Church of the Churchless

Freedom, says Alan Watts, isn't personal but a quality of the world

I don't believe in free will. But I believe in freedom. This isn't a freedom of my personal will to do what I choose. It is the freedom of realizing that I'm part of the unified whole we call the universe. 

This view is scientific. I much prefer it to unscientific notions of free will that basically say, "Because we humans feel that we have free will, it must be so." Unfortunately, feelings have little or nothing to do with truth.

In his book, Determined, Robert Sapolsky laid out the reasons why free will is an illusion. An appealing illusion, to be sure, but an illusion nonetheless. His core conception is similar to a central tenet of Buddhism: causes and conditions result in stuff happening, with the happening producing more causes and conditions that result in additional stuff happening.

We members of Homo sapiens aren't separate from all the happenings of the universe just because we have an evolved brain/mind that can make us feel like we're observing the world from a detached vantage point.

In truth, we're as much a part of nature as a daisy, rock, wolf, or hurricane is. This is so obvious it really shouldn't need to be pointed out. However, because our mind is prone to seeing ourselves as being an isolated "I" who often is at odds with what is not us, we need to be reminded that our sense of selfhood is a sometimes useful falsehood tossed up by evolution. It isn't the way things truly are.

Alan Watts explains this well in his terrific little book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, which he wrote in 1951. I finished re-reading it today. Here's a passage about the nature of freedom.

The meaning of freedom can never be grasped by the divided mind. If I feel separate from my experience, and from the world, freedom will seem to be the extent to which I can push the world around, and fate the extent to which the world pushes me around.

But to the whole mind there is no contrast of "I" and the world. There is just one process acting, and it does everything that happens. It raises my little finger and it creates earthquakes. Or, if you want to put it that way, I raise my little finger and also make earthquakes. No one fates and no one is being fated.

Of course this is a strange view of freedom. We are accustomed to think that, if there any freedom at all, it resides, not in nature, but in the separate human will and its power of choice.

But what we ordinarily mean by choice is not freedom. Choices are usually decisions motivated by pleasure and pain, and the divided mind acts with the sole purpose of getting "I" into pleasure and out of pain. But the best pleasures are those for which we do not plan, and the worst part of pain is expecting it and trying to get away from it when it has come. You cannot plan to be happy.

I'll end with some additional passages from the book about another seeming truth: our awareness of the world in nondual. Meaning, there isn't (1) the world, and (2) our knowledge of the world. What we know of the world is the world. There's just one thing going on, not two.

Certainly most people feel separate from everything that surrounds them. On the one hand there is myself, and on the other the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in the earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone.

...Nevertheless, the physical reality is that my body exists only in relation to this universe, and in fact I am as attached to it and dependent on it as a leaf on a tree. I am cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more.

For I am what I know; what I know is I. The sensation of a home across the street or of a star in outer space is no less I than an itch on the sole of my feet or an idea in my brain.

In another sense, I am also what I do not know. I am not aware of my own brain as a brain. In just the same way, I am not aware of the house across the street as a thing apart from my sensation of it. I know my brain as thoughts and feelings, and I know the house as sensations. In the same way and sense that I do not know my own brain, or the house as a thing-in-itself, I do not know the private thoughts in your brain.

But my brain, which is also I, your brain and the thoughts within it, as well as the house across the street, are all forms of an inextricably interwoven process called the real world. Conscious or unconscious of it as I may be, it is all I in the sense that the sun, the air, and human society are just as vital to me as my brain or my lungs.

If then, this brain is my brain -- unaware of it as I am -- the sun is my sun, the air my air, and society my society.

...That there is a sun apart from my sensation of it is an inference. The fact that I have a brain, though I cannot see it, is likewise an inference. We know about these things only in theory, and not by immediate experience. But this "external" world of theoretical objects is, apparently, just as much a unity as the "internal" world of experience.

From experience I infer that it exists. And because experience is a unity -- I am my sensations -- I must likewise infer that this theoretical universe is a unity, that my body and the world form a single process. 

...But you will cease to feel isolated when you recognize, for example, that you do not have a sensation of the sky: you are that sensation. For all purposes of feeling, your sensation of the sky is the sky, and there is no "you" apart from what you sense, feel, and know.

This is why the mystics and many of the poets give frequent utterance to the feeling that they are "one with the All," or "united with God," or, as Sir Edwin Arnold expressed it -- Foregoing self, the universe grows I. 

Hey, I'm trendy! "Manifest" is the 2024 word of the year.

I was thrilled to see that the subject I've been writing about recently, manifesting, has been named the word of the year for 2024 by the Cambridge Dictionary. (The word was "manifest," to be precise.)

However, I wasn't aware of the manifest craze when I bought James Doty's book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything. And I don't agree with the magical thinking side of manifesting, as mentioned in The Guardian story about the word of the year.

“Manifest”, meaning to dream or will something into existence, has been named the word of 2024 by Cambridge Dictionary, after a surge of celebrity-inspired popularity on social media.

Though far from a new coinage – as an adjective meaning “clear” or “obvious”, the word dates back in English to at least the 1300s – the dictionary’s decision rests on its newest meaning as a verb, which attests to the power of visualisation and positive thinking in making fervently held dreams come to pass.

...Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at Cambridge University, credited social media and the pandemic for popularising the term and practice of manifesting, but cautioned that it had no scientific validity.

“Manifesting is what psychologists call ‘magical thinking’ or the general illusion that specific mental rituals can change the world around us.

“Manifesting gained tremendous popularity during the pandemic on TikTok with billions of views, including the popular 3-6-9 method, which calls for writing down your wishes three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon and nine times before bed.

“This procedure promotes obsessive and compulsive behaviour with no discernible benefits. But can we really blame people for trying it, when prominent celebrities have been openly ‘manifesting’ their success?

“There is good research on the value of positive thinking, self-affirmation, and goal-setting … However, it is crucial to understand the difference between the power of positive thinking and moving reality with your mind – the former is healthy, whereas the latter is pseudoscience.”

Agreed.

That was the point of my previous post, "Manifesting comes in two varieties: scientific and New Age." Doty's book is almost wholly scientific, though sometimes he does express himself in a way that could give a different impression. But I found his chapter, "Step One: Reclaim Your Power to Focus Your Mind," to be in line with modern psychology and neuroscience.

Doty writes:

Within each of us is an incredible inner power that we limit by our own beliefs. It is the power to endure discomfort, to delay gratification, to decide what we let into our minds from our environment and what we don't, to control our response to any given situation, whether real in the moment or replaying in our minds from the past.

This is the power of choice. It is this power that allows us to focus our attention where we choose, no matter how loud or frightening or seductive the external stimuli trying to distract us... This is the power we can call upon ourselves to direct our attention toward inner intentions that produce powerful positive emotions strong enough to break us out of the emotional addictions that have kept us living small. 

...In the end, it's not about the universe: it's about you. We may have come to believe that our inner power is limited by our external circumstances or our past conditioning, but it starts in our own minds.

Now, it sure sounds like Doty is expressing a belief in free will here. But actually what he's talking about is the sense that we are agents with the capacity to control our mind and actions. 

The sense of self-agency is essentially the feeling of being in the driver's seat when it comes to intending, initiating, and carrying out our actions. This gives us the reassuring sense that we can control the outcome of a given situation through our own actions or our will.

...The sense of agency is just that: a sense that is constructed by our brains from a combination of cues in our experience. The brain examines whether our actions appear to be causing the results we intend them to and influencing our environment as we choose, and then uses that data to assess whether we have agency in the situation.

The humbling truth is that our conscious mind does not have access to most of the subconscious processes by which we carry out actions (such as our ability to perform movements), and therefore it can only set an intention, watch its effect, and then interpret them accordingly. In other words, our sense of agency is a story our brain tells us about our experience.

Doty goes on to say that it doesn't matter whether we actually possess free will. What matters is that we have the sense of being an agent who is able to focus the mind, form intentions, and carry out actions that lead to the attainment of meaningful goals. In other words, it's good to feel like we have free will, even if we don't.

The important point here is that the sense of agency is really a perceived subjective experience that can be influenced by our own thought processes. Therefore, the depth and efficacy of our sense of inner power comes down to the story we tell ourselves about our ability to express that power.

As we will explore in future chapters, the feeling of inner power is ultimately the feeling of being able to direct the full capacity of our brain toward an intention we choose, in particular harnessing the power of our subconscious. And the strange thing about the subconscious is that it runs on beliefs. What we subconsciously believe is often what limits the possibilities of a given situation. 

...One may get confused that self-agency implies free will. The nature of free will is a much deeper discussion that brings into play what we know about brain science, psychology, philosophy, and religion.  Some hold that we lack free will because so much of our behavior is governed by forces and influences not apparent to the conscious mind, while others argue that all actions are predicated on the interaction of molecules, atoms, and particles, and therefore every event is predetermined -- we just ignorantly think we are causing our own actions. 

I am not intending to solve this age-old debate. And happily, for the purposes of our discussion of manifesting, we do not have to solve it. I am simply indicating that we do have choices regarding how we manipulate processes within ourselves to manifest our intentions. It is this cognitive control, rooted in the functioning of the CEN [central executive network], that enables our ability to adjust and direct cognitive resources to complete the goal-directed task of embedding our intention into the subconscious and therefore optimizing our ability to manifest.

...Our power to manifest the things and experiences we desire comes down to our ability to throw off the narrow mental habits that keep our perception shrouded in fog and tell us we are unable to influence a situation or resist a habitual reaction and instead to embrace our sense of inner power. In order to produce the results we want, we must first believe in our innate ability to affect the outcome of situations through our actions and will. This process starts with our attention.

Our mental experience isn't always in accord with the mental reality

Descartes famously wrote that even though we could be mistaken about everything else, since God could be a cosmic joker who hides the truth from us, the one thing we can't doubt is that we are a creature who doubts -- and thinks, and in general has conscious experiences. 

You know, the "I think, therefore I am" thing.

It's hard to argue with that. Sort of. Because we can imagine what Descartes could not, given when he lived: that, among other 21st century possibilities, we are creatures who are characters in a computer simulation crafted by an advanced alien civilization.

Part of the simulation includes the capacity to imbue certain characters, human beings in our case, with a conception that they are having conscious experiences. Also, that they are free to choose one thing -- a thought, action, whatever -- rather than another thing, even though the simulation is both doing the choosing and creatingnthe sensation of free will.

Which, in characters like Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and other deniers of free will, is overridden by a sensation of not having free will, just to make the simulation more interesting.

But even if we don't believe that we're characters in a simulation (I consider this unlikely), there's still good reason to consider that much of what we mentally experience isn't actually what is happening in our deeper mental reality.

Thomas Metzinger explains this in the "Meditation and Nonmeditation" chapter in his provocative book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is about the experience of pure consciousness. 

According to the reports of about 500 people who described such an experience in sufficient detail to be included in Metzinger's book, pure consciousness or pure awareness (same thing) happens spontaneously. It can't be forced, since any forcing introduces a subject-object duality that destroys the possibility of experiencing pure awareness in its simple unified clarity.

In other words, we can be it, but we can't observe it. 

However this raises the question of where an experience of pure awareness comes from if it is uncaused, which is what's implied by the notion of spontaneity. Metzinger says:

On a physical or functional level of description, to call something "spontaneous" means to describe it as uncaused and lawless -- and therefore doing so without argument or evidence could be seen as a form of hand-waving or deliberate obscurantism. 

If we try to be intellectually honest, set all metaphysics aside, and stay as close as possible to contemplative experience itself, then the term "spontaneity" can only refer to a phenomenological kind of spontaneity.

There is an experience of spontaneity, and this is what has to be taken seriously. As always, jumping to strong metaphysical conclusions is a way of not taking your own experience seriously.

That last sentence is interesting. It deserves careful consideration.

I'm not capable of doing that right now. So I'll simply agree with Metzinger in an intuitive fashion that he does seem to be correct in saying that when we make more of our direct phenomenal experience than is contained within the experience itself ("I felt a great sense of peace. That must be the presence of God!") we're discounting our experience in favor of a metaphysical or conceptual conclusion.

Here's what Metzinger says in the following paragraphs. This fits with my understanding of why we believe we have free will, though there's no evidence of this other than the belief.

The phenomenological fact that nondual MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] often appears spontaneously and effortlessly, that it has an "ahistoric" quality and cannot be fabricated by applying a mental technique, can be explained with reference to the fact that most of its enabling conditions in the brain are fully unconscious.

We do not experience them. Science may be able to find and isolate these causally enabling conditions, but the brain itself doesn't represent them in its conscious model of reality. There is a parallel case in the phenomenology of volition, of suddenly "willing" something.

Many people proceed from the phenomenological fact that, say, the consciously experienced intention to now move their right arm and reach for a beautiful flower seems to spontaneously occur in their mind, "out of the blue" as it were, and interpret this as proof of free will in a strong sense: as demonstrating the existence of what philosophers call "ultimate origination."

Ultimate origination would mean the capacity to start a new causal chain of events in your mind by an uncaused act of will, an act coming from outside the network of dependent origination. But for the experience of free will, as well as for the experience of spontaneously occurring pure awareness, the same principle holds: 

From the fact that you experience something as uncaused, it does not follow that it actually was uncaused.

...Some intelligent systems control their own behavior based on a model of themselves as agents in a strong sense. To successfully control their own behavior -- which may be bodily or mental -- they use a conscious image of themselves as an entity that possesses the capacity for goal selection and ultimate origination. 

Other intelligent systems don't do this. The difference is important. 

We can think of embodied systems intelligently moving through the world, automatically updating and constantly improving their inner portrait of reality, controlling what they will know and what they will not know.

But some of these systems -- for example, self-aware human beings -- sometimes may use a model of themselves as an epistemic agent, now achieving the same goal by using a special computational device. They would experience themselves as possessing free will, as being agents capable of initiating new causal chains out of the blue.

These systems would have an ego in a strong sense. 

What if reality was much better than it seems to be? (Good news, it is!)

I've had a "what if?" blog post on my mind for quite a while. Might as well try to get it off my mind and into written form, though if this was easy for me to do, I'd have done it sooner. Anyway, here goes...

Most of us, me certainly included, are looking for ways to make reality more pleasant.

This quest goes in many different directions: family life, career, health, friendships, religion, hobbies, athletic pursuits, spirituality, art, romance, and all the other areas where we wish there wasn't such a large gap between what is and what we'd like to be.

Often these efforts require a lot of work. It may not be easy to alter the trajectory of life so that it better matches where we'd like to land our personal Flight to Happiness. 

Another complication is that both popular culture and religious teachings hold out the hope that it's possible to attain a state of consciousness, or being, where in one fell swoop, one major transformation, one overturning of old understandings, we look upon life in an entirely different fashion.

A better fashion, usually, though not always, because some people would prefer knowing how the world really is, even if that reality is disturbing.

So The Matrix presents a choice between taking the red or blue pill, with red leading to a life-changing truth, and blue to reality as it currently appears to be. Some forms of Zen Buddhism embrace the possibility of a sudden enlightenment or realization that overturns existing worldviews. Rumi and other mystical story-tellers speak of seekers looking for truth in far-off places, only to discover that what they longed for was right at home, so close it required no searching at all.

I've got my own "what if?" fantasy. Yet to me, it isn't a fantasy, though I recognize that it will appear that way to other people. 

What if, I wonder, it was possible to attain a state of consciousness where all of the apparent problems of life, all those things we wish were different from how they actually are, were seen to be just fine, unable to be anything other than their current state?

I also wonder, what if it was possible to attain a state of consciousness where all the things we have done, are doing, and will do were seen to be equally just fine, unable to be anything other that what actually occurred?

And lastly, I wonder what if it was possible to attain a state of consciousness where all efforts aimed at preserving our sense of identity as a separate, independent, enduring self were seen to be unnecessary, because who we are right now is just fine, as is whoever we might become in the future?

Wouldn't these three what if attainments be a huge relief? Wouldn't we feel a large weight lifted from our psychological shoulders? Wouldn't life be much more pleasant without the worries caused by viewing the past, present, and future as filled with problems that demand our attention?

I'd say so. 

I also say that for me, you, and everybody in the world, without exception, each of those what if's isn't something to be attained, but something to enjoy right now. 

Because there's good reason -- no, excellent reason -- to believe that (1) determinism controls what happens in the world, which includes us, so whatever has happened, is happening, and will happen necessarily had to be just as it was, is, or will be; (2) in line with this, free will is an illusion; and (3) the notion of a enduring self or soul also is an illusion, since we are a wave temporarily tossed up by the ocean of the world, not an entity separate from the ever-changing reality that surrounds us and indeed is us.

Too good to be true? Absolutely not. This is both scientific truth and spiritual truth, so long as "spiritual" is understood to mean a deep understanding of life, not anything supernatural. But it isn't easy to truly grasp this truth and experience it in everyday life.

I suspect the reason is that it is so simple and close at hand, we look in vain for something complex and distant.

Rather than rely on religion, here's what I consider both true and beneficial

Having been a religious believer for 35 years, Eastern religion variety, I'm deeply familiar with why people are attracted to a belief in God, heaven, supernatural realms, mystical powers, life after death, and such.

In short, it feels good. 

Religions provide a community of like-minded people. They offer a ready-made meaning to life. Their believers are drawn to view themselves as special, possessing knowledge and benefits (like eternal salvation) off-limits to those not within the religion's fold. 

I found all those things highly appealing and beneficial to me.

Until I didn't. For this primary reason: I came to conclude that most of what I believed wasn't true. So I was buying good feelings with a counterfeit coin. This was different than how I felt for a long time, which basically was "I don't know for sure what's true and false about my religion, but it has the ring of truth."

That shift didn't happen overnight. It occurred gradually, bit by bit, in much the same way my first wife, Sue, and I grew apart during the latter stage of our 18-year marriage. In both cases, the final breakup was preceded by a lengthy period of slowly growing disenchantment. 

I'm not claiming that I now have seen the light and know truths about reality that escaped me during my true believing days. Far from it. In some ways I'm more uncertain now about life and the cosmos than I was as a religious believer.

But I'm content with that, because I'd rather be close-to-certain about a few key things regarding this material world, rather than being close-to-certain about some supernatural propositions. 

That tradeoff makes sense to me because I've found that when something is likely both true and beneficial, embracing it is better than being attached to something that's probably false and beneficial. In other words, I'm still wanting peace of mind, happiness, and other good stuff. I just have come to prefer that those goodies come wrapped in truth rather than falsehood.

Again, I'm not saying that I have any unique insights into what is both True and Good. In fact, I'm attracted to these True and Good statements about reality in large part because I see them as founded in a broad scientific outlook, not some narrow perspective. 

If I had to pick two True and Good things that I've come to rely on, they would be:

(1) There's no enduring self. This is a tenet of both modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism. What I am, what you are, what everybody is -- that's something ever-changing, ephemeral, and interconnected with the rest of existence. Knowing this takes the pressure off of me trying to find my true self, of saving my soul, and other notions based on an assumption that such is possible. 

(2) There's no free will. This also is a tenet of both modern neuroscience and ancient Buddhism. Whether termed determinism or karma, it seems highly likely, almost certain, that our actions, thoughts, emotions, and such arise from causes and conditions extending from the present moment to the big bang that brought our universe into being. Again, interconnectedness. 

Now, I realize that even if someone acknowledges these statements to be true, they may vehemently disagree that they are beneficial. And that's fine. For that person. I'm just expressing how I feel, not how everybody should feel. 

Which is a considerable change for me. I used to get defensive when my religious beliefs were challenged. I'd try to defend them by various sorts of arguments, none of them highly persuasive, in my current frame of mind. 

By no means have I lost all of my desire to have people agree with me, rather than disagree. I'm just less concerned about defending my views about no-self and no free will. (Not that I have a choice in the matter.)

More arguments for determinism and against free will

It was akin to waiting to open a present until the actual day of my birthday arrived. I'd noticed that one of the final chapters in Brian Klaas' book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, was titled "Could It Be Otherwise?"

An apt title, since after taking a peek at the chapter, I saw that it was about free will, one of my favorite subjects. I was tempted to skip ahead and read that chapter, but for whatever reason (it sure wasn't free will), I decided to read the book straight through, as I'd been doing.

Today I finished most of that chapter. It was as good as I expected. Klaas doesn't mention Robert Sapolsky and his recent book about the illusion of free will, Determined. Since Fluke was published in 2024, and books take a while to be published after being written, I'm pretty sure Klaas' ideas are independent of Sapolsky's.

Great minds think alike, is the apt, albeit clichéd, notion that comes to mind. Here's some passages by Klaas about determinism.

But if the world is fully deterministic -- meaning that everything that happens is completely caused by what happened previously -- then where does it end? What happened this instant was determined by what happened an instant earlier. 

Today was determined by yesterday. What happened on May 7, 1642, was determined by what happened on May 6, 1642, and that was determined by what happened on May 5, 1642, on and on and on.

Eventually, the stunning logical conclusion of a deterministic universe is that everything that happens was fully determined by the initial conditions and the laws of physics all the way back to the very beginning of the universe. 

The exact state of particles in the instant after the big bang, 13.7 billion years ago, determined the state of the universe in the next instant, which determined what happened in the next instant, on and on, endlessly, until the present moment.

If causes and effects are fully determined in an unbroken chain of events, that means that if you brushed your teeth at 8:07 this morning or if your dog barked after seeing a squirrel in the yard, then that was fully and irrevocably determined by the initial conditions of the universe 13.7 billion years ago during the big bang.

Beautifully said. Klaas discusses objections to this deterministic viewpoint, showing how each objection fails to make sense. For example, he points out that in no way is determinism at odds with change. Determinism is what makes things change: you and me, ocean temperatures, dogs and cats, everything.

Determinism says that only one outcome is possible given the exact state of the world at the time of the attempt... but that doesn't negate the value in speculating as to what might have happened if the other world had come to pass.

For a determinist, then, examining that which is impossible is nonetheless valuable. We understand our world better when we do something that no other species can do so effectively -- explore that profound question "What if?"

...This is a common mistake people make when first encountering determinism, conflating the notion of things being casually determined with things being static. Determinism claims that the interlocking pattern of causes and effects is fixed and inevitable, but that doesn't mean that your nature or your behavior is fixed. 

If you, a smoker, watch a documentary that shows images of lungs riddled by cancer, you may decide to stop smoking. That fits perfectly with deterministic thinking, which would explain that the complex chain of causes and effects in the past led inexorably to the moment in which you watched that documentary.

Brian Klaas' arguments against free will are equally persuasive. Here's some passages that build on his discussion of determinism.

The experience of free will is universal. Humans can't escape certain sensations no matter how hard we try. But when you check those sensations a bit more carefully, the certainty begins to flake away. When I consider where "I" am -- in a metaphysical rather than a geographic sense -- it's logically clear to me that I am, quite clearly, somewhere inside my body.

But if my entire body is "me," then getting a haircut or cutting my fingernails would change something fundamental about who I am, and that seems like a strange way of viewing ourselves.

Instead, the sensation of existence, of navigating the world, makes me feel that the real "me" is lurking somewhere behind my eyes, as though everything from my limbs to my liver is simply a minion of Brian HQ, with the real "me" as a disembodied CEO perched somewhere within my brain toward the front of my skull.

...It reflects our desire to imagine an eternal executive -- a deciding soul -- within each of us, an irreducible essence who controls everything, freely thinking, freely choosing.

...Our feeling of possessing libertarian free will is central to the experience of being human. It leads to a common argument: we feel as if we have free will, therefore we must. This is terrible logic. Perceptions do not make reality. 

To us, the earth doesn't "feel" like a giant round ball hurtling through space around a burning ball of gas that allows us to live in its warmth, but it is. As we've seen with the Fitness Beats Truth theorem, our brains have repeatedly evolved to deceive us.

The magician produced by our minds is a master of illusions. What we feel is not what there is. The laws of physics don't care about your feelings.

The smallest things we do can have huge effects

I don't believe in God. I do believe in the universe. Because it is clearly objectively real, and there's no evidence that God exists as anything other than subjective ideas in human minds.

So I love it when the universe appears to have a message for me. I emphasized appears, since the message I got today from the universe is solely mine. Maybe it's just a coincidence that two authors I've read recently had similar things to say.

No matter. I'm merely sharing what each of them said, which makes a lot of sense to me.

First, I get regular emails from Joan Tollifson where she communicates a fresh essay in line with her particular view of Zen, Buddhism, and spirituality in general. I've become a big fan of Tollifson after reading her book, Nothing to Grasp. 

(I've written several blog posts about the book.)

I liked her newest essay, "The freedom to be exactly as you are," so much, I've included the whole thing as a continuation to this post. Just click on the continuation link and you can read it. Here's an excerpt that reminds me a lot of how Robert Sapolsky describes the illusion of free will in his book, Determined.

In the conceptual picture of cause and effect, it certainly appears that people make things happen. We can seemingly control some things, such as opening and closing our hand, but not other things, such as the functioning of our spleen. These relative differences cannot be denied. We are conditioned to believe in free will and in our responsibility to accomplish great things, be a good person, do our duty, and so on. We habitually judge ourselves and others, compare ourselves to others, and think that we (and others) should be better, stronger, smarter, wiser, more compassionate, more successful, more attractive, more something than we are.

But we don’t actually get to choose the role we are playing in the movie of waking life. No one can simply “decide” to be Martin Luther King or Ramana Maharshi, or to not be Adolph Hitler or Pol Pot if that is the part we’ve been given. Even if we seemingly “choose” to change such things as our name, gender, career, hairstyle, religious affiliation, or anything else, each of these “choices” is a choiceless movement of life itself. Every apparent individual is the result of infinite causes and conditions—the whole universe is moving as each one of us and as everything that happens, and no form ever actually persists for more than an instant. You are not the same as you were when you began reading this article—the whole universe has shifted.

Second, Brian Klaas has written a book, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, that has nothing to do with Zen or Buddhism, from what I can tell after reading about half of it. Yet these excerpts are very much in line with what Tollifson had to say above. They just approach the subject differently.

(Here's a link about how different sperm from the same man differ a lot, if you don't believe what Klaas says about this.)

Motivational posters tell you that if you set your mind to it, you can change the world. I've got some good news for you: you already have. Congratulations! You're changing it right now because your brain is adjusting slightly just by reading the words I've written for you. If you hadn't read this sentence, the world would be different.

I mean that literally. Your neural networks have now been altered, and it will -- in the most imperceptible, minute way -- adjust your behavior slightly over the remainder of your lifetime. Who knows what the ripple effects will be. But in an intertwined system, nothing is meaningless. Everything matters. 

You may think this all sounds a bit trivial or abstract, but consider this: You might decide, or you have already decided, to bring some new humans into the world. Without getting into graphic detail, the precise moment that a baby is conceived is one of the most contingent aspects of our existence. On the day it happens, change any detail -- no matter how insignificant -- and you end up with a different child.

Suddenly, you have a daughter instead of a son, or vice versa -- or just a different son or daughter. Siblings often diverge in unexpected ways, so any change in who is born will radically change your life -- and the lives of countless others.

But it's not just the one day that a child is conceived that matters. Instead, amplify that contingency by every moment of your life. Each detail in the entire chain-link architecture of your lifetime had to be exactly as it was for the exact child who was born to be born. That's true for you, for me, for everyone.

Yet again, the motivational posters have sold you short. "You're one in a million!" they shout at you with uplifting glee. Try one in a hundred million, because that's how many competitors, on average, your single-celled predecessor outswam to successfully become half of yourself. 

You matter. That's not self-help advice. It's scientific truth. If someone else had been born instead of you -- the unborn ghost whom you outcompeted in the existence sweepstakes -- countless other people's lives would be profoundly different, so our world would be different, too. The ripples of life spread out, in unexpected ways, for eternity.

Click below for the entire Tollifson essay.

 

Fluke: great book about chance, chaos, and how everything matters

I'd vowed not to buy any more books from Amazon until I'd finished reading the ones I'd already started. But then a review in New Scientist changed my mind. Which I'm glad it did.

