Church of the Churchless

Before you decide to do something, you're already acting

I'm a big non-believer in free will. OK, more simply put, I don't believe in free will -- even though, like almost everybody, I feel like I have it.

Today I listened to a guided meditation by Jeff Warren on my Calm iPhone app. It starts off this way. 

There's a famous neurobiology finding where a test subject is told to push a meaningless button whenever they feel like it. And meanwhile, scientists are watching the subject's brain activity on an EEG machine.

And here's the weird thing. A full six seconds before the person has the thought, I'm going to push the button now, the brain has already begun pushing the button. It's like the body was already doing it. The mind only jumps in afterwards.

So, I have no idea what to make of this finding. But it did give me a cool idea for a meditation. In this Daily Trip we're going to let go of all sense of being the doer. It's an opportunity to just relax into the weird spontaneous flow of life. 

I'm not aware of the study Warren is referring to. But the general phenomenon of the brain appearing to make a decision well before conscious awareness has said I'll do this, is well established. 

For example, check out "Neuroscientists can read brain activity to predict brain decisions 11 seconds before people act."

Free will, from a neuroscience perspective, can look like quite quaint. In a study published this week in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers in Australia were able to predict basic choices participants made 11 seconds before they consciously declared their decisions.

In the study, 14 participants—each placed in an fMRI machine—were shown two patterns, one of red horizontal stripes and one of green vertical stripes. They were given a maximum of 20 seconds to choose between them. Once they’d made a decision, they pressed a button and had 10 seconds to visualize the pattern as hard as they could. Finally, they were asked “what did you imagine?” and “how vivid was it?” They answered these questions by pressing buttons.

Using the fMRI to monitor brain activity and machine learning to analyze the neuroimages, the researchers were able to predict which pattern participants would choose up to 11 seconds before they consciously made the decision. And they were able to predict how vividly the participants would be able to envisage it.

Lead author Joel Pearson, cognitive neuroscience professor at the University of South Wales in Australia, said that the study suggests traces of thoughts exist unconsciously before they become conscious. “We believe that when we are faced with the choice between two or more options of what to think about, non-conscious traces of the thoughts are there already, a bit like unconscious hallucinations,” he said in a statement.

I find this to be really positive, even inspiring. 

During the 35 years I believed in God and a guru who was God in Human Form, who managed a disciple's karma in a fashion best suited for spiritual development and God-realization, I enjoyed the thought that what was happening to me was God's will. Or, guru's will.

That took the pressure off of me when I did something wrong. Also, when I did something right. Either way, it was a relief to not feel like the responsibility for either good or bad actions fell upon me. I believed that a higher power was guiding what I did.

Now that I'm an atheist, modern neuroscience is showing a different reason for why I'm not responsible for the decisions that I make: the conscious "I" which thinks it is in control appears to be subservient to unconscious brain processes that lay the basis for my actions before I consciously decide to do them.

So "As God wills" is replaced by "As Brain wills." 

Sure, I realize that religious people much prefer feeling like they're being guided by God than by the unconscious aspect of their own brain. However, the end result is pretty much the same. What we do and think and feel springs from a deeper source than our conscious awareness.

Sam Harris often refers to this sort of thing in the guided meditations on his Waking Up app. Harris will point out that in sitting meditation, there's no need to do anything. 

Thoughts come on their own. Emotions arise on their own. Bodily sensations appear on their own. Sights and sounds are present on their own. He urges that we become aware of that open space in which all of these contents of consciousness arise and pass away.

Today I experimented now and then with feeling less like a doer of my actions and more of an observer of them. On the whole, it was a pleasant experience. Life goes more smoothly when I'm not anxiously trying to make everything happen the way I want.

For example, this afternoon I went to our athletic club to exercise before my Tai Chi class.

I didn't have much time to spare in the circuit training weight room. I wanted to use every machine, but saw that a young guy had settled into a leg machine, where he was doing multiple sets and spending a lot of time looking at his phone in between the sets. 

That started to irritate me. But I was able to relax and say to myself, "Let's just see what happens." Well, what happened was that the guy got up and walked out of the weight room. After I'd finished the machine I was on, I went over to the now-available leg machine.

The guy suddenly appeared again. I said, "Oh, so you're still using this." He said, "Yes, but you can go ahead." I told him, "Thanks. It won't take me long." Which it didn't, since I just do 20 repetitions with no break.

When I finished I thanked the guy. We'd had a pleasant encounter. And I really didn't have to do anything other than wait and see how the situation played out without me trying to force anything.

Free will is part of the human mind, not the universe

Free will as people almost always understand it is an illusion. There's little or no doubt about that, as I noted in a recent post. 

Here's an idea that is well worth pondering. I've enjoyed doing just that as I go to sleep, letting my mind wrap itself around an intriguing notion.

So far as we know, we humans are the only entity in the universe that doesn't exist in full accord with determinism -- causes and effects operating in a lawful, orderly manner.

Oh, but what about randomness?

Sure, randomness is real. Every programmer knows about random number generators. Quantum physics is based on probabilities of things happening at the atomic and subatomic level.

But randomness is lawful.

Certain rules determine whether a sequence of numbers, for example, truly is random. And quantum phenomena also are lawful. That's why quantum physics is so amazingly successful in serving as a foundation of modern technologies.

Thus here we are, some 13.8 billion years after the big bang that brought our universe into being, with everything in the cosmos going along with the laws of nature, galaxies forming, stars appearing and disappearing, our planet forming from primordial material, single celled life becoming multicellular life, mammals eventually evolving, then primates, and finally Homo sapiens, while sunlight strikes Earth, continents drift into their current configuration, millions of species come and go, volcanoes erupt, hurricanes form, mountains rise and are eroded away.

All without a single trace of free will. Everything occurring naturally. No one wondering other than we humans, "Should this be happening?"

Human consciousness is the only known place in the universe where a belief in the illusion of free will, and a downplaying of lawful determinism, introduces a sense of It could have been otherwise.

Should we be proud of this? Or is this a flaw in what evolution has brought about, an unfortunate side effect of a human brain that is able not only to be aware, but to be aware of our own awareness?

I enjoy looking on myself as a very, very, very small cog in the vast machinery of the cosmos. I find peace in viewing my life as fully determined, causes and effects leading to the sort of person I am now, in the place I am now, surrounded by the circumstances that affect me now.

Human consciousness is wonderful.

But it isn't perfect. Or infallible. Sometimes what seems to be, actually isn't. That's how I've come to view my sense that I'm in control of my life, that I possess free will, that I can stand outside of the deterministic laws of nature. 

Lying in bed, pondering this stuff as I gradually fall asleep, I have a glimpse of another way of viewing my place in the universe that doesn't make me something separate and distinct from the rest of nature.

And that feels good.

Spooky free will is an illusion

Everybody believes they have unfettered free will, yet almost certainly nobody does. This is just one of the illusions that Anil Seth debunks in his captivating book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness."

I'm fascinated by free will. Of course, I don't have a choice in this.

Seth makes a strong case for being skeptical about our ability to choose actions, thoughts, emotions, and such by somehow stepping outside of all influences other than... 

That's what's so difficult to come up with. What could possibly reside in human consciousness that produces the "free" part of free will? 

If something like that existed, it would be spooky. Meaning, supernatural or other worldly -- like a ghost. Seth writes:

Let's first be clear about what free will is not. Free will is not an intervention in the flow of physical events in the universe, more specifically in the brain, making things happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. 

This "spooky" free will invokes Cartesian dualism, demands freedom from the laws of cause and effect, and offers nothing of explanatory value in return.

So does this mean that everything is determined by those laws of cause and effect? Maybe.

But denying free will doesn't rest on a strict determinism. Even if randomness is at play in certain aspects of reality, such as the quantum realm, this doesn't provide support for free will.

Once spooky free will is out of the picture, it is easy to see that the debate over determinism doesn't matter at all. There's no longer any need to allow any nondeterministic elbow room for it to intervene.

From the perspective of free will as a perpetual experience, there is simply no need for any disruption to the causal flow of physical events. A deterministic universe can chug along just fine.

And if determinism is false, it doesn't make any difference because exercising free will does not mean behaving randomly. Voluntary actions neither feel random, nor are random. 

Seth uses the act of making tea to illustrate features that characterize most, if not all, experiences of volition. 

The first defining feature is the feeling that I am doing what I want to do.

...Although making tea was fully consistent with my beliefs, values, and desires, I did not choose to have these beliefs, values, and desires. I wanted a cup of tea, but I did not choose to want a cup of tea. 

Voluntary actions are voluntary not because they descend from an immaterial soul, nor because they ascend from a quantum soup. They are voluntary because they express what I, as a person, want to do, even though I cannot choose those wants.

As nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it, "Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills."

Then Seth talks about something that Sam Harris emphasizes in his arguments against free will. To me this is a very strong argument.

The second defining feature is the feeling that I could have done otherwise... I made tea. Could I have done otherwise? In one sense, yes. There's coffee in the kitchen too, so I could have made coffee. And after making the tea, it certainly seemed to me that I could have made coffee instead.

But I didn't want coffee, I wanted tea, and since I can't choose my wants, I made tea.

Given the precise state of the universe at the time, which includes the state of my body and brain, all of which have prior causes, whether deterministic or not, stretching all the way back to my origin as a tea-drinking semi-Englishman and beyond, I could not have done otherwise. 

You can't replay the same tape and expect a different outcome, apart from uninteresting differences due to randomness. The relevant phenomenology -- the feeling that I could have done otherwise -- is not a transparent window onto how causality operates in the physical world.

Thus our usual conception of free will is an illusion. However, Seth says:

From another perspective, free will is not illusory at all. So long as we have relatively undamaged brains and relatively normal upbringings, each of us has a very real capacity to execute and to inhibit voluntary action, thanks to our brain's ability to control our many degrees of freedom.

This kind of freedom is both a freedom from and a freedom to. 

It is a freedom from immediate causes in the world or in the body, and from coercion by authorities, hypnotists and mesmerists, or social-media pushers.

It is not, however, freedom from the laws of nature or from the causal fabric of the universe. It is a freedom to act according to our beliefs, values, and goals, to do as we wish to do, and to make choices according to who we are.

This is a much reduced conception of free will from the usual feeling of "I could have done otherwise." It's basically compatibilism, which is a greatly watered-down view of free will where determinism is compatible with acting freely.

Except, you aren't really free in the sense of being able to do something other than what you did. You're merely free to act according to what you're motivated to do -- with the cause of that motivation being outside of your control.

If someone wants to call this free will, it's because they're motivated to do so. But they aren't free to choose to believe in free will. That's a result of causes and effects, not free will.

"Moon" movie points to shocking non-supernatural realization

A year or so ago I watched "Moon" via Netflix. I guess at this point I need to enter an obligatory spoiler alert, in case anyone hasn't seen this 2009 movie and thinks they might want to see it without knowing a crucial plot element.

This was an intriguing movie, though not super-entertaining. The acting was good, but not exceptional. What I distinctly remember was a shocking twist.

There Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is, at a base on the moon where a mining operation is taking place. He's looking forward to returning home after a three-year solitary tour of duty on the moon. 

Sam gets pleasure in recorded messages from his wife on Earth, who was pregnant when he left for the moon. Communication difficulties prevent live back-and-forth communication with his wife.

All this seems completely normal. However, through a series of events that I've mostly forgotten, Sam eventually discovers a shocking secret the mining company has been hiding.

Sam is a clone.

The memories he has of his wife and previous time on Earth were implanted in his brain. None of that is real. Sam isn't who he thinks he is, a human being like everybody else back on Earth. Though his body is human, his mind is artificial.

How Sam deals with this occupies the rest of the movie. 

What galvanized me as I watched "Moon" was that moment when Sam realizes that everything he relied upon to help  get him through his stint on the Moon was false. The foundation of his existence was shaken to the core.

Not only wasn't his Earth life what he'd thought it was, he himself wasn't who he thought he was. 

And this wasn't a shift in consciousness like, say, someone finding their more genuine self after psychotherapy, climbing Mt. Everest, or whatever. It was a total reversal of how Sam had looked upon the world. 

Well, even more than that, since a reversal implies that the thing being reversed is simply the flip side of what the reversal reveals -- like someone realizing they aren't heterosexual but homosexual. A big change, yet they're still sexual. 

Rather, Sam went from seeing himself as a normal human being to seeing himself as not at all human, but a manufactured clone, no different from hundreds or thousands of clones exactly like him that he discovers in a hidden section of the moon base.

What struck me about this aspect of the movie is how Sam's shocking realization could be viewed as a metaphor, or reflection, of another sort of shocking realization that could be possible for any of us. Not that we're a clone, but that we're not who we have always viewed ourselves as being.

Now, I don't know what that shocking realization might consist of. Or if it really would be shocking. Maybe it would feel entirely natural, as if we'd woken up from a dream that had been going on for our entire life.

I'm not talking about a religious realization, such as "God loves me" or "Jesus is my savior." These are additions to a mind that don't overturn a mind's  basic assumptions. Nor am I talking about something supernatural.

Rather, I see this realization as being along the line of "The world as I've known it is an illusion, but there is no world more real than this one." In other words, it is the perception of the everyday world that is turned upside down in some fashion, not the world itself, which remains just as it is.

My best bet as to what this sort of shocking realization could consist of -- which arguably is very much in line with Buddhist enlightenment or nirvana -- is an experience that the self we take ourselves to be actually doesn't exist. 

This is akin to what Sam experiences in "Moon," aside from the fact that Sam was distressed by the fact that he wasn't who he always thought he was, while the experience of selflessness would be much more pleasant, blissful even. Or at least no less pleasant or blissful than our previous existence as a self, just different in a difficult-to-describe way.

Along with this would be a realization that the free will we always thought we possessed also was an illusion.

I see this as a massive relief. I've had glimpses of such a state of being in which I see that who I am at any given moment is the result of causes and effects extending back to my birth -- and even far beyond that, to the moment of the big bang 14 billion years ago.

My view, which isn't at all original, is that evolution adapted us to an illusion of ego/self because this aided in our survival as early humans.

We continue to buy into this story of individual separateness because every human culture teaches it is true, even though some cultures (Chinese and Indigenous, for example) buy into it less than other cultures (American and European, for example).

Anyway, I like the idea that our view of ourselves could be upended in a dramatic fashion.

I'm not sure how this could come about. It simply seems like a real possibility that fits with experiences I had with psychedelics in my college days, and other experiences I've had with meditation/mindfulness since.

Great argument against free will

I've written a lot about free will over the years, arguing for good reason that it doesn't exist.

(You can find those posts by searching my blogs for "free will" in the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

Here's a great concise argument against free will in the form of a letter to the editor in a recent issue of New Scientist. 

Published 9 June 2021

From Adrian Bowyer, Foxham, Wiltshire, UK

A number of people quoted in the article on the hypothesis of quantum superdeterminism criticise it by saying it would make free will untenable (15 May, p 36).

Setting aside that this criticism confuses the desirable with the real, free will doesn’t need determinism (quantum or otherwise) to make it untenable. All it needs is logic.

Every event must be caused by one or more preceding events, be spontaneous or result from both. The two categories – caused and spontaneous – are disjoint, complemental and together universal; there can be no other sort of event instigator.

Thought is a parallel and sequential collection of events. If they are all caused, then there is no free will. If some are spontaneous, then there is still no free will: a spontaneous event is, by definition, not willed.

"Unique" -- fascinating book about the science of human individuality

I love science. So I love scientific books.

Since I'm also fascinated by what makes us into the person that we are, David Linden's "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality" hits the sweet spot for me of reading pleasure. 

Linden is a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute.

Impressive credentials. Plus, Linden is an excellent writer with a sense of humor. 

Here's some excerpts from the three-fourths of the book that I've read so far. These will give you a flavor of the fascinating facts that Linden shares on every page.

Heritability of human traits. One main conclusion of MISTRA [Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart] and related studies was that most human traits, regardless of whether they are physical or behavioral, have a significant heritable component, usually ranging from 30 to 80 percent.

...For decades, the dominant thinking in the field of psychology, and in society at large, was that the most important determinant of one's adult personality was the influence of immediate family, particularly the parents.

This idea came from the twentieth-century psychological movement called behaviorism, which held that humans come into the world as blank slates, ready to be molded by social experience. 

As a result, it was quite a shock when the MISTRA experiments showed significantly higher correlations in personality measures in identical twin pairs than in fraternal ones. The main result was that about 50 percent of the variation in personality can be accounted for by heritability. 

...Importantly, while one's likelihood of having religious beliefs is influenced by both heredity and shared environment, the specific religion you choose has no hereditary component. 

Your genes might contribute to making you religious, but they will not specify a Hindu or Wiccan or Roman Catholic faith -- that's mostly a family and community affair.

Human genome. On average, considering the entire DNA sequence (both the genes and the stretches of other DNA between them), each human is about 99.8 percent similar to any other human, 98 percent similar to a chimpanzee, and 50 percent similar to a fruit fly.

This is because, if you go back far enough in evolutionary time, about eight hundred million years, humans, chimps, and fruit flies al share a common ancestor.

If only a 2 percent difference separates us from chimps, then it follows that small differences in the DNA sequence have a big effect on traits.

...The genome is not a detailed cell-by-cell blueprint for the development of the body and brain, but rather a vague recipe jotted down on the back of an envelope.

...The key point is that the genetic instructions for development are not precise.

...That's the main reason why identical twins, who share the same DNA sequence and nearly the same uterine environment, are not born with wholly identical bodies, brains, or temperaments.

