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Let’s consider
the absurdity of the claim that we
humans have varying degrees of free
will. Some philosophers and
psychologists assert that while we
may not have a completely free will,
we have a free will in certain
respects. We’ll be exploring that
assertion.
Before we do
that, I want to go through a brief
description of what we generally
mean when we say we have a free
will. In essence, what we mean by
free will is that our decisions are
completely up to us. Nothing that
we cannot control is compelling our
decisions. Nothing that is not
under our control would be either
taking part in our decisions, or
making them completely for us.
Right from the start, we can
understand that because we have an
unconscious that is always awake and
active, free will is impossible. If
the unconscious is taking part in a
decision, that decision is not free
from its participation. Again, if
the unconscious is making the
decision completely -- which is the
most accurate description for how
all of our decisions are made --
that decision cannot have been
freely willed.
Civilization has
had this illusion of free will as
its premise for our whole legal
system, our whole political system,
our whole socio-economic system, and
our whole system of relating to each
other personally. This irrational
conclusion leads to unnecessary
harm, problems, and confusion. By
overcoming the illusion of free
will, we can create a much more
intelligent, compassionate, and
understanding world.
Some philosophers
and scientists understand why we
can’t have a completely free will.
For example, they understand that
fifty percent of our personality is
genetic. But, they will assert that
we have a certain amount of free
will; a partially free will. There
are two types of partial free will
that they wrongly conclude. The
first is the idea that while not all
of our decisions are up to us, some
of them are. The second type of
partial free will they claim we have
is that when we make a decision,
that decision is partly up to us.
They claim that it may be partly up
to other factors, but it is also
partly up to us.
Let’s examine
these two claims in detail to see
whether or not they make sense, or
have any evidence to support them.
Let’s begin with the first one that
not all of our decisions are freely
made, but some of them are. Here’s
where the unconscious comes in.
We’ve talked about this before, and
it’s the answer to why even a
partially free will is not
possible. Our unconscious is always
active. There is a part of our
unconscious that controls our bodily
actions like breathing, circulation,
and all of the organs inside of us.
Part of our unconscious is
constantly awake controlling all of
that biology. Because our
unconscious is also awake while we
are sleeping, it is actually more a
part of our experience than is our
consciousness, which is active only
while we’re awake.
As far back as
Freud and the hypnotists, we have
empirically understood that there is
an unconscious. We have understood
that this unconscious is really
responsible for a lot of the
decisions – in truth, all of them --
we generally attribute to our
conscious will. In neuroscience and
psychology today, researchers are
demonstrating this with more and
more hard evidence. Before this, a
researcher would hypnotize a person,
and give them a post hypnotic
suggestion. When the person was no
longer under hypnosis, s/he would
perform the post-hypnotic
suggestion.
The way
researchers determined that the
post-hypnotic action was done by the
unconscious, rather than by the
person’s conscious will, was to ask
the person “why did you do that?”
The person would then confabulate
some kind of reason, but the reason
would not reveal the understanding
that the reason they did what they
did was because of the post-hypnotic
suggestion while under hypnosis.
Other experiments reveal our
unconscious will through priming.
Subjects in an experiment are given
words that will cause their
unconscious mind to focus on a
certain kind of behavior, and they
are evaluated, or they perform a
task while primed with those
words. It turns out that the
priming is responsible for what they
do or don’t do.
When we say what
we say, or decide what we decide, we
have to rely on memories. We can’t
make a decision with no data upon
which to draw on. We can’t say
anything without there being a
collection of words in our
unconscious memory bank from which
to draw for our sentences and
paragraphs, etc. Remember, the term
free will means that we would be
able to make our decisions
completely free of anything that
is not in our control. Think about
it. We have an unconscious that is
the storehouse of all of our
memories – all of the words that we
know, our reasoning processes, and
our morality. Because this
unconscious is something that we’re
not, by definition, even aware of,
we’re obviously not in control of
it. There is no way for us to, in
real time, control our unconscious.