Because Fluke, by Brian Klaas, is a highly provocative book about how chance and chaos govern life to a much greater extent than we normally consider -- since most of us consider that we're able to steer our way through the twists and turns of life through reason, intuition, and our own good sense when it comes to decisions.

I've only read the Introduction and the first chapter, which has a great title: "Changing Anything Changes Everything." 

However, I can already tell that I'm going to hugely enjoy the book. I say this because Klaas appears to be firmly in the same sort of worldview that most appeals to me.

Like Robert Sapolsky, who wrote Determined, a book about the illusion of free will that I've blogged about recently, Klaas (a professor of global politics at University College, London) views life as a tapestry made up of countless interrelated threads.

The tapestry of of life is woven with a magical sort of thread, one that grows longer the more you unspool it. Every present moment is created with seemingly unrelated strands that stretch far into the distant past. Whenever you tug on one thread, you'll always meet unexpected resistance because each is connected to every other part of the tapestry. The truth is, as Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his letter from a Birmingham jail, "We are caught in an escapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."

This is at odds with how life usually is simplistically viewed. We expect that big effects have big causes, often a single cause. What caused World War II? How did Covid-19 become a pandemic? Why did you marry your spouse? What made you choose your religion, or lack thereof?

Confronted with questions like these, typically we come up with an overconfident answer, because uncertainty is distressing while certainty gives us a pleasant feeling of knowingness. Or, we recognize that chance events have a large impact, but we view them as an exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

These passages provide an overview of Klass' central theme.

Few have had quite so dramatic an escape as Motoo Kimora narrowly avoiding death by atomic bomb. But everyone can pinpoint a moment that, in hindsight, was a fluke that changed his or her life. Perhaps it was a more traditional pivot, such as a chance encounter with your future spouse, or taking a class in high school that diverted your career plans to a new passion.

Or maybe it was a near miss, such as a swerve of the steering wheel that kept you alive, or having a generous offer rejected on a house or an apartment only to find something far better that you now call home. These moments stand out because they're obviously consequential. We contemplate what could have been.

It's clear there was an alternative path. But for one small change, spouses never meet, passions remain undiscovered, near misses become fatal hits.

But these seem to be the outliers, the moments we marvel at precisely because they are so rare and unusual. We feel as though we construct our lives not with chance, but with the building blocks of large, hopefully wise, choices -- choices that we feel we, alone control. We may seek advice for which path to choose, but we would not seek advice for that which we can't control.

...Watch just about any inspirational TED Talk or read just about any self-help book, and you will be told that you, alone, are the solution that you seek. These messages are popular because most of us view our lives through an individualistic prism. Our life stories are not crowdsourced. Our major decisions define our path, which means we control our path. To understand that path, worship at the Altar of Me.

Every so often, though, we see a fleeting, perplexing glimpse of our path colliding with someone else's in a way that seems out of our control. We call those moments luck, or coincidence, or fate. But we classify them as aberrations. 

When the world functions "normally," life seems to have a predictable, well-ordered regularity, a regularity that we convince ourselves we can mostly direct, masters of our own destinies. Then, whenever we're confronted by strange coincidences or chance diversions that seem to challenge that confident certainty, we shrug at the brief respite from normality and move on, preparing ourselves to make the next big call that shapes our future.

It's a style of thinking so ubiquitous and commonplace that it's uncontested. That's just how the world works.

There's just one problem: it's a lie. It's the lie that defines our times. We might call it the delusion of individualism. We cling to this delusion, the way a man overboard clings to floating debris. But every so often, a story comes along that makes clear how absurd it is to think of ourselves as separate or separable from everyone and everything else.

The story is about a tourist in Greece who was swept out to sea. A search was conducted, but it came up empty. Eighteen hours later the tourist was found. Alive. Clinging to a soccer ball that he'd seen floating in the distance and managed to reach with his last reserves of strength. The ball had been lost ten days earlier by some boys playing on the beach. Without that accidental kick, the tourist would have died.

This emphasis on interrelationships and the illusion of individuality has a strong Buddhist flavor. Indeed, Klaas says that Western philosophies are much more self-centered than Eastern philosophies, which tend to be other-centered. He advises that the Eastern view of reality is to be embraced, not shunned.

At first, an intertwined world seems terrifying. Nobody wants to be told they're not in control, or that a stranger's decision half a world away, or a long-forgotten decision decades in the past, could kill us or cause our economy to collapse into a crippling recession.

...The reality, for better and for worse, isn't terrifying, but wondrous, giving every moment of life potentially hidden meaning. It flips the individualistic worldview on its head. Rather than being in control of our individual destinies when we make big decisions, even our smallest decisions matter, forever altering the world.

...It's time to adjust our lenses of how we see ourselves within the world. Our chaotic, intertwined existence reveals a potent, astonishing fact:

We control nothing, but influence everything.

In Daniel Dennett vs. Robert Sapolsky debate, Sapolsky clearly won

Hey, it's been a while since I've written a post about free will, or rather, the lack thereof. Obviously the universe determined that I take a break from one of my favorite subjects.

Not a complete break, though.

For during my daily at-home exercise routine, I've been listening to a debate between Robert Sapolsky, who wrote the recent instant-classic book Determined that persuasively argues why free will is an illusion, and Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who is noted for his view that while determinism guides the world, free will still exists.

Here's the You Tube video of their debate. To my mind, Sapolsky kicked Dennett's butt, metaphorically speaking. 

It really was an unfair contest, because Dennett is firmly in the compatibilist camp where most philosophers (as opposed to scientists like Sapolsky) hang out. Compatibilism, as the name implies, holds that while our thoughts, actions, emotions, and such are indeed determined, somehow we humans still possess free will. 

This seems to me, along with Sam Harris, Sapolsky, and other deniers of free will, to be a spectacularly nonsensical position. For it hinges on redefining "free will" to be something other than most people view it as.

Namely, a will that is free. Duh. 

Over and over, Dennett kept saying that, yes, Sapolsky is correct in saying that deterministic causes control what we do, think, and feel. Yet supposedly we humans have free will because those of us with normally functioning brains/minds are able to choose between various alternatives by considering the pros and cons of those alternatives, eventually selecting one that seems to be the best.

And over and over, Sapolsky kept saying that, yes, of course we humans are able to choose between alternatives. But that isn't free will, because we aren't able to choose our values, our preferences, our ways of looking upon the world that underlie all that other choosing. 

Sapolsky would say to Dennett, how did you become the sort of person who is thoughtful, reasonable, interested in carefully looking at various ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, which enables you to exercise the sort of free will that you believe you have?

It was your genes, your upbringing, your culture, your experiences, your education, your circumstances -- everything that has made you the person you are today. Absent all that, you might have become an impulsive drug addict instead of a famous professor and philosopher who carefully chooses between alternatives.

Watching the debate was like seeing two ships pass in the night. Or more accurately, one ship, Dennett's, was incapable of recognizing the other ship, Sapolsky, while it was evident that Sapolsky understood Dennett's position much more clearly than Dennett understood Sapolsky's position.

Both men got snippy and sarcastic toward the other. However, I feel that Dennett behaved considerably worse than Sapolsky. Dennett would make a ridiculous statement along the lines of, "Robert, you can't admit that you're wrong because you don't believe that people can change, they're just subject to the deterministic laws of physics."

That isn't at all what Sapolsky argues in his book. Of course, people change. That's the nature of determinism: causes produce effects, which become causes of further effects. As he told Dennett repeatedly, there simply is no crack, no crevice, in the workings of the world that allows for free will.

Yet obviously changes are continuously happening to everything in the world, animate or inanimate. At every turn, Sapolsky demonstrated the weakness, even vacuousness, of Dennett's brand of compatibilism. 

Dennett couldn't recognize that, not surprisingly. But I sure could.

Our choosing just happens. It doesn't spring from free will.

It's such a beautiful way of looking upon the world. I didn't choose to write this blog post. You didn't choose to read it. Yet here we are, a blog post having been written, and a blog post having been read.

This is how the entire world works. Things happen, yet there is no one making them happen. 

As bizarre as this may seem, it makes good sense for a couple of reasons. First, free will is an illusion. Second, the notion of an independent self capable of freely choosing also is an illusion. 

So choosing just happens. I love those words. So I'll repeat them. Choosing just happens. The proof that it happens is that I just said it, twice. I could have said something else, but I didn't. You could be reading something else, but you aren't.

More proof that choosing just happens. If you need additional convincing, here's some passages from the "Choice and Choicelessness" chapter in Joan Tollifson's book, Nothing to Grasp.

In this chapter, Tollifson talks openly and honestly about her personal problems. I find this marvelously refreshing. Most writers about spirituality either explicitly or implicitly convey the impression that they've got their act together, and they're going to tell you how to follow in their evolved footsteps.

That isn't Tollifson's style. She's my kind of spiritual writer: open, honest, humble, outspoken, unafraid to let the reader know who she really is. There isn't a trace of "holier than thou" in what I've read of her writings so far.

In her 20s, Tollifson drank a lot. Way too much. She sought help and made progress on stopping drinking, finding a therapist who believed that it was possible for a drunk to cut down drastically on their consumption of alcohol, yet still have a drink occasionally.

She writes:

After a few years of drinking this way off and on and being effortlessly aware of the whole thing as it happened, a decision emerged not to drink anymore. This decision felt entirely different from all the previous decisions that had failed.

It seemed to come not from the thinking mind, not from the part of me that was in conflict with my drinking, but rather from nondual awareness, the unconditional love that has no problem with anything. This was not the dualistic, fear-based desire to stop rooted in the thought that "I" was in trouble and needed fixing. This came from an absence of conflict and separation.

There was a felt difference that I cannot entirely articulate, but the hallmark of it was a certainty, an absence of doubt that I could never have manufactured or engineered. It was exactly the same kind of experience I'd had back in 1973 when I first sobered up.

I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt when I met my therapist for the first time that something had completely changed. It was different from all the times when I had tried to stop before and failed. I knew I wasn't going back. No one can manufacture this kind of certainty or make this kind of shift happen. On both occasions, it was clearly not my doing.

Tollifson uses her experience with smoking and drinking as an illustration of how choices occur.

Like many people, I have seemingly made a choice to abstain from smoking and drinking. But what inspired and enabled me to make these "choices" when I did? Why did it work when it did and not on previous attempts that had failed?

What shifted when the decision felt like it came from nondual awareness and had that doubtless certainty about it? What allows me to stick with these choices in any given moment of temptation? Why was I sometimes able to have one glass of wine and sometimes unable to resist pouring myself a second?

If we look deeply, we find no single cause, no easy explanation. If anything, there is an infinite and untraceable web of causes and conditions.

This passage closely echoes the core message in Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined, where he brilliantly argues that free will doesn't exist in the light of modern science. Tollifson also has a problem with finger biting, a habit that she hasn't been able to break.

More and more, brain science is revealing that many of the things we have long considered to be psychological, spiritual or moral strengths and weaknesses are in fact the result of genetics, neurology, hormonal and neurochemical changes, problems with the endocrine system, undetected brain conditions, and a host of other factors including diet, early childhood experiences, socioeconomic conditions, our moment in history, post-traumatic stress, exposure to electromagnetic fields or toxic chemicals, and all kinds of seemingly random things that you would never imagine might be having an impact on your "choices" about something such as finger biting or smoking.

For example, the shape of your throat and your airway may lead to undiagnosed sleep disorders that have recently been linked to such things as depression and attention deficit disorder, and those in turn might trigger a desire to engage in some kind of comforting, addictive, self-soothing behavior.

Because choosing just happens, there's little or no room for judgement of ourselves of others. Sure, we all do this. But that doing also just happens.

We judge ourselves so harshly for being the way we are -- for not making enough money, for not being neat enough, for eating too much, for being too fat, for not being a better mother or a better daughter or a better husband, for not being able to stop smoking, for being depressed, for not being able to snap out of it, for not being present or "in the now" enough, for thinking and daydreaming too much, and on and on -- as if there were some single entity called "me" inside this bodymind who could and should get it together and do a better job of steering the ship.

But no such entity can actually be found. One neuroscientist has recently compared the brain to a "team of rivals," and much of what drives us is below the level of conscious awareness. No one is in control -- not God, not Zeus, not "me." Those are all mythological characters (unless we understand God in a very different way).

Maybe this sounds negative to you. Actually, it isn't. Sometimes seemingly good things just happen. Sometimes seemingly bad things just happen. It is all just happening.

And yet, if we are hurting ourselves and others, there is a natural desire to find a way to stop. This desire is the movement of life itself, as is the apparent process of going into a recovery program, taking up a meditation practice, doing a Feldenkrais lesson, studying yoga, attending talks on radical nonduality, or whatever life moves us to do.

Sometimes the cure works. When the right conditions come together, sobering up happens, or waking up from the dream of being a separate person happens, or being able to meet hatred with love happens, or dissolving into boundless presence happens. 

When other conditions come together, getting drunk happens, or believing in the mirage of separation and encapsulation happens, or meeting hatred with hatred happens, or being totally hypnotized by thoughts and ideas happens.

It all happens to no one. No one is in control of what remedies we are moved to try and what outcomes they seem to bring about. When we see how choiceless it all is, there is compassion for ourselves and others when it doesn't go the way we think it should.

There's boundless potential for change. In us. In other people. In the world. This is possible because there's no one choosing changes. They just happen in accord with the goings-on of the universe.

I've experienced first-hand both the relief of recognizing that there is no one in control and the relative value of such things as therapy, meditation, marital arts training and somatic awareness work in opening up new possibilities. I've seen how the bodymind -- the brain and the nervous system -- can learn new ways of functioning.

In addition to uncovering many previously unsuspected causes for behaviors previously considered to be spiritual or moral weaknesses, brain science has also discovered that the brain has great plasticity -- it can change in ways we never imagined before.

Of course, no independent agent is in control of any of this change. We don't learn these new ways of functioning on command by some act of will. In fact, much of this learning and transformation happens outside of conscious awareness. But learning does happen (when the necessary conditions come together).

So radical nonduality doesn't mean we have to renounce all such activities. It simply means they are a causeless happening of the whole universe. Nonduality recognizes that there is nothing we need to do (other than exactly what we are doing), but it doesn't tell us that we need to do nothing. There is a big difference.

What we do, think, and feel comes not from us, but the cosmos

The title of this blog post, though a statement, actually is a proposition, a hypothesis, a possibility. It fits with a heck of a lot of spiritual teachings, and it fits with a heck of a lot of scientific teachings.

I've been pondering the source of my actions, thoughts, and feelings more intensely now that I'm reading Joan Tollifson's provocative book, Nothing to Grasp. She's a spiritual teacher and writer, with a background in Zen.

But below I'll share some passages from her book that are closely akin to a central message in biologist Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined, where he expertly demolishes arguments in favor of free will from a scientific perspective.

Sapolsky considers, with good reason, that our behavior today flows from influences acting on us seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, centuries, and even longer ago -- potentially going all the way back to the big bang some 14 billion years ago.

So it isn't crazy, from either a spiritual or scientific perspective, to say that what we do, think, and feel comes not from us, but the cosmos. 

I find this to be an uplifting and optimistic point of view. It's something that not only appeals to me, but also something that reflects how I am. More and more, I don't worry as much as I used to about whether I'm doing the right thing, making correct choices, being a good person. 

I feel that my intentions are just the tip of an iceberg of influences acting upon me that is much vaster that my conscious awareness. I'm increasingly comfortable with not planning my life in any sort of detail, since whatever will arise in my future is only slightly of my own doing, and much more in the hands of forces much larger than me.

This is closely related to a sense of no-self. For the more I feel like an isolated individual with a well-defined identity who necessarily has to make his own way in the world, the more pressure I feel to have that way turn out well.

On the other hand, when I relax into a sense of being a minute piece of the unimaginably vast machinery of the cosmos, that pressure and stress is considerably diminished. That's why I enjoyed reading these passages in Tollifson's Nothing to Grasp.

If we look closely, we discover that thinking happens by itself. Waking up from thoughts and fantasies happens by itself. Paying attention happens by itself. Making decisions happens by itself. Even what appears to be deliberate, premeditated, intentional action happens by itself.

Thoughts arise, impulses arise, interests arise, action arises. Everything is one whole movement -- the clouds, the street traffic, the thoughts, the blood flow, the galaxies deep in outer space, the infinite subatomic universes on the head of a pin -- all of it is one undivided choiceless happening. 

There is no actor apart from the action, no doer apart from the deed, no thinker apart from the thought, no "awarer" apart from awareness. 

There is a functional identification with a particular form, a thought-sense of identity and location that coalesces and appears intermittently as needed (and sometimes dysfunctionally, when not really needed). 

...As Jane Doe, you appear to think things through, make choices and perform actions. That appearance is part of the functioning of life. You know whose name to answer to, which mouth to put the food in, how to cut the carrot and not your finger. 

If you had no functional sense of identity as Jane Doe, none of this would be possible. But this functional sense of identity, which appears intermittently as needed, is not the problem. The problem -- the source of our human suffering -- is overlooking the bigger picture, the context in which this functional identification is occurring. 

We suffer because we imagine that we really are Jane Doe and nothing but Jane Doe, that what "I" truly am is a discrete unit of consciousness located inside a perishable and vulnerable body, located on one side of the room and not the other, struggling to survive as this separate fragment.

We overlook our true identity as the awake space that is beholding and being both Jane Doe and Tom Brown and the entire universe, the seamlessness from which nothing stands apart, the unborn and indestructible boundlessness that is our True Nature. 

...This mirage-like appearance of being a separate person is, in fact, absent much of the time in ordinary, everyday life.

For example, as one is absorbed in reading a good novel, or driving down the freeway, or washing the dishes, whenever there is no thought-story about "me" playing in the mind, there is simply the happening of the moment: pages turning and the plot-story of the novel unfolding in the imagination, or cars and landscapes rushing past on the freeway, or soapy water sliding over dishes -- sounds, sensations, movements of the bodymind all happening effortlessly.

The "me" shows up only with the arising of a thought that posits a subject, for example, "I need to wash these dishes more quickly," or "I don't think I really understand the meaning of this novel." Prior to those thoughts, there was no "me" in the picture, but this me-less experience in between thoughts is so ordinary that it is easily overlooked. 

Between Gurdjieff and Zen, I much prefer Zen

Wanting to read something different yesterday, I picked up my copy of P.D. Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous. Since that copy has a 1949 copyright date, it's a first edition of the book that was published after Ouspensky died in 1947.

My mother, though not at all religious, was a fan of P.D. Ouspensky, who studied a form of Eastern mysticism (roughly speaking) taught by George Gurdjieff.

I kept a few books of my mother's after she died. One was The Fourth Way by Ouspensky. I'm pretty sure In Search of the Miraculous also was her book, though it doesn't have her name in it, nor any markings.

I've read the first chapter of In Search of the Miraculous. It's an interesting tale of how Ouspensky met Gurdjieff in Russia during the beginning of the First World War, 1914. He was searching for the miraculous.

I had come to the conclusion a long time ago that there was no escape from the labyrinth of contradictions in which we live except by an entirely new road, unlike anything hitherto known or used by us. But where this new or forgotten road began I was unable to say.

After meeting Gurdjieff, Ouspensky learned of what Gurdjieff called the "work." It took him a while, through repeated conversations with Gurdjieff, to begin to learn what the work consisted of. The first chapter only gives glimpses of this.

Gurdjieff's system exists to this day. When I got my first research associate job in 1973 at the University of Oregon Medical School's Department of Family Practice, a young computer guy working with me spoke about how he and some other people were engaged in the Gurdjieff work. I recall that once he said he'd gone without sleep for several days as part of an experiment that was part of the work.

From the first chapter, it's clear that Gurdjieff had some sound ideas and also some crazy ones. Below I'll share part of a passage about how mechanical we humans are that sounds like something Robert Sapolsky, a denier of free will, could have said in his recent book, Determined. But Gurdjieff also believed that the sun, moon, and planets controlled human actions and were conscious.

This is what Gurdjieff said, according to Ouspensky.

All people think that they can do, all people want to do, and the first question all people ask is what they are to do. But actually nobody does anything and nobody can do anything. This is the first thing that must be understood. Everything happens. 

All that befalls a man, all that is done by him, all that comes from him -- all this happens. And it happens in exactly the same way as rain falls as a result of a change in temperature in the higher regions of the atmosphere or the surrounding clouds, as snow melts under the rays of the sun, as dust rises with the wind.

Man is a machine. All his deeds, actions, words, thoughts, feelings, convictions, opinions, and habits are the results of external influences, external impressions. Out of himself a man cannot produce a single thought, a single action. Everything he says, does, thinks, feels -- all this happens. Man cannot discover anything, invent anything. It all happens. 

...It always seem to people that others invariably do things wrongly, not in the way they should be done. Everybody always thinks he could do it better. They do not understand, and do not want to understand, that what is being done, and particularly what has already been done in one way, cannot be, and could not have been, done in another way.

This is good stuff. However, I'm not sure if I want to read all eighteen chapters of In Search of the Miraculous to find occasional other good stuff that will be mixed in with the weird stuff. Well, I'll probably read the last chapter, since the Wikipedia article about Ouspensky says that he parted ways with Gurdjieff in 1924, for reasons explained in that final chapter.

After I finished reading the first chapter of In Search of the Miraculous, today I listened to a talk on Sam Harris' Waking Up app by Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and Zen practitioner who co-authored The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. 

This was the second of a series of short talks called "Zen and the Art of Living." It was a breath of fresh clear spiritual air after my decidedly murky reading of In Search of the Miraculous. What struck me was how simple Waldinger's central message was: genuine wellbeing (eudaimonia, as the ancient Greeks termed it) is quite different from hedonic happiness based on pleasure.

There's nothing wrong with pleasure, of course. We should embrace whatever pleasures life offers us. However, what makes us feel fulfilled, what gives us a sense of purpose, what truly satisfies, is being as much concerned, or more concerned, with the happiness of other people as with our own happiness.

This is both part of the teachings of Zen, and a conclusion from the long-lasting scientific study of happiness. Social connections are what matter most to our happiness and well-being. And it isn't possible to be self-centered or selfish and have good social connections. Here's a video of a TED talk Waldinger gave on this subject. 

"The Rigor of Angels" ended up disappointing me

As noted in my previous post, I was disappointed when I got to the discussion of free will in William Egginton's book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, and found that Egginton embraced the absurd notion much beloved by philosophers like himself that determinism and free will are somehow compatible.

Hence, the term compatibilism for this nonsensical belief. It's nonsensical because it does away with the "free" in free will, since determinism holds that what came before this present moment determines how that moment unfolds. Where's the "free" in that?

But I became even more disappointed today when I finished Egginton's book and realized that his final chapters contradicted one of the main points he made in the core section of The Rigor of Angels.

Namely, that knowledge of reality, whether through science or some other means, but mainly science, requires following the truth of our space-time continuum wherever it leads, even if this means giving up some cherished previous view of reality.

Hard to disagree with that, though it is indeed difficult at times. I recall a quote about scientific revolutions that I'm going to mangle somewhat, but goes more or less like this: "A scientific revolution occurs when all of the scientists who held the traditional view die off."

The main example Egginton uses of this is quantum mechanics.

It was difficult for physicists in the early part of the twentieth century to give up the idea that the atomic and subatomic realm doesn't possess the same sort of objective reality as the larger world does. Einstein, for example, heartily resisted the conception in quantum mechanics of the position and momentum of a particle being a matter of probabilities, not certainties.

But that's what quantum mechanics found, along with the related Heisenberg uncertainty principle in which it is impossible to know both a particle's position and momentum with complete accuracy, since 100% knowledge of one means 0% knowledge of the other.

So I liked this aspect of Egginton's book. We should indeed be willing to follow the path of evidence wherever it leads, even, or especially, if it leads away from a previously cherished view of reality. After all, open-mindedness and willing to change our mind is a very good thing.

However, when I reached a concluding chapter, "Putting the Demon to Rest," I came away with the distinct impression that Egginton is so attached to his belief in free will, he couldn't see that he was ignoring the massive evidence in favor of determinism -- which he admits is the foundation of reality outside of the very small and the very large. (Meaning, the subatomic realm and the universe as a whole.)

Here's a passage from that chapter:

And just as the uncertainty Heisenberg discovered at the edges of scientific perception is utterly irrelevant to our tracing a plane's path on a map, we can and should brush aside any facile reference to his ideas when talking about, say, the reality of an accused person's actions and intents, or the meaning of a work of art.

The trouble comes when we take our common and perfectly acceptable image of reality as an independent space-time in which things are happening in blissful disregard of our knowledge and start applying it where it doesn't belong: below the limits of observability or beyond the very borders of existence itself; between the links of the mechanistic causal chain enabling a human action; or to the very sense of self underlying that action.

When we do so, we sacrifice the core of what has made the scientific method so extraordinarily successful: its profound humility; its awareness that our knowledge is always subject to revision; to improvement. 

Moreover, when we do this, we err profoundly about human agency and freedom, either erasing it along with all responsibility in a vain attempt to understand humans "scientifically" or projecting at the core of all decisions a purely rational agent, utterly transparent to itself as it navigates life's choices.

As we steer a course through the river of our lives, we are affected by innumerable forces, the vast majority unknown to us. By some accounts this makes of our freedom an illusion, for how can we purport to freely choose when we can't even see a fraction of the legion of influences acting on us, limiting our movements, sparking our appetites?

The threat this picture poses to traditional notions of agency suggests a counternarrative. There must be some part of us that floats above the river, untouched by its waters and therefore utterly free and totally responsible for our every turn. But both these pictures are misleading, and for the same reason.

Our freedom, and hence our responsibility for the choices we make, is neither a thing to look for in our material existence nor some ghostlike essence unmoored from that existence. Rather, it is a necessary postulate for a being who can imagine having chosen differently, the condition of the possibility of conceiving of that life as one possible path among many.

This is plain nonsense coming from a highly intelligent and accomplished humanities professor. Here's how Robert Sapolsky demolishes such compatibilist crap in his book, Determined. He says that after reading lots of writings by philosophers and legal scholars concerning the relevance of neuroscience to free will, he's concluded that they usually "boil down to three sentences."

a. Wow, there've been all these cool advances in neuroscience, all reinforcing the conclusion that ours is a deterministic world.

b. Some of these neuroscience findings challenge our notions of agency, moral responsibility, and deservedness so deeply that one must conclude that there is no free will.

c. Nah, it still exists. 

Egginton does exactly what Sapolsky said above. In The Rigor of Angels quote above, Egginton says that yes, we humans are affected by innumerable forces, the vast majority unknown to us. He also dismisses the possibility of some non-physical supernatural entity, such as soul, that could float above the world and give us free will.

But then he bizarrely claims that freedom is a "necessary postulate," thereby ignoring the massive amount of evidence against free will in an attempt to preserve the notions of agency, moral resp0nsibility, and deservedness that Sapolsky correctly says have to be given up if we accept scientific reality.

In short, Egginton does just what he criticized others of doing in his book: ignoring a new conception of reality because it undermines a traditional view of the world: that our course in life is one possible path among many, as he put it in the quote above, and things could have turned out differently if we'd chosen differently.

There's no evidence for this, and much evidence against it. There's only one path in life, the one that actually happened in the past, is happening now, and will happen in the future. We can imagine alternative pasts and futures, but that imagination is determined by countless factors, not by free will.

Oh, no! The author of "The Rigor of Angels" is a compatibilist

Disappointment is part of life. Okay, a big part. Still, it hurt when I reached the Free Will chapter in the book by William Egginton that I'm enjoying a lot: The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality.

Up to that point, Egginton impressed me with his writing ability, intelligence, and ability to weave the lives and teachings of a poet, physicist, and philosopher into a satisfying picture of what reality is all about.

(One sentence summary of the book: we never learn what reality is, in itself, but how reality appears to us based on our questioning and observations.)

I figured that the discussion of free will which concludes the book would be equally thoughtful and persuasive. But this sentence dashed that hope:

We are physical beings whose every move occurs in the mechanistic flow of space-time, and we are rational agents who can visualize options and choose which one to take.

Now, that sentence may not seem off-base. In fact, taken by itself I have no problem with it, since it simply says that visualizing options and choosing one occurs within the determinism that rules our physical being. Which, of course, is the only being we have.