This means that your individuality is not a matter of "nature versus nurture" but rather "heredity interacting with experience, filtered through the inherent randomness of development."

Free will. We like to imagine that we are fundamentally creatures of free will. We reliably call certain facts, events, and concepts to mind. We make conscious decisions and act volitionally. Our individuality is inextricably bound up with a deep sense of agency and autonomy.

To a large degree, this is a trick our brain plays on us. Most of our behavior is subconscious and automatic. In the words of neuroscientist Adrian Haith: "Almost everything you do is a habit." 

...Almost all of our instincts about memory are wrong. We feel like creatures of free will, with detailed and unlimited recall of those events that have helped to form us as individuals.

In reality, most of our behavior is composed of learned, subconscious habits and skills with only a thin veneer of decision-making at the surface.

Our recollection of specific events is unreliable and subject to further distortion every time we recall them. Our memories of facts and concepts are only marginally better. When asked about how confident we are about the veracity of a particular memory, our estimation bears no relationship to the truth.

We feel like we can learn more and more with no limit, yet intensive training in one type of memory seems to degrade our ability to store some other forms of memory.

Our memories are suboptimal, and yet we hold them close. They feel true and important. They are central to our sense of individuality and agency. The mismatch between how we revere our memories and how often they fail is striking.

Why we should feel more agency than we really have is an interesting and open question. I tend to see it as more of a feature than a bug.

When we feel that we are in charge of our behavior, that we are making decisions based on accurate recollection, this allows for more rapid decision-making in those cases of the "thin sliver of cognitive deliberation" where it is truly required.

In other words, when we don't have to stop and second-guess whether we are in charge, we can be decisive when it really matters.

Sexual orientation. There have now been several large-scale anonymous surveys of sexual orientation performed using random sampling in the United States and Europe.

They indicate that approximately 3 percent of men and 1 percent of women identify as consistently homosexual, about 0.5 percent of men and 1 percent of women as bisexual, and the remainder heterosexual.

...Ask a straight man, "When did you decide to be straight?" and he'll likely answer that it didn't feel like a decision at all, but rather like a deep compulsion that became evident around puberty or before.

Gay and bi men will give the same answer: in one survey in the United States, only about 4 percent of all gay and bi men reported that they chose their sexual orientation -- the rest felt that they were "born that way."

...If sexual orientation had no heritable component, we'd expect that the percentage of twin pairs where both are gay would be roughly the same for fraternal and identical twins. 

Conversely, if sexual orientation were entirely determined by genes, then every gay identical twin would have a gay twin sibling.

The best estimates to date, from a population of 3,826 randomly selected twin pairs in Sweden, indicate that about 20 percent of the variance in sexual orientation in women is determined by genes; in men, it's about 40 percent.

...The conclusion is that genetic variation is one factor in determining sexual orientation, but it is far from the whole story and it is a somewhat stronger effect in men than in women.

As always, it's important to remind ourselves that these estimates of heritability are measures for populations, not individuals. 

It may be that there are some individual women and men who carry gene variants such that their sexual orientation is entirely genetically determined, and others for whom their sexual orientation has no genetic contribution whatsoever.

As with all behavioral traits, there is no single gene that determines human sexual orientation. Rather, many different genes each appear to make a small contribution, and at present we do not have a useful list of these genes. 

We don't know what we don't know until it's too late

My mind, like God, works in mysterious ways. Of course, the big difference between my mind and God is that I, along with my mind, actually can be shown to exist.

At any rate, this morning I found myself thinking along this line. If you consider that this shows I'm questionably sane, I'd be the first to agree with you.

I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. So have you, I'm confident. But from here on I'm going to use "I" to refer to myself as an example that applies to almost everybody.

The problem is, those mistakes have only been evident after the fact. Meaning, after I'd already done what, a bit or a lot later, I regretted doing. 

So at the time I did what turned out to be a mistake, my mind was feeling that I was doing the right thing.

This is obvious, because if I'd had a feeling that I was doing the wrong thing, I would have stopped and tried to figure out what needed to be done right.

Now, this shows that it is really difficult for me to not do the wrong thing, since there's no warning light in my mind that flashes when I'm heading off the right track.

My Subaru Crosstrek, on the other hand, makes a chirp when I cross the center line of the road. In that sense, my car is smarter than I am.

On the positive side -- assuming there's something positive in doing wrong -- it's hard for me to blame myself when I didn't know that I was screwing up at the time, only later.

Hard, yet not impossible, because I often do berate myself for not recognizing what I should have done differently.

I then pondered the question of what to do about this vicious circle of not knowing that I don't know what I should be doing until it is too late to do anything differently.

At first I thought it would be possible to carefully consider alternative ways of doing something before I did it, to have a better chance of doing the right thing rather than the wrong thing.

But there's several problems with this.

One is that it would take too much time, even if I only did this for new or unusual things that needed doing. Washing dishes, for example, is so habitual and familiar, I rarely mess it up. 

By contrast, last Saturday I changed the oil in our generator after it had been running for most of the day during a full week after an an ice storm caused massive power outages in Oregon. 

I got the warm oil draining into a quart yogurt container and figured I had time to change the air cleaner on the other side of the generator. When I went back to the oil change side, the container had started to overflow with oil.

I immediately thought, "That was stupid of me." Yet at the time I had no thought that taking my eye off of the draining oil was going to cause a problem. 

So is it possible to eliminate our screw-ups when we have no idea that we're doing something wrong? No. Screwing up comes with being human. I do feel, though, that focusing on doing one thing at a time reduces the chance of a screw-up.

If I'd patiently watched the oil drain into the yogurt container instead of changing the air cleaner simultaneously, I would have been able to prevent the minor oil spill onto our carport cement.

However, no matter how carefully we try to do things, frequently we'll find that we've done something wrong. In that case, compassion appears to be in order.

After all, few of us consciously set out to mess something up. Almost everybody tries to do the right thing, even if it seems clear to almost everybody else that we did the wrong thing. Thus self-compassion is as important as compassion for others. 

Often we just don't know. And we don't know that we don't know. Neither do the other people who don't know that they don't know.

If the person in the car ahead of me knew that their left-turn blinker has been on for several blocks, I'm confident they would have turned it off. So they're not trying to irritate me by pretending they're turning left, yet never do.

They, like me frequently, are just caught in the grip of not knowing that they don't know.

This, of course, gets us into the much larger question of free will. Along with many, if not most, neuroscientists, after a lot of reading about how modern science looks upon free will, I don't believe it exists.

Which doesn't stop me from getting upset when generator oil being changed overflows a yogurt container. I do, though have a more philosophical attitude when I do something that, in retrospect, I wish I hadn't done.

Since there is no free will, "responsibility" needs to be redefined

Over on his Waking Up app, Sam Harris has posted a series of podcasts regarding the absence of free will -- a subject Harris has frequently written and talked about. 

The titles provide a feel for Harris' subject matter.

(1) Cause & Effect
(2) Thoughts Without a Thinker
(3) Choice, Reason, & Knowledge
(4) Love & Hate
(5) Crime & Punishment
(6) The Paradox of Responsibility
(7) Why Do Anything?

Today I listened to the talk about responsibility. Harris made a lot of sense, as he always does.

When we think about someone acting responsibly, such as by telling the truth, there's several assumptions underlying the usual way people look upon the meaning of "responsible."

Most obviously, if I am responsible for an action, this means that I was the one who carried out the action. This is akin to a parent saying to her three children, upon noticing that a dish has been broken, "Who is responsible for this?"

But the meaning Harris talked about involves whether someone could have done an action differently. An example Harris used was a golfer missing a short putt.

Given my putting skills, it wouldn't be a surprise if I missed a three foot putt. However, Harris said that if the top-ranked golfer in the world misses a short putt, questions are going to be asked: What went wrong? How did this happen? Could the golfer have done better?

The first two questions fall within how Harris views free will. Namely, that it doesn't exist. Causes and effects make the world go 'round, including making skilled golfers miss short putts occasionally. Maybe something distracted the golfer, so his mind was elsewhere.

That would answer the "how" question. We're left with the question of whether the golfer could have done better, if he could have made the putt.

Not if the state of every atom in the universe, including the golfer's brain, was in the same state as when he missed the putt. Exactly the same causes are going to produce exactly the same effects. There's no immaterial free will genie inside our head who can conjure up a different outcome from precisely the same inputs.

So if somehow the golfer had been able to return in time to the moment he was about to attempt the putt, the same thing would have happened. He would miss the putt. 

Where does this leave the second notion about responsibility, that the golfer could have made the putt if he had just tried harder? That would be true if the golfer's brain was different from the state it was in when he failed to sink the putt. 

If the golfer had been more focused, more attentive, more relaxed, more something, then the outcome of the putt could have been different. But this assumes that time travel is possible, that the golfer could change the past to fashion a more satisfying result -- a successful three-foot putt.

But this isn't possible, so it is senseless for someone to say, "That top-ranked golfer is responsible for missing a short putt." Sure, as noted above the golfer moved the club that struck the ball that failed to go into the hole, so in that sense he was responsible.

However, in no way was the golfer at fault for not doing something that could have been done differently, because there always is only one thing going on in reality: whatever is going on. 

Harris notes that since free will doesn't exist, this should make us look upon criminals in a more enlightened fashion. Just as the golfer did the only thing he was able to do, so is a murderer; so is a thief; so is any other sort of law breaker. 

Unfortunately, the legal system is founded on a mistaken belief that a person could have acted differently, if they had chosen to do so. This makes punishment a primary motivation since it is assumed that a criminal deserves to be held responsible for their actions. A more enlightened view would see that prevention of future crimes is a better goal, which might require keeping a person in prison during a hoped-for rehabilitation period. 

Of course, that isn't guaranteed. But it is worth a try, since punishment makes no sense if free will is an illusion.

It would be akin to punishing a baby for pooping in its diaper. That's what babies do. They have no choice. Likewise, punishing a grizzly bear for attacking a human makes no sense, since the bear had no choice.

I find this view of responsibility to be highly appealing.

All of us can think of things in our past that we wish we had done differently. That sense of regret is healthy if it motivates us to perform wiser actions in the future. But it is unhealthy if we revisit past mistakes, believing that it would've been possible for us to have behaved more responsibly. 

No, that wasn't possible. Missed putts can't be redone, nor can anything else.

We can learn from our mistakes. We can't undo them. Only in our imagination is it possible to have done this rather than that. In the real world, there is only what actually happened, not what might have happened in an alternative reality.

So forgive yourself for what you regret. There's no real need to do this, given that you could only have done what you actually did. However, it might make you feel better to say to yourself what a good friend would say to you: "Don't be hard on yourself; it wasn't your responsibility."

Brian Greene: "Behavior is fully governed by physical law"

I love the idea that free will is an illusion.

Sure, for each of us it feels like we can freely choose what to do. But as I've observed numerous times before, it also feels like the earth stands still and the sun sets, which is another illusion.

So if we want to know reality as it is, not as how we consider it to be, it's important to not overly trust our subjective perceptions, because that can lead us astray.

I've continued to enjoy my reading of Brian Greene's new book, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe." Today I finished the Particles and Consciousness chapter, which has a section on free will that made great good sense to me.

Both rationally and emotionally. 

Emotionally, it just is so much more appealing to know that I, and you, and everybody, am not an isolated independent actor who writes my own lines in the play of life. Rather, we are parts of a unified whole, the universe. What we do isn't up to us, but to an amazingly vast interconnected web of causes and effects.

Here's how Greene cogently describes an argument that "knocks free will back on its heels."

Your experiences and mine appear to confirm that we influence the unfolding of reality through actions that reflect our freely willed thoughts, desires, and decisions. Yet, maintaining our physicalist stance, you and I are nothing but constellations of particles whose behavior is fully governed by physical law.

Our choices are the result of our particles coursing one way or another through our brains. Our actions are the results of our particles moving this way or that through our bodies. And all particle motion -- whether in a brain, a body, or a baseball -- is controlled by physics and so is fully dictated by mathematical decree.

The equations determine the state of our particles today based on their state yesterday, with no opportunity for any of us to end-run the mathematics and freely shape, or mold, or change the lawful unfolding.

Indeed, following this chain ever further back, the big bang is the ultimate source of all particles, and their behavior over cosmic history has been dictated by the nonnegotiable and insensate laws of physics, which determine the structure and function of everything that exists.

Our sense of individuality, value, and esteem rest on our autonomy. But faced with the intransigence of physical law, autonomy withdraws. We are no more than playthings knocked to and fro by the dispassionate rules of the cosmos. 

Sounds good to me. I've got no problem with being a cosmic plaything. But why does it seem otherwise to us? Greene has an answer.

Our choices seem free because we do not witness the operation of nature's laws in the world of particles. Our senses and our reasoning focus on everyday human scales and actions: we think about the future, compare courses of action, and weigh possibilities.

As a result, when our particles do act, it seems to us that their collective behaviors emerge from our autonomous choices.

However, if we had the superhuman vision invoked earlier and were able to analyze everyday reality at the level of its fundamental constituents, we would recognize that our thoughts and behaviors amount to complex processes of shifting particles that yield a powerful sense of free will but are fully governed by physical law.

So what's the difference between a human and a rock, given that each is fully governed by physical law? Here's how Greene addresses this important question in a persuasive fashion.

Within the rock there's just not a whole lot going on. What makes you special is that your sophisticated internal organization allows for a rich spectrum of behavioral responses. 

The point, then, is that when evaluating free will there is much to be gained by shifting attention from a narrow focus on ultimate cause to a broader perusal of human response. Our freedom is not from physical laws that are beyond our ability to affect. 

Our freedom is to exhibit behaviors -- leaping, thinking, imagining, observing, deliberating, explaining, and so on -- that are not available to most other collections of particles. Human freedom is not about willed choice. Everything science has so far revealed has only strengthened the case that such volitional intercession in the unfolding of reality does not exist.

Instead, human freedom is about being released from the bondage of an impoverished range of response that has long constrained the behavior of the inanimate world.

Thomas Nagel on why free will doesn't exist

I'm really enjoying my decision to buy a used copy of Thomas Nagel's The View from Nowhere via Amazon. But after reading the "Freedom" chapter this morning, I'm convinced that I didn't freely choose to buy the book.

It felt that way to me, though. Which doesn't mean a whole lot, truth-wise, because reality is what it is, not how we consider it to be.

I've written a lot about free will on this blog. (You can find those posts by using the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

I don't believe it exists. Neither do many neuroscientists and philosophers, including Nagel. Pleasingly, he approaches this subject in a different way than other people whose writings on free will I've read and enjoyed. Yet he comes to the same basic conclusion.

Free will as commonly conceived is highly unlikely, if not impossible. Here's a passage that encapsulates Nagel's basic approach to this question.

I wish to act not only in light of the external circumstances facing me and the possibilities that they leave open, but in light of the internal circumstances as well: my desires, beliefs, feelings, and impulses. I wish to be able to subject my motives, principles, and habits to critical examination, so that nothing moves me to action without my agreeing to it.

In this way, the setting against which I act is gradually enlarged and extended inward, till it includes more and more of myself, considered as one of the contents of the world.

In its earliest stages the process does genuinely seem to increase freedom, by making self-knowledge and objectivity part of the basis of action. But the danger is obvious.

The more completely the self is swallowed up in the circumstances of action, the less I have to act with. I cannot get completely outside myself. The process that starts as a means to the enlargement of freedom seems to lead to its destruction.

When I contemplate the world as a whole I see my actions, even at their empirically most "free," as part of the course of nature, and this is not my doing or anyone else's. The objective self is not in a position to pull the strings of my life from outside any more than TN [Thomas Nagel] is.

At the end of the path that seems to lead to freedom and knowledge lie skepticism and helplessness. We can act only from inside the world, but when we see ourselves from outside, the autonomy we experience from inside appears as an illusion, and we who are looking from outside cannot act at all.

Part of what Nagel is getting at here is that human actions are determined by a host of influences outside of our control. Genetics. Culture. Education. Experiences of many varieties. Society. Other people. Unconscious influences. Emotions. Instincts. Nature. And more besides.

From the inside, most of us feel that we're freely choosing to act. However, when we look at other people, it is easy to think "They're acting that way because of _______," with that blank being filled by many possibilities of determining factors. 

That's easy to do, because we view other people much more objectively than we view ourselves. Yet as Nagel says, when we subject our own actions to the same sort of analysis we apply to others, it becomes obvious that we are equally influenced by factors beyond our control.

I don't have a problem with that. 

Being strongly inclined to philosophical Taoism and Buddhism (leaving out their religious aspects), I like the idea of being a humble part of the whole, a tiny bubble of being whose movements are directed not by me (whoever that is), but by my interactions with the big wide world that surrounds me.

Sure, like almost everyone I have a feeling that I'm free to choose what to do, think, and such. However, I also have a feeling that the sun sets, which also is an illusion, since actually it is our planet which is moving.

Nagel has some ideas about how to deal with the fact that it is very difficult to avoid feeling that we possess free will, in much the same way that it is very difficult to avoid feeling "the sun is setting" -- even if someone is an astronomer. 

Here's part of what Nagel has to say on this subject.

We might try, first, to develop as complete an objective view of ourselves as we can, and include it in the basis of our actions, wherever it is relevant. This would mean consistently looking over our own shoulders at what we are doing and why (though often it will be a mere formality).

But this objective self-surveilance will inevitably be incomplete, since some knower must remain behind the lens if anything is to be known. 

