EXPLORING THE ILLUSION OF FREE WILL 
 
 

George Ortega,
Producer

Nick Vale

Chandler Klebs

Nomi

Creating a world without blame and guilt

The world's first, and already successful*  initiative, including two TV shows, to popularize the refutation of free will 

*How it happened 

Our World's top four minds, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein each rejected the notion of a human free will.

John Searle, the13th ranked post-1900 philosopher, says that our world overcoming the free will illusion "would be a bigger revolution in our thinking than Einstein, or Copernicus, or Newton, or Galileo, or Darwin -- it would alter our whole conception of our relation with the universe." 

The Washington Post, The New York Times, Psychology Today, Los Angeles Times, The Huffington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, USA Today, The Telegraph, Time Magazine, Scientific American, NPR Radio, The Economist, and Science Magazine  all affirm that free will is an illusion.


DOWNLOADS:
PDF of EXPLORING THE ILLUSION OF FREE WILL, SECOND EDITION and PDF of FREE WILL - MOVING BEYOND THE ILLUSION: SCREENPLAY FOR A DOCUMENTARY BY George Ortega

 

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will is two TV shows - WHITE PLAINS NY TV and NYC LIVE CALL-IN TV,  several books - Mine and  Enel's,  and Chandler's one meetup - NYC, this website, Internet video and audio -  YOU TUBE  iTUNES AUDIO PODCAST  PUBLIC DOMAIN VIDEOS & MP3s, and a blog - EXOGENOUS AGENCY

 
Quick Links to the YouTube Episodes: 01-10  11-20  21-30  31-40  41-50  51-60  61-70  71-80  81-90 91-100  101-110  111-120  121-130  131-140  141-150  151-160  161-170  171-180  181-190  191-200  201-210  211-216
 

Quick Links to the 2013 Exploring the Illusion of Free Will, 2nd Edition Chapters: ( by titleIntro. to 2011 edition  Intro. to 2013 digital edition 1  (2 omitted)  3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   Epilogue  Books Refuting Free Will...

 

Home    Contact

 iTunes Audio Podcast
 Public Domain Video at Internet Archive
RSS  Mp3 Audio at Internet Archive

Episodes on YouTube
Full YOU TUBE Collection

 
Site Features
 

Free Will Refutations in Major Publications

 

Free Will Refuted in the Blogs

 

Free Will Refuted on YouTube

 

Recent books for the public and academia refuting free will

 

Edited and Revised Transcripts of the First Eighteen Episodes

 

Quotes Disaffirming Free Will and Affirming Determinism by the Famous

 

Absurd Free Will Defenses by Major Institutions and Publications Who Should Know Better

 

Claiming credit for public awareness that free will is an illusion

 
 

More Featured Episodes

10. Why Change as the basic Universal Process Makes Free Will Impossible

13. Overcoming Blame, Guilt, Envy and Arrogance by Overcoming the Illusion of Free Will

16. Overcoming the Illusion of Free Will as an Evolutionary Leap in Human Consciousness

17. Revitalizing Religion through Transcending the Illusion of Free Will

26. Because Essential Elements of Every Decision are Stored in Our Unconscious, Free Will is Impossible.

38. The Messenger and I Have Evolved Human Consciousness

50. Freud Popularized the Unconscious.  Ortega is Popularizing Unconscious Will

60. Ten Ways to Refute Free Will

 
 

Landmark Coverage Refuting Free Will

 

USA Today - "Why you don't really have free will by Jerry Coyne January 1, 2012

"The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion."


Time Magazine - "Think You're Operating on Free Will? Think Again" by Eben Harrell July 2, 2010

"In an intriguing review in the July 2 edition of the journal Science, published online Thursday, Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts of Utrecht University in the Netherlands lay out the mounting evidence of the power of what they term the 'unconscious will.'...John Bargh of Yale University, who 10 years ago predicted many of the findings discussed by Custers and Aarts in a paper entitled "The Unbearable Automaticity of Being," called the Science paper a "landmark — nothing like this has been in Science before."