But the entire Free Will chapter makes clear that Egginton is a free will compatibilist.

That's a position much beloved by philosophers who agree that determinism rules us humans, yet want to preserve free will in some form, for reasons that are difficult to discern, but center around how horrible it supposedly would be if lots of people gave up a belief in free will.

Wikipedia has a brief description of compatibilism.

Compatibilists often define an instance of "free will" as one in which the agent had the freedom to act according to their own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained. Arthur Schopenhauer famously said: "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." In other words, although an agent may often be free to act according to a motive, the nature of that motive is determined. This definition of free will does not rely on the truth or falsity of causal determinism. This view also makes free will close to autonomy, the ability to live according to one's own rules, as opposed to being submitted to external domination.

Compatibilism is an absurd bit of philosophizing.

It doesn't rescue free will, not in the slightest. It just redefines free will in a way that takes the "free" part out of it -- not as the ability to freely make decisions that aren't affected by prior influences, but as not being subject to external domination such as being in prison or coerced by someone to do something.  

In addition to being absurd, it's arguably useless. That's the point made in a post on the Why Evolution is True blog, "Why do we need free-will compatibilism?" Short answer: no reason. Here's excerpts from the post.

The laws of physics dictate that, from time to time, random thoughts about the free-will debate cross my mind. The latest one, which popped into my brain for no reason this morning, was the question, “Why are we even bothering with compatibilism?”

As you know, “compatibilism” is the philosophical view that even though we cannot control our thoughts and actions beyond what the laws of physics dictate, and therefore have no “free will” in the traditional sense, we have free will in a nontraditional sense.  Those “compatibilistic” varieties of free will vary among different philosophers; Dan Dennett has expounded several versions, and other philosophers still more versions. (This all makes me wonder what we’re supposed to tell people what really constitutes our [compatibilist] “free will.”)

Opposed to compatibilism are the two forms of incompatibilism that see free will as incompatible with physical law:

a.) Contracausal free will. This is the traditional “you could have done/chosen otherwise” free will in which we are agents whose wills can effect, at a given time, two or more different behaviors or choices. It is the kind of free will that most people think we really have, and is certainly the basis of Abrahamic religions whose gods either save you or doom you based on whether you make the “right” choice about God or a savior.

b.) Free will skepticism (sometimes called “hard determinism”). As you must know, this is the view to which I adhere. Though it’s often called “determinism”, with the implication that the laws of physics have already determined the entire future of the universe, including what you will do, that’s not my view. There is, if quantum mechanics be right, a fundamental form of indeterminism that is unpredictable, like when a given atom in a radioactive compound will decay. It’s unclear to what extent this fundamental unpredictability affects our actions or their predictability, but I’m sure it’s played some role in evolution (via mutation) or in the Big Bang (as Sean Carroll tells me). Thus I prefer to use the term “naturalism” rather than “determinism.” But, at any rate, fundamental quantum unpredictability cannot give us free will, for it has nothing to do with either “will” or “freedom”.

And this question struck me, as my neurons chugged through their program this morning:

Why do we even bother ruminating about compatibilism, much less write long books about it?

To me the really important issues are a) vs. b) above, which in principle can be attacked with science, while compatibilism is more or less a semantic issue. If naturalism be true, then we should trumpet it from the rooftops, as it flies in the face of what most people think and (as I note below), does have real and important implications for society.

But why bother so much with compatibilism? The only reason I can think of—and it’s a reason often voiced by philosophers—is that people need to have a definition of free will that comports with their “feeling” that they have contracausal free will, even if the definition itself isn’t contracausal.

But why this need? Even I feel like I have contracausal free will, but I realize that at best it’s an illusion and, at any rate, I have no use for a philosopher-confected definition of some compatibilistic free will. I do just fine, thank you.

l do just fine without compatibilistic free will also. I just wish that Egginton felt the same way, because then his Free Will chapter would have made more sense.

Watch this video of Sapolsky talking about accepting no free will

Here's a thought-provoking video of Robert Sapolsky speaking about how difficult it is for him, and others, to experientially live as if free will doesn't exist, even though he's spent fifty years not believing in it.

I've made the video start at this point of the interview. The next 20 minutes or so are interesting, as is the entire interview, since the conversation moves into atheism and other subjects. Enjoy, whether or not you agree with Sapolsky.

No free will is easily misunderstood. Some blog comments prove that.

I readily confess to being a no-free-will addict. However, I'd never join a 12-step program aimed at, um, freeing me from this addiction, because I consider it a good thing to embrace the reality of determinism instead of the illusion of free will.

I've been feeding my taste for no-free-will for quite a few years. I've read every book published in English on this subject that I can find. Some of them have been read repeatedly.

Most recently, I studied Robert Sapolsky's instant classic Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will closely, since Sapolsky has written the definitive critique of the illusion of free will. So far; maybe an even better book will come along.

As noted in my previous post, I've also been listening to You Tube videos of interviews of Sapolsky by a variety of  people. In the interview I'm watching currently while I exercise, Sapolsky says that almost universally philosophers hate his book.

Well, I consider that a plus, given that most philosophers believe in the nonsensical notion of compatibilism -- the absurd thesis that even though determinism rules the brain/mind, free will is compatible with determinism as long as someone isn't physically confined.

I'm philosophically inclined. So are some of the commenters on my blog posts. I've got no problem with philosophizing. But in my own small way, sort of like Sapolsky, I find myself having to defend blog posts I've written about the illusion of free will against criticisms that don't make sense to me.

Here's some examples from one of two comments on my previous post by always-thoughtful Appreciative Reader. He and I agree that free will doesn't exist. However, Appreciative Reader had some quibbles with my position on free will that seem misguided to me. Here's why.

In one comment, he said:

What I'm arguing against is what you'd previously quoted and linked to Sapolsky having said --- and although you don't spell out the argument again, but you do touch on it here briefly as well, in saying that the Dalai Lama is no more deserving of praise for his pacificism, than, presumably, a Hitler or a Netanyahu might be deserving of censure for their barbarity and their wanton disdain of human suffering. That specific part, that moral argument, I'm afraid I find myself questioning.

First, I never said that the Dalai Lama wasn't deserving of praise, nor that Hitler or a Netanyahu weren't deserving of censure. All I said about the Dalai Lama was:

What matters is that prior causes determine what living beings do, with no exceptions. This applies as much to a sea slug as to a Nobel prize winner or the Dalai Lama or anyone else. So even though Shermer and Sapolsky are both accomplished men, Sapolsky argued that neither of them deserve praise for their achievements, since they weren't responsible for them.

I stand behind that statement 100%. Note that when I said praise isn't deserved by anybody, the reason is that they weren't responsible for the achievements that supposedly merit praise. Since Appreciative Reader agrees that free will doesn't exist, I assume he would agree with this.

That leaves the issue of supporting people who do positive things and condemning people who do negative things. Sapolsky is totally fine with this, as am I, and as is every author who writes about the illusion of free will that I've read.

Think about it this way. A large primate, a gorilla or chimpanzee, say, kills a human. Or on the plus side, learns how to communicate with humans via sign language. Would we say that the primate deserves condemnation for the killing or praise for learning sign language? 

No. Condemnation or praise imply that the primate made a freely chosen decision to do what they did. Likewise, we wouldn't condemn a wolf pack that killed sheep in a rancher's field. We'd simply recognize that this is what wolves do, kill vulnerable prey.

So where is the rationale for condemning or praising humans? Do our minds/brains possess some free will magic that our fellow primates lack? No. Sapolsky is a primatologist. And a human. Thus he's well qualified to argue, as he does, that our actions are as determined as the actions of any other animal.

Appreciative Reader then says:

You start with that implicit premise; then show that there's no free will (an argument I fully agree with, I mean specifically the argument that there's no free will); and that leads you to the very odd conclusion that no one is deserving of admiration or censure. Well, what I question is that premise, which has been slipped in implicitly, undefended, surreptitiously as it were.

Think about it: Sure, we have no free will. Sure, everything is determined (bar the quantum randomness thing). But why would that mean that something good that someone does is not to be admired?

Well, again, words are being attributed to me that I'm pretty sure I haven't said in any of the posts I've written about the illusion of free will. I've said that no one is deserving of praise or blame. But admiration or censure? That's a different thing.

What's important to remember here is the difference between scientific reality and everyday life. As I've noted before, and surely will again (like right now), I'm confident even astronomers say "Wow, what a beautiful sunset," even though they know that the sun isn't really setting, the Earth is turning.

Similarly, the key point that Sapolsky makes in his 400 page book is that determinism rules the mind/brain, with not the slightest crevice where free will could enter. That's a bold assertion, but he does a great job of taking the best arguments in favor of free will and demolishing them.

Yet Sapolsky readily admits that even after his decades of researching and pondering this subject, he still lives his life as if he had free will, in much the same way that an astronomer looks upon a sunset even though it is impossible that the sun is setting. 

Admiration is a wonderful thing. So is condemnation or censure. These are natural reactions when we encounter something positive a person has done, or something negative. Again, I'm not aware that I've ever concluded in a blog post that admiration or condemnation should be avoided. I admire and condemn many times every day. Always have, always will.

I'll end by observing that this subject of the illusion of free will is both astoundingly simple and amazingly subtle.

I've spent so much time thinking about it, including visualizing instances in my own life where I wrongly felt (from my current understanding) that I deserved blame or praise, I consider that I've internalized the key arguments Sapolsky and Sam Harris make -- Sapolsky says that Sam Harris is brilliant in this regard, and he agrees completely with him -- to quite a high degree.

I realize that other people are coming to this subject with less exposure to it. Nonetheless, I resonate with Sapolsky's evident frustration when intelligent people, such as philosophers, fail to grasp basic facts about the argument he's making against free will.

Of course, that failure is determined, as is every other action by the mind/brain. To use Sapolsky's language, we may have read a book, or a blog post, a few days or weeks ago that introduces some new ideas about determinism in our psyche. But months, years, or decades ago, we were exposed to powerful cultural and society influences in favor of free will.

So it figures that grasping the subtleties of determinism and the illusion of free will is going to take some time and pondering. Even after all I've learned about this subject, my understanding still has a long ways to go. Which is why I'm grateful for the comments on my posts, whether they agree or disagree with my position on free will.

Gratitude, by the way, is an emotion that Sapolsky views as key to living wisely without a belief in free will. When things go well with us, we can be grateful that circumstances brought this about, even if we didn't of our own free will.

Emergent properties can't produce free will, says Sapolsky

I enjoyed Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, so much, I've been listening to You Tube interviews of Sapolsky while I do a workout every day with my Monkii 360 Core Training System (the Monkii ball and resistance bungees are an enjoyable way to exercise).

His interview with Michael Shermer was interesting because Shermer had some compatibilist views about free will that Sapolsky strongly disagreed with.

Compatibilism is a misguided attempt to save a form of free will by saying that even though our thoughts, actions, emotions and such are determined by causes, free will is compatible with determinism so long as we aren't physically constrained, such as by being in prison.

Shermer is an intelligent guy. Yet he was strangely incapable of grasping a simple truth that Sapolsky repeated over and over in his book, and again and again in this interview: it doesn't matter whether we feel that we're freely choosing between alternative courses of action, or how complex/sophisticated someone's mental ability is.

What matters is that prior causes determine what living beings do, with no exceptions. This applies as much to a sea slug as to a Nobel prize winner or the Dalai Lama or anyone else. So even though Shermer and Sapolsky are both accomplished men, Sapolsky argued that neither of them deserve praise for their achievements, since they weren't responsible for them.

Shermer seemed to agree with this, saying that gratitude is the more appropriate response to how they've been able to achieve so much. Sapolsky concurred. Gratitude, which I also try to manifest, is a form of thanks to the entire universe for bringing about conditions we're grateful for.

Shermer and Sapolsky discussed emergent properties, a subject that made for interesting reading in Determined. It's amazing how simple rules of behavior can result in complex outcomes when those rules are followed by many living beings.

Ants, for example. Or bees. Or termites. Or marching bands. Or... brains. No single ant knows how to fashion a thriving ant colony, or a single bee a hive. But when a multitude of ants and bees follow simple rules, a (seeming) miracle occurs: sophisticated well-working complexity.

Below I've shared the YouTube video of Shermer's interview with Sapolsky. I've made it start shortly before remarks by Sapolsky about emergent properties that I liked a lot. I also made a transcript of those remarks for those who prefer to read rather than watch a video. 

A key point Sapolsky makes is that the simple determinism guiding individual ants, bees, or neurons in the human brain doesn't change when lots of ants, bees, or neurons result in novel emergent properties that aren't present in individual cases.

Again, one ant can't fashion a colony. One bee can't fashion a hive. One neuron can't fashion a mind. But put many ants, bees, or neurons together, and from their workings higher order entities emerge. Here's the video and transcript.

Every single person who at that point decides that free will can be pulled out of this makes the same mistake, which is they decide that somehow itty-bitty building blocks are working differently now.  They've gotten smarter. They've got more degrees of freedom in their action.

And the real sort of Hail Mary desperate version of pulling free will out of it is to believe that somehow when the upper level emergent property comes out there, it enables you to reach down and now futz with those little building blocks and manipulate them so that they work differently. And they don't.

The whole point of what's amazing about it is that when all your neurons are together and they're inventing aesthetics, your neurons are just the same and stupid and have just the same number of limited rules. Saying this is where free will comes from is like saying one water molecule cannot have the property of wetness.

Wetness is an emergent property. But its like saying, what comes with wetness, is when enough water molecules come together, is that a water molecule comes in two hydrogen and one oxygen, but when enough of them come together, suddenly two oxygens and one hydrogen. And that's where the wetness comes from.

That's not how it works. All of the theories about emergence -- I so love emergence, I torture my students teaching them about this, but it's not where free will comes from. And it's something like, if you gave chimps as many neurons as we have, it's an emergent inevitability that they would come up with religion.

But they would come up with a religion like nothing we've ever seen before on Earth, because the chaoticism, that somehow theirs would feature something much more like bananas, though real chimps in the wild don't really eat bananas, I say as a primatologist. 

So, yeah, emergence is amazing, but you can't get free will by saying that in chaotic systems, unpredictable equals indeterministic. And you can't get free will out of emergent systems because every single version of how that happens requires the building blocks to suddenly get a lot fancier. And it can't work that way.

Lastly, here's a passage from an article in The New Yorker about the dilemma of environmentally minded people having to decide whether they want to have children given the threat climate change poses to human civilization. 

The author of the article, Jessica Winter, speaks of telling her boyfriend, "I am never having children." She really meant it. Now her kids are nine and six. How this came to be reminded me of the illusion of free will. Winter refers to long periods of unconscious change, but the same eloquent images apply to all forms of decisions and actions, short and long term.

This is often how it goes. There is the crystalline uncertainty of the structure and dynamics of the climate system, as limpid as the aquamarine sea: a wave is coming, even if we can't yet say how high or how fast it will be.

But then the plates shift beneath the ocean floor -- this can take years, a decade or more -- and something murky and unanswerable rears up, just under the surface of your consciousness, unknown and yet profoundly certain, humming at a low and dizzying frequency.

It's not a decision anymore. No one even asked you.

New Yorker review of Sapolsky's "Determined" is a subtle look at free will

Because I liked Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, so much, when I saw that the November 13, 2023 issue of The New Yorker had a review of it, I was nervous that the reviewer, Nikhil Krishnan, would have a devastating criticism of the book that I couldn't ignore. I say this because The New Yorker has wonderfully erudite book reviews by highly talented writers.

So I was pleased when it turned out that Krishnan had a subtle take on free will that managed to combine agreement with Sapolsky's thesis that determinism is how the world works on every level, with a contention that virtually everybody looks upon free will not from the objective view of scientific determinism, but from a subjective human view of moral responsibility.

The review's title in the online edition is "How Can Determinists Believe in Free Will?" The description below the title says: Some people think that we can’t be held responsible for what we do, given that our actions are the inevitable consequence of the laws of nature. They’re only half right.

Thus Krishnan argues that (1) yes, our actions are determined, yet (2) yes, we can be held responsible for what we do. I generally agree, for as a practical matter, it is indeed difficult to imagine a society in which responsibility is trashed in favor of hard core determinism, even though determinism is true.

That said, I did have this thought as I was reading Krishnan's review. Since he agrees that determinism is how the world works, this means that people like him who favor a nuanced conception of free will that includes moral responsibility, came to this conclusion through deterministic causes. So in that sense Sapolsky's view of free will -- it's a complete illusion -- wins out even when critics of Sapolsky's book argue for a different perception of free will.

UPDATE: Just came across a letter to the editor in New Scientist that made my point above. Hey, great minds think alike. Of course, Richard and I can't take credit for that, since it was determined that we have a similar view. Here's the letter:

From Richard Taylor,
Guildford, Surrey, UK
Your article claims that some people worry about judging criminals unfairly if there is no free will, meaning their crimes were predetermined. But if the crime was predetermined, then so is the judgment. Worry not, determinism isn't something that just happens to other people!

That's a minor quibble, though. I thoroughly enjoyed Krishnan's thoughtful, well-written review. Since it's quite long, I intended to only share portions that I'd highlighted while I was reading it. But in the end what I've shared below is most of the review. (Guess that was meant to be.) You can read the whole thing either on The New Yorker web site or via a PDF file I made of the review.
Download How Can Determinists Believe in Free Will? | The New Yorker

“Causal determinism,” the philosopher’s unlovely term for that unsettling hypothesis, is the default assumption of most modern science. It matters a good deal if the idea implies that none of our actions are what we call “free.” If science tells us to be determinists, and determinism is incompatible with freedom, shouldn’t we give up on judging people for doing what they were destined to do?

That’s what the Stanford neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky urges. He thinks the time has come to accept the truth about determinism and acknowledge that “we have no free will at all.” What follows? Early in his book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” (Penguin Press), Sapolsky lists, with the morbid relish of a man daring to think the unthinkable, the implications of his heresy: no one is ever blameworthy—or, equally, praiseworthy—for doing anything. No one, Sapolsky writes, “has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else.”

Ordinary human sentiments—resentment and gratitude, love and hate—are pretty much irrational in their normal forms: “It makes as little sense to hate someone as to hate a tornado because it supposedly decided to level your house.” One practical implication is that, since nobody’s to blame for anything, criminal justice shouldn’t be about retribution. Accordingly, he tries to view human beings without judgment. Free-will skeptics are, he suggests, “less punitive and more forgiving.”

The steps of his reasoning are familiar: if everything is determined, there is no freedom; if there is no freedom, there is no moral responsibility. Science tells us that everything is indeed determined. Ergo, no freedom; ergo, no responsibility. Are we bound to agree?

Much of “Determined,” appropriately for a book by a neurobiologist, is an attempt to defend the part of the argument which sits safely in the scientist’s wheelhouse: that our best contemporary science has established the truth of determinism. Sapolsky draws on explanations at every level—from atoms to culture—to make the case that everything we think and do is caused by something other than free will.

We can’t control, say, the conditions of the crucial first nine months of our existence. “Lots of glucocorticoids from Mom marinating your fetal brain, thanks to maternal stress, and there’s increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety in your adulthood,” he writes. You thought your failing marriage was to blame for your depression. But it turns out it was all bound to happen long ago. It isn’t so much that our blame was aimed in the wrong direction as it is that blame, in the strict sense, never truly made sense.

...Why do we resist the truth? In part because we’re skilled at concocting stories in which we’re in charge. One experiment Sapolsky mentions suggests that people had cooler attitudes about gay marriage when considering it in a room with a disgusting smell. The effect was connected to the way certain odors activate the brain’s insular cortex, which is what makes rancid food nauseating to us.

But did the subjects know what was going on in their heads? “Ask a subject, Hey, in last week’s questionnaire you were fine with behavior A, but now (in this smelly room) you’re not,” Sapolsky writes. “They’ll claim some recent insight caused them, bogus free will and conscious intent ablaze, to decide that behavior A isn’t okay after all.” They were being played, but were desperate to regard themselves as the players.

Sapolsky’s summaries are pithy and pacy, his spoiling-for-a-fight tone enjoyably provocative. Still, he doesn’t assert that any one piece of research demonstrates that there is no free will. Rather, he says, “All these disciplines collectively negate free will because they are all interlinked, constituting the same ultimate body of knowledge.” In the end, “there’s not a single crack of daylight to shoehorn in free will.”

To his exasperation, though, many sophisticates are skeptical about free-will skepticism. In a 2020 survey of academic philosophers, some sixty per cent of them—a strikingly large majority in a profession allergic to consensus—didn’t agree that determinism ruled out freedom. Where Sapolsky, who says that he has been a free-will skeptic since adolescence, sees an excitingly counterintuitive conclusion, philosophers often see a reductio ad absurdum. Determinism, they tend to hold, is compatible with freedom, and therefore with moral responsibility, and therefore with blame, gratitude, and so on.

The technical term for that happy reconciliation is “compatibilism.” A compatibilist, that is, agrees that our actions are determined but denies that this truth casts doubt on anything of significance about human practices. Sapolsky will have none of it. He devotes some of his most trenchant writing to these quislings, whose arguments, he claims, “boil down to three sentences”:

a. Wow, there’ve been all these cool advances in neuroscience, all reinforcing the conclusion that ours is a deterministic world.

b. Some of those neuroscience findings challenge our notions of agency, moral responsibility, and deservedness so deeply that one must conclude that there is no free will.

c. Nah, it still exists.

How fair is that précis? Sapolsky clearly thinks that philosophers should start with the results of the sciences (objective, external, impartial) and ask what they imply for our naïve prescientific self-conceptions. If science, coming from outside, tells us that our self-conceptions are confused, so much the worse for them. Yet there’s another way of approaching the question: from the inside out.

Of those who take such an approach, the most influential is Peter Strawson, a compatibilist philosopher whose arguments make no appearance in “Determined.” (Sapolsky mentions him once in a list of his allies, evidently thinking of his son Galen.) What we label “free will,” as Strawson saw it, was something that we could grasp solely in relation to the role it plays in our lives, in our daily practices of judging others and ourselves.

Start from the fact that, in our dealings with other people, we are sometimes angry or resentful, or, in happier moments, grateful. Does the fact that we’re material beings situated within vast chains of causation make these responses—Strawson calls them “reactive attitudes”—irrational? In any case, could we live an intelligible human life while giving up such reactions entirely?

The really troubling forms of philosophical skepticism—say, about the authority of moral demands, the possibility of altruism, the legitimacy of governments—are troubling in part because it’s possible to live without a belief in such things. Can we live without a belief in the possibility of holding one another and ourselves responsible for the things we do? Try it. We are always a “sorry,” a “thank you,” or a “how dare you” away from slipping back into the bad old ways.

Sapolsky’s long-standing convictions on the subject notwithstanding, he admits to being a normal guy with a normal guy’s feelings. “It’s been a moral imperative for me to view humans without judgment or the belief that anyone deserves anything special, to live without a capacity for hatred or entitlement,” he writes. “And I just can’t do it.” He’s in permanent misalignment with his theory of the world: “Sure, sometimes I can sort of get there, but it is rare that my immediate response to events aligns with what I think is the only acceptable way to understand human behavior; instead, I usually fail dismally.” If even the archest of skeptics cannot live out his skepticism, how serious an alternative is it?

For that matter, if Sapolsky has no choice in how he thinks, what would it even be to try to think any particular way? It’s unclear how he could subscribe to “hard incompatibilism,” as he avows, and believe in such ancien-régime vestiges as “moral imperatives.” The very idea that someone “ought” to do something makes sense only if that person is capable of making choices.

For Strawson (like Kant before him), the difference between a story of causation and a story of choice-making is one of viewpoint. We’ll never purge ourselves of those “reactive attitudes,” nor should we try to. But that’s not a rejection of determinism; as Strawson says, we can sometimes “achieve a kind of detachment from the whole range of natural attitudes and reactions . . . and view another person (and even, perhaps, though this must surely be more difficult, oneself) in a purely objective light—to see another or others simply as natural creatures whose behavior, whose actions and reactions, we may seek to understand, predict and perhaps control.”

The parents of teen-age boys are always oscillating between regarding their impossible offspring as creatures moved by hormones to do stupid things and regarding them as rational human beings who should know better. In time, those boys will learn to give Mom a pass for her possibly perimenopausal outbursts and understand that Dad, with his atherosclerosis, occasionally forgets things. On a night out in college, they’ll learn to spot when it might still be possible to persuade an increasingly drunk friend to order an Uber home and the point at which all that remains to do is to pick him up off the ground and bundle him into one as if he were an unwieldy mattress.

What Sapolsky considers “the only acceptable way to understand human behavior,” then, is one that we adopt some of the time. Is it really one we should adopt all of the time? Physics tells us a story about ourselves in which we are as much matter and energy as that mattress. Biochemistry tells us another story. So does neuroscience. So do history, psychology, and anthropology.

All these modes of explanation tell us, in various ways, that people are causal systems, enmeshed in larger ones. But, from a first-person perspective, we’re seldom inclined to wait around to see what the system does when we’re faced with a decision. Instead, we do what even Sapolsky finds himself compelled to do—we get on with things and open the kitchen cupboard to decide (or, anyway, “decide”) what kind of tea we’re going to have.

A few minutes later, a kettle boils. Why? Consider these answers: because I want a cup of Earl Grey; because it’s teatime in England and that’s what we do around here; because the water molecules have reached a certain energy state. Must we choose among these statements? Can’t they all be true?

Sapolsky, to his credit, resists the fallacy of moving from ontological reductionism (the correct view that we’re all physical stuff, governed by the laws of physics) to methodological reductionism (the error of concluding that physics is the only discipline that explains anything). Wisely, he doesn’t think that history, psychology, or anthropology are just window dressing on the hard truth of our material, molecular existence.

Mental states and neurobiological physical states, Sapolsky thinks, “can’t be separated—they’re just two different conceptual entry points to considering the same processes.” Different, but apparently equal, neither privileged over the other. Why, then, does he resist the first-person register of explanation, in which we believe, want, intend, and decide?

Probably because his notion of “free will” isn’t the one we actually make use of. Every now and then, it occurs to Sapolsky that the parties to the debate may be talking past each other, and he makes an effort, a little grudgingly, to clarify his terms. “What is free will?” he asks early in the book. “Groan, we have to start with that.”

What follows is not a definition but a challenge. A man, Sapolsky invites us to imagine, “pulls the trigger of a gun.” That’s one description. Another is that “the muscles in his index finger contracted.” Why? “Because they were stimulated by a neuron,” which was in turn “stimulated by the neuron just upstream. . . . And so on.” Then he throws down the gauntlet: “Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will.”

Sapolsky’s qualifying phrase—“for the purposes of this book”—suggests he recognizes that there are other things “free will” might mean to other people. The real question is whether the thing he thinks has been disproved will be much missed—whether Sapolsky’s concept of free will is “our” concept, what we take it to be when, uncorrupted by the specialists, we go about our days blaming and thanking, loving and hating.

...In the positivist spirit, a philosopher or a scientist may replace “We have free will” with some determinate claim that might be supported or undermined by experimental evidence. But if we’re going to allow the experimental results, and the ambitious thesis that they support, to overthrow our everyday practices of praising, blaming, and punishing, the scientific explication had better be close enough to the everyday concept that underlies these practices. Otherwise, as Strawson—a leading critic of Carnap, and of logical positivism—objected at the time, we’re not solving a problem; we’re just changing the subject.

Sapolsky may want us to replace our everyday concept, complex and muddled as it must be, with a new, improved concept. But he needs to offer us a good argument for doing so. In other words, if this isn’t how we already use “free will,” is it how we should use it? We don’t ask this question often enough. Maybe that’s because “free will” has become, for better or for worse, a term of ordinary language. As with other such large, abstract questions, our professed views on the free-will problem rarely do justice to the complexity of our real thoughts on the subject.

There are sane and humane reasons for reminding ourselves that, as Sapolsky puts it, “some people have much less self-control and capacity to freely choose their actions than average, and that at times, we all have much less than we imagine.” But Sapolsky and skeptical fellow-travellers such as Sam Harris want to blow up our everyday practices; they’re convinced that the innumerable subtle distinctions we mark in our ordinary talk and practices don’t matter. Whatever it is we think we’ve got, we haven’t got it.

