Freedom is what bugs me about Sartre. I don't believe in free will.

Message to those who visit this blog who aren't into Sartre's Being and Nothingness as much as I am (which includes almost everybody, I'm pretty sure):

Today I reached a point in my re-reading of the book where it dawned on me what my central problem with Sartre's existentialist philosophy is -- freedom. It's a big enough problem that I likely will put Being and Nothingness back on the shelf where I picked it up recently.

I enjoy trying to encapsulate complex philosophies and world views in a few words, as crazy as this would seem to an expert in them. 

"Humans are free" makes sense to me as a summary for Sartre. "Life is suffering" strikes me as appropriate for Buddhism. But Sartre also speaks a lot about anguish, which for him is the dilemma created by human freedom.

Here's how his translator defines anguish in her Key to Special Terminology, a handy thing to have around when it comes to reading Sartre, who often writes in a dense fashion.

The reflective apprehension of the Self as freedom, the realization that a nothingness slips in between my Self and my past and future so that nothing relieves me from the necessity of continually choosing myself and nothing guarantees the validity of the values which I choose. Fear is of something in the world, anguish is anguish before myself (as in Kierkegaard).

This obviously is different from suffering, but it's interesting that both Sartre and Buddhism find difficulty at the heart of the human condition.

For Sartre, the cause of this difficulty is our inherent freedom. For Buddhism, the cause of this difficulty is attachment, desire, craving -- which arises because we fail to understand that emptiness is the defining characteristic of everything in existence. Meaning, nothing possesses inherent existence but is part of an interconnected web of relationships and mutual dependencies.

I don't believe in freedom of the will, or free will. Most neuroscientists don't either, or at least lots don't.

Sartre, for some reason, doesn't accept the reality of the unconscious or subconscious. So he takes as self-evident the feeling that he has, which is common to the feeling everybody has, that it is possible to do something different from what we actually choose to do.

Sartre uses the example of a gambler who vows to stop gambling after this activity causes him problems. However, when he comes upon a gaming table, he decides to gamble. Sartre sees this as nothingness coming between his prior vow and his current decision to keep gambling. 

Hence, nothing guarantees that he will ever stop gambling, since he is always capable of exercising his inherent freedom to choose to act in a manner contrary to what his vow demands. That leads to anguish, given that he will always need to choose anew whether to gamble, in accord with his inescapable freedom.

This is pretty much exactly opposite to how I see things. I'm much more in the Buddhist camp. Which also is the neuroscientific camp. I find comfort in what I consider to be this fact: we humans don't have free will. Our beliefs, emotions, actions, and such are fully determined by the laws of nature.

As Sam Harris cogently points out, and I heartily agree with him on this, if we make a decision, and every atom in our brain and nervous system is in exactly the same state as it was when the decision was made, we would make the exact same decision again.

In other words, there is no mysterious nothingness or free-will-fairy in our consciousness that makes it possible for our thoughts, emotions, and actions to be outside of the realm of determinism, as Sartre believes is the case.

In my view of reality, the only psychological freedom we really have is the freedom to feel that we aren't making freely-chosen decisions. There's a tremendous benefit in trading a belief in illusory free will for the hugely more likely fact that we humans are as driven by deterministic forces as the planets in our solar system are.

Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."

I love the idea that I've lost my free will because I never had it, though for much of my life I believed that I did. I find peace in the realization that everything that's happened in my past, everything that's happening now in my present, everything that will happen to me in the future -- my entire life is the result of deterministic causes and conditions (a thoroughly Buddhist concept) that extends from the moment of the big bang some 14 billion years ago to a possibly infinite future of the cosmos.

Sartre, of course, disagrees with this perspective. He's an exceedingly accomplished philosopher, so in Being and Nothingness he anticipated the objections of people like me to his assertion that freedom lies at the heart of human consciousness.

Psychological determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of excuse. It is reflective conduct with respect to anguish; it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces whose type of existence is comparable to that of things. 

It attempts to fill the void which encircles us, to re-establish the links between past and present, between present and future. It provides us with a nature productive of our acts, and these very acts it makes transcendent: it assigns to them a foundation in something other than themselves by endowing them with an inertia and externality eminently reassuring because they constitute a permanent game of excuses. 

Psychological determinism denies that transcendence of human reality which makes it emerge in anguish beyond its own essence. At the same time by reducing us to never being anything but what we are, it reintroduces in us the absolute positivity of being-in-itself and thereby reinstates us at the heart of being.