The New York Times - "Your Move: The Maze of Free Will" by Galen Strawson July 22, 2010

"Some people think that quantum mechanics shows that determinism is false, and so holds out a hope that we can be ultimately responsible for what we do. But even if quantum mechanics had shown that determinism is false (it hasn’t), the question would remain: how can indeterminism, objective randomness, help in any way whatever to make you responsible for your actions? The answer to this question is easy. It can’t."

The Atlantic - "The Brain on Trial" by David Eagleman July/August 2011

"In modern science, it is difficult to find the gap into which to slip free will—the uncaused causer—because there seems to be no part of the machinery that does not follow in a causal relationship from the other parts."

The Telegraph - "Neuroscience, free will and determinism: 'I'm just a machine'" by Tom Chivers October 12, 2010

"The philosophical definition of free will uses the phrase 'could have done otherwise'... "As a neuroscientist, you've got to be a determinist. There are physical laws, which the electrical and chemical events in the brain obey. Under identical circumstances, you couldn't have done otherwise; there's no 'I' which can say 'I want to do otherwise'."


The Guardian - "Guilty but not responsible?" by Rosiland English May 29, 2012

"The discovery that humans possess a determined will has profound implications for moral responsibility. Indeed, Harris is even critical of the idea that free will is "intuitive": he says careful introspection can cast doubt on free will. In an earlier book on morality, Harris argues 'Thoughts simply arise in the brain. What else could they do? The truth about us is even stranger than we may suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion'"


Psychology Today - "Free Will Is an Illusion, So What?" by

If you think carefully about any decision you have made in the past, you will recognize that all of them were ultimately based on similar—genetic or social—inputs to which you had been exposed. And you will also discover that you had no control over these inputs, which means that you had no free will in taking the decisions you did.

Complete List

 
 


A brief history of determined vs. free will ideas

Cause and Effect – At about the 5th century BC, in his work On the Mind, the Greek Philosopher Leucippus penned the earliest known universal statement describing what we today understand as determinism, or the law of cause and effect

“Nothing happens at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity.”

Human Will – The concepts of will and free will are actually Christian in orgin. It was Saint Paul in his Letter to the Romans, which is dated at about 58 A.D., who first discovered this thing we call human will. He came to it by recognizing that he could not often do as much right as he wanted. Saint Paul wrote in Romans 7:15 that:

“I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I can’t.” I do what I don’t want to – what I hate.” (Translation – The Living Bible)

Free Will -- Nothing new was said on the matter for the next few hundred years until St. Augustine grappled with the concepts of evil and justice. Saint Augustine wrote in his book De Libero Arbitrio, 386-395 A.D., (translated as “On Free Will”)

“Evil deeds are punished by the justice of God. They would not be punished justly if they had not been performed voluntarily.”

The problem he saw was that if human beings do not have a free will, it would be unfair for God to arbitrarily reward or punish us. St. Augustine concluded that God could not be unfair, and so he created the concept of a human free will, whereby we earn our reward or punishment by what we freely do.

Scientific concepts relating to the determined will vs. free will question

Classical Mechanics -- In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton publishes his “Laws of Motions” that mathematically describes the physical universe as acting in a mechanistic manner according to the principle of cause and effect.

Classical Mechanics is a completely deterministic theory

Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle -- In 1925 Warner Heisenberg describes mathematically that…

We can measure the position of a particle or the momentum of a particle (momentum meaning its direction and velocity), but we cannot simultaneously measure the position and momentum of a particle.

Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics -- Niels Bohr and others make the following assertions;

1) Particles do not have a simultaneous position and momentum.

2) Elementary particles behave indeterministically, and are not subject to the principle of cause and effect.

Believers in free will saw the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as providing a possibility for free will to exist. They asserted that if elementary particles behave indeterministically, they are not subject to the principle of cause and effect that prohibits free will.

But, as noted above, it eventually became apparent that indeterminism also prohibits free will.