Moreover, each of us knows this -- knows that some of the sources of his actions are not objects of his attention and choice. The objective view of ourselves includes both what we can know and can use, and what we know that we do not know, and therefore know that we cannot use.

Let me call this the essentially incomplete objective view, or incomplete view, for short. The incomplete view of ourselves in the world includes a large blind spot, behind our eyes, so to speak, that hides something we cannot take into account in acting, because it is what acts.

Yet this blind spot is part of our objective picture of the world, and to act from as far out as possible we must to some extent include a recognition of it in the basis of our actions.

(My first post about Nagel's book is here.)

Fated to become who we are, each of us is marvelously unique

I'm fascinated by the subject of free will. Or more accurately, the lack thereof. 

As noted in countless (more or less) blog posts I've written about free will, the arguments in favor of determinism strike me as much stronger than a belief in some sort of magic free will fairy dust that, poof!, somehow makes it possible for us humans to transcend our genetics, experiences, culture, education, upbringing, and so much else that has caused us to become the person we are now.

My latest foray into this subject is Hannah Critchlow's book, "The Science of Fate: Why Your Future is More Predictable Than You Think." 

Critchlow doesn't focus much on free will, per se, but rather on specific examples of how factors outside of our control affect us.

So rather than taking free will on directly, as authors such as Sam Harris have done, she makes a case for fate by discussing how, for example, something so seemingly ethereal as love and sexual attraction can be persuasively explained by goings-on in the brain and body.

I've read almost all of the book and have been enjoying it. Here's a couple of passages from The Cooperative Brain chapter that I came across today. They provide a good overview of the book's central theme.

Namely, even though we're not really in control of who we are, what we do, and what happens to us, the astonishing complexity of the human brain assures that each of us is very much unique.

The latest neuroscience breathes new life into the concept of fate by situating it at the core of what we increasingly believe makes us who we are: our brain. It shows us that we are born with our behavioural propensities already sketched out.

Neurobiology and environment then work in tandem to to keep us inking in the lines of the sketch, finessing the detail in order to produce the full picture of our life.

In seven chapters we've been following the thread of an argument that goes something like this: the brain we are born with, the product of millennia of evolutionary forces, is subject to many species-wide characteristics but shaped by our unique genetic blueprint.

Our early years tend to cement our proclivities through considerable exposure to an environment that has typically been created by our parents, from whom we inherited those tendencies in the first place.

Given that our brains filter information on the basis of prior experience, our present and future reality is based on an avalanching amplification of what has happened before. 

We end up stuck in the version of reality that our brain has constructed, a simulation that has moulded itself to fit our expectations. Much of the time we dwell there quite happily but occasionally we feel its constraints or notice its glitches.

We are unhappy and can't shake the mood. We try to change a habit and may struggle for a while before giving up. Or we try to change somebody else's mind, which doesn't end well. We bump up against the constraints that govern our selfhood, other people's and our version of the world.

The experience can be frustrating. Misunderstanding, resentment and aggression may result. That's just human nature, you may say. We're fated to struggle with ourselves and each other, and most of the time we struggle in vain.

... During the course of researching and writing this book I've ended up convinced of something I hadn't entirely anticipated: that there's no such thing as human nature. Not really.

Yes, we share species-wide characteristics; sure, biology is deterministic at an individual level to a huge degree, but to say we are collectively this, that or the other is yet another over-simple model. It denies the glorious complexity and flexibility on offer to us as our brains, those billions of unique models of reality, encounter one another.

Our brains provide us with a fantastic paradox.

We are primed to seek out patterns in our environment; we comprehend the world by categorising, simplifying and making assumptions, based on what we have experienced before. This skill helps us to take shortcuts in information-processing, meaning we retain the phenomenal speed at which our brains can make calculations, judge situations and direct our decisions.

Yet it is precisely this architecture of the brain, its flexibility, its intricacy, its dynamism, that means every person on this planet is a true individual with the scope to exhibit such wide complexity of behaviours arising from the 100 trillion connections in their mind.

This ever-changing landscape of complex neural circuitry, which is driven to seek patterns, ironically means that attempting to categorise people by simplifying their behaviours to binary brackets is nonsensical, since the scope for variation in perceiving reality and complexity of thoughts and behaviours is so vast.

"On Having No Head" has a few simple truths

On Having No Head is a book by D.E. Harding. I'd bought and read it quite a few years ago. Then, when I needed to weed out unwanted books to make room for more, On Having No Head was given away. 

Recently, though, I heard Sam Harris speak about the book in his Waking Up iPhone app, so I decided to re-buy and re-read it. Here's my review, which is of a second edition of the book that contains a "Bringing the story up to date" section that was written over forty years after Harding wrote the first edition.

My main problem with On Having No Head is the problem that I have with all books about personal spiritual breakthroughs or realizations. In the early days of my churchlessness, I was more interested in stories of how someone uncovered the Secret of the Universe. 

As late as 2006 I was recommending books that now I'm much more skeptical about. Why? Because I've got a better understanding of how the human mind works -- the result of both my own experiences with meditation, and a lot of reading about modern neuroscience and psychology. 

Here's the short version of what Harding experienced on a walk in the Himalayas, after he realized that he wasn't seeing his head (excerpt for a part of his nose).

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it as, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me," unstained by any observer. It's total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious.

OK. I have no doubt that Harding had a breathtaking experience. But here's the thing: like he said, his revelation was of the perfectly obvious. Yesterday I jotted down a note about something Sam Harris said in lesson 28 of the guided meditations in his  Waking Up course.

You're the space in which everything appears. Everything is already happening. All you are is consciousness and its contents.

These three sentences are pretty much the gist of Harding's book. They indeed are perfectly obvious. Everything in the world, or indeed the entire universe, the Himalayas included, has to appear in our consciousness if we are to be aware of it. How else would we know anything?

But here's some facts about the human brain and mind (the mind is the brain in action, basically) that Harding doesn't address in On Having No Head, either because he wasn't aware of them, or chose not to mention them. 

(1) The brain has no feeling. This allows surgeons to operate on the brain while a patient is conscious. So we aren't aware of what our hundred billion or so brain cells are doing in the same way we feel our muscles contracting, our fingers touching something, or our stomach digesting a heavy meal. 

(2) In the quotation above, and elsewhere in his book, Harding speaks of a "vast emptiness" of consciousness. This may be how it feels to us, but that isn't reality. When Harding looked at the view of the Himalayas, his brain was busily piecing together data from his optic nerves, integrating it with past memories/experiences, and presenting him with what he calls a "superb scene." Visual perception isn't a passive mirroring of the world. It involves a lot of brain activity. 

In the updated part of his book, Harding does speak about some neuroscientific truths: there is no evidence for an independent "self" within the brain/mind, nor does it appear that we humans possess free will, which seemingly would require the aforementioned self that doesn't exist. 

Here's what Harding says in his Bringing the Story Up to Date section about his final stage of "The Eight Stages of the Headless Way." It's called (8) The Breakthrough.

This amounts to a profound declaration of intent. It is the realization at gut level (so to say) that one's deepest desire is that all shall be as it is -- seeing that it all flows from one's true Nature, the Aware Space here. 

How is this breakthrough actually made? What can one do to bring it nearer?

In a sense, nothing. It's not a doing, but an undoing, a giving up, an abandonment of the false belief that there's anyone here to abandon. What else is there to do?

After all, one's initial in-seeing -- no matter how "brief" and "shallow" -- was already total self-surrender: everything here went: or rather, it was clear there's nothing here to go. It was the essential quantum leap from the fiction of egocentricity to the fact of zerocentricity. 

And for sure the faithful day-to-day seeing put in since then -- the seeing that already one is Nothing and Everything -- is a most valuable preparation for the discovery that at the deepest level one already wills Nothing and Everything. 

Now, Harding goes on to talk about an unconditional surrender to God's will in which we welcome all that the world is bringing to us. But as noted above, his insight also can be framed as a realization that there is no self residing within our psyche, and there is no free will belonging to that nonexistent self.

Which is fully in accord with how Sam Harris understands the human brain/mind, which explains why Harris is a fan of Harding's book.

Let's explore the subtleties of determinism

This comment interchange on a recent post begs for further discussion. Which I'll start off below after sharing a screenshot of the interchange.

Taking JB's second comment first, I understand why he feels this way -- that this blog is the wrong place for discussing "these kinds of subtle, abstract notions."

Despite the name of this blog, many commenters are fervent believers in some form of religion, and they aren't very open to talking about ideas that challenge the tenets of their religion. But I started this blog 14 years ago with the intent of fostering just the sort of discussion that JB talks about.

So let's see if we can discuss the admittedly subtle, abstract notion of determinism without resorting to religious, philosophical, or supernatural platitudes.

I'd put Spence Tepper's comment in that category. Determinism doesn't make a case for God. Most religions that believe in some form of divine being believe in some form of human free will. And even if someone argues this point, the very notion of God is extremely arguable. 

Thus let's leave God out of this discussion of determinism.

Let's also dismiss Tepper's stark assertion that free will exists for humankind, which also is highly debatable, since most of the scientific evidence argues otherwise. Further, it is difficult to see how free will can coexist with determinism. Is Tepper really suggesting that the universe is deterministic, but humans have free will?

If so, where does that free will come from? God? A soul? But we're going to leave out God and other unproven supernatural entities, so that argument has zero credibility.

Let's return, then, to JB's provocative first comment.

I found it provocative because it makes me think, and that's a good thing. I've read and written a lot about free will and determinism. But this is a fresh idea for me: that determinism carries within it an inherent contradiction, because its apparent trueness can't be the reason someone holds that belief.

I look forward to JB speaking more about this, either in a comment or in an email message to me that I could share. Here's how I see what he said, which may or may not be close to what his understanding is. Because this indeed is subtle territory, I'll sort of circle around this issue in various ways.

(1) If determinism is true, and I believe it is, nothing exists outside of its bounds. This includes a belief in free will and a disbelief in determinism. Those also would be determined by prior causes and effects, as would a belief that determinism holds sway in the universe.

(2) Chance, to my understanding, is unknown determinism. "Chaos theory" isn't actually chaotic in the usual sense of the term. It simply refers to complex systems dominated by feedback loops in which small effects can have large causes, and it is impossible for humans to understand the dynamics of the system in sufficient detail to predict its behavior. But chaos theory is deterministic.

(3) Quantum mechanics may appear to be a refuge for genuine chance. However, as I've written about recently, no one knows the underlying meaning of quantum phenomena. Some theories (many worlds, for example) are deterministic. The Copenhagen interpretation isn't. Regardless, determinism seems to rule in the realm of everyday objects, which is where we live.

(4) I agree with JB that trueness alone can't be the reason someone accepts determinism. That would be only one among many different causes that lead to someone, like JB and me, embracing the idea of a deterministic universe. However, a longing for scientific objective truth is stronger in some people than in others. Even if this longing is determined, not freely willed, it still is a causative factor in how people look upon the world.

(5) Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book called "I Am a Strange Loop." I loved the title. I spent two years in a Systems Science Ph.D. program. Back then (1970's), and also now, feedback loops were recognized as a valid way of conceptualizing how the world works. 

(6) Loops can exist within loops. A belief or a feeling that free will is true can exist within a larger deterministic loop. For example, I believe in determinism, yet in my daily life I have a feeling that I act and choose freely. This is akin to me knowing that the Earth rotates around its axis, yet I feel "the sun is setting" when I see it sinking below the horizon. 

(7) Maybe this is what Tepper is referring to when he spoke of both determinism and free will existing. If so, I agree that we can have knowledge that X is true, yet wrongly have a feeling that Y is true. This is why science is our best way of knowing, since feelings and intuition can lead us astray.

(8) Many books I read accurately say that evolution and natural selection don't care about truth, they care about survival and passing on a being's genetic heritage. This might be part of what JB is getting at. Finding truth isn't an inherent stand-alone motivation for us humans. Even scientists (or especially scientists) acknowledge this.

(9) So again, science and reason are our best means of determining what is true about the world. Discussion, experimentation, hypothesis testing, skeptical questioning -- this is how we overcome human biases and blind spots. On our own, we always will be bound by our personal subjectivity. 

Well, this is a start toward a discussion of the subtleties of determinism.

Feel free to weigh in on what JB, Spence Tepper, and I have said on this subject. Just leave God and supernaturalism out of the comments. Think for yourself. Use reason and evidence to make your case, not faith or feelings.

Modern science is more mystical than ancient mysticism

For many years, about 37, I was deeply attracted to mysticism. One of the reasons was that I loved how mystic teachings taught the self was an illusion and our sense of free will masked God's overarching control over all things, including human actions.

But gradually I realized the downsides of mysticism. There was no demonstrable evidence that God or anything supernatural existed. And my love of science eventually led me to embrace reality, rather than religion -- of which mysticism is an offshoot.

Now, though, I've come to a pleasing conclusion: modern science actually is more mystical than ancient mysticism, so scientific reality contains a big part of what I found so appealing in supernaturalism.

I've started re-reading Paul Singh's fascinating book, "The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self." I was drawn to do this after seeing a mention of the book in a recent comment on one of my posts,  which caused me to order a copy from Amazon.

When the book arrived, it looked familiar.

Indeed, it didn't take me long to find a highly highlighted copy on a bookshelf. So I'm going to give the new Amazon copy to my wife for sharing with members of an atheist/freethinkers discussion group she's organized here in Salem, Oregon.

I decided to re-read the book even though I'd written several blog posts about it in 2016:
No dragon in the garage. Also, no God in heaven.
Free will exists. Freedom of the will doesn't.

I've found that because my views on science, the world, and reality keep evolving (good thing!), often I'll get fresh insights from a book I've enjoyed even if I read it fairly recently. 

Such is happening already with The Great Illusion after re-reading only the Preface and the first chapter, Only God's Will. What struck me today is how modern science is able to dispel illusions (maya, if you like) in a much more powerful and convincing way than mysticism.

Here's how Paul Singh describes himself:

Paul Singh is a biochemist, mathematician, surgeon-physician, and a urogynecologist. He is a scholar of eastern and western intellectual traditions. He is a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the College of Medicine at the University of Science, Arts and Technology at Montserrat, British West Indies.

And here's some excerpts from his book about how us humans are deceived about the true nature of free will and the self:

My lifelong research has confirmed what modern science has shown -- that free will, consciousness, and the self are illusions... Consciousness is any qualitative first-person experience. The feelings that you get when you pinch yourself, drink a glass of water, or feel bored are examples of consciousness.

Consciousness is certainly a fact (you who are reading this sentence are obviously conscious at this moment), but modern brain research suggests very strongly that consciousness cannot exist without a brain.

...Although it is correct to say that we have barely touched upon the perplexing complexity of the human brain, we have come far enough in our understanding that we can declare with confidence that these three entities -- free will, consciousness, and the self -- do not have any independent existence of their own independent of the human brain. 

Their illusory existence is dependent upon the brain just like a mirage is dependent upon the brain and possesses no independent reality of its own. 

Singh then talks about how evolution has given rise to our sense of individual identity, which includes the false notion of "souls" or "spirits" that supposedly enable our identity to live on even after the death of the physical body. Of course, religious and mystical beliefs also are products of the brain. So the brain generates the illusion that consciousness can exist without the brain.

It's impossible to escape from this hall of mirrors by any means other than modern science. Singh writes:

First, the beliefs, that have been found to be illusions by science, are essential for human survival. Since we cannot think any other way than to believe that we are, somehow, independent of our bodies, such a belief must have played an important role in our evolutionary past.

We don't know where the "I" or "self" resides, but we all feel there is such a self. That is what led philosophers for thousands of years to think there is a "ghost in the machine." Ancient Hindus wrote thousands of treatises on this subject and they are still writing them today. But science has demonstrated that these philosophers and religious thinkers were all wrong.

What scientists discover through the scientific method is often counter-intuitive. In the absence of science, we often draw unwarranted conclusions, based on simple observations, frequently mixing our emotions with our observations... The brain determines subjective experience in exactly the same way it determines all other bodily functions. 

...We like to think of ourselves as being something other than our bodies, but actually, as modern science has shown, we are our bodies, You are your body; you wouldn't be you without your body wired together with your brain. Without your brain, you wouldn't be you. 

Everything about you as a person can be explained by what goes on in your brain. Who you are and what you are like, all of your emotions and every one of your ideas, how you think and what you think about, and our own personal story, come from your brain. You would have no idea of your own existence without your brain.

The body you will leave behind when you die will carry your name, because it was your body, and not someone else's. The very possibility of imagining that you can float free of your body is conceivable only because it is your brain that thinks these things. 

...Your inner self, your soul, and the god you worship are nothing else but your own brain interconnected with the rest of your body.

So what's the way out of this brain maze, which sometimes leads us to a correct understanding of reality, yet also leads us astray when it comes to believing in God, soul, spirit, free will, life after death, and the nature of consciousness? Science!

The brain doesn't have the job of "speaking up" and revealing what it does, and the conscious awareness that the brain does produce cannot automatically seem organic or even physical. Only through studying the brain scientifically can we explain why we aren't normally alerted to innumerable details about what our brains are doing as we go about living our lives.

In a way, projecting what is sensed and thought into an alternative sort of reality was something that the human brain had to do as intelligence grew. 

...Because science arrived late to the human scene, non-scientific explanations had plenty of time to get entrenched in so many stories that humans have been telling themselves, and the concepts in these stories got embedded in the languages we all learn to speak as children,

...For people, "mind" has most of the same meanings that "spirit' had millennia ago, and most people today expect mind to share in the same destiny as spirit. 