But this determinism, a reflective defense against anguish, is not given as a reflective intuition. It avails nothing against the evidence of freedom; hence it is given as a faith to take refuge in, as the ideal end toward which we can flee to escape anguish. 

That is made evident on the philosophical plane by the fact that deterministic psychologists do not claim to found their thesis on the pure givens of introspection. They present it as a satisfying hypothesis, the value of which comes from the fact that it accounts for the facts -- or as a necessary postulate for establishing all psychology.

Well, I would have loved to see a debate between Sartre and a modern neuroscientist. I suspect Sartre would be demolished in such a debate. 

I have no problem with links between my past and present, and between my present and future. I have no problem with a nature that produces my acts. I have no problem with never being anything but what I am. I have no problem with accepting a determinism that accounts for the facts.

But I do have a problem with Sartre calling introspection a "pure given." We all can be very wrong about what is in our minds. We can be led astray by unconscious influences. There are countless psychological experiments that demonstrate this. 

Sure, it seems like we have free will. It also seems that the sun sets. Both seemings are wrong. Almost certainly we don't have free will, and it is certain that the earth rotates while the sun remains at the center of our solar systems.

What seems to be true has to yield to facts. That's why I reject Sartre's view of freedom.

Comments

[SantMat64]

And what can I say about free will that I haven't said before? Maybe I can just focus on what SAM HARRIS said at Caltech. He called free will not only an "illusion" but also a "totally incoherent idea" that contradicts what science tells us about how the world works. "The illusoriness of free will," he said, "is as certain a fact, to my mind, as the truth of evolution." This is one of Harris's characteristic traits, flaunting his certitude like a badge of honor.

Harris asks us to consider the case of a serial killer. "Imagine this murderer is discovered to have a brain tumor in the appropriate spot in his brain that could explain his violent impulses. That is obviously exculpatory. We view him as a victim of his biology, and our moral intuitions shift automatically. But I would argue that a brain tumor is just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions, and if we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer's brain, that would be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it."

Harris seems to be advancing a reductio ad absurdum, except that he wants us to accept the absurdum: there is no fundamental difference between me and a man compelled to kill by a brain tumor. Or between me and someone who can't help washing his hands every 20 minutes, or someone who's schizophrenic, or a babbling baby, or a newt, or a worm. I mean, if I'm not different from a guy who kills because a tumor provokes him into murderous rages, how am I different from anyone or anything with a brain, no matter how damaged or tiny?

Here's the difference. The man with a tumor has no choice but to do what he does. I do have choices, which I make all the time. Yes, my choices are constrained, by the laws of physics, my genetic inheritance, upbringing and education, the social, cultural, political, and intellectual context of my existence. And as Harris keeps pointing out, I didn't choose to be born into this universe, to my parents, in this nation, at this time. I don’t choose to grow old and die.

But just because my choices are limited doesn't mean they don't exist. Just because I don't have absolute freedom doesn't mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn't exist because it isn't absolutely free is like saying truth doesn't exist because we can't achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.

Harris keeps insisting that because all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined. Of course all our choices are caused. No free-will proponent I know claims otherwise. The question is how are they caused? Harris seems to think that all causes are ultimately physical, and that to hold otherwise puts you in the company of believers in ghosts, souls, gods and other supernatural nonsense.

But the strange and wonderful thing about all organisms, and especially our species, is that mechanistic physical processes somehow give rise to phenomena that are not reducible to or determined by those physical processes. Human brains, in particular, generate human minds, which while subject to physical laws are influenced by non-physical factors, including ideas produced by other minds. These ideas may cause us to change our minds and make decisions that alter the trajectory of our world.

Some of us have a greater capacity to perceive and act on choices than others. The killer with a brain tumor, the schizophrenic, the sociopath, the obsessive-compulsive do not and cannot make decisions--or change their minds--in the way that I do. When I weigh the pros and cons of writing about Harris, my chain of reasoning is determined by the substance of my thoughts, not their physical instantiation.

Consider: When I watch the video of Sam Harris talking at Caltech, is it the electrons streaming through my MacBook, the photons impinging on my eye, the sound waves entering my ear that make me want to respond to Harris? Of course not. It's the meaning of the video that stirs me, not its physical embodiment. I could have watched a DVD of Harris's talk, or read a transcript, or listened to someone summarize his lecture over the telephone. And it's possible that Harris's words, instead of provoking me to write a critical response, could have changed my mind about free will, so that I decided to write a column defending his point of view. Of course, if I thought about it for a moment, I'd realize that the fact that Harris had changed my mind and hence my actions was evidence of my free will.