Once we give up on free will, after all, we have to be willing to say that nobody has ever done anything intentionally (or voluntarily or deliberately or on purpose). That no line can truly be drawn between the malicious and the accidental, the voluntary and the forced. That no event has really been an action, except in the undemanding sense in which the puppet Punch killing Judy was an action. We are not, except in this minimal sense, “agents.” Bits of our bodies move; things happen. That’s it.

Yet we can wonder whether this ideal of the “causeless cause” is what we really mean in our careless everyday talk of free will. If it isn’t, then insisting on that as the appropriate standard is, as Strawson once remarked, “like offering a text-book on physiology to someone who says (with a sigh) that he wished he understood the workings of the human heart.”

As it happens, Carnap’s own definition, or explication, of “free choice” was devised to be compatible with the truth of determinism. Free choice, he wrote, “is a decision made by someone capable of foreseeing the consequences of alternate courses of action and choosing that which he prefers.” He saw no contradiction between free choice thus understood and even the strongest form of determinism.

More than that, he thought that without determinism—that is to say, without reliable relations of cause and effect—there is no free will. The point of making a choice, he noted, is that it has consequences. Indeterminacy—should the kind that exists at the quantum level encroach upon the meso-level scale of human lives—would replace our agency with sheer randomness, which is not anyone’s idea of freedom.

Still, if Sapolsky’s radical revisionism threatens to eliminate our moral vocabulary altogether, the traditional compatibilist approaches can err in the other direction: they can deny us grounds for reforming our practices of moral judgment. So we might want to ask—in the philosophical tradition not of positivism but of pragmatism—about the “cash value,” the practical uses, of invoking free will. Ignore the many things we say about free will and focus on what we do. By attending to our practices, we can conduct a more profitable line of inquiry: What do we need free will to be?

Consider these questions. How does my response to a student who has failed to meet a deadline change when I discover that she sprained her wrist the day before? How do I respond to a piece of fruit chucked at me when I discover that the chucker is two years old? How vehemently do I press for a tough prison sentence when I learn that the defendant was abused as a child? Is there a difference between someone jumping into a pool and being pushed in? Between falling in after he stepped on a banana peel and falling in because he was drunk?

In each of these situations, we can ask whether the person in question had or lacked something called “free will.” But look back at the factors that seemed to undermine the exercise of free will: rotten luck, immaturity, circumstance, coercion, accident, and incapacity. When the terms on the obverse side of the contrast are so disparate, it’s hard to be confident that there really is a single thing called “free will” whose presence or absence we can meaningfully debate.

The philosopher J. L. Austin, in a paper titled “A Plea for Excuses,” observed that, though it’s tempting to view “freedom” as a positive term requiring elucidation, we tend to use it just to rule out one of these miscellaneous antitheses. Freedom’s just another word for no excuses. In Austin’s spirit, you can wonder how much would be lost if we ceased talking about free will altogether and spoke more specifically of what we meant. “He was not acting of his own free will,” you tell me. “What do you mean?” I ask. “Was he being held at gunpoint? Sleepwalking? High on narcotics?” “Oh, no,” you say, “I just mean he’s a toddler.” Maybe you should have just said that. Maybe, in other words, there is no one thing that we need “free will” to be.

Sapolsky’s most persuasive passages remind us of the many modest changes that we have made to our practices in light of advances in our understanding of certain facts about ourselves. Things got better for people with epilepsy once we learned that the condition was not a form of demonic possession that was “brought on by someone’s own freely chosen evil.” Things got better for people with schizophrenia (and for their families) once it was recognized that the condition was at base a biochemical disorder, not a product of faulty mothering. Some of our current moral conceptions and presumptions may come to seem just as confused. We may currently be blaming people whom it would be better to treat, tolerate, or simply avoid.

Or, perhaps, better to forgive. That was, after all, part of Sapolsky’s case for his new morality: free-will skeptics are “less punitive and more forgiving.” To understand all, he might have said, is to forgive all. But he can’t have really meant that. Forgiveness is, as much as vengeance, a concept that can be applied only from within the first-person point of view. If free-will skepticism means never having to say you’re sorry, then it also means never being forgiven. Sapolsky’s ethic of forgiveness demands that we retain something of our old-fashioned belief in holding one another responsible.

The traditional project of compatibilist philosophers has been to treat determinism, free will, and moral responsibility as fixed parts of a triad and to search for ways to reconcile them. The skeptics, seeing an irresolvable contradiction, have concluded that the whole idea of moral responsibility has to go. But there are other ways of reconciling scientific and moral inquiry.

It may be that we need a suppler and more humane approach to holding one another responsible, an approach that takes more seriously what our best scientific accounts tell us about ourselves. We needn’t follow the skeptics to the conclusion that the best morality would be no morality at all to recognize that our current morality remains a work in progress.

Nikhil Krishnan is a fellow in philosophy at Robinson College, University of Cambridge.

Humans are much more complex than many people believe

I enjoy most of the comments left on my Church of the Churchless blog posts, the exceptions being from people who are preachy, closed-minded, or dogmatic (worst of all, preachily closed-minded dogmatic).

So when I got a email message this morning from frequent commenter Appreciative Reader, who disagreed with my contention that not believing in free will implies not desiring retribution as a guiding principle in a justice system, leaving rehabilitation, deterrence, and protection of society as the core remaining principles, I told him that I'd convert his message to a comment, then respond to it in a blog post tonight.

Which I'm doing here. I'll share my thoughts after the comment. 

From Appreciative Reader: Sant64 argues, or tries to argue, in his comment above: “Every time an atheist is asked on what basis human life has value, they sputter.”

That’s a completely fallacious argument. It assumes that it is only belief in God that keeps men moral; and that without belief in God people would go looting and raping and killing their way through life. Which is a completely circular argument, and entirely mistaken: because only some out-and-out psychopaths would do that; and a psychopath would probably do that even if he believed in God.

Now that’s a completely clichéd argument; and an entirely done-to-death rebuttal of that pathetic argument. And there’s absolutely no reason to hash this out with those who put forward this argument, at least not unless they’re sincere and might sincerely listen to reason. The only reason I mention this, and spell out this cliched fallacious argument and its rebuttal, is that it occurred to me that no-free-will folks quoted in this and other blog posts seem to be making that exact same error.

Here’s what I mean:

(And before proceeding further, let me get two things out of the way, within the space of these parentheses. First, I completely believe that there’s no free will, as I’ve said many times, in as much as that follows directly and trivially from a scientifically-grounded materialist paradigm. And two, none of this has anything, remotely, to do with compatibilism!)

It's been argued recently that understanding that there’s no free will lets us stop wanting retribution, and instead base our justice system on simply deterrence.

Now, it suddenly occurs to me, to say that is to make the exact same error that Sant64 is making! That’s begging the question, much like he’s done; that’s a circular argument, much like his is; and that’s a fallacious argument, like his is.

It's assumed --- completely baselessly --- that believing in free will necessarily sets someone to seek retributions for wrongs done (or perceived). And that simply isn’t true.

For instance, take Jains. They expressly believe in free will, and an immaterial soul as well. Yet, basis the karma theory that the Jains first put forth, most of them completely abjure retribution, in as much as they believe any retributive act will bounce back on them as karma. For that matter, not just Jains, but every belief system that subscribes to the karma theory, including RSSB, will essentially dissuade people from seeking retribution, on exactly those grounds.

Even leaving aside that sub-section of people (Jains, and Hindus, and RSSB-types, and Sikhs, and Buddhists --- the Indic lot, broadly speaking, basically) who specifically believe in karma, think about it: After all, why should only believing someone has free will want me to seek retribution? Let’s say, hypothetically, that I believe in free will. Let’s say I believe that someone has wronged me, because they have free will. Thing is, whether I seek retribution, or not, is entirely a function of how *I* am constituted. I may well, basis my own value system, not want retribution, even despite believing someone who’s wronged me has free will.

Likewise, even if I did not believe in free will: nevertheless, if retribution is how I’m wired, then that’s what I might go for, even against a highly evolved AI-powered self-driving car that may have harmed my near and dear ones. (Heh, like how in Asimov’s ‘I, Robot’, the detective is completely antagonistic to all robots, at a personal level, basis his own specific, personal experience once in the past with robots, despite knowing they’re simply programmed automatons simply following the program that’s been fed to them.)

In fact, I’d say that only the subsection of free-will-believers that believe in the Abrahamic eye-for-an-eye creed (specifically those who believe in the Old Testament, and those who believe in the Koran --- and not who believe only in the gentler teachings of the New Testament don't subscribe to the OT nonsense, and certainly not others who don’t subscribe to the Abrahamic faiths at all) will insist on retributive justice because of believing people have free will. And in their case, it’s not so much their belief in free will per se, as their belief in the vile (im)morality taught in the Old Testament Bible and in the Koran, that is to blame.

----------

So then, what I’m saying is, the idea that realizing that there’s no free will is an argument for doing away with retributive justice, is fallacious, is what I’m saying. The one has nothing to do with the other. You can believe in free will, and still not want retributive justice. And you can believe people don’t have free will, and yet vote for keeping retributive justice. The free will part is completely redundant --- or, at best, an incidental tangent --- to deciding whether we want our justice system to be retributive.

(And, to repeat, I say this while believing, myself, that there’s no free will. I’m only pointing out this error in reasoning, as it appears to me, is all.)

My response: I'm not going to weigh in on the issue of whether atheists have a basis for finding value in human life, because I agree with Appreciative Reader that this is an absurd question.

I'll simply observe that most of my friends are atheists. They find value in life via many different ways. These are the same ways religious people find value in life: being of service to others; belonging to a community of people with shared beliefs; feeling part of a whole that is much bigger than oneself; embracing love and friendship.

Now, on to the question of no free will and its relation to retributive justice. 

This question is a large part of every book I've read about the illusion of free will, including Robert Sapolsky's Determined. For if we accept that someone didn't have the ability to act this way rather than that way, and the way they acted was illegal or against a societal norm, then punishing them for an act that stemmed from circumstances, not free will, is as illogical as blaming a lion for killing a gazelle, or cursing a tornado for destroying houses. 

I believe Appreciative Reader is confusing "is" with "ought." I'm quite sure that neither Sapolsky nor any other author arguing that free will is an illusion has said, as Appreciative Reader did above, "It's assumed --- completely baselessly --- that believing in free will necessarily sets someone to seek retributions for wrongs done (or perceived)."

That word, necessarily, is off base here, as it almost always is in reference to the brain, mind, and human behavior.

Sapolsky, for example, goes to great lengths in his 400 page book to explain how amazingly complex we humans are, how what causes an action or thought or emotion or anything else is determined by what happened a few seconds to a few minutes before, and also a few hours to a few days before, and also a few months to a few years before... continuing on to cultural and genetic influences that stem from hundreds of years to thousands of years before.

So while I and others who don't believe in retributive justice may also not believe in free will, it's very difficult to prove that the two beliefs are causally related in a necessarily sense. For it's very rare, perhaps nonexistent, for some human trait to be the result of a single cause. Even genes, as Sapolsky points out, create effects through interactions with other genes, and are activated by the environment though epigenetic influences.

What I see Appreciative Reader failing to recognize is that a no-free-will author like Sapolsky or Sam Harris isn't saying that giving up a belief in free will will make someone give up a desire for retributive justice. That's an "is" lacking evidence. Instead, what they're saying is that giving up a belief in free will "ought" to lead someone to consider the wisdom of punishing someone for an act that is either illegal or against societal norms. Note the "should's" in this quotation from Sapolsky's book, which are synonymous with "ought."

Suppose trials were abolished, replaced by mere investigation to figure out who actually carried out some act, and with what state of mind. No prisons, no prisoners. No responsibility in a moral sense, no blame or retribution.

This scenario invariably provokes the response "So you're saying that violent criminals should just run wild with no responsibility for their actions." No. A car that, through no fault of its own, has brakes that don't work should be kept off the road.  A person with active COVID-19, through no fault of their own, should be blocked from attending a crowded concert. A leopard that would shred you, through no fault of its own should be barred from your home.

Again, there are always many, many, many causes acting upon us. Human behavior and human beliefs are inherently unpredictable. This is guaranteed by our 100 billion or so neurons, each of which has thousands of connections to other neurons. The most complex structure in the known universe is the human brain. That's why it doesn't make sense to say this necessarily causes that. 

The situation is akin to thermodynamics. A molecule of air is inherently unpredictable. But measure a roomful of air and we can say what the temperature is. Likewise, Appreciative Reader makes good points when he says that some belief systems, like Jainism, accept free will but not retribution. Here he makes the excellent point that "whether I seek retribution, or not, is entirely a function of how *I* am constituted. I may well, basis my own value system, not want retribution, even despite believing someone who’s wronged me has free will."

This is just the point I made above. Individual personal behavior is very different from a collective abstract belief system. This is why it makes little sense for Sant64 to speak about atheists in general, just as it makes little sense for Appreciative Reader to speak about those who deny free will in general. For while we can make generalizations about large groups of people, those generalizations necessarily obscure the complexity of how individuals in those groups actually believe and behave.

I'll end by observing that while I agree with most of what Appreciative Reader said in his message to me that became a comment, I think he is off base with this contention: "So then, what I’m saying is, the idea that realizing that there’s no free will is an argument for doing away with retributive justice, is fallacious, is what I’m saying."

No, that argument is strong, because those who make it are speaking in "ought" terms of how a society should be, not in "is" terms of how individuals or groups within that society actually behave. Over and over, in his book Sapolsky speaks of how difficult it is for even him to give up the desire to punish people who do despicable crimes that Sapolsky finds abhorrent.

Virtually all of us have a long history of either explicitly or implicitly accepting free will. Changing to accept that free will is an illusion doesn't alter the memories, experiences, and neuronal connections of many years and decades. Altering our view of the world is a messy process. It proceeds in fits and starts, with steps forward and backward and sideways.

And while Appreciative Reader doesn't find this view of mine that I shared in a reply to his email message to be relevant to what he said in the message, my mind finds it relevant, though admittedly rather tangential.

My snap reaction is that what you point out is the mystery or conundrum of no-free-will, which is the same as the mystery or conundrum of no-self. Or indeed, of no-supernatural.

 

Meaning, when we view ourselves (correctly, in our opinions) as not being separate from the world, from the universe, then there is no View From Nowhere, as philosophers sometimes say. There’s no independent vantage point from which we can perceive things, including ourselves.

 

So when Sapolsky, or I, or anybody says that retribution isn’t a valid approach to dealing with criminals because of no-free-will, they/we are speaking from within the all encompassing framework of no-free-will. Thus there’s always a View From Somewhere, which is determined by previous causes and becomes a cause of future effects. 

 

And so it goes. Sapolsky says several times in his book, and reiterates this in a lengthy interview with physicist Lawrence Krauss, that on a good day he can only get a small percentage of the way toward truly seeing the world through the lens of no-free-will.

 

In other words, he accepts this rationally and intellectually, yet still reacts to people and events as he did as a free will believer. I feel the same way, obviously, being not as far along the path of no-free-will experiencing than Sapolsky is.

Emergent complexity helps explain how the brain works

I was planning to set aside Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, having finished it, including an appendix that I wrote about a few days ago. I called that post Neurons and synapses are what we are.

That's absolutely true. If anyone doubts this, hire an unethical doctor to scoop out all of your neurons and synapses from your head and see if anything of you remains. (Spoiler alert: you'll surely be brain dead and almost certainly totally dead also.)

But here's the obvious thing: we aren't just neurons and synapses. We're so much more. Perceptions, thoughts, emotions, actions, everything that emerges from the goings-on of those neurons and synapses. You know the saying. The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

It's important to keep in mind, though, that without the parts, there can't be a whole.

That's why you can't do away with the 100 billon or so neurons in the human brain and have a human mind. Those neurons have to exist in order for the emergent complexity of the brain, mind, and consciousness to manifest.

This is basic neuroscience. So when I saw a comment from frequent commenter Spence Tepper that started off with "Mainstream neuroscience has already rejected the view that consciousness can be reduced to chemistry alone," I thought, this is so obvious, why take the time to say it?

My suspicion is that Tepper was engaging in one of his frequent commenting ploys, which I find annoying: set up a straw man, meaning a fictitious statement that no one actually believes, then ridicule that statement as reflecting a poor understanding of reality.

However, there's another possibility. Spence Tepper doesn't understand the nature of emergent complexity. So since this might be the case, I'm pleased to educate him via some quotations from Sapolsky's chapter, "A Primer on Emergent Complexity."

First, though, some basic observations about scientific disciplines. These reflect the notion of emergent complexity. 

Quantum mechanics basically deals with subatomic particles, though quantum effects can be observed in larger entities such as atoms. Then there's physics, which studies the constituents of matter at higher levels of organization (of course, quantum physics is part of physics). Chemistry deals with properties of matter at a higher level still. Biology, still higher. Neuroscience, psychology, sociology -- even higher.

Again, each of these disciplines deal with emergent complexity at a certain level. But none of the levels would exist if subatomic particles didn't. 

Here's the passages from Sapolksy's emergent complexity chapter. Not the easiest reading, but fascinating. I love the reference to the road being traveled on being constructed at the same time.

This chapter focuses on a related domain of amazingness that seems to defy determinism. Let's start with some bricks. Granting ourselves some artistic license, they can crawl around on tiny invisible legs. Place one brick in a field; it crawls around aimlessly. 

Two bricks, ditto. A bunch, and some start bumping in to each other. When that happens, they interact in boringly simple ways -- they can settle down next to each other and stay that way, or one can crawl up on top of another. That's all.

Now scatter a hundred zillion of these identical bricks in this field, and they slowly crawl around, zillions sitting next to each other, zillions crawling on top of others... and they slowly construct the Palace of Versailles.

The amazingness is not that, wow, something as complicated as Versailles can be built out of simple bricks.* [*footnote says, Note to self: check to see if Versailles is made of bricks.]

It's that once you made a big enough pile of bricks, all those witless little building blocks, operating with a few simple rules, without a human in sight, assembled themselves into Versailles. 

This is not chaos's sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where these identical building blocks actually all differed when viewed at a high magnification, and you then butterflew to Versailles. Instead, put enough of the same simple elements together, and they spontaneously self-assemble into something flabbergastingly complex, ornate, adaptive, functional, and cool. With enough quantity, extraordinary quality just... emerges, often even unpredictably.

As it turns out, such emergent complexity occurs in realms very pertinent to our interests. The vast difference between the pile of gormless, identical building blocks and the Versailles they turned themselves into seems to defy conventional cause and effect.

Our sensible sides think (incorrectly...) of words like indeterministic. Our less rational sides think of words like magic. In either case, the "self" part of self-assembly seems so agentive, so rife with "be the palace of bricks that you wish to be," that dreams of free will beckon. An idea that this and the next chapter will try to dispel.

...What makes for emergent complexity?

-- There is a huge number of ant-like elements, all identical or coming in just a few different types.

-- The "ant" has a very small repertoire of things it can do.

-- There are a few simple rules based on chance interactions with immediate neighbors (e.g., "walk with this pebble in your little ant mandibles until you bump into another ant holding a pebble, in which case, drop yours"). No ant knows more than these few rules, and each acts as an autonomous agent.

-- Out of the hugely complicated phenomena this can produce emerge irreducible properties that exist only on the collective level (e.g., a single molecule of water cannot be wet; "wetness" emerges only from the collectivity of water molecules, and studying single water molecules can't predict much about wetness) and that are self-contained at their level of complexity (i.e., you can make accurate predictions about the behavior of the collective level without knowing much about the component parts). As summarized by Nobel laureate physicist Philip Anderson, "More is different."

-- These emergent properties are robust and resilient -- a waterfall, for example, maintains consistent emergent features over time despite the fact that no water molecule participates in waterfall-ness more than once.

-- A detailed picture of the maturely emergent system can be (but is not necessarily) unpredictable, which should have echoes of the previous two chapters. Knowing the starting state and reproduction rules (a la cellular automata) gives you the means to develop the complexity but not the means to describe it. Or, to use a word offered by a leading developmental neurobiologist of the past century, Paul Weiss, the starting state can never contain an "itinerary."

-- Part of this unpredictability is due to the fact that in emergent systems, the road you are traveling on is being constructed at the same time and, in fact, your being on it is influencing the construction process by constituting feedback on the road-making process. Moreover, the goal you are traveling toward may not even exist yet -- you are destined to interact with a target spot that may not exist yet but, with any luck, will be constructed in time. In addition, unlike last chapter's cellular automata, emergent systems are also subject to randomness (jargon: "stochastic events"), where the sequence of random events makes a difference.

-- Often the emergent properties can be breathtakingly adaptive and, despite that, there's no blueprint or blueprint maker. 

The joy of punishment is tough for even free will deniers to give up

At long last, I've almost finished reading Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. Just have the final chapter to go. 

The next to last chapter, "The Joy of Punishment," was both interesting and disturbing. Sapolsky uses history and psychological research to examine how and why we humans find so much satisfaction when a person is punished for something they've done.

He goes into grisly detail about the "drawing and quartering" of Robert-Francois Damiens, who in 1757 stabbed King Louis XV of France with what was essentially a penknife, creating only a superficial wound. 

Nonetheless, Damiens was executed in a public square before a massive crowd that cheered as he was subjected to some horrendous tortures that I won't describe, to avoid bad dreams for anyone reading this.

Much more recently, Sapolsky describes the execution of Timothy McVeigh in 2001, after he killed 168 people and injured 853 after exploding a massive bomb at a federal building in Oklahoma City. This time there was no public execution, just death by lethal injection, which went smoothly.

So we've made some progress in not blatantly celebrating the punishment of a fellow human being. Sapolsky takes comfort in this, since if free will is an illusion, retribution for a crime makes no sense -- only rehabilitation and protecting society from additional criminal acts does.

But Sapolsky is appealingly honest about how difficult it is for even him to give up the joy of punishment. Here's how that chapter ends.

The theme of the second half of this book is this: We've done it before. Over and over, in various domains, we've shown that we can subtract out a belief that actions are freely, willfully chosen, as we've become more knowledgeable, more reflective, more modern.

And the roof has not caved in; society can function without our believing that people with epilepsy are in cahoots with Satan and that mothers of people with schizophrenia caused the disease by hating their child.

But it will be hugely difficult to continue this arc, so much so that I've spent a lot of the last five years procrastinating over this book because it seemed like a waste of time. And because I am endlessly reminded about how far I personally have to go.

As I noted, I've worked with public defenders on various murder trials, teaching juries about the circumstances that produce brains that make horrible decisions. 

I was once asked if I would take on that role working on the case of a White supremacist who, a month after attempting to burn down a mosque, had invaded a synagogue and used an assault rifle to shoot four people, killing one.

"Whoa," I thought, "WTF, I'm supposed to help out with this?"

Members of my family died in Hitler's camps. When I was a kid, our synagogue was arsoned; my father, an architect, rebuilt it, and I had to spend hours holding one end of a tape measure for him amid the scorched acrid ruins while he railed on in a near-altered state about the history of anti-Semitism.

When my wife directed a production of Cabaret, with me assisting, I had to actively force myself to touch the swastika armbands when distributing costumes. Given all that, I'm supposed to help out with this trial?

I said yes -- if I believed any of this shit I've been spouting, I had to. And then I subtly proved to myself how far I still had to go.

On these trials I've worked on, the lawyer has often asked me if I wanted to meet with the defendant, and I've instantly said no -- I would have to admit during my testimony to having done that, and it would compromise my credibility as a teaching witness impartially discussing the brain.

But this time, before I knew it, it was I who asked these attorneys if I could meet with the defendant. Was this because I wanted to figure out what epigenetic changes had occurred in his amygdala, what version of the MAO-beta gene he possessed? Because I wanted to understand his personal case of turtles all the way down? No, I wanted to see close up what the face of evil looked like.

Perhaps when done with the writing, I should read this book.

It will be hard. But we've done it before.

Robert Sapolsky's overview of the first half of his book, Determined

Now that I've about three-fourths of the way through Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, I was going to attempt a summary of the first half of the book (the second half focuses on the implications of living without a belief in free will).

Then I realized that the best person, by far, to summarize the initial part of Determined is the author himself. Sapolsky does this in a brief "Interlude" chapter. Below is most of that chapter. It should make pretty good sense on its own, though obviously Sapolsky is describing entire detailed chapters in just a few sentences. 

The repeated mention of "turtles all the way down" deserves some clarification though. That Wikipedia page gives examples of how this phrase has been used. Here's how Sapolsky talks about it early on in his book.

Here is the point of this book: While it may seem ridiculous and nonsensical to explain something by resorting to an infinity of turtles all the way down, it actually is much more ridiculous and nonsensical to believe that somewhere down there, there's a turtle floating in the air. The science of human behavior shows that turtles can't float; instead, it is indeed turtles all the way down.

Enjoy the summary:

Why did that behavior -- dastardly, noble, or ambiguously in between -- just occur? Because of what happened a second before, and a minute before, and a... The easy takeaway from the first half of this book is that the biological determinants of our behavior stretch widely over space and time -- responding to events in front of you this instant but also to events on the other side of the planet or that shaped your ancestors centuries back.

And those influences are deep and subterranean, and our ignorance of the shaping forces beneath the surface leads us to fill in the vacuum with stories of agency. Just to restate that irritatingly-familiar-by-now notion, we are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control -- our biology, our environments, their interactions.

The most important message was that these are not all separate -ology fields producing behavior. They all merge into one -- evolution produces genes marked by the epigenetics of early environment, which produce proteins that, facilitated by hormones in a particular context, work in the brain to produce you. A seamless continuum leaving no cracks between the disciplines into which to slip some free will.

Because of this, as covered in chapter 2, it doesn't really matter what Libet-style experiments do or don't show; it doesn't really matter when intent occurred. All that matters is how that intent came to be. We can't successfully wish to not wish for what we wish for; we can't announce that good and bad luck even out over time, since they're far more likely to progressively diverge. Someone's history can't be ignored, because all we are is our history.

Moreover, as the point of chapter 4, it's biological turtles all the way down with respect to all of who we are, not just some parts. It's not the case that while our natural attributes and aptitudes are made of sciencey stuff, our character, resilience, and backbone come packaged in a soul. 

Everything is turtles all the way down, and when you come to a juncture where you must choose between the easy way and the harder but better way, your frontal cortex's actions are the result of the exact same one-second-before-one-minute-before as everything else in your brain. It is the reason that, try as we might, we can't will ourselves to have more willpower.

Moreover, this seamless continuum of biology and environment forming us doesn't leave room for novel portals of free will by way of the revolutions of chapters 5-10. Yes, all the interesting things in the world can be shot through with chaoticism, including a cell, an organ, an organism, a society. And as a result, there are really important things that can't be predicted, that can never be predicted.

But nonetheless, every step in the progression of a chaotic system is made of determinism, not whim. And yes, take a huge number of simple component parts that interact in simple ways, let them interact, and stunningly adaptive complexity emerges. But the component parts remain precisely as simple, and they can't transcend their biological constraints to contain magical things like free will -- a brick may want to be something elegant and glamorous, but it will always remain a brick. 

And yes, truly indeterministic things seem to happen way down at the subatomic level. Nonetheless, it's not possible for that level of weirdness to percolate all the way up to influence behavior, and besides, if you base your notion of being a free, willful agent on randomness, you got problems. As do the people stuck around you; it can be very unsettling when a sentence doesn't end in the way that you potato. Likewise when behavior is random.

As shown in everyday life, in jury boxes, schoolrooms, award ceremonies, eulogies, and the work of experimental philosophers, people hold on to the notion of free will with ferocious tenacity. The pull toward attribution and judgment, whether of others or of ourselves, is enormous and is demonstrable (to varying degrees) in cultures all over the world. Heck, even chimps believe in free will.

Nevertheless, we have a big problem, which is that amid all this science and determinism and mechanism, we're still not very adept at predicting behavior. 