But what seems like undeniable common sense, confirmed by our intuitions and assumed by the ordinary words we speak, is really just a built-up web of imaginative notions that developed over the long course of ordinary human events, hardened by regular use as people lived out their mundane paths in life.

Those notions and fabulous stories conveying them have made many people feel extremely special, perhaps so special that it can seem as if the whole of creation is really about them.

Your brain is quite real. What the brain is busily doing in so many special ways must be largely hidden from awareness. Our innate curiosity can raise good questions about what is going on. After that, however, only science can responsibly investigate what the brain actually does and how it accomplishes all the special things it can do.

The true story of the human brain is more amazing than anything imagined before.

Nicely said, Dr. Singh.

What Singh talks about in his book isn't all that different from what I've read in many other books about neuroscience, the illusion of free will, and how consciousness arises in the brain. 

But reading the excerpts I've shared led to a more solid realization in my own brain that all of mysticism, all of meditation, all of religion, all of everything, is the product of nerve cells firing in the marvelously complex cranium of us Homo sapiens. 

Our clear understanding of reality, along with the illusions that confuse us -- all this arises from a single source: the human brain. There is no way a brain can understand itself, since most of what transpires in the brain occurs outside of conscious awareness.

So modern science is the only way to reveal the secrets that lie hidden within us. Not mysticism, because mystics are subject to the same illusions regarding free will, consciousness, and the self that everyone else is. Yes, meditation can result in different brain states. 

But so can drugs, extreme sports, a walk under the night sky, loving someone deeply, and so much else. There's no way out of the maze of the brain except through the collaboration of many brains working together to cut through illusion and reveal reality.

Which is a damn good description of modern science. 

Free will is a religious delusion, not an atheist one

After writing a recent post about the illusion of free will, "Simple task shows why free will is an illusion," a comment on the post included this:

Mind blown because I assumed atheists believed in free will too. Thought the whole notion of not having free will was part of a mystical “everything is karma” sort of ideology.

Sam Harris, who thought up the simple task I described in the post, is both a noted atheist and a strong advocate for free will being an illusion. Or delusion.

Harris published "The End of Faith" in 2005. In 2012 he published "Free Will," which argues for its illusory nature. I've read and enjoyed both books, so to me it is perfectly natural that atheists don't believe in free will, since that describes me also -- an atheist who rejects the illusion of free will.

Today I listened to Part 2 of Harris' talk about free will on his Waking Up iPhone app. In it he describes a conversation he had with a rabbi. 

The rabbi told Harris that free must exist so humans can choose between doing good and evil. Plus, I assume, between believing in God and not believing in God. Here's a Judaic take on free will:

Free will in Judaism is the capacity to choose between different courses of actions, words or thoughts—not due to outside influence, internal nature or any sort of personal preference. Just a balanced choice between right and wrong.

This notion that human beings can exercise their own free will when making moral decisions is axiomatic to Judaism. And the conflict between human free will and the omnipotence of his Creator is a pervasive theme in the Jewish narrative of history.

...The Hebrew Bible is a story of G‑d’s interaction with man. G‑d rewards those who listen to His will and help perfect His world; He chastises those who disobey and destroy it. The choice to do one or the other is clearly in our hands. “Behold,” G‑d says, “I have placed before you good and evil, life and death. Choose life! Without a belief in free will, none of this would make sense. There could be no instructions, no reward, and no chastisement.

But as with all things relating to religiosity, there's a lot of confusion about how free will relates to God or the divine. Just scroll through the Wikipedia article, "Free will in theology," and you'll see what I mean. 

In both Western and Eastern religions there's much debate about how free will can coexist with God's omniscience/omnipotence, destiny, and such. Of course, this isn't surprising, since there is no evidence that God or a supernatural divinity even exists, so obviously this makes it tough to figure out how free will relates to a nonexistent entity.

With regard to atheism, I'm sure many atheists do believe in free will, since this is the default human condition.

Meaning, unless someone studies neuroscience and psychology, and carefully observes their own mind in the way Sam Harris describes in his "think of a movie" exercise, they're going to continue to believe they have free will, since this is how it seems to us (much as it seems the Sun rises and sets, while actually the Earth is rotating).

But as Harris observes in his Waking Up talks about free will, determinism is more compatible with an atheist view of reality. We don't choose our parents, and thus our genetic heritage. We don't choose the culture we grow up in. We don't choose the laws of nature. We don't choose the structure and functioning of our brain.

Yet all of these things, and so much more, affects how we think, feel, decide, and in general, look upon the world. Thus free will seems to require a dualistic conception of reality. 

This is reflected in the Wikipedia article mentioned above, which says that in Hinduism, Advaita (which is monistic) generally believes in a fate-based approach, while Dvaita (dualistic) schools are proponents of free will.

By and large, atheists view humans as being an integral part of nature, and of the universe. Whatever forces operate upon other entities in the world, these same forces impact human beings. I love this conception, because it points toward an inherent oneness and interdependency. 

In contrast, most religions view this world as a pale shadow of heavenly realms, and humanity as being "fallen" or sinful, and thus needing redemption by a savior, guru, spiritual guide, or whatever. Free will serves as a rationale for why a good God would leave humans in such a sorry state: we chose to distance ourselves from God, so now we're reaping the consequences of this bad decision.

This doesn't make sense, along with other aspects of religion. But religious believers accept a lot of theological nonsense, with a belief in free will being part of that dogma.

Just think about it: how could our will truly be free?

Meaning, not under the influence of our prior experiences, knowledge, values, desires, etc., etc. There would have to be some sort of free will fairy dust floating around inside our head that somehow stood completely apart from all of the causes both inside and outside of us that otherwise affect our thoughts and actions.

This is why dualism is the only refuge of those who believe in free will, because the human brain clearly operates under the dictates of the laws of nature. So religious believers imagine that a soul or spirit magically is responsible for our free will. Of course, as Sam Harris notes in his talks, we don't choose this soul. 

Thus as ridiculous as a belief in soul is, even this doesn't support a belief in free will. Nothing does, which is why most of us who embrace reality, rather than religion, consider free will to be an illusion.

Simple task shows why free will is an illusion

Just to polish up my enlightened state of being, which already was at a very high stage after listening to a guided "Daily Calm" meditation on my iPhone's Calm app for the last couple of years, about a week ago I decided to download Sam Harris' "Waking Up" app.

But after listening to the Free Will - Part One talk, I'm now convinced that the reason I just gave for getting the Waking Up app almost certainly isn't what caused me to do this. 

Which isn't really a surprise, since I've been fascinated by the notion of free will, especially the lack thereof, for a long time. You can use the Google search box in this blog's right sidebar to find my many posts on this subject (just type in "free will" and choose the HinesSight button).

Harris started out by saying that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. Meaning, while it often is said that we humans have the illusion of free will, Harris claims that we really have no reason to believe in that illusion.

To provide some experiential evidence of this, in his Waking Up talk Harris asked the listener (me, in this case) to think of a movie that I'd seen. Almost instantly, "Crazy Rich Asians" popped into my head. My wife and I had seen this movie recently. I'd liked it a lot. 

Then Harris asked the listener to think of two additional movies, one at a time, which I did. One was "Goldfinger," a movie I saw four times when I was in high school. Guess I had James Bond fantasies back then.

The operative word in what I just said is "guess," because Harris then correctly said that when the thought of a movie title appeared in my mind, there wasn't any conscious volition involved. I didn't think, "Now, what movie should I pick, and how should I go about picking it?"

Instead, the names of three movies simply appeared. Which shows that my brain was coming up with the movie titles on its own, outside of my conscious awareness, not via free will. 

I found a You Tube video where Sam Harris has an audience he's speaking to go through this exercise, with a similar sort of commentary as in the Waking Up app. See:

Now, what has this to do with religion, mysticism, or spirituality? That's a great question I just asked of myself. Here's some brief responses.

For one thing, it shows that when people try to explain why they believe in God, follow a certain religion, or whatever, there's little reason to accept that their answer is the true explanation. In fact, it's probably impossible to ever accurately determine why somebody did something, or believed something, or thought something. 

The human brain is hugely complex, and way beyond our capacity to comprehend.

Especially our own brain, since that brain is us, and we have no vantage point to study it from the outside. Harris seems to be on the right track when he says that all we're capable of is being aware of what arises in our consciousness -- not how it came to be there.

At the end of the video above, Harris (a philosophical neuroscientist) says that one of the best-proven facts in psychology is that people are terrible at offering up reasons for why they did something. We're addicted to explanations, so give reasons for our actions even when those reasons are demonstrably wrong.

This is humbling.

Which is great, since most of can use an extra dose of humility. Sure, we're not going to stop explaining to ourselves and others why we do what we do, but we can take ourselves less seriously (and less surely) once we understand how our brain works, and why free will is an illusion.

Lastly, and I've talked about this in previous blog posts, giving up a belief in free will should make us more compassionate and less judgmental. 

When we believe that someone (which includes ourself) could have done something other than what they actually did, this lays a foundation for negativity: anger, resentment, desire for punishment or retribution, disdain, disgust (I'm assuming here that what was done wasn't good, or at least didn't appear to be good).

Understand: giving up a belief in free will doesn't mean that we accept murder, rape, and other sorts of bad behavior. It simply means that just as we aren't able to control what pops into our head when asked to think of a movie we've seen, people also aren't able to control how they act toward others.

So we need to protect society from criminals, while not viewing them as "evil." That word makes no sense if free will is an illusion. (It also makes no sense if free will isn't an illusion.)

There's good reason to think we are zombies. I'm OK with that.

Ah, the stories we tell ourselves. About our self. Likely on planet Earth only we humans do this. Somehow our brains have evolved the capacity to conjure up stories featuring our favorite subject, Me, that often, if not usually, are far from the truth.

 

I've started reading a compelling book, “Selfie,” by Will Storr. Subtitle: “How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us."

 

In a chapter called The Tribal Self, Storr tells the tale of a gangster guy, John, in Great Britain who did despicable things, including  beating someone badly outside of a London nightclub, as mentioned in the passage from the book that I've shared below. 

 

Yet John managed to rationalize his behavior as not only being acceptable, but even exemplary, since he was standing up for the members of his "tribe." Which is what we all do, since culture has a much greater influence on us than we assume, given that, like fish, we swim in a cultural sea that is normally almost entirely invisible to us, since it both surrounds us and, to a large extent, is us. 

 

Below is a passage from that chapter that I really liked. Storr speaks here about subjects that I've read about in many other books  about modern neuroscience, yet rarely, if ever, expressed so clearly and passionately.

 

The passage starts off with a mention of our brain's "interpreter."

 

This isn't a language translator. Rather, it is, as Storr puts it, "...your internal monologue, the chatty voice that narrates it all, interpreting everything that's happening to you, discussing it with you, making theories about it, never shutting up."

 

This being a blog, where I write about stuff and other people comment on what I've written (or, as often happens, comment on something else entirely), there's a heck of a lot of interpreting going on. So read on to learn what modern neuroscience and psychology have to say about the stories we tell ourselves.


(The bad news is, we're zombies! And the good news is, we're zombies!)

Will Storr writes:

 

The disconcerting truth is that we all have interpreters narrating our lives, and they’re all just guessing. We all confabulate, all the time. We’re moving around the world, doing things and feeling things and saying things, for myriad unconscious reasons, whilst a specific part of the brain constantly strives to create a makes-sense narrative of what we’re up to and why. 

 

But the voice has no direct access to the real reasons we do anything. It doesn’t really know why we feel the things we feel and why we do the things we do. It’s making it up. 

 

Since these experiments [with split-brain patients], study after study has demonstrated ordinary, everyday confabulation in non-split-brain participants. My favourite involves people who were shown two photos of the opposite sex and asked to choose which they were most attracted to. The photos were then placed face down and, with a magician’s sleight of hand, switched.

 

The photos were then shown again, now in the wrong positions. Incredibly, only 17 per cent of of participants noticed that they’d  been switched. Those that didn’t notice were asked to give a detailed explanation as to why they’d found this person more attractive, as opposed to the other one. They merely confabulated away, listing all the reasons, even though they were actually describing the wrong person.

 

Our brains invent stories like this because they want to make us feel like we’re in control of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. The guesses the interpreter makes might be right. But they might just as easily be wrong. 

 

‘When we set out to explain our actions, they are all post-hoc explanations using post-hoc observations with no access to nonconscious processing,’ writes Gazzaniga. Any inconvenient facts that don’t fit with the interpreter’s story are ignored or suppressed. ‘That “you” that you’re so proud of is a story woven together by your interpreter module to account for as much of your behaviour as it can incorporate, and it denies and rationalizes the rest.’

 

All this means that ‘listening to people’s explanations for their actions is interesting but often a waste of time.'

 

If this is correct, it leads us toward an uneasy conclusion,. Imagine, for a moment, that a human works like this: you’re a zombie, just behaving automatically, sometimes chaotically, and the only reason you think you’re in control of your behaviour is that you have a dishonest voice in your head that tells you that you are.

 

When you do something, like decide who you fancy, or beat someone nearly to death outside a London nightclub, your little voice tells you those acts were the result of conscious decisions made by you, and then lists all the reasons you were right — but actually you’re like a zombie, with no free will, being fooled into believing you have the ability to make conscious choices by your lying little voice.

 

Wouldn’t that be odd?

 

Well, yes. It’s also widely believed to be true. The disconcerting fact is that what we do in the world is, depending on which academic you believe, either largely or wholly controlled by our unconscious. 

 

‘If you devote your time to thinking about what the brain, hormones, genes, evolution, childhood, foetal environment and so on have to do with behaviour, as I do,’ writes the professor of biology, neuroscience and neurosurgery Robert Sapolsky, ‘it seems simply impossible to think there is free will.’ 

 

Most of those who argue that we do have free will believe its power to be limited, marginal or conditional. The illusion that we have it in the way we think we do is perhaps the most important and most devious job of the self.

 

Well, I find it to be strangely comforting to know that, no matter how the world appears to me, the stories I have in my head about my life, my beliefs, my behavior, my sense of right and wrong, my conception of my place in  the grand cosmic scheme of things — all those stories really aren’t under my conscious control, but have popped out of the dark recesses of my unconscious, accompanied by a falsehood that feels good, but almost certainly isn’t true: “You are the author of these stories, via your own free will.”

 

Being a zombie strikes me as a pretty damn good thing, actually.

 

It means that who I am, deep down, is very different from whom I appear to be to myself. Since I love mysteries, this leaves me with a primal, albeit probably unanswerable, question:

 

Who am I, when I’m not busy embracing stories about myself that my unconscious conjures up, which I mistakenly assume to be my own conscious creation?”

 

Lastly, here's another bit of good news: research shows that not believing in free will has no relation to ethical behavior. So giving up a belief in free will won't make you a jerk. 

A justice system not based on a belief in free will would be much better

Free will is an illusion. There's little doubt about this, though it will make some time for this scientific fact to be accepted by most people. Wrong habits of thinking take time to change. Here's a comic strip example.

In my most recent post about free will, I gave a poor review to a book that somehow managed to conclude that even though determinism rules, and free will is an illusion, the justice system still should assume that a person was freely responsible for making the choice to commit a crime.

This continues to leave the door wide open to making retribution a rationale for inflicting severe punishments on so-called "evil doers," rather than having a justice system focus on rehabilitation of criminals and protecting society from criminals during their period of rehabilitation (which could be a life sentence in the rare cases where no possibility of of rehabilitation exists).

A regular commenter on this blog, "Appreciative Reader," left this comment on the post:

Brian, can you talk about (or perhaps link to) the specifics of what you have in mind when you advocate for our penal/justice system to focus on prevention of crime and rehabilitation of criminals (as opposed to going for something like "punishment")? What would such a system actually look like?

Well, a bit of Googling turned up some links that seem to be worth perusing: here, here, and here. 

I'm also sharing some excerpts from one of my favorite books about free will, Richard Oerton's "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing Up t0 a False Belief." I've written about the book in several posts, but I don't believe I've shared these quotes before. Oerton is a British lawyer, so his views about the justice system and free will are well-informed.

Here's some of what Oerton has to say in a chapter called "Towards a rational penal system."

In a system which made no concessions at all to irrationality, retributive punishment would play no part whatsoever, but the other aims of sentencing set out at the start of Chapter 21, would still be relevant.

[These are: (b) the reduction of crime (including its reduction by deterrence); (c) the reform and rehabilitation of offenders; (d) the protection of the public, and (e) the making of reparation by offenders to persons affected by their offences.]

The overriding purpose would simply be the protection of society through the prevention of crime. The focus would be on the harmfulness, rather than the wickedness, of the offender. Imprisonment would still be necessary in very many cases -- and in the case of offenders who were both dangerous and unreachable, it might have to last a very long time -- but subject to that, the aim of those involved in the penal system would be to decide on the approach best calculated to turn the offender away from crime.

It is here, in relation to the treatment of offenders, and not in the hair-splitting statutory rules about deserts and culpability, that their varying mental states would be important. Under our present system, reform of the offender hardly gets a look-in, and our prisons are full of people with mental illness which goes largely untreated. 

Official statistics tell us that three-quarters of prisoners have below average I.Q.s, that over two-thirds have one or more mental health disorders and that nearly one-tenth are psychotic (that's to say, insane).