So, to make every
decision we make, we have to draw on
an unconscious part of us that we
can’t control. The words that I’m
saying right now are just coming out
of me. My unconscious is leading me
to say what I say. My conscious
mind then becomes aware of what I’m
saying, and, to the extent I’ve been
conditioned to believe in free will,
wrongly concludes that it made the
decision. Whether we see the
unconscious as controlling the very
decision itself, as many experiments
in hypnosis have demonstrated, or as
taking part in the decision, we
can’t, therefore, have a free will.
Especially since
Freud, we’ve come to understand that
we have a part of us that is
unconscious and is not, therefore,
in our control. That seems a very
easy way for us to understand the
logic of why we don’t have a free
will. But, the fundamental reason
we don’t have a free will is the law
of cause and effect. Everything
that happens has a cause. Nothing
can happen without a cause. This
has been known since Leucippus, who
at about 500 B.C., wrote, “Nothing
happens at random, but everything
for a reason and by necessity.”
If everything has
to have a cause, this means that
every one of our decisions has to
have a cause. It doesn’t stop there
because if everything has a cause,
then the cause of every one of our
decisions must have a cause, and the
cause of that cause must have a
cause. You then get a chain of
cause and effect that spans back to
before we were born. Things that
are happening before we were born,
and before the planet was created,
determine what’s happening at this
exact moment, and what will happen
in the future.
How does all this
apply to the claim that some of our
decisions are freely made? To
answer a question with a question,
how could it be that some of our
decisions are subject to this law of
causality, and others aren’t?
That’s why I say that the notion of
varying degrees of free will is
absurd, incoherent, and logically
inconsistent.
Now let’s explore
the second claim, that part of every
decision we make is in our control,
and thus, freely willed. Imagine
yourself writing a report, raking
leaves, doing dishes, or whatever
you’re doing. There is something –
in this case, your unconscious –
that insists on both taking part in
your decision, and in the actual
doing. If that is the case, you
can’t rightfully say that either the
decision to do something, or the
doing of it, is the result of a free
will. Something that you can’t
control is insisting on
participating.
The unconscious
never sleeps. To the extent that it
is not making the decision
completely (it actually is, as we’re
just beginning to demonstrate in
neuroscience and psychology) the
unconscious is certainly taking
part. If we have to draw on our
unconscious for the concepts -- the
building blocks, the words, the
memories -- upon which we’re going
to make our decision, then obviously
that unconscious is going to, at the
very least, take part in every
decision we make.
You may want to
conclude that part of our decisions
is up to us, and part of them is up
to something else. However, the
part of any decision that was up to
us would have causes. It couldn’t
escape that law of causality that
governs everything. If we claim
that part of our decisions was up to
us, we confront the following kinds
of questions. What was the reason
for that decision? Why did we make
that decision? What caused us to
have that reason?
It’s not that we
can always know completely what the
causes are, especially once you go
back three or four steps in this
chain of cause and effect. We’re
usually just guessing at what the
causes are. We start out with the
fact that everything must have a
cause because things can’t happen
uncaused. Think about what it would
mean if some of our decisions were
uncaused, and not subject to this
law of causality that governs
everything. Clearly, if a decision
of ours is not caused – if it is
random or indeterminate – it can’t
have been the result of a free
will.
When we say free
will, what we mean is that our
decisions are be up to us, and we
can take pride in, and feel
accountable for, them. A free will
decision is presumably one for which
there would be our own autonomous
reasons. Asserting that we have a
free will is akin to asserting that
our will is free of causality, free
of any kind of reason, and free of
the self. It’s easy to see how the
term “free will” is incoherent, and
doesn’t really make sense.
Whether
philosophers, psychologists and
other thinkers make the assertion
that some of our decisions are
freely willed, or that some parts of
our decisions are freely willed,
because we have an unconscious, and
because our world works according to
cause and effect, these assertions
are simply mistaken.