Take someone with extensive frontal cortical damage, and you're on solid ground predicting that their social behavior will be inappropriate, but good luck predicting whether they'll become an impulsive murderer or someone who is rude to a dinner host. Take someone raised in a hellhole of adversity and deprivation, and you're pretty safe predicting that the outcome won't be good, but not much beyond that.

In addition to the unpredictable versions of predictable outcomes, there are a world's worth of exceptions, of thoroughly unpredictable outcomes, Every so often, two rich, brilliant law students murder a fourteen-year-old as a test of their addled philosophy. Or a Crips gang member facing his second stint in jail has his mug shot go viral and winds up as an international fashion model and brand ambassador for a Swiss fragrance line, squiring around the daughter of a knighted Brit business mogul. Maybe Laurey, out among the waving wheat in Oklahoma, realizes that Curley's a dull pretty boy, and shacks up with Jud Fry.

Will we ever get to the point where our behavior is entirely predictable, given the deterministic gears grinding underneath? Never -- that's one of the points of chaoticism. But the rate at which we are accruing new insights into those gears is boggling -- nearly every fact in this book was discovered in the last fifty years, probably half in the last five.

The Society for Neuroscience, the world's premier professional organization for brain scientists, grew from five hundred founding members to twenty-five thousand in its first quarter century. In the time it has taken you to read this paragraph, two different scientists have discovered the function in the brain of some gene and are already squabbling about who did it first.

Unless the process of discovery in science grinds to a halt tonight at midnight, the vacuum of ignorance that we try to fill with a sense of agency will just keep shrinking. Which raises the question that motivates the second half of this book... "What if everyone started believing that there is no free will? How are we supposed to function? Why would we bother getting up in the morning if we're just machines?"

Chaos theory is cool, but it can't save free will

As I make my way through Robert Sapolsky's lengthy (400 pages of text) book about the non-existence of free will, Determined, I become more and more impressed with both Sapolsky and what he has wrought.

He's a terrific writer and thinker. His talent is reflected in the fact that he's a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant." And his scientific expertise is evident by the approach he takes in Determined. 

Usually non-fiction authors are content to make a strong case for their subject. Sapolsky does that in arguing that free will is an illusion. But he goes beyond in identifying the arguments that free will believers make and then systematically dismantling those objections to his no-free-will thesis.

I'm into that section of his book now. After a chapter called "A Primer on Chaos," he moved into "Is your Free Will Chaotic?" 

Often the only thing people know about chaos theory is the well-known butterfly effect. You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and eventually that leads to a tornado in Texas. Chaotic systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions.

A MIT meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, discovered this when he found that when the values of variables in a weather model were rounded off to fewer digits, as in 0.506 instead of 0.506127, that made a big difference.

Lorenz finally spotted that slight rounding error introduced after lunch and realized that this made the system unpredictable, nonlinear, and non-additive... When you have a nonlinear system, tiny differences in a starting state from one time to the next can cause them to diverge from each other enormously, even exponentially, something since termed "sensitive dependence on initial conditions."

In his next chapter, Sapolsky says:

Part of the neglect [of Lorenz's 1963 paper] reflected the fact that chaos theory is a horrible name, insofar as it is about the opposite of nihilistic chaos and is instead about the patterns of structure hidden in seeming chaos.

The more fundamental reason for chaoticism getting off to a slow start was that if you have a reductive mindset, unsolvable, nonlinear interactions among a large number of variable is a total pain to study. Thus most researchers tried to study complicated things by limiting the number of variables considered so that things remained tame and tractable.

And this guarantees the incorrect conclusion that the world is mostly about linear, additive predictability and nonlinear chaoticism was a weird anomaly that could mostly be ignored.

Until it couldn't be anymore, as it became clear that chaoticism lurked behind the most interesting complicated things. A cell, a brain, a person, a society, was more like the chaoticism of a cloud than the reductionism of a watch.

...The growing interest in chaos theory generated the sound of a zillion butterfly wings flapping. Given that, it was inevitable that various thinkers began to proclaim that the unpredictable, chaotic cloud-ness of human behavior is where free will runs free. Hopefully the material already covered, showing what chaoticism is and isn't, will help show how this cannot be.

Sapolsky then describes two forms of the "giddy conclusion that chaoticism proves free will." Here's some key passages in Wrong Conclusion #1: The Freely Choosing Cloud.

But now to the critical mistake running through all this: determinism and predictability are very different things. Even if chaoticism is unpredictable, it is still deterministic. The difference can be framed a lot of ways.

One is that determinism allows you to explain why something happened, whereas predictability allows you to say what happens next. Another way is the woolly-haired contrast between ontology and epistemology; the former is about what is going on, an issue of determinism, while the latter is about what is knowable, an issue of predictability.

...We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we've chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons, that agency and volition dwell there. Our intuitions scream this, because we don't know about, can't imagine, the subterranean forces of our biological history that brought it about.

It is a huge challenge to overcome those intuitions when you still have to wait for science to be able to predict that behavior precisely. But the temptation to equate chaoticism with free will shows just how much harder it is to overcome those intuitions when science will never be able to predict precisely the outcomes of a deterministic system.

Sapolsky then moves to Wrong Conclusion #2: A Causeless Fire.

Go back to the figure at the top of page 141 with its demonstration with rule 22 that two different starting states can turn into the identical pattern and thus, it is not possible to know which of those two was the actual source.

This is the phenomenon of convergence. It's a term frequently used in evolutionary biology. In this instance, it's not so much that you can't tell which of two different possible ancestors a particular species arose from (e.g, "Was the ancestor of elephants three-legged or five-legged? Who can tell?"). 

It's more when two very different sorts of species have converged on the same solution to the same sort of selective challenge. Among analytical philosophers, the phenomenon is termed overdetermination -- when two different pathways could each separately determine the progression to the same outcome.

As one example of this, Sapolsky cites a fire starting in building A thanks to negligence. A separate unrelated nearby negligence led to a fire starting in building B. The two fires merge and converge, burning down building C between them. The owner of building C sues the other two owners, but each argues that if my fire hadn't happened, building C would still have burned down.

As another example, he cites a group of soldiers comprising a firing squad assigned to kill someone. A blank bullet is given to one of the soldiers at random, so it is impossible to tell who wasn't actually a killer. Sapolsky then says:

So you can't do radical eliminative reductionism and decide what single thing caused the fire, which button presser delivered the poison, or what prior state gave rise to a particular chaotic pattern. But that doesn't mean that the fire wasn't actually caused by anything, that no one shot the bullet-riddled prisoner, or that the chaotic state just popped up out of nowhere. Ruling out radical eliminative reductionism doesn't prove indeterminism. 

...Where have we gotten at this point? The crushing of knee-jerk reductionism, the demonstration that chaoticism shows just the opposite of chaos, the fact that there's less randomness than often assumed and, instead, unexpected structure and determinism -- all of this is wonderful.

Ditto for butterfly wings, the generation of patterns on sea shells, and Will Darling. But to get from there to free will required that you mistake a failure of reductionism that makes it impossible to precisely describe the past or predict the future as proof of indeterminism.

In the face of complicated things, our intuitions beg us to fill up what we don't understand, even can never understand, with mistaken attributions.

Nature's seamlessness leaves no room for free will

One of the joys for me of maintaining this blog in good working order is also one of the frustrations.

I enjoy seeing what people think of my posts via the comments they leave on them. But frequently I'll be amazed at how a fairly simple idea, which I view as essentially unarguable, is twisted into complex knots by commenters who are so eager to maintain a belief, they ignore the facts I've presented.

Or, if the facts are recognized, they are shape-shifted into something other than what they actually are.

Now, I readily admit that I'm guilty at times of doing the same thing. All of us can become so attached to our personal perception of reality we'll bend over backwards, as well as forwards and sideways, to avoid being confronted with a viewpoint that challenges that perception.

Understand: I'm not calling for gullibility here. Or accepting a claim without good reason.

But when a good reason has been presented, and commenters on one of my posts sidestep that reason without confronting it head on, then I get frustrated at the lack of productive dialoging on this blog. Which obviously pertains to communications on the entire Internet. 

Communicating via episodic messages is much more difficult than communicating face-to-face, which is hard enough.

But hope springs eternal, as the saying goes.

So here's another try at convincing some commenters that the determinism espoused by Robert Sapolsky in the Determinism book he wrote about the illusion of free will deserves to be taken seriously, not discounted through wordplay that ignores the scientific reality of what supports Sapolsky's book.

In my previous post, I included a quote from his "Where Does Intent Come From?" chapter that included the word seamlessness, which I've boldfaced.

Why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before it." Then why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before that," forever isn't absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. The absurdity amid this seamlessness is to think that we have free will and that it exists because at some point, the state of the world (or of the frontal cortex or neuron or molecule of serotonin...) that "came before that" happened out of thin air.

In order to prove there's free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can't with anything known to science.

There's Sapolsky's challenge.

In his book he presents a vast amount of biological, psychological, sociological, anthropological, and neuroscientific research demonstrating how the human mind, and the behaviors emanating from those minds, are determined by chains of causes and effects.

If you disagree with Sapolsky, then you need to show, as he says, how some state of the world -- in this case the world of the human mind/behavior -- can happen out of thin air. Meaning, without a cause.

I see some commenters arguing that through meditation or other means of fostering greater self-awareness, people can become free of prior influences. Well, no, all that's happened is that other influences now are operating on the person's mind. 

I also see some commenters arguing that by carefully reasoning through some problem, an action can be taken that, though perhaps not worthy of being termed free will, is an act of agency. (Which is just a synonym for free will, in truth.) Well, no, all that's happened is that careful reasoning has become one of the deterministic causes of the action.

The problem is that pesky word, seamlessness. We humans love to imagine seams in the natural world. Miracles. God. Angels. The supernatural. Prophets. Mystical visions. ESP. Magic. And so on. And so on.

Even though there is no demonstrable evidence for any of these seams in the fabric of the natural world (maybe a zipper is a better image), for various reasons we love to conjure up realms that are free of the laws and constraints that govern our universe.

One of those realms is free will. It just feels so right, so correct, so true, that the self we envision residing inside our head can choose to do things, and to feel things, and to perceive things, that are beyond the determinism applying to everything else in the world.

That sensation of being someone special is intoxicating. Animals, plants, galaxies, molecules, all that other stuff is bound by natural laws, but we, me, I'm beyond this stuff, for I am free to will whatever I want.

Problem is, we aren't special. Not in reality. Just in our own minds. That's what Sapolsky means by seamlessness. The natural world contains no gaps, crevices, or openings where anything other than determinism (and quantum randomness) holds sway.

Again, if you don't agree, refute this contention by providing solid evidence of a seam.

I'll end with a quotation from the chapter in Sapolsky's book, "Willing Willpower: The Myth of Grit," that I finished reading this morning. Guess what (you have three guesses and the first two don't count) word I'm going to boldface.

We're pretty good at recognizing that we have no control over the attributes that life has gifted or cursed us with. But what we do with those attributes at right/wrong crossroads powerfully, toxically invites us to conclude, with the strongest of intuitions, that we are seeing free will in action.

But the reality is that whether you display admirable gumption, squander opportunity in a murk of self-indulgence, majestically stare down temptation or belly flop into it, these are all the outcome of the functioning of the PFC [prefrontal cortex] and the brain regions it connects to.

And that PFC functioning is the outcome of the second before, minutes before, millennia before. The same punch  line as in the previous chapter concerning the entire brain. And invoking the same critical word -- seamless. 

As we've seen, talk about the evolution of the PFC, and you're also talking about the genes that evolved, the proteins they code for in the brain, and how childhood altered the regulation of those genes and proteins.

A seamless arc of influences bringing your PFC to this moment, without a crevice for free will to lodge in.

OK, a final end, because this thought just came to mind. It strikes me as strange that some readers of this blog can be powerfully attracted to Oneness, a unity that underlies apparent differences, yet strongly object to the oneness espoused by Sapolsky where the universe is a seamless web of causes and effects that binds everything together into unity.

More on the illusion of free will, from Robert Sapolsky and me

I'm continuing to enjoy Robert Sapolsky's book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, which I first wrote about a few days ago. The book is getting a lot of publicity, way more than any other book on this subject so far as I can tell. 

Before I share what I said about the illusion of free will on my HinesSight blog yesterday, here's more from Sapolsky -- quotes from the end of his chapter "Where Does Intent Come From?"

In the first chapter, I wrote about what is needed to prove free will, and this chapter has added details to that demand: show me that the thing a neuron just did in someone's brain was unaffected by any of these preceding factors -- by the goings-on in the eighty billion neurons surrounding it, by any of the infinite number of combinations of hormone levels percolated that morning, by any of the countless types of childhoods and fetal environments were experienced, by any of the two to the four millionth power different genomes that neuron contains, multiplied by the nearly as large range of epigenetic orchestrations possible. Et cetera. All out of your control.

...Why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before it." Then why did that moment just occur? "Because of what came before that," forever isn't absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. The absurdity amid this seamlessness is to think that we have free will and that it exists because at some point, the state of the world (or of the frontal cortex or neuron or molecule of serotonin...) that "came before that" happened out of thin air.

In order to prove there's free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. It may be possible to sidestep that with some subtle philosophical arguments, but you can't with anything known to science.

And here's what I said in my HinesSight post yesterday, I don't believe in free will. Here's why. I left out a quotation from Sapolsky's book that I included in my first post about it.

Today the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of spent quite a bit of time talking about free will.

This is one of my favorite subjects, for after pondering quite a few books about free will, or the lack thereof, I'm highly confident that free will is an illusion.

I can't recall exactly how our group started conversing about it, but for sure I spurred our conversation by saying that I've started reading Robert M. Sapolsky's terrific book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.

To give you a feel for his general view of free will, here's an eight-minute interview featuring Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor of biology, of neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery.

I was worried that my passion for this subject wouldn't be shared by other members of the discussion group. I was wrong. We had a really interesting discussion of free will in which some people agreed with me that we don't possess it, and others presented reasons why they think we do.

Since I'm writing this blog post, not them, I'm going to focus on briefly relating some of my arguments for why free will doesn't exist. These aren't original, obviously. They flow from the books I've read by people arguing that free will is an illusion.

(1) Humans are part of the natural world. We are animals. Animals with powerful brains, to be sure, but animals. If a grizzly bear attacks someone, we don't consider that the bear had the free will to do otherwise. We just say, it was doing what bears do. So what makes us think that we stand apart from the natural world by possessing some sort of free will magic in our brain?

(2) The core argument against free will is simple. Everything about us, and the rest of the world, is determined. That's why Sapolsky's book has that title, Determined. Sure, we make choices. So do bears. And sea slugs. Those choices, those intentions, don't spring out of nowhere. They arise out of the goings-on in our brain, which is amazingly complex, yet still determined by causes and effects that range from a few seconds ago, to the moment of our birth, and even beyond given cultural and genetic influences on us.

(3) Recall something you've done that you regret. That's easy for me. Probably is for you also. We all have regrets. Often, or usually, that regret is made more painful by believing that we could have acted differently. But consider this. If every atom in your brain and outside world were in exactly the same condition as it was when you acted the first time, you'd do exactly what you did again. No doubt about it. Free will assumes that we have a choice to act differently. That can't be true if nothing has changed from when we acted initially.

(4) But as Sapolsky says in the video above, change does happen. All the time. Life and our world as a whole is nothing but change. People change. Animals change. Rocks change. Plants change. Free will, since it doesn't exist, can't change anything. Yet circumstances change. Every thought we have, every feeling we have, every action we take, all that changes us. So there's no fatalism involved in giving up a belief in free will. In fact, not believing in free will opens us to the reality that change can occur for countless reasons. Life is a never-ending series of surprises caused by determinism.

(5) Believing in free will fosters judgmentalism. We see someone in an unfortunate situation and think, "It's their fault." Giving up a belief in free will leads to a realization that, as strange as this may sound, no one is deserving of praise or blame. They're just doing what was determined that they do. So are we. Everybody is. Sure, society is justified in imprisoning dangerous people. But not to punish them. To protect others. And to change the prisoner for the better, if this is possible.

(6) There's no reason to think that people would go wild and crazy if they didn't believe in free will. Animals don't believe in free will, yet a wolf pack, herd of deer, school of fish, or flock of birds do just fine without such a belief. Us human animals have a strong sense of community and social cohesion. We generally want to get along with our fellow humans, notwithstanding our political, religious, and other sorts of divisions. Morality flows from a much deeper source than free will. It is embedded in our being thanks to evolution.

This morning I emailed a link to my HinesSight post to the members of our discussion group. After sharing the link, I added some personal observations.

We discussed why not believing in free will makes a difference in someone’s life. Well, after our meeting I had some thoughts about my father that I’d never had before. I have no early memories of him as my mother and he divorced when I was just a few years old.

 

Then I had no contact with him until my 30s when he started to phone me after he learned he had a serious case of emphysema that, I believe, eventually caused his death, though I could be wrong about this. It turned out that I was able to see him for a single hour in a Boston hotel room, which I wrote about here.

My fresh insight today was visualizing what it might have been like for my father as a newborn in this country to German immigrants who, he told me, he had learned came to work on the railroads. His mother died giving birth to him. His father then deserted his child, my father, who was eventually adopted by a Hines family. Which is why I have that last name rather than Mueller. 

 

I got to thinking about how a newborn’s brain/mind could be affected by his mother dying in childbirth in the early 1900s, then being orphaned. How much love and closeness did he receive as that infant? Could this help explain why my father, by all accounts from what I’ve been able to learn, was an egotistical selfish asshole? Maybe? Probably? 

 

Regardless I felt more compassion for my father this morning than I ever have, because viewing him as the product of deterministic forces put him in a different light than how I’ve tended to see him: as someone who willfully abandoned my mother after she gave birth to a sister of mine who was born with a congenital heart defect and reportedly needed a warmer drier climate than Massachusetts had to offer. He refused to move, so my mother went to Texas where my sister, Evie, died before too long.

 

Not viewing my father as having free will cast him in a different light for me. I’d already been inching in that direction when I wrote a blog post in 2013 about thanking him, and even loving him, for who he was, even with all his flaws. 

I'm loving Determined, a great book about no free will

Thanks to a recent article in New Scientist, Is Free Will an Illusion?, I learned about two new books on this subject.

The one that appealed to me most was Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, by Robert M. Sapolsky -- a professor of biology, of neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery at Stanford.

It arrived yesterday. I had no problem holding it up to take this photo, but I wanted to show how thick it was, 403 pages plus some appendices. I was worried that a book of this size could be heavy reading if the author got into the complex details of how the brain works.

That worry vanished after I read the first chapter this morning. Sapolsky is a terrific writer with an engaging style. Informal. Creative. Easy to understand. I'd read parts of his earlier book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: A Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. It was interesting, but wasn't nearly as pleasant to read as Determined.

Here's how the first chapter ends. I was almost moved to tears when I read this. This passage not only makes great good sense, it has an emotionality that other books about no free will that I've read lack, which take a more cerebral approach to this subject.

Finally, any contemporary view of determinism must accommodate a profoundly important point, one that dominates the second half of the book -- despite the world being deterministic, things can change. Brains change, behaviors change. We change. And that doesn't counter this being a deterministic world without free will. In fact, the science of change strengthens this conclusion; this will come in chapter 12.

With those issues in mind, time to see the version of determinism that this book builds on. 

Imagine a university graduation ceremony. Almost always moving, despite the platitudes, the boilerplate, the kitsch. The happiness, the pride. The families whose sacrifices now all seem worth it. The graduates who were the first in their family to finish high school. The ones whose immigrant parents sit there glowing, their saris, dashikis, barongs broadcasting that their pride in the present isn't at the cost of pride in their past.

And then you notice someone. Amid the family clusters post ceremony, the new graduates posing for pictures with Grandma in her wheelchair, the bursts of hugs and laughter, you see the person way in the back, the person who is part of the grounds crew, collecting the garbage from the cans on the perimeter of the event.

Randomly pick any of the graduates. Do some magic so that this garbage collector started life with the graduate's genes. Likewise for getting the womb in which nine months were spent and the lifelong epigenetic consequences of that.

Get the graduate's childhood as well -- one filled with, say, piano lessons and family game nights, instead of, say, threats of going to bed hungry, becoming homeless, or being deported for lack of papers. Let's go all the way so that, in addition to the garbage collector having gotten all that of the graduate's past, the graduate would have gotten the garbage collector's past.

Trade every factor over which they had no control, and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would be hauling garbage cans. This is what I mean by determinism. 

AND WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Because we all know that the graduate and the garbage collector would switch places. And because, nevertheless, we rarely reflect on that sort of fact; we congratulate the graduate on all she's accomplished and move out of the way of the garbage guy without glancing at him.

This passage is a terrific way of getting across the point that there's no such thing as an inner Me who is separate and distinct from our body/brain/mind, which itself is the result of a vast network of causes extending all the way back to the big bang. 

In short, none of us is anything special. We're just the result of what the cosmos has fashioned into a form that goes by our name and has the characteristics that the circumstances of our birth, upbringing, and countless experiences have determined us to be.

Here's another passage from the initial chapter, "Turtles All the Way Down," that provides a good introduction to the no-free-will waters Sapolsky invites us to swim in via his book. Me, I'm ready to dive in.

We can all agree on that; however, we're heading into very different terrain, one that I suspect most readers will not agree with, which is deciding that we have no free will at all. Here would be some of the logical implications of that being the case:

That there can be no such thing as blame, and that punishment as retribution is indefensible -- sure, keep dangerous people from damaging others, but do so as straightforwardly and nonjudgmentally as keeping a car with faulty brakes off the road.

That it can be okay to praise someone or express gratitude toward them as an instrumental intervention, to make it likely that they will repeat that behavior in the future, or as an inspiration to others, but never because they deserve it. And that this applies to you when you've been smart or self-disciplined or kind.

Oh, as long as we're at it, that you recognize that the experience of love is made of the same building blocks that constitute wildebeests or asteroids. That no one has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else. 

And that it makes as little sense to hate someone as to hate a tornado because it supposedly decided to level your house, or to love a lilac because it supposedly decided to make a wonderful fragrance.

That's what it means to conclude that there is no free will. This is what I've concluded for a long, long time. And even I think that taking that seriously sounds absolutely nutty.  

Some final thoughts on Paul Breer's books

Whew. I did it.

Finished all 495 pages of Paul Breer's second book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. It was interesting reading, though it repeated some of the themes in his first book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. 

I admire authors like Breer who put a lot of time and effort into writing about a subject that, given its nature, isn't going to land their book(s) on best seller lists. It's a labor of love, not of money. I speak as someone who has put a lot of time and effort into writing books of the same sort.

Breer is on solid ground -- according to both Buddhism and neuroscience -- in his contention that we humans lack both an independent Self that stands apart from the physical mind/body as well as the free will that such a Self is widely considered to be capable of.

I found Breer's assertion in his second book to be more problematic: that it is possible to become enlightened by coming to an experience of Pure Consciousness.

This supposedly is consciousness before it becomes identified with things in the world, though in a Zen-like assumption (he practiced Zen for five years) Breer says that Pure Consciousness never stands alone, but always is experienced along with the sensing of material objects.

So this explains why a Zen practitioner can become enlightened upon hearing a bell rung or seeing a bird flying. At certain moments Pure Consciousness is manifested as the ground upon which impure consciousness operates.

OK, I can bring myself to believe that. However, I'm more skeptical that if Pure Consciousness becomes a permanent part of our experience, then we are no longer bothered by bad things happening to us, like disease, pain, disability, financial ruin, and such.

It'd be nice if this were true. And Sam Harris, along with others who embrace Buddhist precepts, seem to believe something similar.

They argue that when we wake up to the true nature of consciousness, it is seen as akin to the clear sky that remains unaltered even as hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms form and dissolve in the sky. If I ever achieve such a state, I guess I'll know I'm enlightened when I can hear Donald Trump talk without feeling repulsed by his constant lies, hatefulness, and fearmongering.

There are passages near the end of Breer's second book that describe Pure Consciousness and enlightenment in terms that seem unobjectionable to me, even if I can't buy into them entirely. For example:

The Undifferentiated realm you refer to lies hidden beneath all this orienting. "IT" is there in everything we experience -- every  image, every sound, every smell. As I said earlier, according to Trungpa's hypothesis, we get a glimpse of Pure Consciousness every time we see a bird, hear a truck, or smell somebody's dinner cooking. 

That glimpse happens at the very beginning of each experience -- prior to any kind of orienting. It is so brief, however, (he argued that it lasts less than a millisecond), that it rarely reaches awareness. Almost immediately we begin to sort inputs into sensations, combine sensations to form objects and then name and evaluate what we have constructed. 

And it works. It works so well that we never get to see (or hear, smell, etc) what is actually there. We pick and choose those aspects of the stimulus that are important for our survival -- and pay no attention to those that aren't.

...Becoming enlightened involves peeling off all three layers of orienting so that we can grasp the "IT" that precedes every image, sound, smell, taste or touch. From the perspective of that fundamental Ground, we get to see the phenomenal world objectively for the first time, that is, we see freed of all the self-related add-ons that distort what's really going on.

For example, it becomes possible to look at a weed without dismissing it as a violation of one's personal concept of beauty or to smell a rotten piece of meat without recoiling in horror. It's breathtaking to discover what a scene (and I mean any scene) looks like when it is no longer seen from the biased perspective of an observer whose primary mission in life in self-survival.

Makes sense. I could use some of that sort of enlightenment. 

Lastly, I wanted to share a passage in Breer's second book where he speaks about the sex abuse/incest charges that led to him spending two years in prison. I like how open Breer is about his prison experience. Several times he describes experiences he had during that time that related to themes in his book.

Here he says that he was wrongly accused. 

Throughout my own time in prison and on parole, I tried to use Hakuin's story as a model of acceptance. In the beginning I had no success at all; in time what made a modicum of success possible was the constant reminder that there was no master controller inside my accuser that chose to fabricate a story.

While that reminder kept me from becoming bitter, it was not until I awakened to my deeper nature that I truly accepted what happened. 

As that acceptance arose, my negative feelings vanished, leaving in their wake a heightened awareness of the pain I had caused that led my accuser to lie. In the process my concern gradually shifted from self to other -- taking with it the last vestige of resentment. 

No free will is the secular version of karma

It had to be. During my religious days -- well, make that 35 years -- I wrote two books that addressed the subject of karma.

In God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder, karma was secondary to my main theme of spirit being the creative power of the cosmos. But in Life is Fair, the whole book was about this spiritual law of cause and effect.

Now, when I've become an atheist, I'm fascinated by the strong neuroscientific and philosophical arguments against free will. What's interesting is that no free will is almost exactly the same as karma.

Guess I was meant to not believe in free will. 

Of course, often karma is viewed as having supernatural elements, especially in its Eastern religious form. Karma is seen as extending over multiple lives, through reincarnation. But otherwise, no free will is the secular equivalent of karma.

To demonstrate this, below are some quotes from the literature of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based religious organization headed up by a guru that I belonged to for those three and a half decades.

I assembled these quotes in the course of my research for my first book. I read, or rather re-read, every book in English published by RSSB and took notes on various subjects concerning how mysticism and the new physics could relate.

Here's some of what the RSSB books say about karma, which sounds just like the notion of no free will, leaving aside the references to God as being the overseer of karma and mentions of past lives. Every quote is from a book written by one of the RSSB gurus, such as Charan Singh and Sawan Singh.