We are physical creatures, but we are not just physical. We have free will because we are creatures of mind, meaning, ideas, not just matter. Harris perversely--willfully!--refuses to acknowledge this crushingly obvious and fundamental fact about us. He insists that because science cannot figure out the complex causality underpinning free will, it must be illusory. He is a throwback to the old behaviorists, who pretended that subjective, mental phenomena—because they are more difficult to observe and measure than planets and protons—don't exist.

Dwelling on Harris depresses me. All that brainpower and training dedicated to promulgating such bad ideas! He reminds me of one of the brightest students I've ever had, who was possessed by an adamant, unshakable belief in young-earth creationism. I did my best to change his mind, but I never succeeded. I probably won't change the minds of Sam Harris and other hard-core determinists either, but it's worth a shot.

[Brian Hines]

SantMat64, I don't understand your position on free will. It seems to contain a highly dubious assumption: that thoughts and the mind somehow are non-physical entities.

Please provide evidence of this. Not links to New Age web sites. Links to peer-reviewed scientific research demonstrating that thoughts and the mind are non-physical. I'm familiar with the current state of neuroscience. I'm almost 100% certain that you are completely wrong in your assertion that thoughts and the mind, including your choices, don't arise from the action of the brain, which obviously is a physical entity, being composed of many billions of neurons and vastly more connections between those neurons.

How do you explain anesthesia? How do you explain dementia? How do you explain unconsciousness from being hit on the head by a baseball bat? If the mind isn't physical, why do physical causes result in the mind going off-line or becoming dysfunctional?

You mistakenly say that Harris and other neuroscientists deny subjectivity. That's also flat-out wrong. Harris is a big proponent of meditation, being an avid practitioner of a Tibetan Buddhist style of meditation. Subjectivity is simply being conscious. Since consciousness arises from the brain, this makes subjectivity physical. It is the central feature of consciousness, since no one has direct access to our consciousness but us.

So where does your supposed free will come from? Please explain. The brain operates according to the laws of nature. Or do you deny that? If so, what are those laws? If they're non-physical, how do they control the physical brain? Or if you're unaware of those laws, why do you claim that your choices are made outside of the realm of the physical laws of nature?

I appreciate your comment. Some of it makes sense. But your claim that thoughts and the mind aren't physically instantiated in the brain makes no sense.

[um]

Does the driver drives the car or is de driver driven by the car?

If the car is defect, the driver cannot drive
If the driver is defect he cannot drive the car.

The car is meaningless and valueless without the driver.
It is the driver that uses the car for his own purposes that in no way are related to the car.

[Ron E.]

It appears that the issue of free will is confused with choice. Choice is limited to the data that we are programmed with via our cultures and genetic natures. Choice arises naturally depending on the needs and desires of the moment and is an automatic reaction to conditions.

To have free will there needs to be an entity (somehow within the organism) that is separate and uninfluenced by the physical/mental brain/body. This would require some mysterious agent that operates outside of natural laws. The concept of free will can give justification to the hope or desire that there is some agent (call it a soul, God etc.) running the show - which helps with mankind’s neurosis about our future demise.

As a human being with a naturally strong bond to the natural world, my view is that consciousness, free will, the mind and self etc. are all part of the naturally evolved mental framework that developed as we evolved and grew bigger, more complex brains. Nature has served us well in evolutionary terms, ensuring that life’s main objective for any organism is to get its genes into the next generation – and we have excelled at that.

With our amazing mental abilities, it would be a shame if we unconsciously choose to use them to justify some ego-based justification that we are special or that we have special rights such as a separate self that has something we call freewill. We have a great need to live in harmony with nature – which includes ourselves as we are, and not to imagine ourselves to be special and independent of nature.

[SantMat63]

Sam Harris is a master of the polemic. His book, Free Will, is a scant 66 page essay and is lacking in many essential ways, particularly in the matter of evidence for his claims. Harris states there is no free will, that it is an illusion, but offers no proof for his assertion. In fact, on Pages 13, 38, 39, and 40, he states that the sources of our intentions, desires, actions, and wants are unknown, a mystery, inscrutable or obscure. He seems to be asserting that because we do not know the sources for our thoughts and actions, it necessarily follows that we do not have free will. Such a flimsy connection is not proof.