The only prison in the country which is run entirely on therapeutic principles is Grendon. Its regime, far from being soft or lenient, makes much greater demands on the prisoners than any ordinary prison: a consultant psychiatrist uses unexpectedly colourful language in saying that it provides "group therapy with turbo-charged-rocket-boost-high-voltage-plasma-engines, going at warp factor ten."

A report by the Chief Inspector of Prisons in 2009 reaffirmed its "remarkable achievements with some of the ... most dangerous and difficult prisoners." It was awarded the Longford Prize in 2008, when the judges described it as a beacon of hope for the prison service.

...I feel real anger, too, about the way in which, when such criminals are caught, we ignore all the distorting influences which society has allowed to bear upon them, along with any contribution which their genetic endowment has made to their criminality, and treat their crimes, not as a result of these things, but as a result of something called free will.

If free will really did allow us to choose our personalities, or to slough them off at will, who in the world would freely choose to have the personality of a serial killer, or to act in accordance with it? Would you choose even to step into the slightly more comfortable shoes of Burglar Bill? 

Criminals are victims of causality just as their victims are, and none the less so if, as sometimes happens, causality has made them arrogant, gloating and glad to be the people they are.

There is another lesson which determinism teaches us about crime, and that is the need to intervene more often, more early, and more effectively, in the lives of those who are on the way to becoming criminals.  Although attempts actually to do this are spasmodic and half-hearted, the need to do so is becoming increasingly to be recognised. 

Even if we profess to reject determinism, we know deep down that our only hope of making a real reduction in crime lies in tackling at an early stage the chains of causality which lead to it. We cannot rely on "free will" to do the job; it will not come riding to the rescue at the last minute, like the U.S. Cavalry in an old Hollywood film. 

It is true that the imposition of penalties on convicted offenders may deter them from future crime, because it modifies the causal chain, but this comes too late -- too late for the criminals and too late for their victims.

"Free Will Explained" is a poor explanation of free will

I had high expectations when I began reading Dan Barker's book, "Free Will Explained." Being a firm non-believer in free will, I figured that Barker, an avowed atheist, would give free will the same de-bunking as Sam Harris and numerous other scientifically minded authors have.

I'm a free will junkie.

I find this subject fascinating. I've read most of the books that argue free will doesn't exist, even though we humans believe we possess it. So since the subtitle of Barker's book is How Science and Philosophy Converge to Create a Beautiful Illusion, I expected a rational, reasonable, factual explanation of not only why free will is an illusion, but the benefit of giving up a belief in it.

Well, even before I got through the introduction, I found myself writing more and more question marks in the margins, because what Barker was saying made so little sense.

He admits that free will is a fiction. Determinism rules through chains of causes and effects. So far, so good.

Where Barker lost me is his contention that "Free will is a product of judgment." He claims that "free will is irrelevant -- it doesn't even exist -- until you judge behavior. It is a retroactive product of judgment."

He's talking about a particular sort of judgment, moral judgments. Supposedly free will is a social truth, like marriage. Well, this goes against how almost everybody in the world, aside from Barker, I guess, looks upon free will.

Almost everybody feels like they possess free will, even though it is an illusion. Likewise, almost everybody says "the sun is setting" rather than "the Earth is revolving." We feel like we have free will when we're alone, just as we see the sun setting when we're alone. If someone is by themselves on a desert island, they are still going to feel like they have free will, no moral judgement required.

We choose a flavor of ice cream. We pick a book to buy. We decide where to go on vacation. None of these decisions entail making moral judgments, unless the meaning of "moral" is stretched far beyond its normal usage. I fail to see how a sense of free will only arises after a judgment is made, but this is a core tenet of Barker's book. 

Now, what bothers me the most about "Free Will Explained" isn't the crazy way Barker looks upon free will, but the implications he draws from that viewpoint. Unlike virtually every other author who writes about the illusion of free will, somehow Barker is simultaneously able to embrace the reality of determinism while also claiming that we are morally responsible for our actions.

"We can be completely unfree, yet also completely accountable for our own actions," he writes. Barker further asserts that "moral accountability only needs to go as far back in time as the mental decision to act was made."

So even though someone's decision to rob a bank, say, was completely determined by their genetics, upbringing, and countless life experiences, Barker is fine with the justice system assuming that they possessed free will and could have chosen to not rob the bank. Hence, it is perfectly justified, in Barker's view, to exact retribution for freely willed acts, rather than viewing criminality as something that society needs to be protected from, and the criminal rehabilitated from.

Barker goes so far as to write, "Yes, the brain tumor (or whatever) is one of the causes of the action, but the individual human being is the actual perpetrator. It is irrelevant to ask whether the person was ultimately free or not. We only assume the person was immediately free."

Huh? Barker admits that free will is an illusion, It doesn't exist. Yet somehow he is OK with a judge or jury assuming that someone with a brain tumor was "immediately free" at the moment of making a decision, even though the tumor caused them to act in a certain unlawful way.

One of the more annoying parts of Barker's book is when he raises the straw man of determinists failing to praise people or favoring moral education. He says that when his children took their first steps and he clapped his hands to congratulate them, "Should I have acted like a dull determinist and coldly remarked to my kids, 'That's no big deal. You had no choice'?"

Geez. Barker doesn't understand how us determinists view reality. Everything at the level of everyday life is determined, everything! (I'm leaving out quantum phenomena, though arguably these also are determined, albeit in a probabilistic sense.)

A determinist is going to praise their children because this is what they have been determined to do. If they don't, then they have been determined to do that. There's no getting outside of the bounds of determinism in our causal universe. 

At the end of his book Barker notes that "Free will is not a scientific truth, it is a social truth." Again, this doesn't make sense. An illusory sense of free will exists in humans because it has some sort of evolutionary advantage. This makes it a scientific truth. The illusion of free will also is a scientific truth, as Barker readily admits.

Yet he persists in believing that it is better that people believe in the illusion, than in the truth. He appears to be fine with exacting retributive justice that is justified by a judge or jury assuming that someone possessed the free will to not commit a crime. 

Amazingly, Barker goes so far as to say, "Denying free will is a put-down to human nature." Wow. Discovering the truth that free will is an illusion is a put-down to human nature? I heartily disagree. For centuries people had the illusion that some races are superior to others, which justified slavery. They also had the illusion that women are the weaker sex and shouldn't be able to vote, among other consequences of that illusion.

Belief in free will isn't an innocent illusion. It is used to justify harsh punishments, since our justice system is founded on an assumption that, aside from insanity, people are free to either commit a crime or refrain from that behavior. Books like the one Barker wrote aren't merely wrong, they are dangerous.   

 

 

Free will and religion are both comforting fantasies

I've just about finished re-reading a great book by a British attorney, Richard Oerton, who has spent half a century pondering the nature, or rather lack thereof, of free will. 

Previously I've written about "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing Up to a False Belief" in these posts:

Free will is a wonderful thing to lose
Sitting in the jury box, I deny free will
Belief in free will linked to desire to punish

Oerton makes some highly persuasive arguments against free will, building his case with a mixture of logic and facts. I'm enjoying his book even more the second time through, perhaps because I've had five years since the first reading to do my own further musings about free will.

I'm going to share some excerpts from Oerton's chapter, "Free will and religion: some parallels." 

A basic parallel is that both free will and religiosity come naturally to people. It just seems so obvious that humans can freely choose to do this rather than that. It also appears so obvious that God exists, since how could the universe come into being without a creator?

Well, reality doesn't give up its secrets easily. This is the lesson of science: coming to know how things really are, as opposed to how they appear to be, is tough going. Religious belief is easy to come by. So is believing in free will. 

What Oreton does is his book is challenge the easy belief in free will. He also makes a good case for viewing religion and free will as two sides of the same faulty-belief coin. Here's some passages that I particularly liked in the above-mentioned chapter. He's just spoken about the Age of Faith many centuries ago when atheism would have been almost unthinkable.

There may have been a few who questioned the existence of God but, by and large, it would not have entered anyone's head to do so. Religious belief was in the air that people breathed, taken for granted. They were born into it, they lived in it and they died in it. 

They knew that God existed, and knew with such certainty that they would never have felt the need to say so. And don't we think now about free will in very much the same way as our ancestors thought then about God? Don't we accept it just as unquestioningly? Our own age may not be an age of religious faith, but it is an age of faith in free will.

...One of these parallels lies in the fact that God and free will are both mystical concepts. The idea that we might be able to understand God is almost blasphemous. God is by definition transcendent, supernatural, and (as the old hymn has it) moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform.

If an unbeliever questions a believer about the nature or behavior of God, the unbeliever will be met sooner or later (and probably sooner) by the assertion that, because God is what God is, such questions are unanswerable. And so it is with free will: those who want to live by it must accept that there are no good answers to the questions which they might (but seldom do) ask about its nature and purported effects.

...those who believe in free will see the behaviour of their fellow human beings in such a way as to justify and reinforce their belief -- just as religious believers see the work of God so clearly in the workings of the world that they cannot see these workings in any other way.

And here's some passages that make some great points about how, if we accept the reality of evolution, as every educated person should, some tough questions about free will arise.

We can't very well say that free will has always existed, if only because the human race hasn't always existed. It would not be credible to suggest that the earth's first life forms had free will. It would not be credible to suggest that an influenza virus now has free will, or even a tapeworm, or a woodlouse.

All these living things must be creatures of causality, governed and moved purely by physical processes. If we, as twenty-first century people, are not governed by physical processes because we have what we call free will, we must have managed, at some stage of our evolution, to detach ourselves from the laws of nature which up until then had governed us.

But when and how? So far as I know, evolutionary scientists have not concerned themselves with these questions, and they are unlikely to do so unless they themselves believe in free will, know exactly what it is and manage to devise some criteria according to which its existence or non-existence can be recognized. 

We would be wise not to hold our breath.

Yet another parallel lies in the fact that like belief in God, belief in free will (so long as it remains unexamined) tends to be comforting to those who hold it.

...And the "utilitarian" argument for belief in God -- that it ought to be fostered because it is socially cohesive and leads people to live better lives -- is paralleled by a similarly utilitarian argument for belief in free will: that it is an important part of our society, our culture, our morality, our sense of self, and so on, and that we must therefore hang on to it however incoherent it may prove, on examination, to be, because humankind cannot stand very much reality.

Experience of conscious will is an illusion

I don't believe in free will. But like most people, I have a feeling that my intention to do something is what causes that thing to happen. 

So we have two things going on:

(1) A scientific world view doesn't support a belief in free will. As I've written about a lot on this blog (type "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar to find the many posts), there is no evidence of an immaterial self/soul that somehow floats free of the material/physical goings-on in the human mind. So there's no entity within us which can function freely of causes and effects or the laws of nature.

(2) Yet we humans have a strong sense that our intentions lead to thoughts, actions, and everything else we're capable of doing. After all, I think type an example of a thought and the next thing I do is type "I need to finish writing this paragraph." Who the heck is controlling what I'm doing right now if it isn't my conscious intention?

Well, study carefully this photo I took of a fascinating figure in Daniel Wegner's book, "The Illusion of Conscious Will," and you'll get a very interesting explanation of why the experience of conscious will is indeed an illusion.

Note that there is an "actual" and "apparent" causal path leading to an action. 

The actual causal path flows from an unconscious cause of the action. Meaning, the human brain is doing things below the surface of awareness that cause us to do something.

At the same time, there also is an unconscious cause of thought. This takes an actual causal path in the brain that leads to a thought. 

So the brain is unconsciously causing both an action and a thought.

These two things are actually happening. However, our experience of conscious will -- the feeling that our thought or intention is what causes an action to occur -- is an illusion. This is shown in the "Apparent Causal Path" arrow leading from thought to action. 

Here's a few passages from Wegner's book that explain what is going on here. (Wegner is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.)

The experience of will, then, is the way our minds portray their operations to us, not their actual operation. Because we have thoughts of what we will do, we can develop causal theories relating those thoughts to our actions on the basis of priority, consistency, and exclusivity.

We come to think of these prior thoughts as intentions, and we develop the sense that the intentions have causal force even though they are actually just previews of what we may do. 

Yet in an important sense, it must be the case that something in our minds plays a causal role in making our actions occur. That something is, in the theory of apparent mental causation, a set of unconscious mental processes that cause the action. At the same time, that something is very much like the thoughts we have prior to the action.

...We must remember that this analysis suggests that the real causal mechanisms underlying behavior are never present in consciousness. Rather, the engines of causation operate without revealing themselves to us and so may be unconscious mechanisms of mind.

...The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview your actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do. 

In fact, however, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as cause of the action.

So while our thoughts may have deep, important, and unconscious causal connections to our actions, the experience of conscious will arises from a process that interprets these connections, not from the connections themselves.

This is brilliant. I'm only read about 1/4 of "The Illusion of Conscious Will," but I'm far enough into the book to have gotten a good feel for Wegner's thesis. He provides a lot of evidence to support it, both scientific and philosophical. 

Naturally spiritual (using that word broadly) implications of this illusion are easy to come by. For example, it can be argued that the so-called enlightenment of Zen, Taoism, and such simply is an intuitive seeing-through of the illusion of conscious will. 

Meaning, the illusion that "I" am determining what I do (and also by implication, what happens to me) is somehow experienced as the scientific falsity that it is. Of course, this is just a fact -- assuming Wegner's hypothesis is correct, as it seems to be -- not any sort of supernatural or mystical state of mind. 

It is just our actual state of mind, seen for what it is. It'll take another blog post to explain this more fully.

Free will is a meaningless expression

Here's another episode in my so-far never-ending quest to convince readers of this blog that free will, as normally understood, is an illusion. (For previous attempts, type "free will" in the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

Below is a letter to the editor in the July 30 issue of New Scientist, a British publication. Which explains the weird spelling of "randomize" and "recognize." Damn, can't those Britons speak English correctly, like us Americans do?

Anyway, I digress. 

I thought Carpenter's last paragraph was right-on. Along with reflexes, intuitions seem to be another example of unconsicous brain processes that we aren't aware of being prepared in advance. 

With rational, conscious, deliberative step-by-step thinking, by contrast, we are aware of how the brain is going through the process of making a decision. But awareness of a mechanistic process doesn't make it any less mechanical. 

If the hood (or bonnet) of a car is closed, the existence of an engine isn't obvious. With the hood open, it becomes clearer that when the car moves, it is because of the engine. Closed or open, though, the same mechanical processes are making the car move.

Not a perfect analogy to the brain and our illusory feeling of free will, but sort of close. Here's the letter:

We can see brains randomising choice
From Roger Carpenter

Nial Wareing speculates that the brain might make its decisions probabilistically, and that in some circumstances it might deliberately randomise its actions (Letters, 2 July). It has long been known that this is what it does.

Recordings show that neurons in the brain encode probability and run races with each other to make decisions. A good deal of randomness is gratuitously injected into this process. To an outside observer, the resultant unpredictable responses look like “free will”, and would indeed be highly desirable in predator/prey interactions.

To the owner of the brain, the crucial difference between those responses that we recognise as unconscious – like reflexes – and those that we think we have “willed”, is that we experience the latter being prepared in advance, but not the former. But both are equally mechanistic. Free will is a pretty meaningless expression.

Cambridge, UK

Free will is an illusion: convincing Sam Harris video

Below is a 9-minute video that encapsulates Sam Harris' views about free will.

Which, in short, is that it is an illusion. And that the world would be better off if people recognized this, rather than wrongly believing that humans are able to freely choose what to do at any given moment.

The background music in the video is a bit distracting. But Harris' message is so convincing, and the video is so well done (aside, perhaps, from the music selection), I urge you to watch it.

Now, I realize that some people don't look upon free will in the way that Harris does.

Harris, like me, considers that free will means just that: we are free to will what we want to do. This is how the legal system looks upon free will. It also is how virtually everybody who believes in free will looks upon it: as the capacity to do this rather than that. 

The alternative view of free will makes little, if any, sense. Namely, that while we are not free to choose what we will, if there is nothing constraining us from carrying out that determined choice, then we have "free will." 

Well, this viewpoint simply means that humans have as much free will as a well-functioning computer does. Absent software or hardware problems, a computer is able to carry out the tasks that it has been programmed to do. But does this mean it has free will?

No. Likewise, Harris says that because we live in a deterministic universe, human actions also are determined by all of the influences acting upon us from birth onward (even before birth, of course, given genetic influences). 

If you watch the video and find flaws in Harris' arguments, please leave a comment explaining what you think he got wrong. Like I said, I find the video highly convincing, but I'm open to hearing reasons why free will isn't an illusion. So far, I just haven't come across any convincing ones.

Sam Harris - Free Will from The Inspiration Journey on Vimeo.

Free will exists. Freedom of the will doesn't.

I've written a lot about free will on this blog. To me it seems obvious that free will doesn't exist. At least not in the way most people believe that it does. 

(You can find my numerous posts on this subject by typing "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar.)

But after finishing Paul Singh's book, "The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self," I realize that when commenters on my posts object to free will being an illusion, they're usually thinking of free will of being something different than how I see it. 

So hopefully this blog post will clear the confusion up. (Yeah, I'm an optimist.)

Singh makes a distinction between Free Will, which does exist, and Freedom of the Will, which doesn't. I agree with him. However, the problem is that when most people think of free will, they're really talking about freedom of the will. 

Free will, in Singh's view, is essentially the philosophical position of compatibilism. Meaning, this definition of free will is compatible with determinism. Wikipedia says:

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent. Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics. They define free will as freedom to act according to one's motives without arbitrary hindrance from other individuals or institutions.

