How free are we really? For all my life, I thought that I
could be the orchestrator of my own symphony. That if I work hard on myself and cultivate
the right amount of self-awareness, I will be able to dictate my fate and my future.
Although I always assumed that free will is something quite self-evident, at some point I
had to question the reality of this assumption. That point was when I heard my favorite
contemporary thinker, Sam Harris, asserting that free will is an illusion.
There is so much to unpack here, so let’s start with the fundamentals.
Understanding what Sam Harris wants to say is mind-bending, to say the least.
It took me hours to decipher his stream of reasoning, and, even now, I am not sure if
I understand completely. So, I will try to
elaborate on what I managed to understand. The basic premise of Harris’ postulate is twofold:
First that we don’t have control over our background,
the biochemistry of our brains, and also over the effects of our environment on our development.
He writes in his book titled “Free will”: “How can we be “free” as conscious agents if
everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and
of which we are entirely unaware?“ Second that there is substantial
evidence that the brain decides on our actions before we perform them.
The famous Libet experiment, performed by psychologist Benjamin Libet in the 80s,
claimed that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before
a person feels that they have decided to move. Sam Harris mentions two more studies from 2011
in his book and suggests that: “These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that
we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments
before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have
complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do.”
I did my own research, and there are several people disputing the
validity of the Libet experiment. In any case, this is a debatable
topic and requires further investigation. Sam Harris essentially suggests that a
powerful mixture of determinism and randomness shapes the reality of our experience and,
since we can’t control determinism and randomness, there can be no such thing as free will.
Free will and what we call the “self” are, essentially, two sides of the same coin.
So, since the self is an illusion, since there is no I in the locus of experience, and we are one
with consciousness, how can there be free will? I think that we are just arguing semantics here.
The notion of free will was introduced as a way for philosophers to explain the choices people
make and how much control they have over them. As it is stated in Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “From at least Aristotle onwards, ancient
philosophers engaged in systematic reflection on human agency. A question that Aristotle seems to
recognize, while not satisfactorily answering, is whether the choice an individual makes on
any given occasion is wholly determined by his internal state. He says that “the man is the
father of his actions as of children”—that is, a person’s character shapes how she acts. Aristotle
responds by contending that her present character is partly a result of previous choices she made.
While this claim is plausible enough, it seems to ‘pass the buck’, since ‘the man is the father’
of those earlier choices and actions, too.” In the course of history many philosophers
tried to refute the idea of free will and embrace a more deterministic view of reality.
Determinism in the West is often associated with Newtonian mechanics and physics, which depicts
the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws.
Sam Harris writes in his book: “Losing a belief in free will
has not made me fatalistic—in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom.
My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal and indelible. There is no telling
how much I might change in the future. Just as one wouldn’t draw a lasting conclusion about oneself
on the basis of a brief experience of indigestion, one needn’t do so on the
basis of how one has thought or behaved for vast stretches of time in the past. A creative change
of inputs to the system—learning new skills, forming new relationships, adopting new habits
of attention—may radically transform one’s life.” The point Harris tries to make is also twofold:
First, that our moral interpretation of others’ actions should be conducted under the prism of
a background check. We stop hating others because we think harder about the origins
of their actions and their psychological and physiological background. We relate differently
to others when we understand them better. Second, that accepting that there is no free will
allows us to be more relaxed in the face of absurdity and the machinations
of the cosmos. This is clearly a stoic view. Letting go of the agency that free will dictates,
renders one more capable of asserting control over the things one can control.
Free will isn’t free. It comes at a cost.
If you believe that there is no free will, the cost is how to accept that the idea of self
doesn’t matter anymore. That you just are. That you are not the one pulling the strings anymore,
you are not in the cockpit of your experience,
you are just floating in your experience. But maybe there is freedom in floating.
This is a very liberating feeling for some, but it can also be a very disturbing feeling for others.
Rejecting free will shouldn't make you a fatalist. Evolution isn’t an act of free will.
It is a part of the mechanics of the cosmos that tries to push us towards a certain state.
I am not really sure about the exact future of that state. I can only look at human history,
try to recognize patterns, and offer a vague idea of the future based on those patterns.
If, on the other hand, you believe that there is free will, the cost is how to be a more
responsible human being. The freedom to exercise your will contains also your responsibility to
internalize morality and its principles and strive for a universal moral framework that
will make co-existence less arduous. Personally, I still haven’t
decided and both ideas seem plausible. I understand what Sam Harris wants to say.
That we are an amalgamation of past experiences, biological mechanisms, and
environmental influences, and that we don’t have control over all that.
But we do have control over our decision to understand all that (to some extent)
and how to orient ourselves in the world according to our understanding of all that.
We are all essentially part of a big experiment called life.
It is our moral duty to be more like the scientist and less like the guinea pig in that experiment.