely unlikely and distinctly unappealing to me. In his credo, Einstein also said:

Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own.

Interconnectedness. Interdependence. Involvement.

This indeed seems to be what life is all about. Yet the notion of free will implies that we can be lone wolves, unaffected by the "pack" of society, culture, other people, and the natural world.

Yuck! Who would want that? And who could possibly attain that?

According to a persuasive essay by Galen Strawson in the online New York Times, "Your Move: The Maze of Free Will," nobody. Here's the basic argument that Strawson, a philosophy professor, uses to demonstrate that we can't be ultimately morally responsible for what we do.

(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself—because of the way you then are.

(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are — at least in certain mental respects.

(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.

(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

The key move is (3). Why can’t you be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all? In answer, consider an expanded version of the argument.

(a) It’s undeniable that the way you are initially is a result of your genetic inheritance and early experience.

(b) It’s undeniable that these are things for which you can’t be held to be in any way responsible (morally or otherwise).

(c) But you can’t at any later stage of life hope to acquire true or ultimate moral responsibility for the way you are by trying to change the way you already are as a result of genetic inheritance and previous experience.

(d) Why not? Because both the particular ways in which you try to change yourself, and the amount of success you have when trying to change yourself, will be determined by how you already are as a result of your genetic inheritance and previous experience.

(e) And any further changes that you may become able to bring about after you have brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by your genetic inheritance and previous experience.

Read the entire essay (just three and a half well-written pages) to better understand what Strawson is saying. Which seems pretty darn unarguable to me.

The message I get from this solid bit of philosophizing is... relax. Chill out. We need to stop carrying the weight of the cosmos on our anxiety-ridden, guilt-prone shoulders. Each of us is the result of everyone and everything that has come before us, and is still with us now.

We aren't steering our own separate ship across the ocean of life.

We're being carried by currents far below the surface of our consciousness, influences that transcend our puny awareness of here and now (for example, the atoms we're made of can be traced back many billions of years to the big bang).

Stawson ends his essay with this response to the seemingly solid fact that we are not the causes of ourselves:

Is there any reply? I can’t do better than the novelist Ian McEwan, who wrote to me:

“I see no necessary disjunction between having no free will (those arguments seem watertight) and assuming moral responsibility for myself. The point is ownership. I own my past, my beginnings, my perceptions.

And just as I will make myself responsible if my dog or child bites someone, or my car rolls backwards down a hill and causes damage, so I take on full accountability for the little ship of my being, even if I do not have control of its course. It is this sense of being the possessor of a consciousness that makes us feel responsible for it.”

Comments

[Roger]

(c) But you can’t at any later stage of life hope to acquire true or ultimate moral responsibility for the way you are by trying to change the way you already are as a result of genetic inheritance and previous experience.

(d) Why not? Because both the particular ways in which you try to change yourself, and the amount of success you have when trying to change yourself, will be determined by how you already are as a result of your genetic inheritance and previous experience.

--The key phase, "true or ultimate moral responsibility" is the issue. Is there another type of 'moral reponsibility' that would work? Could we acquire some sort of relative moral responsibility? Thus, in a small way change the way we already are despite the results of our genetic inheritance and previous experience. Likewise, how far back does this 'previous' experience need to go?

[Nietzsche]

Interesting post and I think I see what you mean but I have to add some things.

Schopenhauer did indeed say that we are not free but he started with freeing the will from causality. In other words the will itself is not bound by the laws of causality and it strives for sex and power. Our thoughts on the other hand are also free but not nearly strong enough to stop the will and therefore we are not free to act in accordance with our thoughts. It is like trying to stop a huge fire with your breath. But Schopenhauer thought that the power of our compassion was strong enough to stop the lust and anger for a moment. Also he thought that if we could still the will we could for a moment enjoy the non-duality of what the will is in itself. He was quite a metafysicus.

However Frankl (a Jewish psychiatrist) came with a new insight he said that next to the will that is pushing us you can also become aware of a will that is pulling us. The will in the body became a pushing force but the will in its pure transpersonal form is a pulling force that you can feel if you want and you can decide to make it stronger if you chose so, if you meditate on it. The best way to experience this is when you are suffering a lot. If you get a sudden experience of the pulling transpersonal free will than your thoughts will find a meaning in life because like the pushing will looks meaningless to the mind the pulling will gives our mind all the meaning and mission. Your real meaning can be found in relation ship to the others, transpersonal. It makes one sustain the biggest suffering just to mean something to loved ones. That is a big message in a culture that is only interested in causal matters that push us around and seem meaningless by nature :)

It is difficult to explain all this in such a short post but as an end remark. I do think there is a reason why compassion is so strong in us (like Shopenhauer said), why it is able to still the forces of the body, is is because there is a transpersonal will in it. It is maybe the strongest prove that life is more than a selfish struggle for survival. At the very least it is a struggle that we have to life together.

[john]

Whether we choose free will over determinism or vice-versa depends on our perspective of whether we're looking at things subjectively (first-person) or objectively (third-person).

Whether I actually have free-will or it just appears to my mind that I do, from a subjective point-of-view that I have freedom of choice is axiomatic. Experientially, I have free will.

Likewise, if we accept the determinist argument, I can claim that he, (as the object of my thought), does not have freewill and his actions are entirely foreordained. His actions are deterministic.

However, it doesn't appear I can claim that you, (as the subject of your first-person point-of-view), are not experiencing free-will, experiencing himself as devoid of free choice or experiencing determinism.

[Robert Searle]

I think my evolving ideas on free will may be of interest......

http://kheper.net/essays/A_Certain_Ethical_Problem_in_Esotericism.html

[George]

Schopenhauer and nietzche are interesting in their own right, and indeed in expressing desire or drives as wills, but I am not sure the meaning of a will to power or sex is really understood or even meaningful in a modern sense where we have evolutionary biology and genetics, which provide more clearcut explanations for our urges or biological desires.

While our genetical makeup as mammals will surely mean we have inherited similar instictual drives, we seem to have higher order functions by which we can better control our more instinctual urges.

So while it is an interesting question, I do not believe we are wholly enslaved by our unconscious instictual predispositions or even our emotions - so in that respect we are more free than the rest of the animal kingdom.

On a cultural level, it is true we cannot decide what family we are born Into or what our conditioning is - so free will would seem limited - but ppl can certainly make choices within a certain range and their attitude to life often makes all the difference, not always, but often.