 

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will, 2nd Edition Chapters

Intro. to the 2011 1st. edition 

Intro. to the 2013 2nd. edition (digital version)

1 How I came to see my causal will

2 Proving causal will in real time (omitted)

3 Morality within a causal will perspective

4 What it all means

5 We Do Not "Experience" Free Will

6 How the Hedonic Imperative Makes Free Will Impossible

7 How the Unsolicited Participation of the Unconscious Makes Free Will Impossible

8 Asking When a Child Gains it Illuminates the Incoherence of the Concept "Free Will"

9 Overcoming our Reluctance to Overcome the Illusion of Free Will

10 Why Change as the Basic Universal Process Makes Free Will Impossible

11 The Absurdity of Varying Degrees of Free Will

12 Why the Concept of Free Will is Incoherent

13 Overcoming Blame, Guilt, Envy and Arrogance by Overcoming the Illusion of Free Will

14 Why Both Causality and Randomness Make Free Will Impossible

15 Why Frankfurt's “Second Order Desires” Do Not Allow for a Free Will

16 Overcoming the Illusion of Free Will as an Evolutionary Leap in Human Consciousness

17 Revitalizing Religion through Transcending the Illusion of Free Will

18 Why Humans Cannot Circumvent Natural Law to Gain a Free Wil
l

Epilogue: How Refuting Free Will Went From  Academia to the Public Spotlight – with hyperlinked  articles in major publications – 2004-2012

Books Refuting Free Will and  Fundamental Moral Responsibility
 

 

YouTube Collection



Site Map

 

Chapters of the 2013 Exploring the Illusion of Free Will, Second Edition

 

Chapter 5.  We Do Not "Experience" Free Will

The myth, or illusion, that we have the ability to choose our thoughts and feelings, and decide what we want, appears to have been prevalent at least from the beginning of civilization. We tend to hold each other and ourselves responsible for what we do. When we do that, it causes harm. When we assume or attribute responsibility, we often conclude that if we’ve done something wrong, we deserve to be punished. So, we punish each other and ourselves. When we do wrong, we often feel the pain of guilt. Aside from that, considering all of the evidence that demonstrates that we don’t have a free will, for our entire civilization to be structured on the premise that we do is bewildering.

The most fundamental reason people say they have a free will seems to be that they claim to experience every thought they have as being fundamentally up to them. As we’ll see, that is not actually the case. Before we get into that, I want to briefly define what people generally mean when they say they have a free will. Free will is generally accepted to mean that we can decide whatever we want regardless of our basic character, our personality, our unconscious, what we’ve learned or haven’t learned, our genetic makeup, and so many other factors that actually combine to compel our every thought, feeling and action. The reality is that we human beings have causal wills. We have a will, in the sense that we make decisions, but all of these decisions are caused by factors outside of our control. Causality means that everything happens according to the principle of cause and effect. It means that everything that happens, including our every thought, feeing and action, has a cause. And that cause has a cause, because everything must have a cause. Events do not happen in the universe that are not caused. The universe is causal, so our human will must be causal.

Consider that we experience the world as flat. We do not experience our world as an orb, which it is. That a flat world is an illusion we’ve understood at least since the time of Columbus in 1492. But that illusion doesn’t make much of a difference, unless we want to travel around the globe, or to the Moon and back. That kind of illusion does not impact our everyday life, but the illusion of free will impacts it profoundly. When people say they experience a free will, what they really mean is that they experience a will. Let’s distinguish between the two. The will is synonymous with volition, or the act of choosing or deciding. In a certain sense, we decide all of the time. I decided to write this book. You’ve decided to read it. But that is not what people claim. People claim that these decisions are free from the influence of the causal past, and how their parents raised them, and their desires, etc. For example, if a person is given a choice between an apple and a corn muffin, their choice is going to be determined to a great extent by which they prefer, or which tastes better to them. But, we don’t get to choose our taste. There are many ways of describing the different factors that make free will impossible. Taste, or our preferences for different foods, is one.