Likewise, Singh writes:

Free will, according to common sense, is demonstrated by the way that a person's actions are as he or she wills their actions to be, and not otherwise. This basic conception of free will is the one built into our moral and legal systems, as we hold people responsible for their freely willed actions.

If you are able to rest content with this common sense conception of free will, then you can continue to speak of "free will" as something real and sensible, without worrying about science someday refuting it.

But this is a very weak view of free will. It just means, say, that when I will or desire to go grocery shopping in my car, nothing is stopping me from starting my car's engine, driving into town, and getting what's on our grocery list.

On the other hand, someone in jail could have the same desire, yet wouldn't have the freedom to carry out the willed actions. Thus they lack free will in this instance, and I don't. Meaning, I am free to do what I will -- go grocery shopping -- and they aren't.

This is far distant from how most people look upon free will. The usual conception of free will is that a person is able to freely choose what to will, and not merely freely carry out a willed action. 

Thus Freedom of the Will is really what's usually meant by Free Will. Singh explains:

Free will defenders agree that a person's willing decision to something should result in the intended action, in order for the person to display liberty of action. What about the liberty of the will itself?... A person's control over an action really isn't like controlling ones' will.

...Defenders of freedom of the will set a requirement along the following lines. A person's will, they say, could have willed otherwise in the moment of willing, if a person's will is truly free. They then design a required test for this "could have willed otherwise" that goes something like this: If a will is free, then at the moment of decision, and with everything exactly the way it is, a will could both decide to do an action and not to do that action.

These requirements go far beyond anything suggested by ordinary free will. We aren't really talking about ordinary free will any more, but rather "freedom of the will." 

...Defenders of freedom of the will treat the will as a mini-person, applying to the will the same sort of criteria for freedom that they apply to the whole person. If a person is free only if nothing outside of the self completely determines what he or she does, then the same must be true of the will itself; a will is free only if nothing outside of it completely determines what it does.

Even if things outside the will inform and influence it, the will must supply something extra to finally decide what is to be done, so that it retains the ability to both choose and change any choice.

There is no evidence that this sort of free will, "freedom of the will," exists. It goes agains everything science knows about the human brain, determinism, and the laws of nature. Freedom of the will requires a supernatural influence that overrides the physical goings-on in our craniums.

Singh says:

This FoW [Freedom of Will] criterion is commonly accepted among philosophers and theologians who prefer dualism over naturalism, usually for religious reasons. Dualism asserts that a person as a whole, and something within a person as well, cannot be entirely physical in nature and operation.

This non-physicality is manifested in a power to counter-balance and even override what would otherwise happen according to forces and laws. 

...What is clear is that devotion to the FoW criterion drives free will enthusiasm towards the speculation that the will must be entirely unnatural and transcendent. If it were just another cog in the material machine, it wouldn't be able to control the machine by itself.

Freedom of the will calls for freedom from reality.

Which is why freedom of the will doesn't exist, while free will does. Einstein had it right:

“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: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).”

    -- Albert Einstein

Stephen Hawking's "Genius" series looks at free will confusingly

Wow! As a big Stephen Hawking fan, I never thought that I'd write a blog post where I took him to task for getting a scientific subject wrong. 

But after watching Episode 3 of Hawking's new "Genius" series, I've got to point out how confusing this Why Are We Here? episode was when it came to free will. 

I've read a lot about free will. I've thought a lot about free will. I've written a lot about free will. (For example, see here, here, and here.)

So I was all eyes and ears as Hawking led three ordinary people -- meaning, non-scientists -- through exercises designed to get them thinking in a scientific way. Clips can be viewed on the PBS web page devoted to Episode 3, along with the entire hour long show. 

We see them marveling at floating plates in a room within an English castle. Not surprisingly, this isn't the result of magic, but magnetism. The lesson learned is that scientific understanding of the laws of nature is the way to comprehend the world, not supernatural explanations.

Then the three Genius explorers tackle a difficult problem: how to knock an olive on a toothpick that's balanced on the edge of a cocktail glass into the drink. Without touching it with their hands.

A pendulum device on a long chain looks promising. The swinging round ball definitely has what it takes, but the scientific students keep either missing short (no contact) or long (too much contact, so the glass breaks). After many tries, and many refills of the drink by a bartender in the room, they figure out what to do.

Use a board with markings to get the ball in a precise spot, and use a button that deactivates a magnet holding the ball in place so the "push" on the ball is exactly the same every time. It doesn't take long for them to find the sweet spot where the olive is gently knocked into the glass. 

And they can do this repeatedly. Lesson: if something is done in exactly the same way, the same thing will happen according to the laws of nature. 

A replication of the famous Libet experiment about conscious vs. unconscious choice gets us directly into questions of free will. The three people are asked to push a button (which sets off fireworks!) at a moment of their choice while staring at a large clock projected onto a castle wall. 

They note the time they consciously chose to push the button. As Libet found, and as other researchers have confirmed, a conscious decision to do something is preceded by unconscious activity in the brain. So this teaches the threesome that free will doesn't really exist, since the sense of "I freely choose to do this" is an illusion.

Actually, brain processes outside of our awareness determine what we choose. Thus they learn that determinism resulting from the laws of nature rules the universe, and us.

I was nodding along agreeably with Episode 3 up to this point. The points Hawking was making seemed eminently justified, being in line with familiar scientific principles I'd read about in numerous books and articles.

But then the episode took a turn.

A Doppelganger challenge featured many people wearing masks of the three Genius explorers. They lined up behind the real person. Then each individual decided to take a step to the right or left when a loud "beep" sounded. Before long these choices resulted in the Original and Doppelgangers being considerably out of step with each other, so to speak.

The lesson Hawking was teaching here struck me as way more scientifically problematic than what had been presented before. This exercise pointed to the Many Worlds (or Many Universes) theory of quantum mechanics. 

As a Wikipedia article discusses, the notion that all possible outcomes occur, that the "universe splits into all possible universes all the time" (as Hawking says near the end of Episode 3) is by no means a settled understanding of science. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics has a lot of fans, but the article quotes a critic: "And who here believes the laws of physics are decided by a democratic vote?"

Yet Hawking and some other scientists, such as physicist Sean Carroll, speak as if it is virtually certain that every possible action or choice does occur in a parallel universe. 

Now, obviously there's no problem entertaining this hypothesis. It makes a lot of sense, and resolves some difficult questions about the quantum world. My problem is with how Episode 3 related free will to the Many Worlds theory. I failed to see how everything happening that could happen saves free will, as one of the threesome seemed to believe.

After all, Hawking had just led the three people to several understandings: the laws of nature rule the universe, and unconscious brain processes determine our conscious choices.

So someone decides to step to the right when hearing the beep in the Doppelganger exercise. This wasn't a freely willed choice. Yet certainly a different choice -- step to the left -- could have been made by the person's brain, given different causes acting within the brain.

I fail to see how everything that could happen, does happen has any relevance to free will. If anything, the Many Worlds theory points to Determinism Gone Wild. Not only does one thing happen according to the laws of nature, everything happens. 

Assuming the Many Worlds theory of the quantum realm is true. I'm not aware of any empirical evidence that it is. Thus Hawking's conclusion in Episode 3 struck me as poetic and appealing, but not convincing: "The universe you see is the one that gives rise to you out of all possible universes."

A member of the threesome said, "It took a whole universe to make me." OK, granted. The Big Bang can be viewed as the cosmic event that led to the present moment. Another quote from the episode: "We are a product of the universe, but the universe we live in is personal to us."

Well, sure.

We all experience the world through our own subjectivity. And the Many Worlds theory takes this farther, since there supposedly are countless other "me's" having subjective experiences in parallel universes. Naturally the only universe I'm aware of is the one I'm in.

It makes sense for Hawking and his collaborators on "Genius" to end Episode 3 on a semi-uplifting note after effectively putting free will on a skewer and roasting it to death. The basic answer he gives to the episode's main question, Why Are We Here?, is that we are here because we're not in an infinity of other parallel universes. 

Again, how this relates to free will and choice eludes me. But maybe the universe simply has determined that I'm not supposed to understand this.

Great Taoist view of free will and determinism

Free will fascinates me. I don't believe it exists. Yet it sure seems like I have it.

Of course, if the cosmos has determined that I shall believe in free will, even though it is an illusion, I have no choice but to feel like I have free will.

(Type "free will" into the Google search box in the right sidebar to find my many blog posts on this subject that I couldn't help but write.)

Today I was re-reading a chapter in one of my favorite books, Raymond Smullyan's "The Tao is Silent."

Below are some excerpts from Is God a Taoist? Smullyan's take on free will and determinism from a Taoist perspective is pretty damn brilliant.

Reminds me of Alan Watts. But Smullyan is a mathematical logician (so says the back of his book), so he has a unique way of writing about this stuff.

HIs chapter consists of a dialogue between God and a Mortal.

MORTAL: Anyway, it is reassuring to know that my natural intuition about having free will is correct. Sometimes I have been worried that determinists are correct.

GOD: They are correct.

MORTAL: Wait a minute, now, do I have free will or don't I?

GOD: I already told you you do. But that does not mean determinism is incorrect.

MORTAL: Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature, or aren't they?

GOD: The word determined here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies.

Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.

...MORTAL: So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?

GOD: It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear.

Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you."

Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin?

Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish.

If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the "force." In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial. 

Society would do fine without a belief in free will

I'm fascinated by free will. Especially the lack thereof. Do a "free will" Google search of my blogs (via the box in the right sidebar) and you'll find lots of posts I've written on this fascinating subject. 

(Some are here, here, here, and here.)

It doesn't bother me at all that modern neuroscience is steadily demolishing philosophical and religious reasons for believing in free will. If this is the way the world works, where's the problem?

To me, worrying about the consequences if people stop believing in free will is almost exactly the same as previous worries about what would happen if people learned that the earth isn't the center of the cosmos, or that we evolved from other life forms rather than being God's unique creation.

How can scientific truth be harmful?

Sure, sometimes there is a period of psychological adjustment when science reveals uncomfortable facts -- What, we humans weren't made in the image of God, starting with Adam and Eve six thousand years ago??!! -- but it is better in the long run to embrace the way things truly are, rather than fantasies.

So I was skeptical about the conclusion of a Scientific American article, "The World Without Free Will: What happens to a society that believes people have no conscious control over their actions?" Here's some excerpts from the final paragraphs.

If neuroscience research continues to degrade people's belief that they have free will, how will society change? We see three possibilities. History is replete with examples of moral norms evolving with new knowledge about the world.

...New research unveiling the biological machinery behind human thought and action may prompt a similarly dramatic change in moral views. This is the first possiblity... Though uncomfortable at times, doubting free will may end up as a kind of growing pain for our society, aligning our moral intuitions and legal institutions with new scientific knowledge and making us stronger than before.

It may not happen that way though. As our research has suggested, the more people doubt free will, the more lenient they become toward those accused of crimes and the more willing they are to break the rules themselves and harm others to get what they want. Thus, the second possibility is that newfound skepticism of free will may end up threatening the humanitarian revolution, potentially culminating in anarchy.

More likely is the third possibility. In the 18th century Voltaire famously asserted that if God did not exist, we would need to invent him because the idea of God is so vital to keeping law and order in society. Given that a belief in free will restrains people from engaging in the kind of wrongdoing that could unravel an ordered society, the parallel is obvious. 

What will our society do if it finds itself without the concept of free will? It may well reinvent it.

I hope not. These arguments in favor of preserving an unscientific belief in something that almost certainly doesn't exist fail to make sense to me.

For one thing, Voltaire was wrong about the idea of God being vital to keeping society lawful and orderly. Atheists and agnostics aren't any more prone to lawlessness than religious believers. Arguably, less so, since the most secular countries tend to have less crime.

Likewise, I can't understand why not believing in free will would make someone less moral. If morality is determined, as everything else is, someone's attitude about free will is just one of many influences on his or her behavior.

I used to believe in free will. Now I don't. I can't discern any effect this change has had on the way I go about my everyday life. I still make choices, decide what is right and wrong to do, and make moral judgments.

All that has changed is how I regard the philosophical implications of what I'm doing.

Meaning, I no longer consider that I'm capable of making decisions that are divorced from all of the causes impacting me: genetics, experience, upbringing, culture, environmental influences, bodily states, and such.

As the above-linked article points out, Japan is one of the countries where a small percentage of people believe in the Western notion of God. China is another. I'd argue that most Japanese and Chinese also have a different notion of free will than people in the United States do.

We are much more individualistic, by and large.

Yet does our indvidualism and belief in free will lead to lower crime rates and a greater concern for the welfare of others? No. This country lags behind many, if not most, industrialized nations in many indicators of social well-being.

A belief in free will tends to make us more judgmental toward other people, as argued here. it leads us to think that if someone does something wrong, they could have done otherwise, so deserve punishment or whatever else results from their bad decision (like poverty or poor health).

So I'm eager for society to give up a ill-founded belief in free will. Let's embrace reality.

All of us are connected. No man or woman is an island. We're all parts of an interconnected whole -- the universe -- that collectively determines what happens in every part of itself. To me this is a beautiful way of looking at the world, one that offers way more meaning than an illusory embrace of free will.

 

 

"Buddhist Biology" book paradoxically embraces free will

This happens to me a lot, in my now-churchless frame of mind. I'll buy a book that seems to be in my sweet spot: scientific, yet also philosophical, with just enough of a spiritual-but-not-religious tone. 

Like Goldilocks, not too much, not too little. Just right.

I don't mean to sound like a crotchety literary perfectionist. I realize that the reason I like to read books is because they're written by people who aren't me.

I enjoy reading stuff I don't agree with. So long as I can understand the author's reasons for saying what he or she does.

With "Buddhist Biology: Ancient Eastern Wisdom Meets Modern Western Science," I was rocking and rolling along with David Barash's explanations of how pared-down Buddhist teachings, stripped of their supernatural elements, are right in line with modern biology.

(My previous posts about the book are here, here, and here.)

But then I came to the final chapter, Meaning (Existential Bio-Buddhism?). Here Barash says that he will present his personal perspective "rather than attempting to describe objectively the interface between Buddhism and biology."

That's where my enjoyment of the book went downhill. Not all the way to the bottom, not even close. I still enjoyed "Buddhist Biology" a lot and can heartily recommend it.

I just wish that Barash hadn't interjected his personal belief in free will into the book, because free will is very much at odds with both Buddhism and modern science. 

In a footnote early on in the last chapter, Barash writes:

Personal note: my literary agent suggested that I refrain from introducing existentialism into this book, worrying that it is not only passé but also too highbrow. Although he is very intelligent and wise in the ways of Western publishing, my hope is that you, dear readers, will prove him wrong, at least in this regard.

Well, this reader thinks the agent was exactly right. Not for the reason Barash states; I enjoy existentialism; in my college days I embraced Sartre, Camus, and other existentialist thinkers. 

What irked me about the final chapter was how it contradicted so much of what Barash had argued persuasively in favor of before. Here's how I summarized this in one of my blog posts about the book:

The core of Barash's book, which I've almost finished, is that three principles underly Buddhism in all of its varied forms. However, lots is added on to these principles that can't be defended scientifically.

But this much can. Definitions are from the book's glossary.

(1) Anatman -- not-self; denial that things, animals, or people have an independent, substantial nature. In particular, neither humans nor anything else have an eternal non-material soul. Neuroscience supports this.

(2) Anitya -- impermanence; a state of constantly becoming. Change happens. Everywhere. All the time. No exceptions. Except maybe the laws of nature that proclaim "change happens." Evolution is one example.

(3) Pratitya-Samutpada -- connectedness; the dependent co-arising of all phenomena; dependent origination; interdependence of all things. Fundamental premise of ecology, biology, systems thinking.

So we humans don't have an independent nature, or self. We are constantly changing, as is everything else. We are part of an interconnected, interdependent universe where no entity is an island, complete unto itself.

Where in this view of the cosmos is there room for free will? Logically, nowhere. But I guess Barash's fondness for existentialism overrode both his scientific and Buddhist sensibilities, because his last chapter included passages that made me pen in large question marks in the book's margins.

The concept of choice turns out to be especially important here, because in the view of the existentialists, we are free; indeed, in Sartre's paradoxical words, we are "condemned to be free."

...Thus, Buddhist thought diverges from materialist biological science in asserting that genuine intentionality exists even though strict cause-and-effect thinking (supported by biology) insists that free will is an illusion.

...But that does not mean that we are stuck with an atomized, un-Buddhist mind-set, since to a large extent, minds are among those things that we are free to make up for ourselves...admittedly with a gentle shove from that array of genetically inspired tendencies that we designate "biology."

...In any event, "going with the flow" of our biologically generated inclinations is very close to existential "bad faith," wherein people pretend -- to themselves and others -- that they are not free, whereas they in fact are.

...We are free, terrifyingly free, to make these decisions, to keep the ball in the air.

Look: I'm not bothered by a belief in free will. To me, it is like a belief in God. Almost everybody in the world considers that they have free will, and also that God exists. 

Heck, I feel as if I have free will also.

I also feel that the sun rises and sets. But science tells me that the Earth rotates as it orbits the sun. Science also tells me a lot about the nature of the human brain. To me, believing in free will is as scientifically indefensible as believing that the Earth stands still while the sun moves around it.

Tellingly, Barash presents zero scientific evidence in support of his contention that "we are free, terrifyingly free." He says that "in fact," we are free. But doesn't offer up any facts in defense of that statement.