The Karmic Law is supreme on the material and mind planes, and nothing happens of its own accord, spontaneously, so to say. The law governs the planes; therefore, no haphazard happening of events takes place anywhere, whether the events are of microscopic or astronomical dimensions. (Sawan Singh)

According to the layer of our Karmas that comes into action, our Lord makes people act towards us in that way. So we should never blame anybody. (Charan Singh)

Our present life was marked out in the minutest detail, even before we were born, and no change can be made in that now. (Charan Singh)

No person, dead or living, can influence the life of another person. That is settled strictly according to the law of Karma. You go where your attachments are and you reap what you sow. These are eternal laws which work in this creation and every soul is bound by them. (Charan Singh)

Everything in our life is predestined according to the karmas of our past life, but this does not preclude all effort on our part. The effort that we make is also part of our destiny. We, in fact, have no free will as we call it... our will is very limited and what we call free will is all circumscribed by our birth, the family we are born into, the country, the education, and so forth, over which we had no control. All these circumstances have moulded our thoughts and we act and think accordingly. (Charan Singh)

There is no necessity to worry because whatever is destined, whatever has to happen, has already happened, is already destined. (Charan Singh)

We cannot think why should we do anything if it is already written in our destiny and we will get it automatically anyway. If a thing is in your destiny, then your way of thinking will be to develop it. We are all just like puppets who are dancing, and the strings are being pulled by Him according to our karmas. The realized souls and the unrealized souls are all dancing in the same way. The only difference is that the realized souls know that He is pulling the string and the unrealized souls think that they are dancing by their own effort. (Charan Singh)

If we look at it on a grand scale, from the top down, we have hardly any free will at all...We may say that this is my decision, this is my free will, but we forget what has led us to make that decision, to think in that direction... So, on a broader scale, we have absolutely no free will at all. Everything was planned, so to say. But with our limited view, looking from here up, we have free will. (Charan Singh)

We cannot know what is our karma or what is in store for us... Karma will be taken care of automatically. We should not try to analyze what is our karma or what is not our karma, for that will take care of itself. (Charan Singh)

What destiny has planned for you will come to pass without any planning on your part. Your destiny will cause you to act and make effort according to its plan. Destiny and effort go hand in hand. One is as much a part of the other as the sun and its rays. (Jagat Singh)

The whole universe is at work in every thought and action

I'd thought that I'd read, or at least heard about, every book by Alan Watts -- one of my favorite authors. But then I saw a comment on this blog where someone recommended The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East.

So I ordered it, as the commenter said that Watts had interesting observations about free will, one of my favorite subjects. Sweet! Favorite author plus favorite subject equals enjoyable reading.

Watts wrote The Meaning of Happiness in 1940, when he was just 24 years old. Though I'm just a few chapters into the book, it's clearly the product of an intellect wise beyond his years. In a preface written in 1952, Watts says that his ideas have gone far beyond the philosophy of the book.

I'm sure that's true. However, The Meaning of Happiness contains themes that continued on through the rest of Watts' life, such as the folly of viewing reality as being divided into material and supernatural spheres.

I haven't come across specific mentions of free will yet, but a section where Watts talks about the nature of spirituality implies rather strongly that what we call "our" will actually is the will of the entire universe, a view that I find both scientifically correct and emotionally inspiring.

Here's some excerpts that resonated with me.

In itself, spirituality is purely an inner experience; it has no necessary effect whatsoever on one's outward behavior judged from the standards of efficiency and worldly wisdom. This is not to say, however, that it is something absolutely private and personal, finding no expression that others can see.

For spirituality is a deep sense of inner freedom based on the realization that one's self is in complete union and harmony with life, with God, with the Self of the universe or whatever that principle may be called. It is the realization that that union has existed from all time, even though one did not know it, and that nothing in all the world nor anything that oneself can do is able to destroy it.

It is thus the sense that the whole might of the universe is at work in one's every thought and action, however trivial and small.

...In one sense you feel that your life is not lived by you at all; the power of the universe, fate and destiny, God Himself, are directing all your motions and all your responsibilities are blown to the winds. In another sense you feel free to move as you wish; you seem to be moving life with the same vast power with which life moves you, and your littlest acts become filled with gigantic possibilities. 

Indeed, physicists tell us that the stars are affected when we lift a single finger.

The result of these two feelings is that you no longer distinguish between what you do to life and what life does to you; it is as if two dancers moved in such perfect accord that the distinction between lead and response vanished, as if the two became one and the same motion.

By the whirling, ever-changing movement of this dance you are carried along without pause, but not like a drunken man in a torrent, for you as much as life are the source of the movement. And this is real freedom; it includes both freedom to move and to be moved; action and passivity are merged, and in spirituality as well as in marriage this is the fulfillment of love.

All this, however, does not take place in the ecstasy of trance, in some abstract state of consciousness where all shapes and substances have become merged into a single infinite essence.

The spiritual man does not perform his ordinary activities as one in a dream, letting his surface thoughts and deeds run on mechanically. He can become just as absorbed in the usual affairs of the world as anyone else, but in a certain way he sanctifies them for under his hands sharpening a pencil becomes as much a religious act as prayer or meditation.

Indeed, he can afford to become absorbed in everyday affairs almost more than others, and he can do so with a certain zest and abandon for to him ordinary human thoughts and activities are as much included in the dance of the spirit as is anything else.

This, indeed, is much of his secret, for he knows that spirituality does not consist in thinking always about the spiritual as such. His world is not divided into "watertight compartments" and his religion is not a special form of thought and activity, for the spiritual and the material are not separated. 

...Those who cannot feel that man's principal concern should lie outside this world, who feel that salvation has nothing to do with removal to another realm of experience or with mere obedience to a moral law -- such people can find little assistance from religion as usually taught, and today they constitute a very large proportion of intelligent men and women.

For the nineteenth-century conflict between religion and science was, for those whose eyes were open, a stripping off of nonessentials from religion, but unfortunately official religion seldom saw it in this way. It clung to supernaturalism, which, rightly or wrongly, rationalist science has discredited, and continued to make it the keystone of spirituality.

But that kind of religion does not encourage the type of love upon which spirituality is founded. We have seen that its technique is imitative and thus unlikely to produce genuine, firsthand religious experience; we have also seen that its contempt of this world and its concentration on the world hereafter has little to do with the essentials of religion.

...In this sense, religion is union with life; whether that life is this present life of physical form, of thought and feeling with brain and soul, or whether it is a life of purely psychic substance is beside the point.

These are only different grades of existence; they are not different grades of spirituality, for the same spiritual laws apply in every grade of existence, and when one has learned union with one of them, one has discovered the secret of union with any of them.

We have suggested that the secret of this union lies in a positive attitude toward the world in which we live. 

To repeat the question which religion has to answer, we want to discover how we can learn to be united with life in all its expressions, in living and dying, in love and fear, in the outer world of circumstance, and in the inner world of thought and feeling, so that in union with it we may find freedom and happiness. 

To be united with life in all its expressions may seem a large demand to make on oneself, for those expressions include disease, pain, death, madness, and all the horrors which man can devise, wittingly or unwittingly, for his fellow creatures. 

In fact the "nub" of the whole problem is the acceptance of the dark side of life, for this is the very occasion of our unhappiness. "Acceptance" may seem a weak word for a positive attitude of love, but it is used because the type of love in question is relaxed.

It is positive but not aggressive; it grows in its own way and is not forced. Therefore we may say that it is not enough to tolerate the dark side of life; acceptance in this sense is much more than a "let it be" with a resigned shrug of the shoulders.

Let us call it "creative acceptance," though because this phrase smacks overmuch of philosophical jargon we will write the noun and only remember its qualifying adjective. This is perhaps wise in another way, for a truth oddly comes out of a play on words: to be genuine, acceptance must be unqualified.

Here's some ways to free yourself of the free will illusion

As noted before, one reason, among many, why I enjoy Paul Breer's books about the illusion of free will and of independent selfhood is that in addition to persuasively arguing why we humans lack free will or an enduring Self he talks about how these illusions can be markedly reduced, if not outright eliminated.

His second book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Sectarian Path to Enlightenment, has the greatest focus on "how to." I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but I've come across some tips that make sense to me.

Breer was a student of Zen Buddhism for five years. He observes that Zen, like most spiritual traditions which don't believe in an immaterial soul or self, basically has the attitude that enlightenment -- defined as a recognition of no-self (and by implication, no-free-will) -- is best attained by detouring around the notion of selfhood and free will that virtually everybody has.

Meaning, these traditions don't aim directly at demolishing that notion, which Breer views as being akin to a boulder in the road that usually is bypassed instead of blowing it up. Breer, though, favors a blow it up approach. Or at least, chipping away at the boulder until it is just a small rock.

However, some of his techniques for doing this that I've come across so far are mainstream approaches in Buddhism, which includes Zen. So I'm suspecting that later on in the book I'll learn about Breer's more explosive techniques.

An approach he talks about quite a bit is akin to the noticing or labeling technique of mindfulness. But rather than saying to ourself, "I'm angry" or "I'm sad" or whatever, Breer prefers leaving out the "I" and saying "Anger is arising here" or "Sadness is arising here," where here means the body/mind of the person experiencing those emotions.

Over time this diminishes our sense of being a freely willing agent, or a self to whom those feelings are happening. I agree, but I find the same benefit in simply saying to myself "anger" or "sadness," as some of the mindfulness teachers I've studied advise.

Breer writes:

The more you do it, the clearer it becomes that while the sensations [or emotions, in my examples] are real, there is no inner "I" producing or even having them. Each time you acknowledge that fact, the self shrinks. 

Repeated often enough, the practice will clear the mind of all self-referencing, leaving nothing but sensations (now more vivid than before), feelings (no longer possessed by an inner "I") and problem-solving thoughts (those not in service to the illusory self).

This is similar to what the Buddhists call mindfulness meditation; it goes deeper, however, in that it does more than keep your mind focused on what is happening; it serves as a constant reminder that the self-as-ego is an illusion, that all events involving the body-mind are arising on their own out of Circumstance.

It will gradually convince you, in other words, that there is no inner "I" doing anything at all, thus no inner agent for you to identify with. In turn, acknowledging that the entity you take yourself to be does not exist will clear the way for the discovery of who you really are.

Another mindfulness technique Breer likes is to lose yourself in sensations. I see this as being akin to the Zen adage of "chop wood, carry water." Well, maybe not just akin, but exactly the same.

Most of us tend to distance ourselves from our experience by either considering how the experience affects our (illusory) "I," or how other people may be viewing our experience from their own perspective ("Can the audience tell I have stage fright?").

Here's how Breer puts it:

Losing yourself in an experience means experiencing a feeling or sensation without being aware that you are having it. In the ordinary (samsaric) way of perceiving, you are usually aware that you're aware -- for example, that when looking at a tree, you are not only aware of the tree, but also aware that you're looking at it.

I remember hiking high in the Rocky Mountains years ago and stopping to take in the panorama before me. It bugged me that I couldn't simply look at the scenery without being simultaneously aware that I was doing the looking. 

It felt like I had a monkey on my back, a useless, unshakeable, mind-created burden that corrupted the influence of just plain looking. That monkey, I began to see later, was present in almost every experience I was having: that included eating ("I" am eating this meal), showering ("I" am taking a shower), reading  ("I" am reading this book) and so on.

In one form or another, the self (as either the inner "I" or the body-mind) was sticking its nose into everything I was doing, feeling or thinking. That's when I turned to sense-immersion for help.

With practice I found it possible to get rid of the monkey altogether, leaving nothing but the sensation of the moment. What I found was a new clarity -- accompanied by an unshakeable feeling of peace. Once I could look at a tree without the thought that "I" was doing the looking, the tree became more vivid, more present.

There was a new stillness to the experience, one cleansed of all judgment, evaluation, preference, and desire. In a word, the "I" monkey was gone -- and in its place stood a world seen for the first time in its pristine rawness -- a world no longer corrupted by the presence of a self obsessed with its own survival.

When meditation is carried further, something still more astonishing happens, namely the disappearance of whatever is being observed. When both observer and observed are gone, what remains is consciousness which is no longer tied to this or that -- just consciousness itself, or what we referred to earlier as Pure Consciousness.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Right now it is enough to see meditation as a way of eliminating thought while you remain alert. Since self-awareness is sustained with thinking, cleansing the mind of all unnecessary thought will shrink the self and bring more freedom and clarity into your life. 

...The freedom comes from a shrinking of the self, i.e., a shrinking of all those activities like worrying, regretting, desiring, resisting, complaining, etc. that are spawned by the self illusion.

Well, on this blog I've been skeptical of other writers who claim that Pure Consciousness exists and can be experienced. My view is that even if Pure Consciousness exists, it couldn't be experienced, or at least remembered, without an impure consciousness that can say "Pure Consciousness was just experienced."

But I remain open to whatever evidence or arguments Breer brings forth in the rest of his book about Pure Consciousness.

I do like his attitude toward experiencing the world without using the lens of our (illusory) self. Many years ago a friend shared a poem that, I'm pretty sure, contained this marvelous line:

"We should be able to look upon a mountain without considering it a commentary on our life." 

UPDATE: I got the idea right, but not the words:

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life

― David Ignatow

Paul Breer speaks of a selfless experience while in prison

A few commenters on a recent post about how Paul Breer describes the Cosmic View and Local View of enlightenment in his book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Sectarian Path to Enlightenment, have noted that Breer was indicted in 2012 on a felony charge of sexually abusing a relative.

I pointed out in my own comment that Breer speaks of being in prison for two years in both of his books about the dual illusion of free will and of an immaterial self or soul. In the first book I read, and liked a lot, he didn't mention what he was in prison for. And so far I haven't come across a mention of the charge in the book I'm reading now, just that he had a profound experience while in prison, which I'll share below.

Of course, whether or not Breer was convicted of sexual abuse has absolutely no bearing on the truth or falsehood of the message he conveys in his books.

I consider it much more likely than not that this message is true, since I've read quite a few books about the illusion of free will and an immaterial self or soul that contain the same message. So this is a good opportunity to emphasize that moral outrage, which is reflected in the comments about Breer being indicted, isn't called for if free will is indeed an illusion. 

Sure, it is entirely appropriate to decry someone's behavior. Virtually everybody agrees that sexually abusing a relative, or anyone else, is wrong. Those convicted of doing this deserve punishment.

But not because of moral outrage that they had the freedom to act differently than they did. Because punishment, such as prison time, serves to deter other people from doing the same thing, prevents the sexual abuser from harming more victims, and can lead to rehabilitation of the offender so they don't commit additional crimes.

These reasons are discussed in a chapter in the Beyond Self-Realization book that I read today, "Implications for Society" -- implications, that is, of giving up a belief in free will. Breer writes:

Incarcerating offenders achieves two things: it protects the community while punishing the offender. The more heinous the crime, the more severe the punishment. For the believer in free will, the system appears to work -- it keeps criminals off the street while providing an outlet for the public's wrath.

At least that's the way most people see it. But if the ideas we've been discussing here are valid, we have to consider the possibility that the whole criminal justice system is based on a serious error in thinking. There are actually two kinds of error involved. The first is theoretical -- why do criminals commit crimes; the second is programmatic -- how do we get them to stop doing it.

Let's start with the first: we commit the philosophical error of reification when we predicate our system of justice on the assumption that each of us houses a master controller that (within limits) is free to choose how we behave. There is no evidence, either scientific or personal, that such a controller exists.

Having committed that error, we then proceed (the second error) to erect a judicial system that punishes offenders for doing something they freely chose to do -- while paying scant attention to the real causes of their crime -- namely the genes they inherited from their parents and the culture in which they were raised.

...Let me put it this way: if our actions are ultimately caused by Circumstance, we cannot morally judge individuals for having made them happen. We can judge the appropriateness of the behavior without judging the individual as the originating cause of that behavior. From this perspective, the individual is simply the place where the offending behavior arose.

Since the offense has its roots in antecedent conditions (genes and environment), the appropriate way to change that behavior is to change the conditions that caused it, that is, through education, treatment, and the reinforcement of lawful behavior.

I heartily agree with what Breer says. It matches what other writers about the illusion of free will have said in their own books. For example, I quoted Sam Harris in this blog post: 

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.

As promised above, here's how Breer describes a no-self experience he had while in prison, along with some observations he made about prison life.

I recall vividly the day I first became aware that the self was gone. I was in prison, sitting down, talking to friends when this deep peace suddenly descended on me. I felt absolutely invulnerable, not because of some new-found confidence, but because there was no self left to be concerned about.

It took awhile for me to recognize the experience for what it was: all I could be sure of was the peace that had come over me, a peace deeper than any I had ever felt. The peace was so deep, in fact, that when I compared it to previous tranquil times in my life, I was aware that those earlier times were still laden with tension. In other words, I had never truly been at peace.

Later, after release, when friends asked me what prison had been like, I found it hard to answer. My attention was riveted to the present; I was happy to talk about what I could see (faces and flowers), hear (birds and traffic), and what I felt (sad for the inmates I left behind) -- but there was no longer any need to complain about injustice -- no one inside me to feel sorry for -- no self to pity.

....In the prison where I spent two years, of the 1400 inmates doing time there, no more than 300 were enrolled in a training program at any one time. The rest learned nothing -- other than how to "con" the system -- that is, avoid work, get extra food, fool the nurses, hide pornography, or steal from each other. A few did make good use of their time -- in some cases by getting their GED, in others by earning a college degree. But they were noteworthy for their rarity.

As a whole, aside from its deterrent value, time spent behind bars was a waste of life -- a boring, meaningless, sometimes frightening experience designed to punish wrongdoers without any interest in the social and psychological factors that caused their crimes in the first place.

...I feel frustrated by the refusal of the authorities to wake up to just how overwhelming a person's background can be in shaping the choices he makes as an adult. I met many inmates in prison who dropped out of school early so they could make money selling drugs -- or in some cases, by stealing cars or electronics. 

By the time they reached their 20's, they had no marketable skills -- and no realistic path for gaining them. So they remained uneducated and unemployed. The only way to survive at that point, at least in their eyes, was to engage in illegal trade -- selling or manufacturing drugs, robbing stores or assaulting and stealing from individuals.

In consequence by the time they finish their sentences they are no more capable of earning an honest living than when they entered prison. Not surprisingly, upon release they return to what they know best -- crime.

Enlightenment: the Cosmic View vs. the Local View (I go with local)

Whew. What a relief. So good to know that I was mistaken.

After reading Paul Breer's first book about the illusion of free will, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, I decided to dive even deeper into the Breer waters and bought his follow-up book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. 

This second book has a different structure that I wondered about when I began reading it, but is turning out to be appealing. The book starts by saying that a local library has announced a course about -- no big surprise -- Beyond Self-Realization. 

Eight people sign up. The course is led by Richard, described as 88, tall, slender, receding white hair, steel-rimmed glasses, bears a resemblance to the author. Each chapter consists of a talk given by Richard on some subject relating to the illusion of free will and a non-sectarian path to enlightenment, and the resulting dialog between Richard and his students about that subject.

I was enjoying the book until some mentions of how the course was about "direct consciousness of our true nature -- that is, a consciousness unmediated by language" got me concerned that even though secular was in the title, maybe Breer had embraced some supernatural or religious notions after writing his first book.

Since the second book is 495 pages long, I didn't feel like reading all that and then getting to the end and having a what the fuck!? moment caused by Breer reaching a conclusion that didn't make any sense to me.

So I read one of the concluding chapters in hopes of reassuring myself. Which, I did. As you can read below, Breer holds a Local View of enlightenment rather than a Cosmic View. Since I agree with most of his Local View, I felt a sense of relief that the book wasn't going to lead into a supernatural dead end.

It just appears to lead to a conclusion about enlightenment which, while firmly within the bounds of modern neuroscience, isn't proven.

Namely, that a state of pure consciousness prior to being conscious of any internal or external entity is possible. Sam Harris, a noted atheist and neuroscientist, seems to believe in pure consciousness. I've argued on this blog that I'm skeptical about this, since consciousness always seems to have some content, something we're conscious of other than consciousness itself.

But compared to The Cosmic View, Breer's take on The Local View is hugely closer to how I see things. Have a read and see how you feel about the two views.

The Cosmic View
The majority of people who write about their enlightenment experience believe they have gained access to Reality. Pure Consciousness for them is a window into that realm of Being which constitutes the bedrock of All That Is.

It is that undifferentiated, unchanging state out of which the world of forms emerges, a state that transcends both space and time and has neither beginning nor end. As such, it precedes even the Big Bang. In Tolle's view, as you just pointed out, it is a "Presence that fills the cosmos."

Cohen is more precise: "Consciousness in this primordial state is the 'I' of the entire universe -- the subjectivity or interiority of everything that exists." Both are saying that the real you (the I AM of Pure Consciousness) is the "mother" (to borrow Lao Tzu's term) of every form we perceive -- every blade of grass, star, stone, or trash can.

Although the language varies according to the religious context in which it appears, we find similar statements among the Gnostics of Jesus's time, the medieval Christian mystics, the Sufi's of Islam and the Kabalists of Judaism. Even Zen Buddhists (known for their reluctance to theorize) subscribe to a similar view. 

...What these schools of thought have in common is a belief that in enlightenment we gain access to an indefinable THAT which constitutes the very foundation of reality. It is this unformed and undifferentiated THAT (read Pure Consciousness) which precedes the formation of the universe and everything in it. When we awaken from our ego-saturated dreams, we discover THAT is who we really are.

...We can agree when he [Deepak Chopra] says that "You are the light of awareness that gives rise to the experience of the universe." -- but must disagree when he concludes that consciousness and the universe are equivalent. When he makes that claim, he's conflating two different things -- as if he were arguing that the sensation of eating an apple is no different from the apple itself. 

...The way individuals have traditionally interpreted their personal enlightenment has a lot in common with the two cases (the geocentric theory and free-will) just described. I refer first to the fact that in both cases what appears to be true turns out on closer examination to be illusory; like those two previous beliefs, the belief that we are the universe or that in our role as the Absolute we created the material world out of nothing is unsupported by either common sense or logic.

...To see what I mean, let's take a look at an alternative interpretation of the enlightenment experience. 

The Local View
There is a minority of writers, even within Buddhism, who offer a more modest interpretation of what enlightenment means (the Local as opposed to the Cosmic view). They argue that in enlightenment we gain access not to an undifferentiated realm that pervades everything in the universe, but to one that exists solely within the consciousness of the individual observer.

They're saying, in other words, that enlightenment resides in the individual rather than the cosmos. The experience of Oneness may appear to have a universal character, but again this is deceiving. It only appears to exist in all things seen or heard (every stone, every blade of grass, etc.), when it actually resides in the brain of the perceiving individual -- not as awareness of discrete objects but as Consciousness Itself as it illuminates those objects from within. 

If all things appear to participate in a single Whole, it is because they are perceived through the lens of a Consciousness free of any differentiation. It follows, then, that the felt experience of Oneness originates in the individual observer, not in the objects being observed.

...The difference between the two interpretations is significant. While the first interprets the Pure Consciousness experience as a discovery of universal Reality, the second argues that it is a discovery not of Reality but of that which exists in the individual -- namely Consciousness before it becomes aware of something.

While the Local View says nothing about Reality, it says something important about individual consciousness. It says that embedded in our perception of things is a state of Awareness that is unlike anything we experience while orienting to our environment.

In contrast to the world of everyday life -- the world of sensations, objects, and thoughts which we grasp with our minds and five senses -- this inner world presents itself as an invisible Presence that has no form, no boundaries, never changes, and is neither spatially nor temporally divided, yet arises in a specific place -- the brain.

...In the Cosmic View enlightenment implies the discovery of THAT out of which the material world of things has emerged. In other words, it precedes the creation of matter -- e.g., of stars, moons, and planets. So, even if all material objects were destroyed, it would continue to Be.

Not so according to the Local View which argues that the experience of enlightenment depends on having a physical brain. If that brain, along with all other material things, were to be destroyed, enlightenment would be impossible.

Free will is an illusion we're better off without

Well, at long last I've finished Paul Breer's book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, which I've been writing about recently. 

I enjoyed it a lot. But then, I'm a big fan of the notion that free will is an illusion that we'd be better off not embracing. In the post I'll explain in my own words some of what struck me most strongly in the book. 

Spontaneity. Breer opened my eyes to a fact that other writers on free will don't emphasize much. If we look upon our thoughts, emotions, and actions as not being produced by our own unfettered free will, the alternative is to recognize that the whole universe, really, has generated the causes and effects which result in our doing or experiencing something.

That's beautiful. It substitutes the loneliness of the isolated free-willing self with the companionship of everything in the natural world, since that world is acting through the person that is us -- as contrasted with the illusion of a non-material soul or self that somehow is part of our being and does the deciding for our mind and body.

This is where Breer's spontaneity in his title comes from. There's no limit to the forces acting upon us. Everything in the cosmos is potentially at our disposal, forming who we are, what we do, and what we experience. Things happen in our life, but there's no one inside our head controlling the happenings. They spring up unbidden, often surprising us (sometimes in pleasant ways, sometimes in unpleasant ways).

Sense of free will remains. However, for most of us, the generally pleasing sense that we are freely willing agents will stay as it is. Or at least, much as it is. Sure, that sense may be diminished by contemplating the illusion of free will through books, videos, blog posts, meditation, and other means.

I agree with Breer, though, that evolution has instilled a sense of free will in us for good reasons (not that evolution uses reason), and that the culture in which we live typically fosters a sense of free will through explicit and implicit means. For example, the legal system in most countries assumes that a criminal of sound mind and body would have been able to not commit a crime if he or she had wanted to.

Free will seems so real because it's an obvious truism that we can only be conscious of conscious contents of consciousness.

Since neuroscience knows that unconscious influences drive most, if not all, of our thoughts, emotions, and actions, those deterministic factors will remain a mystery to us. So this produces a sense of freedom in us, whereas actually what's going on is that we're clueless about why we do or feel something -- even though we love to tell stories to ourselves and others about the motivation for our actions.

Empty rowboat. There's a story that I believe originated in Taoism via Chuang Tzu about a man in a rowboat on a foggy lake.

There is a Zen story about a man who repaints his boat. Once it’s done, he’s so pleased with how it looks that he decides to take it out on the lake, even though it’s a foggy day. As he steers through the fog, another boat slams into his, damaging the new paint job.

The man is furious. Why the hell didn’t the person in the other boat pay attention and watch where he was going? The man turns to yell at the person in the other boat, and finds that there is no other person. It’s just an empty boat, drifting on the lake.

If a man is crossing the river and an empty boat collides with his skiff, even though he is a bad-tempered man he will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the other boat he will scream and shout and curse at the man to steer clear. If you can empty your own boat crossing the river of the world, no one will oppose you, no one will seek to harm you. Thus is the perfect man – his boat is empty. ~ Chuang-Tzu

I don't think Chuang Tzu is correct about no one opposing or seeking to harm a person with an empty boat, meaning, I assume, a realization that they lack a self or soul capable of free will. However, I like the notion that the person who got angry at a boat, before realizing that no one was controlling the boat, is just as empty of control as the boat drifting without anyone in it.

Happening here. Breer talks quite a bit in his book about how to make no-free-will and a lack of agency a lived experience rather than just an intellectual understanding. Of course, an intellectual understanding is part of our lived experience, so it's important in its own right.

Breer believes, with good reason, that language plays a key role in how both our sense of self and of having free will is created and maintained. After all, in English we say things like "I am writing this blog post," which obviously assumes that somebody referred to as "I" is doing something called "writing."

In other words, a subject -- me -- is considered to be different from the activity I'm engaging in, writing a blog post. So Breer recommends an alternative: "Writing a blog post is happening here," where here refers to the person, the body/mind, known as Brian Hines. 

Doing that all the time would be absurd. My brief conversations with a grocery store clerk wouldn't go so smoothly if, after they ask, "How is your day going?," I said "A fine day is happening here." I'd rather simply say "Fine," or "I'm doing well, how about you?"

It seems to me that the mindfulness exercise of labeling fits well here. If I find myself getting upset at something, a frequent occurrence when I watch a news program about politics, rather than telling myself "I'm irritated," I prefer to mentally say "Irritation" or "Irritation here." 

That serves to reduce my sense of selfhood and free will somewhat. But I have no interest in giving up the use of "I" in ordinary conversation or writing.

Is romantic love a product of Western culture?

I wasn't expecting to find the "Love and Sexuality" chapter in Paul Breer's book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, to be very interesting. After all, he'd already made his arguments for why free will is an illusion, along with describing the benefits of giving up the illusion.

But his observations about how romantic love is largely a product of Western culture, and is at odds with Eastern philosophy, were thought-provoking. I'm not sure what to make of them, which is why the title of this blog post ends with a question mark.

What do you think? Here's excerpts from the chapter pertaining to this issue. Breer is a retired sociologist, so his views carry some academic weight.