Not everyone throughout history believed in free will. At 7:15 in a letter to the Romans dated about 58 A.D., Paul writes, “I don’t understand myself at all, for I really want to do what is right, but I can’t.” I do what I don’t want to – what I hate.” He is actually describing what this book is about. If we had a free will, then every act would be completely up to us. Every moral decision would be completely up to us. If Paul had a free will, he could have been completely good, and never transgress his morality. He realizes he doesn’t, and brings up the issue of human will in Christianity. It’s not until about 380 A.D. when Augustine is grappling with the question of evil and punishment that he must have thought to himself “Wait a minute. If God is all-good, then we can’t blame God.” Augustine wrote a book called De Libero Arbitrio, which is Latin for “On Free Will.” He apparently coined the term free will. So, if we do something wrong, it must be our fault. This is interesting, because I was doing some research on good and evil within the Judeo-Christian context, and in Isaiah 45:7, God is quoted as saying “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” Before Augustine, people certainly did hold each other responsible, so they did seem to attribute free will to each other, but there was no term or doctrine describing this perspective. Again, Leucippus in the 5th century B.C. wrote the first statement on causality, the logical extension of which makes free will impossible. He wrote, “Nothing happens at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity.” If everything happens for a reason, that of course makes free will impossible.

Augustine claims that what we do is completely up to us, because God granted us a free will, however when you think about it from a theological standpoint, there is a contradiction. On the one hand, the standard teaching is that God is all-powerful, and that nothing happens without God wanting it to happen. On the other hand, we have the idea that God is ceding his power by granting human beings a free will. The logic there is clearly inconsistent. The concept of an all-powerful God is also somewhat incoherent. There is a question that illuminates this logical conflict – If God is all-powerful, can s/he create a boulder so large that even s/he can’t lift it? If you think about that, you will very quickly realize that the idea of an all-powerful God is incoherent. You might ask yourself, “Can God cease to exist? Can s/he just stop being God?” I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. Augustine came up with his personal solution to blaming God for the evil in this world. This is curious also because we’re taught in Judaism, and Christianity and other religions that when events go well, we should thank God. If something goes right, it is God’s doing, and we should feel grateful. But, when something goes wrong, it’s our fault. The inconsistency here could not be clearer.

The basic Judeo-Christian-Islamic teaching is that holding certain doctrines and beliefs will vastly improve your likelihood of spending the rest of eternity in Heaven than holding opposing doctrines and beliefs. For example, if you don’t believe that there is a God, that disbelief would put you at risk of eternal damnation. According to some, your not believing in free will would also put you at risk. This probably explains much of why people say to themselves “of course I experience free will.” Anyone who really delves into the question would more likely than not finally realize otherwise. It may be because of this religious insistence on holding certain beliefs and rejecting others that we haven’t explored the matter of human will as comprehensively as we could.

Let’s explore in a bit more detail why free will is not what we experience when we make decisions. After this taping, I plan to take a break before doing another taping this afternoon. I could choose to go to the nearby White Plains Library to browse through some art books. I could also choose to go to the nearby Galleria Mall and have a cup of coffee, but let’s say I opt for the library. If I were to claim that that was a free choice, I would be claiming that I made that choice regardless of, for example, the strongest motivation acting upon me at that given time. Part of me would like to go to the Galleria for a cup of coffee, and just hang out with people there. Part of me would like to browse through art books. I’ve been going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City recently – the amazing Egyptian collection – which may explain why this is so. My decision is not free of that. I am faced with two competing motivations – go to the mall or to the Library. So, what is going to happen? The stronger of those two motives is going to win out. I’ve actually already made the decision, but between now and then I could change my mind. I could at the last minute say “well, I would really rather be around people, and there are probably not many people at the library.” I could end up going to the mall for coffee. But if I were to do that, it would be because I would be feeling that prospect as the stronger of the two motives.