I found this deeply irritating.

Again, not so much as to detract markedly from my enjoyment of his entire book. I just mentally erased Barash's last chapter from the substance of what he said, viewing his personal belief in free will as one of those paradoxes that make people so entertainingly interesting. 

I used to work with a statistician who was fond of quoting Emerson:

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

Absolutely.

We are all multitudes, full of messy seeming contradictions, paradoxes, inconsistencies. Yet, I'd argue (because science supports me in this) that the human brain/mind is a entity founded on and formed by causes and effects, not the free will of an independent self.

Which is what Barash also argued up until his last chapter, where he flipped over into his existentialist mode. 

I might have been able to accept an existentialism that was consistent with Buddhism, though not with biology, even though this would have gone against the theme of Barash's book: that the core of Buddhism is compatible with modern biology.

However, it sure seems that free will is at odds with Buddhism also. I offer up the Great God Wikipedia's article on "Free Will." Here's what the Buddhism section says. Pretty involved; I don't claim to understand it completely.

This Zen Buddhist perspective on free will (and the lack thereof) is easier to comprehend. 

Free will is “the freedom of humans to make choices that are not determined by prior causes or by divine intervention.” We don’t talk much about divine intervention in Buddhism, but we definitely talk about prior causes.

So, if we go with that definition, it doesn’t look like there is free will in the view of Buddha-Dharma because everything that happens, including “choice” is determined by conditions. Volition is a mental factor that arises dependent upon conditions, which is precisely what makes it not an independent self.

If there were an independent self, then it could have free will, and in fact that’s what we feel to be true as humans. We believe that “I” as a free agent can, within the limits of conditions imposed by the world, decide what to do now. Don’t we think so?

Free will may sound like a really great thing to have, but it seems to me that it would be kind of a burden to have free will. A question you can contemplate is: If it feels like “you” have to decide anything, do you feel a little bit of unease with that “freedom” of so-called free will?

If you open to the possibility that the boundless totality of conditions is determining your every move, that your “self ” is receiving its function from myriad conditions, do you feel some ease with that sense of “being controlled”?

It sure seems like Buddhism doesn't share Barash's view that "we are free, terrifyingly free." Nor, obviously, does science, including biology.

So Barash's contention that humans have free will isn't founded either in Buddhism or in biology, the twin subjects of his book. Rather, it is founded in his own feeling that he has free will -- a feeling, like I said before, that is shared by most other people.

Fine. I just would contend that Barash's belief in free will, along with my non-belief in free will, are both the result of causes and effects occurring in a marvelously complex interconnected cosmos. 

Not the result of free will. (I just had to say that.) 

Brilliant arguments in favor of "no free will"

I've got no problem with a scientifically and logically defensible conclusion: neither I, nor anyone else, has free will. 

(Of course, I had no choice but to write that sentence.)

The whole existentialist and religious thing -- most early existentialists were Christians -- puts way too much undeserved pressure on us to choose the right thing to do.

Maybe this made some sense when little was known about the brain, biology, genetics, systems theory, ecology, and such. 

But now it is clear that reality is a web of interdependencies, interelationships, cause and effect linkages. Demonstrable evidence for a non-material free-floating soul that freely decides what to do is precisely zero.

Which is fine with me.

See some of my previous blog posts on this subject here, here, here, here, and here.  I'm happier feeling like a part of a grand whole, rather than an isolated bit of freely choosing something-or-other.

Believers in free will don't have a coherent explanation of how such exists. Yet they do their best to buck up their subjective sense of freedom with slippery arguments like compatibilism. 

I do my best to understand compatibilist arguments. But fail. Just seems like the last gasp of die-hard philosophers who want to play some word games before being overwhelmed by scientific truth.

A few years ago Sam Harris wrote a book called "Free Will."

Compatibilist philosopher Daniel Dennett recently wrote a response to Harris' contention that we don't have any. After which Daniel Meissler demolished Dennett's attempted critique in a great piece, "Daniel Dennett is wrong about free will."

If you're interested in this subject, for reasons beyond your control, you need to read what Meissler wrote. Great stuff. Hard to believe how anyone could believe in free will after reading his piece. The comments are interesting also.

Here's a few excerpts to whet your reading appetite.

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"Seriously? Do you [Dennett] really think that, in a country where only half of the population believes in evolution, any significant percentage of people are going to have an advanced belief in free will?

No. They aren’t. Most believe that people make choices independently of causes, to a significant degree, and therefore deserve reward and punishment. This is the basis of the American justice system and of much of our culture. This highly nuanced dance that Dennett is doing isn’t on the radar because they don’t even have radar.

Ask someone why a murderer deserves to die. Ask 1,000 people in a scientifically valid poll. You’ll find that most people believe the following: The murderer had a choice. That means that despite their bad upbringing, despite their drugged out mom, despite whatever hardships, they had the concrete, tangible, and available OPTION to not commit that murder.

So they are 100% guilty. Period.

That’s the resolution that most people have in this country when it comes to considering free will. Not everyone, but most.

...None of these things get us to freedom unless you’re describing it in the loosest and most useless way possible. As I said in the opening, he’s basically saying that if it feels free then it is, and that’s the best you’re going to get.

Well, I don’t have to accept the best illusion I’m going to get and call it freedom. I’d rather, for the sake of human dignity and the respect for reason, acknowledge that it’s an illusion and work within that framework. It’s more true, which I think is generally more healthy.

...These things are not in your control. They happen to you. They trim your options down to the limited set that present themselves to you from, well…you don’t know where. That was Harris’ entire point. Whatever options get presented for you to choose from are labeled as your freedom, and you’re not even thinking about all the others that weren’t presented.

What’s free about that?

Oh, right, it’s as free as it can be, and we should be happy with that.

Sure, and a shackled slave is free to run from the plantation in lots of different ways:

1. In a straight line
2. In a zig-zag pattern
3. Towards the river

Picking from available options is illusory freedom because it ignores the fact that you were only presented a few choices, and you weren’t the one who chose them. This is true without even mentioning the uncomfortable bit that you’re also not the one picking afterwards.

...As I said at the start: Dennett’s argument reduces to this:

1. We have free will because we feel like we do
2. We have moral responsibility because it’s practical to behave as if we do

This is a reckless assault on truth in the name of wishful thinking."

Sitting in the jury box, I deny free will

Ah, it was my first time to sit in the jury box as a prospective juror. I didn't want to waste my opportunity. Which, because I hate jury duty, was the opportunity to not be a real juror. 

Yet I'd held my right hand up along with the other eleven people in the jury box (six were needed for the trial) as the judge swore us to tell the truth during the voir dire process of the defense and prosecuting attorneys questioning us prospective jurors about whether we could fairly decide the case (it involved menacing without physical contact).

So I wanted to truthfully say something that would lessen my chances of being chosen for the jury.

That meant I kept my mouth shut as the defense attorney asked people about whether they had close relationships with police officers, whether they felt police were more credible than "regular" people, and so on.

But I was definitely ready to speak up if an opportunity presented itself. My general plan was to look as weird as possible -- meaning, unpredictably out of sorts with the whole trial/jury system that I had unwillingly been drafted to be a part of. 

Not a stretch for me. Not at all. Weird is well within my repertoire. 

My assumption was that both the defense and prosecuting attorney were looking for predictable jurors, people they could count on to look upon the evidence and testimony in a way that favored their side. I liked what I said, when I got my chance, because it was even hard for me to figure out the precise judicial implications of my remarks.

It was the male prospective juror sitting in front of me who opened up my opportunity. The defense attorney said that the defendant had some sort of mental illness. He asked the twelve of us if this affected how we looked upon his client.

The man raised his hand. The defense attorney called on him. The guy said he didn't believe that mental illness absolved someone of responsibility for a crime. More: he said that even a meth addict was responsible for what they did while high.

That hit my neuroscience button. I felt like I had to say something in response. I raised my own hand. After the attorney recognized me, I spoke along these lines:

Here's a yang perspective to the yin view expressed by the man in front of me. He believes in personal responsibility. I say, free will is an illusion. I'm an avid reader of neuroscience books. It's almost universally agreed by the authors that free will doesn't exist.

Mentally ill people don't have free will. Neither do mentally healthy people. We're all just doing stuff for reasons other than free will. Yet the justice system is based on free will. Retribution is ridiculous given the illusion of free will. 

There can be other reasons for a sentence than retribution, of course. But punishing someone for a freely willed action isn't a valid reason, since there is no such thing as free will.

As so often happens, when I stopped speaking I thought, Wow, I make so much sense to me. In my usual grandiose way, I halfway expected the judge and attorneys to applaud. Then, vow that they were quitting the legal profession until legal codes were brought up to date with modern neuroscience.

However...

What actually happened is that the defense attorney said "Interesting..." I then had another familiar thought: My profound pronouncement about the nature of reality is not being embraced by those less enlightened than me.

Which didn't really bother me, since the uncomprehending "thud" with which my dissertation about free will hit the courtroom gave me hope that I'd now be looked upon by one or both of the attorneys as a weird unpredictable intellectual philosophical crank outlier. 

In short, poor juror material.

Indeed, after a ten minute break following the voir dire period, I was super happy to see other people called up to fill the first six chairs in the jury box. The rest of us were dismissed. Joy!

I can't be sure that my free will comments helped me get out of jury duty. But I suspect they did. So thanks to Richard Oerton for writing "The Nonsense of Free Will: Facing up to a False Belief" which I finished reading recently.

Oerton is a British lawyer. Several chapters of his book directly address free will and the justice system. Some excerpts:

The idea of free will is central to the criminal law, and the judges quite clearly believe that the offender might, by exercising his own free will, have refrained from committing the offense of which he has been convicted and any other offences on which their view of him is based.

...So don't we have something of a contradiction here? Why does a judge assume that someone who has proved dangerous in the past will go on being dangerous in the future? If he might, by exercising his free will, have avoided his past crimes, why might he not, by the same means, avoid any future ones, so abstaining from behavior which is not only destructive but self-destructive?

...If free will existed it would mean that, although our personality may be determined, this determined personality does not determine our behaviour because free will allows us always to transcend it.

...But if free will did exist, with anything like the implications just described, then it would invalidate pretty much the whole of psychology, psychiatry, criminology, sociology and any other science or system you can think of which concerns itself with human behaviour.

...Of course, offenders differ from one another in their mental states, doing so to an almost infinite degree, and these differences should be reflected in the way in which they are treated by the penal system, but there are causal explanations for the crimes of all of them, free will affects none of them, and retributive punishment is not something which any of them deserves or from which any would benefit.

This reminds me that most religions believe in free will. Otherwise getting rewards in heaven or punishments in hell wouldn't make any sense. But that's a subject for another blog post.

Right now the cosmos' determinism is directing me to go soak in a hot bath with a cool glass of wine and toast my freedom from jury duty today. Brought about by good deterministic reasons, naturally. 

Free will is a wonderful thing to lose

Most of us are afraid of losing our freedom.

We like being able to say what we want, go where we want, do what we want. Within limits, of course. Absolute freedom is impossible. Constraints are part of the human condition.

This helps explain the almost universal belief in free will, and the desire to exercise free will to the fullest.

Even if we're constrained by outer circumstances, such as not being able to drive 200 miles an hour because our car won't go that fast, most people have the feeling that what they are capable of choosing to do is within their control.

I walk into Starbucks. I'm asked "What would you like?" It certainly seems as if I'm free to order whatever is on the menu, even though I've never had a desire for any drink other than a latte or regular coffee.

In one sense, this is true.

My brain and vocal cords are capable of speaking the sounds that correspond to the dizzying variety of beverages that can be ordered at Starbucks. However, the notion that I can freely will to do whatever at any moment is ridiculously wrong.

Free will is an illusion. More accurately, as Richard Oerton says in his book "The Nonsense of Free Will," it is an illusion of an illusion.

Determinists sometimes speak of "the illusion of free will", but this is a very odd sort of illusion. If you see a mirage in the desert, the illusion is of something which conforms with the laws of nature and might really be there. But the illusion of free will, surely, is an illusion of something incomprehensible: an illusion of an illusion?

Incomprehensible, because genuine free will (as contrasted with watered-down varieties such as compatibilism) can't coexist with causality. And everywhere we look, causes and effects rule the roost. Oerton writes:

Human beings, according to a believer in free will, manage somehow to stand outside the natural laws which govern the rest of the universe and, despite being inextricably a part of it, are somehow exempt from the inter-dependent causal relationships of its other elements.

So that's why I titled this post as I did.

Free will, if it existed, would cut us loose from everything else in the cosmos. We'd be free-floating bits of... what? Hard to imagine. What would it be like to be unaffected by anything in existence, utterly detached from every other sentient being and insentient object, having no relationship with them?

Sounds like hell to me. Which got me to thinking about why the illusion of free will is worshipped so highly by most religions.

Shouldn't a primary life goal, whether spiritual or secular, involve relating more intimately, lovingly, caringly, and compassionately with other parts of the universe? Isn't it better to be connected than alone, part of the pattern woven into the fabric of the All rather than an isolated thread?

In Christianity, probably along with other monotheistic religions, God supposedly gave humans free will. (Of course, if we weren't free to accept or reject that gift, that seems to limit our freedom.) This supports notions of heaven, hell, salvation, redemption, and such.

Because if everything we do and all that we are is determined by forces outside our control, the theological basis for divine rewards and punishments dissolves. Stuff just happens naturally, causes and effects proceeding in accord with the laws of nature.

Eastern views of karma thus seem closer to reality than Western views of sin and virtue. However, there still remains the question of what gets the karmic ball rolling for an individual soul/self.

Meaning, if what we do is determined by previous causes and effects, yet we still have to go through rewards and punishments of our current actions, where is the fairness in that if free will wasn't present at the beginning of a long causative chain?

That's one problem with karma-based spirituality. Another is that our interconnectedness with the cosmos through causes and effects generally is viewed by Eastern religions as something to escape from, rather than to embrace.

Traditionally, Hinduism and Buddhism speak of being freed from cycles of birth and rebirth controlled by karmic law. We keep being born in different bodies, human or otherwise, until our store of karma is exhausted through some means: meditation, selfless service, guru's grace, or whatever.

This used to make sense to me. So much sense, I spent several years writing a book, "Life is Fair," about the karmic rationale for vegetarianism that was published in India. (A PDF file of the book can be downloaded via the previous link.)

Now, though, I'm happy to see myself as nothing special. I'm just a temporarily existing part of a vast cosmos that existed long before me and will continue on long after me. I'm affected by the countless connections I have with other things and people.

Those interrelationships have made me who I am, and continue to form me. I'm not free to do whatever I will. My will, intentions, desires, actions, and such spring from causes which, ultimately, can be traced all the way back to the big bang some 14 billion years ago.

And also are as recent as the sights and sounds cascading into my brain right now, along with every other influence acting upon me at the moment.

Would I have it any other way? No. Thankfully, because I've got no choice.

Free will doesn't exist, and I don't exist apart from everything else in the cosmos. I'm a part of the whole, dependent, not independent. Naturally I also am not free to lose my belief in free will; that's just happened, for reasons not of my own making.

Sam Harris explains how life is good without free will

Free will. Who needs it? Not me. Not you. Not Sam Harris. Not anybody. 

Which is a good thing. Because almost certainly free will doesn't exist. So it's good news, and unsurprising news, that something humans don't have isn't necessary to live a satisfying life.

Harris is an excellent writer and thinker. Read his "Life Without Free Will."

If you're under the illusion that you're free to do whatever you decide to do, his piece will reassure you that's it's fine to give up that unsubsantiated belief.

I particularly liked this section of the essay.

In my view, the reality of good and evil does not depend upon the existence of free will, because with or without free will, we can distinguish between suffering and happiness. With or without free will, a psychopath who enjoys killing children is different from a pediatric surgeon who enjoys saving them. Whatever the truth about free will, these distinctions are unmistakable and well worth caring about.

Might free will somehow be required for goodness to be manifest? How, for instance, does one become a pediatric surgeon? Well, you must first be born, with an intact nervous system, and then provided with a proper education. No freedom there, I’m afraid. You must also have the physical talent for the job and avoid smashing your hands at rugby. Needless to say, it won’t do to be someone who faints at the sight of blood. Chalk these achievements up to good luck as well.

At some point you must decide to become a surgeon—a result, presumably, of first wanting to become one. Will you be the conscious source of this wanting? Will you be responsible for its prevailing over all the other things you want but that are incompatible with a career in medicine? No. If you succeed at becoming a surgeon, you will simply find yourself standing one day, scalpel in hand, at the confluence of all the genetic and environmental causes that led you to develop along this line.

None of these events requires that you, the conscious subject, be the ultimate cause of your aspirations, abilities, and resulting behavior. And, needless to say, you can take no credit for the fact that you weren’t born a psychopath.

Of course, I’m not saying that you can become a surgeon by accident—you must do many things, deliberately and well, and in the appropriate sequence, year after year. Becoming a surgeon requires effort. But can you take credit for your disposition to make that effort? To turn the matter around, am I responsible for the fact that it has never once occurred to me that I might like to be a surgeon? Who gets the blame for my lack of inspiration?

And what if the desire to become a surgeon suddenly arises tomorrow and becomes so intense that I jettison my other professional goals and enroll in medical school? Would I—that is, the part of me that is actually experiencing my life—be the true cause of these developments? Every moment of conscious effort—every thought, intention, and decision—will have been caused by events of which I am not conscious. Where is the freedom in this?