Most of us growing up in a Western culture have either known romantic love directly or participated in the experience vicariously through literature and film. While being in [romantic] love tends to be a relatively brief experience, counted more often in months than years, our fascination with it rarely ceases altogether, even in old age.

It comes as something of a shock, therefore, to learn that the non-Western world of Asians, Indians, Africans, Polynesians, and Eskimos knows little of romantic love. A phenomenon we have always thought of as a human experience is limited primarily to Western and, to a lesser degree, Near Eastern culture.

Strange as it may seem to someone nurtured on Romeo and Juliet, Gone with the Wind, and Love Story, it appears that, before we can fall in love, we must be educated to the concept of romantic love... According to Denis de Rougemont, at the heart of Tristan's and Iseult's passion is a surrendering of self, not to the other, but to the experience of love itself.

...That which gives romantic love its intense, unreal, soaring quality is the very thing that dooms it to non-fulfillment. The lovers are not in love with each other but with love itself. The other person is simply an excuse for being in love, the passion being "tasted and savoured for its own sake, in a kind of indifference to its living and external object."

...As free agents we are not only separate from everyone else physically; we are separate spiritually, separate as souls, separate as centers of will and moral responsibility. The more highly a culture values this spiritual separateness, the greater will be the pain of differentiation and, thus, the greater the appeal of a kind of love that promises to overcome all separation through a merging of selves.

According to this alternative hypothesis, the widespread appeal of romantic love in Western culture draws much of its power from our view of ourselves as autonomous agents. Easterners, many of whom are inclined to look upon romance with disdain, are more apt to find their basic identity in the Tao, the Buddha-nature, the Brahman, or whatever it is that transcends subject and object, the ultimately nameless One.

They view free will and moral responsibility as expedient illusions, necessary for survival in the samsaric world, but meaningless in the nirvanic world of no-form. For the un-Westernized Easterner, all autonomy is ultimately illusory. The world is One and all seemingly separate objects and selves participate in that Oneness. If differentiation appears painful, it is because we do not yet see beyond the illusion of form.

Our Western belief that individual souls remain separate throughout eternity, in heaven as well as on earth, creates a sense of personal isolation unknown elsewhere in the world. This isolation heightens the appeal of returning to a less differentiated state through a surrender of the agent/self to passion. 

As Rougemont points out, romantic love is not a surrender of the self to another person, but to love itself. Surrendering to another person may ease the burden of individual responsibility, but it does not erase the boundaries of the agent/I. Romantic love goes further. By shutting out everyone else, it reduces the world to "me and thee" and then holds out the promise of further dissolution into oneness.

Interesting, though not completely convincing. Breer is saying that romantic love functions as a Western  alternative to Eastern oneness. Rather than merging with a cosmic entity, the Western lover seeks to merge with a physical beloved.

Well, maybe. Having been married for 33 years, I remember when my wife and I were very much into romantic love. But as Breer says, that sort of highly passionate love can't last for long. Now Laurel and I are into plain love, which is plenty good enough for us.

I've never thought that when we first met and were experiencing the passion of romantic love, this was a substitute for merging into Oneness. But who knows? Maybe that's what we were doing, unconsciously.

If you're an Easterner who reads this post, leave a comment about whether you agree that romantic love plays a smaller role in India, China, Japan, and other Asian countries. I've heard that this is true, which explains the historical popularity of arranged marriages, but am not sure it is true. 

We surrender to a higher power when we no longer believe in free will

I like the idea of surrendering to a higher power. I just don't like the notion that this is God or some other supernatural entity, for I prefer my surrendering to be founded in reality, not illusion.

I'm not sure, though, if surrendering is the right word. Acceptance seems more accurate, but it lacks the imagery of surrendering -- which for me conjures up two generals negotiating the terms of the end of a war that one has won and one has lost.

In this case, what's being surrendered is a belief in free will, the subject I've been writing about recently. The idea of acceptance comes from an understanding that whatever is happening in my life, it is the result of a chain of causes and effects, not free will, so it makes sense to accept my life on those terms.

The main quibble I have with surrendering is that this really isn't a battle between two opposing forces. Actually there is no one to surrender to, and no one doing the surrendering. That's why I lean toward acceptance as a better term, except when I like the dramatic energy of surrendering. 

One thing that's being accepted by giving up a belief in free will is that nature is in charge, not us. Meaning, it is the entire universe that is guiding things, not a mythical free will that stands apart from the natural world.

Paul Breer says this in his book, "The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will."

According to [William] James, a surrendering of control to a higher power plays the key role in most conversion experiences, the specific object of that surrender being secondary. While in our culture it is God to whom we usually relinquish our power ("Not my but Thy will be done"), it could just as easily be Circumstance or Causal Necessity or Chance.

The secret, as Alcoholics Anonymous has long claimed, lies in "turning it over." For most individuals, what follows from that surrendering of will (or, more accurately, the illusion of will) is [as James says]:

the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same... A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state of mind.

At what James calls the "glowing centre" of the conversion experience is a kind of power, but it is a far cry from the power of which Nietzsche speaks, the power to overcome either oneself or others through the exercise of will. It is, if anything, the very opposite.

It is the power which comes from seeing oneself as the instrument of a higher will or, in less theistic terms, as a vessel through which the energy of the universe is passing. It is the power of powerlessness, the power that comes from giving up all pretense of authorship, all aspiration to divinity.

In ordinary circumstances, powerlessness implies impotence and frustration at not being able to control events. The powerlessness of which James is speaking, however, is that of someone who sees that no straining is necessary. It contains no "violent effort," no desire to dominate, no frustrated need to prove one's superiority.

The self that has been converted or reborn is emptied of all trace of will and stands ready to experience that transcendent power we usually identify as divine, but which can just as easily be conceptualized as the power of Circumstance.

However described, such power is never experienced as one's own; it belongs to the whole field of forces of which the experiencer is but a part. For that reason, it is not something in which one takes pride. It is simply that which is arising here, something for which one is more apt to feel grateful than proud.

...With the giving up of agency, speculating about either the past or future becomes less interesting. We are drawn more intimately into the present and all the things going on around us right now. In the process, our perspective of how we are related to the world changes.

Seeing ourselves as links in a chain of cause and effect has the effect of reconnecting us with the world. Of course, we have never been unconnected to that world. It has only seemed that way because of our identification with an entity standing off to the side looking at the world or listening to the world, but never entering into it.

When we give up straining either to bend the world to our will or to prevent it from taking away the things we love, we can experience what it is like to live in that world. Because our wishes are less urgent and our efforts less violent, we no longer feel pitted against the world. 

Every event, at least in hindsight, appears necessary. When those events involve us, we feel more accepting of whatever outcomes arise here. We not only feel more accepting of them, we find ourselves identifying more and more with them.

We being to see ourselves as a stream of outcomes arising here and that awareness, more than anything else, is what makes us feel connected to the rest of the world. 

As a stream of outcomes, we are at the effect of a million past and present events: our genes, our education, friends we have made along the way, the house we live in, our boss's mood, the mail we get, the weather, and even the food we eat.

At the same time, through our own mood, our ideas and perceptions, our looks, our personality, and our physical movements, we represent the causes to which other events must respond.

This feeling of connectedness, while more superficial than the Oneness of Buddhist enlightenment, has the power to dissolve the paranoia which arises from our view of the world as alien and resistant to our will.

Here's how to do away with blame, regret, and pride

If a religion, spiritual path, or mystical realization could promise a very good chance that you'd be able to do away with feelings of blame, regret, and pride -- along with other negative or good-to-let-go-of emotions -- would you want to pursue that opportunity? 

I sure would.

Especially if that opportunity didn't involve believing anything that couldn't be demonstrated to be true. And since I no longer believe in God or any other supernatural entities, I'd give the opportunity bonus points if it was thoroughly secular.

That's why I've been so enthused for quite a few years about seeing through the illusion of free will, with my enthusiasm intensified recently by a book I'm reading, Paul Breer's The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will.

As noted in previous posts, Breer is fairly unique among writers on the illusion of free will in his emphasis on the benefits of seeing through the illusion, along with tips on how to do this. On the benefits front, Breer persuasively argues that without a belief in free will, blame, regret, and pride naturally fall away.

Giving up the ghost of agency exposes guilt, remorse, and sin as demons whose power to torment us rests on an error in our thinking. In light of the pain those demons continue to inflict upon us, it seems reasonable to ask why we continue to tolerate the error. In part, the answer lies in what we stand to lose by changing our thinking.

We are attached to a view of ourselves as causal agents who are not at the effect of other causes. We enjoy seeing ourselves as islands of freedom in a sea of determinism. From this perspective, every time we act out of will we perform a small miracle. 

We are gods who move the world of experience and behavior without ourselves being moved. Once a god, it is hard to settle for less, hard to leave that island and join other creatures of the sea, hard to accept that we are bound by the same laws of motion, heredity, and conditioning as the rest of nature.

Giving up the illusion of agency implies rejoining the natural world, or more accurately, recognizing that, despite our dreams of divine status, we have never been parted from it.

If we give up our identity as soul-agents, we also stand to lose the satisfaction of pride and approval, which, some would argue, more than compensate for the pain of guilt and disapproval. The fear of losing credit for our accomplishments is certainly one of the reasons we have resisted attacks on free will.

Breer, though, makes clear that we gain much more than we lose by giving up the illusion of agency, of free will. 

After all, while the feeling of pride we get from being praised for something we did is real, it isn't necessary to demand that people stop saying, "You did a great job." We just need to remember that the you being referred to isn't an independent entity who is responsible for freely willing their actions, but a person whose actions are the result of deterministic causes and effects.

In other words, instead of thinking "I did that," we realize "That happened here, via this person." Thus giving up a belief in free will leads to the sort of humility that is difficult to attain from years or decades of ardent meditation.

(I speak as someone who engaged in decades of ardent meditation.)

The same applies to feelings of blame, whether directed at others or at ourself, and regret. In no way am I past feelings of blame, self-blame, and regret -- feelings that I've struggled with in the past and surely will continue to do so in the future.

All I'm saying is that the more I look upon the world through the lens of no-free-will, which I've been doing more strongly after I started reading Breer's book, I've been having some success with toning down feelings of blame, self-blame, and regret. Breer writes:

When we interpret blame as positional (aimed at our behavior) rather than moral (aimed at our agent) we both feel and respond differently. Being identified as the person in whom an offensive act has arisen, as opposed to the agent who has made that act happen, is less likely to make us defensive. 

As persons instead of agents, we have less to defend; while our value as body/minds remains open to judgment, our worthiness as creators of experience and behavior is no longer at stake. Once relieved of the fear of being proven unworthy agents, we are unlikely to develop feelings of rage or harbor thoughts of seeking revenge against our accuser.

If our behavior needs explaining, we need only point to our genes, our previous conditioning, and certain features of our present environment. Because the behavior has arisen here, however, we will still suffer the consequences. 

If those consequences are punitive, it behooves us to defend ourselves against false accusation. The choice may even arise to defend ourselves against a legitimate charge. Whatever the decision, our belief that we are positionally but not morally responsible makes it easier for us to be objective in weighing the evidence presented.

Yesterday Laurel, my wife, and I put this mirror up on a wall in our house. (Laurel likes blue, along with dog art.) I took the lead in putting it up, since I'm more familiar with our cordless drill and am more rigorous in measuring where a wall hanging should go than Laurel is.

But rigorous doesn't mean error-free. This was kind of a tricky installation, since the mirror needed to cover up some earlier work on our 1973-era home that occurred before we bought it in 1990. A previous mirror, not blue, of a different shape used to cover up those patches.

So I measured. I calculated. I put pencil marks on the wood wall where the screws should go to make for a mirror perfectly centered over the desk and vertically in just the right place to cover the patches. Everything was looking good. Until...

Laurel said as we were about to place the hangers on the back of the mirror over the screws, "The screws aren't even close to the fasteners." Absolutely correct. I was guilty as charged.

Interestingly, I didn't feel more than a slight twinge of regret or self-blame. I just started to remove the screws so they could be put in the correct location. I had no idea why my measuring and marking went amiss. That really didn't matter.

As Breer said, I had to deal with the consequences of my positional responsibility for the mistake. I was the person who caused the mistake. However, I didn't feel that I was an agent who freely willed whatever caused the mistake. It just happened. 

Five or ten minutes later. The mirror was solidly on the wall. Mistake corrected. Now, sure, this was a minor problem. It remains to be seen how I'll react when I make a bigger mistake and am tempted to blame myself for it. 

I'm simply saying that by deeply pondering the illusion of free will, I feel a bit less bound by my tendency to blame myself when something goes wrong or praise myself when something goes right. Increasingly, I'm seeing that things just happen, and I'm the person where they happen.

No entity inside us which is either free or not free

Here's more pearls of wisdom from Paul Breer that I'm harvesting from his book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, that I've been blogging about recently. 

I'm finding Breer to be a clear thinker who is one of the few people writing about free will, or rather the lack thereof, who is out to show not only that free will is an illusion, but how that illusion can be dispelled.

The difficulty of letting go of the false notion that we humans possess free will, while the rest of the world doesn't, is that as discussed in my previous post, free will requires an independent agent. So along with free will, there goes the illusion of soul also, which is typically described as possessing some godlike qualities such as being the Unmoved Mover of our thoughts, emotions, and actions.

This doesn't mean that we aren't a person. Obviously we are.

Each of us is a unique mind and body who has experiences like no one else. Our personhood isn't in question. What's highly questionable is the presence of a Self within that mind and body which stands apart from the determinism, the cause and effect relationships, that fashion us as a person.

I've seen it argued in comments on my recent blog posts about free will that it is possible to enhance our freedom through meditation, introspection, and other ways of becoming acquainted with how our mind works.

Almost certainly this isn't true. Breer explains why in some passages that I admire for their subtlety. 

Our Occidental sense of what it means to be human rests heavily on our belief that we are morally responsible for what we do. To a great extent, our resistance to the idea of non-agency stems from our fear that, if the agent within us turns out to be an illusion, so will our image of ourselves as moral beings. 

Without that image, we shall lose our special place in the universe, in particular the status which comes from our unique ability to transcend the chain of cause and effect.

...Before going any further, it might be wise to remind ourselves that non-agency does not mean that the agent inside of us lacks the power to cause behavior; it means more simply that there is no such agent.

There is no entity inside of us which is either free or not free, no entity to play the role of either prime mover of subsequent events or hapless victim of previous events. It makes no more sense to interpret that lack of agency as a sign that there is nothing we as agents can do (and get depressed as a result) than to interpret it to mean that there is nothing we as agents have to do (and feel relieved).

Both interpretations are misleading in that they suggest the lingering presence of either an I pacing the corridors of the mind, frustrated by its ability to bend the world to its own image, or an I smugly observing the ebb and flow of a life in which it has no further responsibilities. 

If there is no inner agent either causing our experiences or serving as mediator between antecedent circumstances and experience, it seems safe to conclude that our behavior, thoughts, and feelings are caused by the circumstances themselves.

If you don't believe this, Breer invites you to try an experiment. Part of that experiment could involve meditation and mindfulness, in the sense of "witnessing."

To answer the question for yourself, check your experience the next time you act on a decision, e.g. the next time you get up from your chair to get a drink. Observe your mind carefully. Can you find any evidence of an agent that initiated the getting up?

Presumably you will be able to recall the decision to get up, perhaps even some of the thoughts leading up to that decision, but can you find the entity that caused your body to move? Was there a you that moved your body, or did your body simply move itself? Is it possible, in other words, that the physical act of getting up out of the chair was just as spontaneous as the decision which preceded it?

When I say that all thoughts, perceptions, feelings, decisions, and behavior are spontaneous, I am using the term in a special sense to indicate that there is no autonomous entity initiating them. 

Who, then, you might ask, is performing this present experiment? Who is viewing this experience and drawing conclusions about the presence or absence of an agent? Is there not, after all, a witness to these "spontaneous" events? And is not this witness the very I we have been seeking? 

The formal practice of "witnessing" or observing the flow of one's mind is encouraged in some spiritual traditions as a way of helping the adept to disengage from the contents of consciousness.

To anyone who stays with the practice long enough, however, witnessing proves to be simply another activity arising on its own -- just like the thoughts and feelings being witnessed. When we go looking for the agent "doing" the witnessing, we find nothing beyond the act of witnessing.

We can watch as witnessing presents itself to consciousness, but can never catch the "witness" independently of what it is witnessing. Sustained meditation, in fact, confirms the absence of a witness -- or, for that matter, any agent at all. We see this most clearly in the Buddhist practice of Vipassana or Insight meditation.

Our belief that we're freely acting agents causes pain and suffering

Want to feel better? Want to take steps toward genuine enlightenment? Want to embark on a journey toward truth and away from illusion?

All those wants can be achieved by giving up a sensation of being an independent agent, or soul, or ego, that stands apart from the laws of nature that govern everything else in existence. 

So argues Paul Breer in a persuasive fashion in his book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. I'm enjoying the book a lot. Here's excerpts from the first chapter, "An Overview of the Agency Problem," that provide a good overview of what the book is all about.

What I mean by agent is what writers of a more spiritual age called the soul and what modern psychologists refer to as ego. Despite the difference in coloring, all three terms refer to a common animating principle or entity that stands at the center of our being, directing our thoughts, decisions and moral judgments.

More that any feature of personality or physical appearance, it is this soul-ego-agent that we conventionally think of as our real self. It is that which ultimately distinguishes us from each other. When we get right down to it, you are you and I am I because of a difference in agency. We may resemble each other in behavior or looks. We could even be identical twins, but because the animating force within us is unique, we as individuals are unique.

That, at any rate, is what most of us have been brought up to believe.

Starting early in childhood, we are taught that our true self resides not in our bodies or even in our minds, but in our souls. As soul-agents, we are not only unique but, unlike all other creatures on earth, endowed with the power and freedom to cause our own behavior. We are more than bodies, more than minds. In our essence, we are spiritual beings.

That conception of homo sapiens is rarely challenged even by those who profess a materialist philosophy. The broad acceptance of free will among the religious and non-religious alike obscures the fact that the concept of agency rests on the same dualistic assumptions as our belief in God, the Devil, heaven, hell, the Holy Ghost, salvation, and divine judgment.

What makes free agency a specifically spiritual concept is the assumption that the agent's choices are not caused by antecedent conditions. They are mysterious, inexplicable -- unconnected to the chain of cause and effect which links all events in the material world. The agent is free, in other words, because of its power to cause behavior without itself being the effect of other causes.

To the extent that we humans possess that power, we quality as Unmoved Movers. We are godlike, divine, and not fully of this material world. There is reason to suspect, however, that the little man or woman inside of us (the homunculus) is no more real that any of the other spiritual entities with which we have traditionally populated the unseen world.

...If it should turn out that we are not souls or agents after all, what else is there for us to be? The answer is almost too obvious.

If we are not the prime movers of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, must we not be the thoughts, feelings, and actions themselves -- as well as the physical bodies in which those experiences arise? This much is certain: if we are not free agents, we cannot be the authors of our own experience and behavior. Nor can we be the internal managers who organize and process that experience: the experience organizes and processes itself.

It is not even appropriate to say that we are subjects having the experience. We are the experience. We are that which is happening here in these bodies. We are constellations of experience and behavior arising spontaneously out of genetic and environmental circumstance. We are also the physical structures in which those events are taking place. 

...My own interest in non-agency has evolved out of a five-year immersion in the chilly waters of Rinzai Zen. While I have long since given up what Alan Watts called "aching-legs Zen" for the comforts of reading and thinking I have retained the Easterner's concern with integrating philosophy into everyday life.

It strikes me as little more than a game, fascinating perhaps, but still a game, to embrace the idea of non-agency without taking steps to incorporate that idea into the way one deals with work, love, pain, death and all the other dimensions of human existence. Because the idea is so central, taking it in deeply has the potential for transforming the way we feel about almost everything we do.

...The book is both an argument and a strategy for replacing the illusion of agency with a view of ourselves as constellations of experience and behavior arising spontaneously out of circumstance. If there is any originality here, it does not lie with the argument against free will. That argument has evolved in a variety of places and constitutes a major chapter in the history of both Eastern and Western philosophy.

What may be new is the spelling out of how the illusion of agency adds to the pain of life and, paradoxically, how much freer we would feel if we were to begin defining ourselves as that which is arising here. 

...Straining, blaming, craving, defending and protesting are all implicated in the agency syndrome. Their emotional counterparts -- anxiety, guilt, despair, pride, and anger -- can be expected to change as behavior itself changes. For anyone patient enough to see the process through, the end result is a transformation of personality.

The more thorough the uprooting of agency, the more radical will be that transformation.

Accepting free will means denying determinism

I keep writing blog posts about free will for a couple of reasons.

One, it's a fascinating subject that points to the heart of what religiosity is all about, and what atheism is all about. Two, some of the comments on my posts indicate that visitors to this blog have some mistaken notions about free will.

Regarding religiosity and atheism, the only way free will could exist is if the complex web of causes and effects that result in determinism and chance (the only two proven options in our universe) somehow isn't operative in us humans.

Meaning, some unknown supernatural force -- which proponents of free will have never persuasively identified -- must intervene in the human brain/mind to make possible actions that lie outside of the realm of determinism.

If this sounds a lot like soul, or God, that's because free will has a lot of commonality with religious belief. Both assume that some mysterious entity unknown to science is present in human consciousness that can do things that would be impossible otherwise.

So determinism is the key concept here. Accept determinism, and free will is denied. Deny determinism, and free will is accepted. Or at least has the door opened to it. Richard Oerton expresses this nicely in his book, The Nonsense of Free Will.

The essence of determinism is that the complex causal chains which bring a human being into existence run on so as to create, through the interaction of hereditary characteristics and environmental influences, his or her character, with all its motivations, its desires and constraints, and that they then run on through that character to cause or determine his or her behavior. 

But the belief that this is so cannot be reconciled with a belief in free will. Free will demands that the causal chains do not run through us to determine our actions. Our actions are instead the result of something called free will and they cannot be predicted even in principle. 

...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.

Obviously there's much that isn't known about the mind. I'm entirely open to learning more about how behavior, emotions, thoughts, and such are generated by the mind, which is the brain in action and incorporates both conscious and non-conscious aspects. 

But as noted above, free will is a much simpler subject. All that needs to be decided is whether the human brain/mind operates in accord with the laws of nature, which involve two mechanisms: determinism and chance.

Determinism clearly isn't compatible with free will. Neither is chance, which rules out theories that some sort of probabilistic quantum phenomena operate in the brain/mind, since chance is incompatible with free will also.

(Deciding what to do based on a random outcome has nothing to do with being free, or willing.)

Today I read a comment that said if someone takes a driver training course, that increases their free will, since now they have an increased ability of being able to drive a car safely and getting where they want to go without an accident.

No, this is wrong. Learning more about how to drive a car simply changes the causes that operate on a driver. Determinism is still determining how they drive. The factors or causes that go into their driving ability have changed, that's all.

I also read a comment that spoke about how thoughts might directly lead to action, or thoughts might be only indirectly related to action, if the cause of an action is unconscious and thoughts merely reflect what the unconscious has decided to do. Coming along for the ride, so to speak, rather than doing the driving.

OK, that's interesting, but it also has nothing to do with free will.

Denying free will and accepting determinism doesn't mean that everything is known about how the brain/mind functions. The only necessary assumption is that whatever is happening in the brain/mind, that whatever is occurring in a deterministic fashion. Or with a smidgen of chance, if someone assumes quantum probabilities occur in the brain/mind. (A dubious assumption, but possible.)

I plan to move on in my next posts to sharing what I'm learning in Paul Breer's The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. I'm enjoying the book. Well written, thoughtful, creative. Breer shows how a belief in self, or an inner agent, is intimately tied in with a belief in free will.

Which is why I like my short saying so much: No self. No free will. No problem.

Ideas about free will I'm compelled to share

A nice thing about writing on the subject of free will is that it's easy to explain why I'm doing it. I had no alternative. To put it in the words of a Doris Day song, "Whatever will be, will be."

I've been writing about free will recently, but mostly by quoting the words of knowledgeable authors on this subject. In this post I'm going to take a more eclectic approach, sharing a variety of ideas about free will that have been rummaging through my mind the past few days.

Trump's indictments. Here in the United States those of us who can't stand Donald Trump have been thrilled that last week he earned his fourth criminal indictment. Most of those cases, and maybe all of them, hinge in part on the prosecution proving that Trump knew what he was doing was wrong.

This is akin to the distinction between murder and manslaughter, the difference being the intent of the person who did the killing. I mentioned to my wife that if free will doesn't exist (my strong belief), it doesn't really matter what Trump thought about his allegedly criminal acts, since it is his actions that really matter. 

That's true to some extent. However, in his wonderful short book, Free Will, I found a passage where Sam Harris describes why the thoughts of an accused criminal do matter even though free will is illusory.

We need not have any illusions that a causal agent lives within the human mind to recognize that certain people are dangerous. What we condemn most in another person is the conscious intention to do harm. Degrees of guilt can still be judged by the facts of a case: the personality of the accused, his prior offenses, his patterns of association with others, his use of intoxicants, his confessed motives with regard to the victim, etc.

If a person's actions seem to have been entirely out of character, this might influence our view of the risk he now poses to others. If the accused appears unrepentant and eager to kill again [or to try to steal an election again], we need entertain no notions of free will to consider him a danger to society.

Why is the conscious decision to do another person harm particularly blameworthy? Because what we do subsequent to conscious planning tends to most fully reflect the global properties of our minds -- our beliefs, desires, goals, prejudices, etc.

If, after weeks of deliberation, library research, and debate with your friends, you still decide to kill the king -- well, then killing the king reflects the sort of person you really are. The point is not that you are the ultimate and independent cause of your actions, the point is that, for whatever reason, you have the mind of a regicide. 

No free will is a feature, not a bug. I came up with this little mantra of sorts that I've been enjoying saying to myself from time to time: "No self. No free will. No problem." A book just arrived from Amazon that I ordered because it seems to echo this, Paul Breer's The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. I'll be writing about the book once I'm able to read it. 

Video by David Lane. Today David Lane, a.k.a. neuralsurfer, left a comment on this blog where he shared a link to a video he made called The Prisoner's Dilemma: Why Evolution Favors "Free Will." Those quotation marks around free will reflect the fact that in the video, free will is recognized as an illusion, but a generally beneficial illusion. The video is well worth watching.

Solitaire. Every day I play several games of Klondike, a solitaire game that I've argued in a blog post is a fine philosophy of life. My iPhone app has several options, including a random draw (you might be able to win the game, or you might not) and a Daily Challenge where the game is definitely winnable, but not always easy to win.

Over the years I've arrived at an approach to playing Klondike that usually is successful. I've never written down those guidelines. They're just part of how I play a game of Klondike. A few days ago my approach failed me with a Daily Challenge. When this happens, I realize that I have to step outside my usual approach, to do something different.

This is an interesting mental exercise. I have to stifle my intention to play the way I usually do, because what I usually do didn't let me win the Daily Challenge. Today, after several failed attempts to win the Daily Challenge of a few days ago, I went all in and consciously set out to play the game wrong.

Meaning, by and large, whatever seemed right to me to do, based on my lengthy experience with this solitaire game, I didn't do, and whatever seemed wrong to me to do, I did. The result: I finally won the Daily Challenge. 

My point in sharing this anecdote is that a lack of free will doesn't mean acting like a robot or an automaton. At no point did I believe that I was acting freely, not when I followed my usual approach to playing the game or when I upended that approach and did the opposite, pretty much.

My brain simply led me to do something different when doing the same thing didn't lead to the outcome I wanted.

Admitting to being stupid can be really satisfying. Yesterday I wrote a post for my HinesSight blog, "My guide to happiness: act stupid, then undo your stupidity." I didn't mention free will in this post, but the subject lurked below the surface of the Starlink router installation that I used as an example of my stupidity.

OK, stupidity is a harsh word. But apt, since that was how I felt after I read the installation instructions several times, paying special attention to where the ethernet cable was to be connected, then ended up doing the exact opposite.