Let’s say we
understand and accept this
inescapable truth that free will is
impossible. What does that mean to
our world? Many of us genuinely
understand the science and logic of
the conclusion that free will is
impossible. But, we’re sometimes
reluctant to accept it, in part
because we’re all, very ironically,
conditioned by the causal past to
believe we have a free will, and to
take pride in this notion. We’ve
been conditioned to not want to
relinquish this belief so easily.
Some of us are
reluctant to live our lives and
restructure our civilization
according to the truth of our causal
and unconscious human will. We
believe that if we all understood
that free will is an illusion, and
everything is truly fated – that
we’re instruments of God, doing the
will of God, or more secularly, that
we’re robots, or computers, doing
exactly what we’re programmed to do
– civilization would collapse
because many of us would say to
ourselves, “if I’m not morally
responsible for anything, then I can
do anything, and can’t justly be
held accountable.”
That’s really not
something we need to fear because
one of the ways nature has
conditioned us is that we are
hedonic creatures. We seek pleasure
and avoid pain. That is an
imperative that, incidentally,
controls every decision we make. A
second imperative we’re hard-wired
for is that, at the time we’re doing
anything, we consider it to be the
most moral of our available
choices. In hindsight, or to
others, it may clearly seem wrong.
Our moral imperative always compels
us to do the greater of two or more
goods, or the lesser of two or more
evils.
We as individuals
and we as a planet – would not allow
anarchy to reign just because we
understand that we humans do not
have a free will. For example,
let’s consider that everyone in our
family and everyone we know
completely understood that free will
is an illusion. Everything is a
movie and we’re all programmed.
We’ve obviously been programmed to
occasionally upset or hurt one
another – to say or do things that
are offensive, or aggressive, or
threatening, to each other. If we
really had a free will, we’d all be
perfect angels, and we wouldn’t be
aggressing against anyone. But to
the extent that reality, or fate, or
God, compels us to see free will as
an illusion, and understand that
everything is actually
predetermined, we wouldn’t spend our
time blaming each other. We would
begin to explore why fate is doing
this to us, understanding that our
blaming or aggression is really an
offense by fate against both the
blamer and the blamed.
Under the notion
of free will, we are all competing
with each other, and against each
other as adversaries. But when we
understand that free will is an
illusion – that everything is fated
– then all of the sudden our friends
and we are on the same side. We’re
no longer competitors; we’re
cooperators in trying to find an
answer to why fate is disturbing our
relations. If you want to look at
this from a theological standpoint,
there’s the idea of Satan, who is
responsible for messing things up on
the planet. From this perspective,
the notion that we humans have a
free will is probably one of his
prime strategies for advancing his
agenda. If Satan has everyone at
each other, accusing ourselves and
each other for things that we’re not
responsible, then we’re not going to
be as focused as we would otherwise
be on solving the issue at hand in
the best, and most intelligent, way.
Think for a
minute about how amazing it is that
our civilization – humankind – is so
completely confused about likely the
second most fundamental aspect of
being a human being, (the first
aspect being that we exist). This
second aspect is the matter of why
we do what we do. Who is all of
that that up to? For us to conclude
that it’s up to us rather than the
causal past, or God, or all of these
influences that come together
completely independent of our
control, is bewildering.
To the extent
that we see free will as an
illusion, I would hope that we can
create a much more intelligent
world. Consider how much harm our
world is subject to because we blame
each other and ourselves, and how
profoundly our world could change
through our understanding the true
nature of reality and human will.
It would be major. It would
arguably be the biggest change ever
in human history. We’ve had
democracy, and various religions,
but this evolution of our
consciousness would be much grander
and influential. It would be change
on a scale that humanity has never
before experienced.
Life is, and can
continue to be, wonderful with our
continuing to hold the belief that
we have a free will. But to the
extent that we understand that
everything is really a movie – that
what I’m saying right now, and what
you’re reading right now, and what
you did earlier today, and plan to
do tomorrow, and everything we ever
do is completely predetermined --
that understanding can make our
lives so much more wonderful, in the
most literal sense meaning full of
wonder.
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