Hard to argue with. But if you feel like disagreeing with Sam Harris because you believe in free will, go ahead. After all, you're powerless to do anything else.

Free will is a limiting, destructive belief

Free will. Who could be against this seemingly wonderful notion? The opposite idea seems to be a depressing downer: Unfree determinism. 

After I'd read the first part of Sam Harris' new book, "Free Will," I shared my enthusiasm with my wife about giving up the belief that I can freely decide what I think, feel, or do. She wasn't nearly as enthused, perhaps because of her lengthy experience as a psychotherapist.

"But wouldn't people then use I've got no free will as an excuse for doing whatever they want? And wouldn't this take away people's motivation to change, to improve themselves, to pursue difficult undertakings?"

I had a ready response. 

"Anyone who reads Harris' book will simply have more information dumped into their brain, an additional experience that will combine with all the other influences which currently determine their brain states. How they change as a result can't be predicted. Giving up a belief in free will might be highly positive for them, rather than negative."

Here's some quotes that illustrate how Harris approached this subject. 

Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing the sense of free will has only improved my ethics -- by increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness, and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits of my own good luck.

...Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic -- in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling how much I might change in the future... A creative change of inputs to the system -- learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits of attention -- may radically transform one's life.

Absolutely.

If who we are and what we do is up to us, we're confined in an exceedingly small cage of individualistic selfhood. We can only move in directions that are apparent to our conscious free will. Fortunately, this isn't the truth known to modern neuroscience and psychology. 

Psychologist Shimon Edelman discusses how the illusions of free will and selfhood are being replaced by the scientific truths of determinism and extended "virtual" selves. Here's how he puts it in a book that nicely complements Harris', The Happiness of Pursuit.

Insofar as the extended system -- the effective and narrative Selves planted in the great web of cause and effect -- can reach deep into geographical and social space, the computational need for such focusing of behavioral feedback is pressing. By taking responsibility for the processing and use of this information, the phenomenal Self gives rise to another useful illusion: that of free will.

In the West, it has been known since at least the time of Voltaire and Hume that the concept of uncaused cause, which is a prerequisite for free will, is logically incoherent: if my "free" decision to do a particular deed arises absolutely independently of any of the existing circumstances, including my own prior actions and states of mind, then in no sense can it be considered free, or, indeed, mine.

...I do not obey a code of conduct that is implicit in the web of cause and effect; rather I am part of the web. The ultimate reach of this web is universal -- and within the boundaries of physical law the universe is, of course, free.

...The bottom line, then, is this: the Self, along with all of its perceived and remembered attributes -- anything and everything that is included in the feeling of being you -- is a product of the brain's virtual reality engine. This virtual Self is computed and put in charge of the situation purely for reasons of good governance, that is, efficient and purposeful control of the brain's life support system -- your body.

So here's another reason why my wife doesn't have to worry much about people giving up their belief in free will and turning into irresponsible there's no reason to do anything couch potatoes: evolution has led to a virtual/illusory sense of self being front and center within human consciousness.

Even if I intellectually know that I have no free will, it sure seems like I'm able to choose what words I'm going to type in the next moment. (Yet as every writer knows, what's going to be written isn't known until the words appear on paper or a computer screen.)

The inward feeling of free will isn't much of a problem. What's culturally destructive is how this illusory feeling gets translated into social policies which assume that individual human beings are capable of freely deciding their thoughts and actions.

Harris talks about how our justice system is founded on this assumption.

Retribution becomes the main goal, rather than rehabilitation and prevention of future crimes. Often it will be necessary to lock people up to keep them from committing additional offenses. However, there's no scientifically defensible reason to believe that a criminal freely chose his/her unlawful act.

Would we punish hurricanes or earthquakes, if this were possible, berating them for the destruction they bring to humans? Or if ways to prevent these natural occurrences could be found, wouldn't we simply implement them without considering that a malevolent motivation lies behind 150 mph winds or 8.0 Richter Scale shakings?

Harris writes:

Viewing human beings as natural phenomena need not damage our system of criminal justice. If we could incarcerate earthquakes and hurricanes for their crimes, we would build prisons for them as well. We fight emerging epidemics -- and even the occasional wild animal -- without attributing free will to them. Clearly, we can respond intelligently to the threat posed by dangerous people without lying to ourselves about the ultimate origins of human behavior.

Then there's sin (or the Eastern version, bad karma).

Sin can't exist without free will, which is why earthquakes, hurricanes, and rattlesnakes don't have to spend time in a confession booth. A belief in sin or freely willed bad karma has decidedly destructive consequences, as Harris notes.

Despite our attachment to the notion of free will, most of us know that disorders of the brain can trump the best intentions of the mind. This shift in understanding represents progress toward a deeper, more consistent, and more compassionate view of our common humanity -- and we should note that this is progress away from religious metaphysics.

Few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. Within a religious framework, a belief in free will supports the notion of sin -- which seems to justify not only harsh punishment in this life but eternal punishment in the next.

And yet, ironically, one of the fears attending our progress in science is that a more complete understanding of ourselves wil dehumanize us.

No, truth can't be dehumanizing. Which includes the truth, free will does not exist. 

The dizzying joy of being freed from "free will"

Free will is an illusion.

We're full of wants, desires, thoughts, emotions, and such. But we can't want our wants, desire our desires, think our thoughts, emote our emotions, or freely choose anything.

This is the convincing central message of Sam Harris' "Free Will," a short book that I read halfway through today and am enjoying as much as I thought I would.

It's only 66 pages long.

Yet it could have been even shorter, because Harris necessarily repeats his no free will theme in various ways -- getting his point across from different perspectives. I say "necessarily" since the illusion of free will is so strong, most people resist the scientifically defensible conclusion that it doesn't exist.

I'll write more about the book after I finish it. For now, I mostly wanted to talk about the joy of embracing the no free will reality. 

Not that I have any choice in feeling that joy. Your results may differ if you read the book. Heck, they almost certainly will. Each of us is different. Yet we all share certain facts, nicely summarized by Harris in the passage below that I liked a lot.

Recently I heard someone talk about Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." Frankl argues that we have the freedom to choose our psychological reactions to situations, even those as extreme as being in a concentration camp.

Not true, says Harris. He writes:

One of the most refreshing ideas to come out of existentialism (perhaps the only one) is that we are free to interpret and reinterpret the meaning of our lives. You can consider your first marriage, which ended in divorce, to be a "failure," or you can view it as a circumstance that caused you to grow in ways that were crucial to your future happiness.

Does this freedom of interpretation require free will? No. It simply suggests that different ways of thinking have different consequences. Some thoughts are depressing and disempowering; others inspire us. We can pursue any line of thought we want -- but our choice is the product of prior events that we did not bring into being.

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain.

And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime -- by your genes, by your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas.

Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from?

...What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, a mystery -- one that is fully determined by the prior state of the universe and the laws of nature (including the contributions of chance). To declare my "freedom" is tantamount to saying, "I don't know why I did it, but it's the sort of thing I tend to do, and I don't mind doing it."

I love the notion -- more, the reality -- that free will is an illusion. It's difficult to explain the dizzying enjoyable feeling I get when I realize there's no exit.

Wherever I turn, whichever way I go, always I'm in a maze of causes and effects not of my own making, because there's no separate "me" apart from those causes and effects. We're all in this maze together; no man or woman stands alone; individual human islands are an impossibility; it's all one big continent of interacting influences, a beautiful natural ecology of determinism.

Here's my favorite Harris passage from the part of his book that I've read so far.

Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors. 

But there is a paradox here that vitiates the very notion of freedom -- for what would influence the influenced? More influences? None of these adventitious mental states are the real you.

You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.

Wonderful. Love it! You are the storm. Nothing scary about a hurricane if you are the hurricane. Nothing bothersome about the brain's workings if you are those workings.

Sam Harris' "Free Will" arrives today

Ooh, ooh, I'm so excited! Amazon tells me my pre-ordered copy of "Free Will" by Sam Harris should be delivered today.

Can't help my excitement. I have no free will. Harris gives away the plot line of his book in The Illusion of Free Will. In that short piece he ends with a great question:

How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?

His new book is just 96 pages long. Good. I want to learn Harris' answer.

There's no free will, so you're unable to believe me

I gave it my best try last night -- arguing that we humans don't have free will, though it seems ever so obvious that we do. (Of course, it also seems obvious that the sun goes around the Earth, which demolishes the "obviousness" argument for anything.)

My wife and I belong to a three-couple book/article discussion group. Yesterday the subject was the justice system. When it came time for me to share my thoughts, I started off by quoting from Jerry Coyne's column in USA Today, "Why you don't really have free will."

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

But before I explain this, let me define what I mean by "free will." I mean it simply as the way most people think of it: When faced with two or more alternatives, it's your ability to freely and consciously choose one, either on the spot or after some deliberation.

A practical test of free will would be this: If you were put in the same position twice — if the tape of your life could be rewound to the exact moment when you made a decision, with every circumstance leading up to that moment the same and all the molecules in the universe aligned in the same way — you could have chosen differently.

Well, it was a good choice to lead off my part of the discussion in this fashion. Because it stimulated some passionate exchanges between me and several free-will believers. 

I said that if the goals of the U.S. justice system basically are deterrence, punishment, rehabilitation, and restitution, one of these -- punishment -- should be taken off the table, since people don't have free will. Punishment (retribution) doesn't make sense if someone wasn't able to freely choose between committing a crime or not committing a crime.

Deter further crimes by putting them in jail, and serving as a warning to other potential criminals. Rehabilitate them through education, counseling, training, and such while in prison. Force them via restitution to pay back people they've harmed.

But don't believe that someone deserves to be punished out of a sense that he or she freely willed to commit a crime.

As Coyne implied above, this belief requires a supernatural, immaterial, non-physical source of our actions, a soul or free-floating consciousness unaffected by genetics, prior experiences, environmental factors, memories, unconscious influences, hormones, and so on.

At every moment, I argued, all we know is that what happened, did.

A belief in free will assumes that something other than what did happen, could have. That's an interesting philosophical notion which has inspired lots of fictional works. What if Hitler won the Second World War? What if John Kennedy hadn't been assassinated?

However, we never see those "what if's" in reality. There's only one path through time and space that we follow. Coyne says:

Now there's no way to rewind the tape of our lives to see if we can really make different choices in completely identical circumstances. But two lines of evidence suggest that such free will is an illusion.

The first is simple: we are biological creatures, collections of molecules that must obey the laws of physics. All the success of science rests on the regularity of those laws, which determine the behavior of every molecule in the universe. Those molecules, of course, also make up your brain — the organ that does the "choosing."

And the neurons and molecules in your brain are the product of both your genes and your environment, an environment including the other people we deal with. Memories, for example, are nothing more than structural and chemical changes in your brain cells. Everything that you think, say, or do, must come down to molecules and physics.

True "free will," then, would require us to somehow step outside of our brain's structure and modify how it works. Science hasn't shown any way we can do this because "we" are simply constructs of our brain. We can't impose a nebulous "will" on the inputs to our brain that can affect its output of decisions and actions, any more than a programmed computer can somehow reach inside itself and change its program.

And that's what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. 

That word, "predetermined," came up often last night. Some of my fellow discussants were strongly opposed to the notion that everything we do, think, and feel was determined at the moment at the big bang, with events simply unfolding according to the laws of physics.

I understand. Again, almost everybody feels like they have free will. I certainly do. But feeling so doesn't make it so. 

Also, I pointed out that the "pre" part of predetermined usually is an abstraction when we're talking about people. Practically speaking, it's more accurate to say that our behavior is determined. Meaning, the human brain is so complex, as are the environmental influences acting upon us, there's no way to precisely predict what someone is going to do.

It's like chaos theory.

Chaotic systems, such as a turbulent river, are deterministic yet unpredictable. Throw a cork into the water above some rapids. You won't be able to predict where it will end up, but it will end up somewhere after innumerable causes and effects act upon it. The cork doesn't use its free will to decide "I'm going to head this way rather that way for no reason, just because I want to."

Yet us humans imagine that we can, the imagining being determined, of course, just as everything else is. 

Last night I was told that without free will, there can't be any morality. I don't get this argument. Other primates act in ways we'd call "moral." Apes demonstrate empathy, concern, sharing. Why is free will required for getting along with our fellow humans?

We respond to other people; we communicate with other people; we learn about their needs, and tell them our own; we do our best to act kindly, compassionately, honestly, generously. Why? Because we're drawn to. This is our nature. We aren't isolated individuals. We're connected with, and influenced by, everything and everyone we come in contact with.

To me, a belief in free will is horribly confining. It implies that I'm a tiny island rather than a vast continent, a free-standing part rather than an integrated whole, a fallen leaf rather than living foliage on the branches of a tree that, ultimately, is the entire cosmos.

Actions are determined. So justice should be determinate.

Within reasonable guidelines, judges should be able to determine sentences which fit with determining factors of the criminal and the crime. Since there's no such thing as a Free Will Fairy which floats above people's heads and makes decisions out of the blue, completely independent of brain functioning, heredity, environmental influences, or whatever, condemning a troubled 14 year old to a life sentence without parole after he shot his grandfather is absurd. 

When we give up belief in free will, genuine morality is possible. Otherwise we're trapped in cruel Old Testament "eye for an eye" vengeance, assuming that we can be as free to punish as a criminal was free to commit a crime.

Jerry Coyne responds to comments on his free will essay here. Interesting give and take. I feel like I understand his position, which makes a lot of sense, but other people are so invested in their free will'ness, they misinterpret Coyne's arguments and fuzzy-up the whole notion of free will.

LIke Massimo Pigliucci does. 

Indeed, it is not surprising at all that we make all sorts of unconscious decisions before we become aware of them... Incidentally, I find it strange when some people argue that “we” are not making decisions if our subconscious is operating, since presumably we all agree that our subconscious is just as defining of “us” as conscious thinking is.

Hmmmm. So an intuition pops into awareness from my subconscious, and when I follow it, that's "free will"? Even though I wasn't free to will it? That's a strange view of free will, not at all as Coyne describes it. 

Free will may be an illusion, but it feels real

Over the years, and decades, I've had lots of intense discussions with other people about free will.

Partly this is because my first book about physics and mysticism had a chapter called "Laws of cause and effect govern lower levels of creation." Then my second book, "Life is Fair," argued in a different fashion that karma rules the universe, and karma is basically a spiritualized form of cause and effect.

My view of reality is much different now. I don't agree with myself about a lot of stuff that used to make sense to me, but doesn't from my current perspective.

I'm still fascinated by the notion of free will, though.

So I was excited to see that the most recent issue of New Scientist had an article called "The free will delusion." Here's some excerpts, some of which refer to a thought experiment described in a short video that you can watch here.

Neuroscientists increasingly describe our behaviour as the result of a chain of cause-and-effect, in which one physical brain state or pattern of neural activity inexorably leads to the next, culminating in a particular action or decision. With little space for free choice in this chain of causation, the conscious, deliberating self seems to be a fiction.

From this perspective, all the real action is occurring at the level of synapses and neurotransmitters - putting us a lot closer to that deterministic world of 2500 than most people think.

For now most of us are content to believe that we have control over our own lives, but what would happen if we lost our faith in free will?

...People whose belief in free will was challenged were, on average, less altruistic than the other group. The researchers also found that priming people with anti-free will statements made them behave more aggressively towards strangers, as measured by how much chilli sauce they added to a dish destined to be eaten by someone who had expressed a dislike of hot foods

...When Stillman and colleagues asked supervisors to rate the work of their employees, those with a greater belief in their own free will were generally rated as performing better than those with weaker beliefs.

...All the evidence indicates that our sense of free will is deeply ingrained. In 1998, the International Social Survey Programme asked around 40,000 people from 34 countries: "Do we make our own fate?" More than 70 per cent answered in the affirmative. And people don't just believe they have free will, they also believe they have more of it than others.

...Alfred Mele, a philosopher at Florida State University, suggests that when scientists talk about the brain and free will, they need to tread carefully. "Neuroscientists often talk as if our conception of free will depends on having non-physical minds or souls," says Mele, and as modern neuroscience pretty much rules these out, free will seems to fall too.

But this needn't follow. As Nahmias's studies show, belief in free will doesn't depend on having a soul, but on feeling in control of "your" actions. So long as the citizens of 2500 do not lose that perception, the reality of determinism should have little effect on their behaviour. And if the recent studies prove anything, it's that this feeling of controlling our own destiny is very robust.

Well, it should be.

Neuroscientists understand that we humans aren't capable of knowing how our brain is working behind the conscious scenes. An intention pops into our awareness and we think, "Ah, this is what I want to do."

So our direct experience is of free will, just as we intuitively believe that we have (or are) a "self" separate and distinct from the physical body. It's sort of like no matter how well we cognize that the earth's rotation makes the sun appear to move through the sky, it still seems to us that the sun rises and sets while the earth stands still.

Personally, I can't understand how our will could be "free."

How could this be? What does free even mean? Completely unaffected by outside influences? This isn't possible, given what is known about the laws of nature, heredity, how the brain works, culture, and our social nature.

I think the closing conclusion in the excerpts above that I quoted from the New Scientist article gets it about right. If I view myself as someone who can control "my" actions, then I'll feel like I've got free will (even though I don't).

But if I recognize that I'm part of a marvelous interconnected web of relationships and exchanges of energy with entities both living (such as my friends and relatives) and insentient (such as the sun and earth's atmosphere), then I won't regard myself as being isolated from the effects of influences beyond my skin.