When I did this, it felt entirely right. Until I realized my mistake, then it felt entirely wrong. Even worse than wrong, since at first I wasn't able to detach the misattached cable and I worried that our broadband speed was going to sink from reasonably fast to utterly zero.

I didn't freely choose to make the mistake. It just happened. I also didn't freely choose to undo the mistake. It too just happened. What was particularly interesting is how good I felt about publishing the post and sharing it on Facebook -- my personal account plus three pages that I manage.

There was something satisfying about telling the world, or at least the small slice of the world that will read that blog post, that I was in the grip of what sure looked like stupidity, but which to me was an example of how the human brain just does what it has been determined to do.

You know, whatever will be, will be.

Free will is an illusion. But it's a useful illusion.

As noted in my previous post about a book by Daniel Wegner that persuasively describes the illusion of free will, appropriately titled The Illusion of Conscious Will, in this post I'll share some of what Wegner says in a concluding chapter about why a belief in free will, though wrong, can be useful.

That chapter is called "The Mind's Compass." Conscious will is the mind's compass.

Like an actual compass, which does no actual steering of a ship, free will indicates what is happening with a person, even though it also doesn't do any actual "steering." Wegner writes, "Just as compass readings do not steer the boat, conscious experiences of will do not cause human actions."

Instead, conscious will is "a feeling that organizes and informs our understanding of our own agency." It indicates when we sense having authored an action. Here's a passage that describes why a sense of free will can be a good thing. Wegner also mentions spiritual traditions such as Zen that view it as an undesirable thing.

All in all, then, it might be better to err on the side of too much perceived control. And indeed, this seems to be what most people do. Shelley Taylor (1983; Taylor and Brown 1988; Taylor, Wayment, and Collins 1993) has explored the role of such a positive illusion in psychological and mental health, and has catalogued many instances in which it seems to be better to think you have control than not.

This sometimes seems to be true even if no real control exists at all. The belief that one has control can be beneficial even in the case of dire circumstances -- among people who have terminal illnesses that make their future uncontrollable, for example, or who have suffered serious trauma and so are left with memories of uncontrollable events in the past.

It could be unpleasant and potentially disheartening to be brought down from this cloud of fantasy to the reality of lack of actual control, but an inflated perception of control seems generally to be better even than an accurate view of control.

But there might be benefits, too, to losing one's illusions. Albert Einstein, the epitome of the good scientist, remarked on the mental peace that can come from relaxing the striving for control and accepting a philosophy of resignation to determinism: "The conviction that a law of necessity governs human activities introduces into our conception of man and life a mildness, a reverence and an excellence, such as would be unattainable without this conviction" (quoted in Home and Robinson 1995, 172).

Religious traditions such as Zen Buddhism teach a philosophy of relinquishing the pretense of control and view a break with the illusion of conscious will as the ultimate form of enlightenment (Breer 1989). One wonders, however, whether it is possible purposefully to renounce the illusion of purpose or whether one must only sit back and wait for the loss of the illusion to happen. 

And here's how Wegner concludes his book.

Sometimes how things seem is more important than what they are. This is true in theater, in art, in used car sales, in economics and -- it now turns out -- in the scientific analysis of conscious will. The fact is, it seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do.

Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is a mistake to conclude that the illusion is trivial.

On the contrary, the illusions piled atop apparent mental causation are the building blocks of human psychology and social life. It is only with the feeling of conscious will that we can begin to solve the problems of knowing who we are as individuals, of discerning what we can and cannot do, and of judging ourselves morally right or wrong for what we have done.

The illusion is sometimes fragile. There are days when we wonder whether we're willing anything at all. In The Reader (1995), Bernard Schlink captures this feeling: "Often enough in my life I have done things I had not decided to do. Something -- whatever that may be -- goes into action; 'it' goes to the woman I don't want to see anymore; 'it' makes the remark to the boss that costs me my head; 'it' keeps on smoking although I have decided to quit, and then quits smoking just when I've accepted that I'm a smoker and always will be. I don't mean to say that the thinking and reaching decisions have no influence on behavior. But behavior does not merely enact whatever has already been thought through and decided. It has its own sources..." (20)

But usually we assume that how things seem is how they are. We experience willing a walk in the park, winding a clock, or smiling at someone, and the feeling keeps our notion of ourselves as persons intact. Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time.

The feeling of doing is how it seems, not what it is -- but that is as it should be. All is well because the illusion makes us human. Albert Einstein (quoted in Home and Robinson 1995, 172) had a few words on this that make a good conclusion:

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord... So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.

 

How the brain creates the illusion of conscious will

As I said in my previous post about Sartre and how his view of freedom bugs me because I don't believe in free will, Sartre takes it for granted that because he feels like he is free to choose his actions, this is proof that free will actually exists.

This is wrong.

It goes against what is known about the human brain. So because I realize how entrenched a belief that they possess free will is in the minds of most people, including commenters on this blog, I dug out what I consider to be one of the best books debunking free will: Daniel M. Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will. 

Below is how Wegner summarizes his position in the book's first chapter, "The Illusion." (Wegner is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard.) But all isn't completely lost for believers in free will, because Wegner also discusses in his book why free will seems to be true. Meaning, evolution has given us a sense of free will because this illusion has benefits.

In my next post I'll share the benefits that Wegner describes in a concluding chapter, "The Mind's Compass." (Preview: a compass tells us what a ship is doing, but it doesn't control the action of the ship.)

Broadly speaking, what Wegner says below has implications for more than just how we view free will. Our inability to know what the brain is doing down in the engine room, so to speak, should make us cautious about drawing strong conclusions from our conscious experience insofar as we believe that what we're conscious of reflects what is going on in the brain.

Philosophers and psychologists have spent lifetimes thinking about how to reconcile conscious will with mechanistic causation... The solution explored in this book involves recognizing that the distinction between mental and mechanical explanations is something that concerns everyone, not only philosophers and psychologists.

The tendency to view the world in both ways, each as necessary, is what has created in us two largely incompatible ways of thinking. When we apply mental explanations to our own behavior-causation mechanisms, we fall prey to the impression that our conscious will causes our actions.

The fact is, we find it enormously addictive to think of ourselves as having minds, and so we are drawn into an intuitive appreciation of our own conscious will.

Think for a minute about the nature of illusions.

Any magician will tell you that the key to creating a successful illusion is to make "magic" the easiest, most immediate way to explain what is really a mundane event. Harold Kelly (1980) described this in his analysis of the underpinnings of magic in the perception of causality.

He observed that stage magic involves a perceived causal sequence -- the set of events that appears to have happened -- and a real causal sequence -- the set of events the magician has orchestrated behind the scenes.

Laws of nature are broken willy-nilly as people are sawed in half and birds, handkerchiefs, rabbits, and canes appear from nothing or turn into each other and back again.

The real sequence is often more complicated than the perceived sequence, but many of the real events are not perceived. The magician needs special pockets, props, and equipment, and develops wiles to misdirect audience attention from the real sequence. 

In the end, the audience observes something that seems to be simple, but in fact it may have been achieved with substantial thought, preparation, and effort on the magician's part. The lovely assistant in a gossamer gown apparently floating effortlessly on her back during the levitation illusion is in fact being held up by a 600-pound pneumatic lift hidden behind a specially rigged curtain.

It is the very simplicity of the illusory sequence, the shorthand summary that hides the magician's toil, that makes the trick so compelling. The lady levitates. The illusion of conscious will occurs in much the same way.

The real causal sequence underlying human behavior involves a massively complicated set of mechanisms. Everything that psychology studies can come into play to predict and explain even the most innocuous wink of an eye.

Each of our actions is really the culmination of an intricate set of physical and mental processes, including psychological mechanisms that correspond to the traditional concepts of will, in that they involve linkages between our thoughts and our actions. This is the empirical will.

However, we don't see this. Instead, we readily accept a far easier explanation of our behavior. We intended to do it, so we did it.

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (1973) remarked that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Clarke was referring to the fantastic inventions we might discover in the future or in our travels to advanced civilizations. However, the insight also applies to self-perception.

When we turn our attention to our own minds, we are faced with trying to understand an unimaginably advanced technology. We can't possibly know (let alone keep track of) the tremendous number of mechanical influences on our behavior because we inhabit an extraordinarily complicated machine.

So we develop a shorthand, a belief in the causal efficacy of our conscious thoughts. We believe in the magic of our own causal agency.

The mind is a system that produces appearances for its owner. Things appear silver, for example, or they appear to have little windows, or they appear to fly, as the result of how the mind produces experience. And if the mind can make us "experience" an airplane, why couldn't it produce an experience of itself that leads us to think that it causes its own actions?

The mind creates this continuous illusion; it really doesn't know what causes its own actions. Whatever empirical will there is rumbling along in the engine room -- an actual relation between thought and action -- might in fact be totally inscrutable to the driver of the machine (the mind).

The mind has a self-explanation mechanism that produces a roughly continuous sense that what is in consciousness is the cause of action -- the phenomenal will -- whereas in fact the mind can't even know itself well enough to say what the causes of its actions are.

To quote Spinoza in The Ethics (1677), "Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions."

In the more contemporary phrasing of Marvin Minsky (1985); "None of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control.... Perhaps it would be more honest to say, 'My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand.'"

In 2017 I wrote a blog post about Wegner's book: "Experience of conscious will is an illusion." In that post I shared an image from the book that illustrates what is spoken of in the passages above. I'll also include my commentary on the image.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believing in free will isolates us

Before I head off into other directions in my blog posts, I want to share some additional thoughts about free will, and the lack thereof -- a subject that has been a theme of mine recently.

(And also non-recently, since I've written a lot about free will over the years.)

The main reason I don't believe in free will is that there doesn't seem to be any good reason to believe in it. By and large I prefer truth over falsehood, reality over illusion. Especially when it comes to science. Movies, novels, and TV shows -- I'm fine with falsehoods and illusions there.

While it certainly seems that we humans possess free will, that subjective feeling doesn't count for much when it comes to understanding reality.

After all, it also feels like consciousness is something ethereal, whereas actually it is the product of electrochemical goings-on in the brain. If you truly believe that your consciousness is non-physical, ask someone to hit you on your head with a baseball bat and see if your consciousness is unchanged.

Often an objection is raised to those who, like me, don't believe that people are ultimately morally responsible for their actions, since we humans lack free will. If nobody believed in free will, goes the argument, how could society hold people accountable for bad behavior and reward people for good behavior?

The usual response is that echoed by Galen Strawson in his book, "Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc." Strawson, a philosopher, rejects free will. But he says in an interview that comprises a chapter in his book:

You may be convinced that determinism is true: You may believe that in five -- two -- minutes' time you will be able to look back on the situation you are now in and say truly, of what you will by then have done, "It was determined that I should do that."

But even if you do fervently believe this, I still don't think it's going to touch the feel of DMR [deep moral responsibility] that you have right now as you stand there. 

...Given that the experience of DMR is seemingly inevitable in our everyday lives, can we shake free of it, can we at least diminish it, can we somehow truly live, breathe the impossibility of DMR, and not just accept it as a merely theoretical context?

We have to remember that evolution isn't much concerned with whether living beings are in touch with objective reality. Evolution favors changes in living beings that enhance their survival value, their ability to reproduce and pass on their genetic heritage to their offspring.

A feeling that we humans have free will seemingly has survival value. It puts our individuality front and center. Those two words, "free" and "will," are inherently egoistic. Here I am, an isolated being, free to do as I want by exercising my will.

This attitude, of course, ignores reality.

We all are dependent on the laws of nature and other people for our existence. We all are heavily influenced by our genetics that's handed down by countless generations of our ancestors, both human and non-human. We all are also heavily influenced by the experiences we have from the first breath we take at our birth until the last breath we take at our death.

All of that determines what we do and think and feel, even if it seems like we are able to freely choose what actions we take, what thoughts are in our mind, and what emotions impact us.

I'd much rather view myself as an integral aspect of the whole of reality, rather than as an isolated part disconnected from outside influences by my supposed free will. Aside from that second option not making any sense, it's unappealing.

There are too many divisions in the world: political, cultural, religious, etc. A belief in free will is one more division that leads people to see themselves as a stand-alone island rather than as a tiny bit of ground in a vast shared continent. 

Another good reason to not believe in free will

I'm addicted. To many things. One of them is reading about why free will makes no sense. I ingest books and essays on this subject with delight. Until another one comes along. Then I eagerly imbibe it also.

This morning I got my No Free Will fix courtesy of a chapter in Galen Strawson's book, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, The Self, Etc.

The chapter, "Luck Swallows Everything," started off in a familiar fashion.

Strawson, a philosopher, picked apart the easily pickable argument that free will exists in the form of compatibilism, an incoherent argument that we humans have free will even if determinism holds true, because free will is compatible with determinism so long as our determined actions take place without us being forced to act that way, such as by someone holding a gun to our head.

He says about compatibilists:

Free will, they say, is simply a matter of being unconstrained in such a way that one has genuine options and opportunities for action, and is able to choose among them in the light of what one wants or thinks best.

It simply doesn't matter if one's character, personality, preferences, and general motivational set are entirely determined by things for which one is in no way responsible -- by one's genetic inheritance, upbringing, historical situation, chance encounters, and so on.

Einstein also found this point of view absurd.

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 do something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will light up my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Man can do what he wills, but cannot will what he wills.

Strawson expands upon the point Einstein alludes to in this quotation. Free will requires genuine unfettered freedom. Sure, just as the compatibilists argue, we all carry out lots of actions every day. I drive my car into Salem.

Like an annoying three year old endlessly asking a parent, "Why?," the question becomes, why did I drive my car into Salem. Answer: to go to my Tai Chi class. And why do I go to Tai Chi classes? Because I like Tai Chi. Why do I like Tai Chi? Partly because I like Taoist philosophy and Tai Chi can be viewed as Taoism in motion. And why do I like Taoism?... on and on go the string of Why's, which are rooted in determinism, causes and effects.

Strawson says that the basic reason we decide to do something, why we decide to do anything, is that this is simply the overall way we are. I guess this is akin to an exasperated parent finally saying, "Just because, that's why!"

But Strawson argues persuasively that free will requires that a person be able to trace it to a self-caused state, causa sui. 

In order for one to be truly or ultimately responsible for how one is in such a way that one can be truly responsible for what one does, something impossible has to be true: there has to be, and cannot be, a starting point in the series of acts of bringing it about that one has a certain nature; a starting point that constitutes an act of ultimate self-origination.

There's a more concise way of putting the point: in order to be ultimately responsible, one would have to be causa sui -- the ultimate cause or origin of oneself, or at least of some crucial part of one's mental nature. But nothing can be causa sui in any respect at all. Even if the property of being causa sui is allowed to belong unintelligibly to God, it can't plausibly be supposed to be possessed by ordinary finite human beings.

Obviously we don't originate ourselves. We are born because we were conceived. After our birth, countless influences other than genetics determine how we are. These experiences all have their own causes.

So nothing is self-caused, and nothing has free will.

Why not believing in free will is so wonderful

I've written a lot about free will on this blog. More accurately, my posts on this subject have been about the near certainty that we humans lack free will. At least, as it is normally considered to exist.

Meaning, almost everybody who believes in free will considers that it means we're able to choose one thing instead of another without any causal influence affecting that choice.

Tonight I pondered whether to have leftover spaghetti for dinner, or to make tempe with rice. I decided on the tempe and rice. I had some reasons for that decision. This means that my will wasn't free, since those reasons influenced my choice.

In fact, this is always the case. There's absolutely zero evidence that the human brain is able to act or choose without being affected by prior experiences, brain states, the condition of the world, and such. 

The only way free will could exist is known as compatibilism. And this way negates free will as it is commonly understood.

Those who believe in the philosophical notion of compatibilism say that as long as a person isn't constrained by outside influences, such as someone holding a gun to my head and saying "You must choose to have spaghetti tonight," then that person is acting freely.

But this is a much watered-down version of genuine free will, which is viewed as the ability of a human being to choose between two actions, thoughts, or whatever in a way that is unaffected by the inward and outward state of that person's reality. 

In other words, neither the person's brain nor the external world has any effect on the person's choices. Those choices are made through some sort of unexplained supernatural Free Will Fairy Dust, which is such an absurd idea, I reject it (almost with most neuroscientists).

One big reason why I don't believe in free will is that I much prefer reality to unreality. I'd rather embrace an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable falsehood. That's why I no longer believe in God, soul, life after death, and other fantasies that used to give me comfort in my true believing days.

It's impossible to live a "spiritual" life, leaving aside the thorny question of what that word means, if that life is founded on untruths. Thus science is the cornerstone of any genuine search for meaning.

Imagine if we still had a medieval understanding of how the universe came to be. No knowledge of the big bang. No knowledge of the astounding vastness of the cosmos. Our worldview would be hugely constricted compared to the modern understanding astronomers and cosmologists have gifted us with.

I see a belief in free will as being similarly constricted. It imagines that each of us is, essentially, the "god" of our own thoughts and actions that are created by us independently, freely, out of nothing other than our own unfettered ability to choose between this and that.

Believers in free will typically don't try to justify their belief. They just accept what seems obvious to them: "It feels like I can choose freely, so that must be so." Of course, it also feels like the sun sets each day, rather than the sun standing still and the earth revolving.

The truths of science take quite a while to filter down into widespread understanding. So I look forward to the day that free will is viewed as akin to the earth-centered cosmos: a mistake caused by a superficial knowledge of reality.

Consider all the findings of modern science: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, and so many other disciplines. These countless findings all have something in common. Regularities rooted in the laws of nature and other forms of causes and effects. 

There is no finding that free will exists, because if it did, this would be the only instance of an effect occurring in the everyday world without any cause. (I said "everyday" because arguably some quantum effects in the subatomic realm occur without a cause, though even here the wave function is a cause based on probabilities.)

Thus the interconnectedness of our universe, the marvelous oneness where causes and effects multiply without end across not only our planet but the vast expanse of time and space beyond earth, all that is not only compatible with the lack of free will, it demands it. 

Free will is a medieval'ish bastion of human separateness, specialness, individuality, and isolation.

Believers in free will imagine that they are islands of unfettered action unto themselves, rather than what we humans actually are: beings who are an integral part of everything in existence, both affected by everything that surrounds us, and affecting everything that surrounds us. 

What I or you or anybody does isn't based on our individual self. Every thought and action, no matter how small, requires an entire cosmos to carry out. My fingers typed this blog post, but the words and ideas didn't spring from my free will. They emanated from elsewhere. 

Understanding that "elsewhere" is what science is all about. Also, in my view, what spirituality is all about. We don't need to imagine supernatural realms beyond the physical to have a grasp of our place in the oneness of the cosmos. 

That oneness is right here, right now. And in large part it is glimpsed by giving up a belief in free will.

 

Free will is the missing ingredient in self-improvement

I've almost finished reading Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, a book I've been writing about lately. 

I have few criticisms of it. But after I read the "Emotion and the Law" chapter, I realized what was missing from Barrett's book: a discussion of free will. Meaning, the lack thereof.

Most of that chapter made sense to me. I'll explain the part that didn't. This passage struck me as fine.

The third type of responsibility relates to the content within your conceptual system, separately from how your brain uses that system to predict when breaking the law. A brain does not compute a mind in a vacuum. 

Every human being is the sum of his or her concepts, which become the predictions that drive behavior. The concepts in your head are not purely a matter of personal choice. Your predictions come from the cultural influences you were pickled in.

...All of your predictions are shaped not just by direct experience but also indirectly by television, movies, friends, and the symbols of your culture... Your mind is not only a function of your brain, but also of the other brains in your culture.

OK. I've got no problem with these thoughts. However, this passage strikes me as problematic.

This third domain of responsibility cuts two ways. Sometimes it's trivialized as "society is to blame," a phrase lampooned as bleeding-heart liberal sentiment.

I am saying something more nuanced. If you commit a crime, you are indeed to blame, but your actions are rooted in your conceptual system, and those concepts don't just appear in a puff of magic.

They are forged by the social reality you live in, which gets under your skin to turn genes on and off and wire your neurons. You learn from your environment like any other animal. Nevertheless, all animals shape their own environment.

So as a human being, you have the ability to shape your environment to modify your conceptual system, which means that you are ultimately responsible for the concepts that you accept and reject.

So Barrett is saying that while past experiences, both personal and cultural, go a long way toward determining our actions in the present, we still have the ability to choose different experiences in the future which will modify the conceptual system that guides our behavior now.

This assumes that we possess some sort of magical free will that operates outside of the causes and effects that are described in much detail by Barrett as creating the conditions that produce both human emotions and other behavior.

To confirm that Barrett has a flawed understanding of free will, I dug out my copy of Sam Harris' short 66 page book aptly called Free Will. It didn't take me long to re-read it. The way Harris talks about choices makes more sense than how Barrett views this subject.

Harris writes:

When we consider human behavior, the difference between premeditated, voluntary action and mere accident seems immensely consequential. As we will see, this distinction can be preserved -- and with it, our most important moral and legal concerns -- while banishing the idea of free will once and for all.

Certain states of consciousness seem to arise automatically, beyond the sphere of our intentions. Others seem self-generated, deliberative, and subject to our will... Within certain limits, I seem to choose what I pay attention to.

The sound of the leaf blower intrudes, but I can seize the spotlight of my attention in the next moment and aim it elsewhere. This difference between nonvolitional and volitional states of mind is reflected at the level of the brain -- for they are governed by different systems.

And the difference between them must, in part, produce the felt sense that there is a conscious self endowed with freedom of will.

As we have begun to see, however, this feeling of freedom arises from our moment-to-moment ignorance of the prior causes of our thoughts and actions. The phrase "free will" describes what it feels like to identify with certain mental states as they arise in consciousness.

Thoughts like "What should I get my daughter for her birthday? I know -- I'll take her to a pet store and have her pick out some tropical fish" convey the apparent reality of choices, freely made. But from a deeper perspective (speaking both objectively and subjectively), thoughts simply arise unauthored and yet author our actions. 

...And the fact that our choices depend on prior causes does not mean that they don't matter. If I had not decided to write this book, it wouldn't have written itself. My choice to write it was unquestionably the primary cause of its coming into being.

Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe.

But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being... From the perspective of your conscious awareness, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world.

...You can do what you decide to do -- but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. Of course, you can create a framework in which certain decisions are more likely than others -- you can, for instance, purge your house of all sweets, making it very unlikely that you will eat dessert later in the evening -- but you cannot know why you were able to submit to such a framework today when you weren't yesterday.

...You have not built your mind. And in moments in which you seem to build it -- when you make an effort to change yourself, to acquire knowledge, or to perfect a skill -- the only tools at your disposal are those that you have inherited from moments past.

Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behavior -- but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control. My choices matter -- and there are paths toward making wiser ones -- but I cannot choose what I choose.

And if it ever appears that I do -- for instance, after going back and forth between two options -- I do not choose to choose what I choose. There is a regress here that always ends in darkness. I must take a first step, or a last one, for reasons that are bound to remain inscrutable. 

...To say that I could have done otherwise is merely to think the thought "I could have done otherwise" after doing whatever I in fact did. This is an empty affirmation. It confuses hope for the future with an honest account of the past. 

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 contribution 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 and I don't mind doing it."

...You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise. 

...Why did I order beer instead of wine? Because I prefer beer. Why do I prefer it? I don't know, but I generally have no need to ask. Knowing that I like beer more than wine is all I need to know to function in a restaurant. Whatever the reason, I prefer one taste to the other.

Is there freedom in this? None whatsoever. Would I magically reclaim my freedom if I decided to spite my preference and order wine instead? No, because the roots of this intention would be as obscure as the preference itself.

So we see that while Barrett considers that we're able to modify our past mental programming by filling our brain/mind with different future experiences we consider to be better for us, she fails to realize that our choice of those different future experiences doesn't spring from our unfettered free will, but from the same sorts of influences that created our past mental programming. 

This seems clear to me, as it is to Sam Harris. But it's a fairly subtle notion that, as Harris says, is irrelevant to most of our everyday life. Nonetheless, it's an important notion, because it points to the wonderful awe-inspiring interdependency of everything in our world. Harris writes:

We do not change ourselves, precisely -- because we have only ourselves with which to do the changing -- but we continually influence, and are influenced by, the world around us and the world within us... In improving ourselves and society, we are working directly with the forces of nature, for there is nothing but nature itself to work with.

A physicist demolishes the argument in favor of free will

Ian caused a tremendous amount of damage today. Countless cars were destroyed. Lots of homes and business were rendered unusable. Emergency 911 calls largely weren't responded to, because Ian created so much trouble over such a large area.

If Ian was a person, he'd be charged with innumerable crimes. But Ian was a massive Category 4 hurricane that struck Florida today, so there won't be any jail time for the perpetrator of all that havoc.

Watching cable news cover the hurricane, I was impressed (as I have been with previous hurricanes) with how accurately forecasters were able to predict the path Ian would take and how dangerous the storm would be: wind speed, rainfall amount, amount of storm surge, and so on.

Science makes this possible through computer models, weather satellites, storm-chasing airplanes filled with instruments, and other accomplishments of modern meteorology. But at the root of the capacity to predict what a hurricane will do, or what anything will do, is an understanding that reality is deterministic, governed by lawful causes and effects.

Ah, but most people believe humans have free will. (Not that they have any choice in this.)

One day, I'm confident, a belief in free will shall be viewed in much the same way as we regard a belief that the earth is flat. A product of ignorance that was disproven by science and now is held by just a few cranks.

In her book Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions, Sabine Hossenfelder tackles the question, "Has physics ruled out free will?" Short answer: yes. Here's passages from this chapter that provide a longer answer.

The major problem with discussions about free will is that philosophers have put forward a heap of definitions that have nothing to do with what nonphilosophers think free will means.

I am tempted to write "normal people" as opposed to "philosophers," but maybe that's a little uncharitable. And I don't want to be uncharitable. Certainly not.

For this reason, let me begin by stating the problem without using the term free will. The currently established laws of nature are deterministic with a random element from quantum mechanics. This means the future is fixed, except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence.

Chaos theory changes nothing about this. Chaotic laws are still deterministic; they are just difficult to predict, because what happens depends very sensitively on the initial conditions (butterfly flaps and all that).

Our life is thus not, in Jorge Luis Borges's words, a "garden of forking paths" where each path corresponds to a possible future and it is up to us which path becomes reality. The laws of nature just don't work that way.

For the most part, there is really only one path, because quantum effects rarely manifest themselves macroscopically. What you do today follows from the state of the universe yesterday, which follows from the state of the universe last Wednesday, and so on, all the way back to the Big Bang.

...For your will to be free, it shouldn't be caused by anything else. But if it wasn't caused by anything -- if it's an "uncaused cause," as Friedrich Nietzsche put it -- then it wasn't caused by you, regardless of just what you mean by you.

As Nietzsche summed it up, it's "the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far." I'm with Nietzsche.

This is how I think about what's going on instead: our brains perform computations on input, following equations that act on an initial state. Whether these computations are algorithmic is an open question that we'll come to later, but there's no magic juice in our neocortex that puts us above the laws of nature.

All we're doing is evaluating what are the best decisions to make given the limited information we have.

A decision is the result of our evaluation; it does not require anything beyond the laws of nature. My phone makes decisions each time it calculates what notifications to put on the lock screen; clearly, making decisions does not necessitate free will.

...If free will doesn't make sense, why, then, do many people feel it describes how they go about their evaluations? Because we don't know the result of our thinking before we are done; otherwise, we wouldn't have to do the thinking.

As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, "The freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot be known now." His Tractatus is now a century old, so it's not like this is breaking news.

...The easiest way to deal with it [incompatibility of free will and physics] is through dualism, according to which the mind has a nonphysical component. Using dualism, you can treat free will as an ascientific concept, a property of your soul, if you wish.

This will be compatible with physics as long as the nonphysical component does not interact with the physical one, because then it'd be in conflict with evidence -- it'd become physical. 

Because the physical part of our brain is demonstrably the thing we use to make decisions, I don't see what one gains from believing in a nonphysical free will, but then this isn't a new problem with dualism, and at least it isn't wrong.

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.