He cites some well known experiments, such as the Libet, (debunked, see link)

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/

...all of which are inconclusive, and does not provide the reader with strong scientific evidence to back up his assertions.

Mr. Harris critiques compatibilism by too often, for such a short essay, emphasizing the differences between himself and Daniel Dennett, the philosopher who has written Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves. In fact, Dennett makes a very cogent case for the compatibilism and coexistence of determinism and free will in human beings. One of Mr. Harris's breezy dismissals of compatibilism on Page 16 is that the "free will compatibilists defend is not the free will most people feel they have." Such a statement seems to imply that Mr. Harris sets aside the fine and scholarly work of many philosophers such as Dennett, because it does not accord with some popular misconception of free will. Populism would appear to trump scholarship in this book.

On Pages 10 and 24, Harris apparently infers that if we had exceptional machines and brain scanners to monitor our action sequences and choices, we would be astounded to discover that we were not in control of them. However, we do not yet have experiments that might be conclusive. To state that one knows the outcome of future experiments is nonsense. In fact, neuroscience is at the beginning of a long voyage of discovery about the brain, the mind and consciousness.

Another difficulty with "Free Will" is the author's shift to prescription rather than description. Such a segue is yet another example of the philosopher David Hume's famous and much discussed Is/Ought problem concerning Ethics (and Harris' penchant pretentions of polymathery). Harris suddenly advocates, quite radically, what the justice system should do. On Page 54, he writes: "Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved with morality itself." Why should any of us assume, given Mr. Harris's assertion that choices are not in our control, that most citizens will agree about changes to our justice system? Many people, if not in conscious control of their belief and ethical systems, may reach opposite conclusions. Mr. Harris is not the only champion of determinism who seems to dismiss reason as a motivating factor, and then to advocate change based on conscious reasoning.

The larger point here is that Harris' views on free will are not accepted as consensus by the scientific world. This is the thing about Harris that I've pointed out before -- he garnered much of his popularity with his style of speaking with absolute certitude on various controversial issues with absolute certitude. But Harris' conviction doesn't make his views correct. The question of will is still being worked out, with compelling arguments on multiple sides. The problem of free will vis-à-vis determinism reaches back to Ancient Greece and Israel, and is not quickly or easily perused. Galen Strawson, Saul Smilansky, Peter Strawson, Manuel Vargas, Robert Kane and Daniel Wegner are excellent sources.

[Ron E.]

As previously mentioned, a separate non-physical self is needed for there to be free will. One way to understand the illusion of being (having) a self with free will is to imagine being on a plane from say London to New York. The plane is your life; you board it at the start of your journey (birth) and disembark at the end (death). While on the plane you are able to choose what to do, whether to chat to your neighbour or not, watch the in-flight film or not, to have the vegetarian meal or not, read a book etc. – all activities that originate from your conditioning, absorbed from your particular culture, education, various beliefs. It is from these hotch-potch of accrued mental influences that choices are mechanically selected – nothing to do with free will, just manifestations of your conditioning. And all the time the plane (your life) is moving on from birth to death.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett speaks of the illusion of the ‘Cartesian theatre,' the sense that there is ‘someone’ looking out at a world ‘out there’, and also watching our own thoughts pass by. In reality, says Dennett, there are only mental processes. There are streams of thoughts, sensations, and perceptions passing through our brains, but there is no central place where all of these phenomena are organised. Similarly, psychologist Susan Blackmore has suggested that the self is just a collection of what she calls ‘memes’—units of cultural information such as ideas, beliefs, and habits. We are born without a self, but slowly, as we are exposed to environmental influences, the self is ‘constructed’ out of the memes we absorb.

The concept of self is not static, but rather constantly evolving through social interactions and the ongoing construction of our identity. Brian Lowery: ‘Selfless. The social creation of you.’

And, Jay Garfield’s book: ‘Loosing Ourselves’, explains why dropping the illusion of ‘self’ in favour of just being a person helps us to abandon egoism and escaping the isolation of self-identity.

[La Madrugada]

Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion.

[Spence Tepper]

The eternal mystery contains the eternal potential of free will.

[Spence Tepper]

The more conscious and aware we are, the more free will we have. But do we use it?