We don’t really experience a free will. We experience a will. I experience the will, the decision, the volition, to go to either the library or the mall, but I don’t experience this will free of factors that compel it. Why might I have the motivation to go to the library and browse through books? Years ago, in college, I was an art major, and I have an appreciation of art. But we don’t get to choose what we appreciate, or desire to do. For example, being naturally good at mathematics, or art, or music, or whatever, is not something we get to freely choose. We come into this world with a certain personality, and our personalities are, in fact, about fifty percent genetic. Naturally, if our personality is half due to our heredity, and our genes are certainly not something we can freely control, and the other half of our personality is due to environmental factors like how we were raised, and where we were raised, and the kinds of unique experiences we’ve had in our lives, it’s easy to understand that our human will is not free of those compulsions. When we make a decision, we’re not “experiencing” that our decision was free of all of those factors. We’re just experiencing a decision. If we took the time to ask ourselves, “Why did I decide this? What motivated me? What compelled me to decide this as opposed to that?” then we would realize that the decision was not free from certain factors that lie beyond our control. To say that we experience free will is to say that we experience a will that is free of even causality, or this process of cause and effect that governs everything.

All you have to do is acknowledge to yourself that if you made a decision, there must have been a cause for that decision – there may be one or several, depending on how you are defining cause. Every event must have a cause. We know this from science and experience. We know that nothing happens that is not caused. If there is a cause for our decision, then there is a cause for that cause, and there is a cause for that cause, and a cause for that cause. We sometimes refer to causality as cause and effect – the chain of cause and effect. So, if we took the time to investigate the reasons or causes for the decisions we make, we would see that they are subject to this chain of cause and effect. It is important to recognize that a cause can never come after an event, so each cause must always precede its effect. If you have a chain of causes going further and further back into the past, ultimately it is going to stretch back to before we were born. That alone tells you that our decisions are not free. We might want to explore the reasons for our decisions. I decided to go to the library because I’ve been going to the Met, and have been amazed by the Egyptian exhibit there. But why did that exhibit amaze me? It might be because I have some experience in art. Was that experience free from causality, or reasons? No.

Keep in mind that we’re actually just guessing about all of these causes. We’re trying to figure out why we did what we did, and we may or may not correctly identify its true cause or causes. But that there always is a cause is certain. Sometimes we’ll get to the point where we must admit that we don’t know why we feel a certain way. For example, I don’t know why I’m so awed by Egyptian art, and find it so beautiful. If we don’t know what causes us to make the decisions we make, certainly we are not experiencing those decisions as having been freely made. By this reasoning, we can understand that 1) we don’t have a free will and 2) we don’t even experience our will as free. The notion that we obviously “experience” a free will, upon even a cursory exploration, turns out to be false. We don’t experience a free will, we experience a will, and there is a world of difference between the two. Why is this so important? Someone might say that it’s fine that we don’t have a free will, but wonder how knowing that changes anything. Think about it. If we don’t have a free will, every single decision we make is compelled by causes that we’re not in control of. Everything that any of us thinks and does, and everything that happens – because causality is not limited just to human will; it applies to the entire universe – is completely determined by the causal past. Some people say that particle behavior at the quantum level is not determined, but that is actually a false interpretation of quantum mechanics. Particle behavior at the quantum level is actually entirely causal. There are certainly some actions going on at that scale that we don’t understand. For example, we can’t use the standard causality model of Newtonian, or classical, physics to make predictions at the quantum level, so we rely on probabilities. Nonetheless, the essential nature of matter is causal. The universe is causal. If it wasn’t, and if our wills were not causal, how would that possibly work, and what would that even mean? How could anything happen that is not caused? The concept of randomness in the strongest sense of events happening without anything having caused them to happen is simply incoherent.

The world is like a movie. Actors are generally given some leeway in interpreting their characters. We are like actors who don’t even get to interpret our roles. It is so amazing, and that’s one of the reasons I wrote this book. It is also amazing that the universe, via the causal past, has compelled us to get the second most fundamental aspect of human nature completely wrong. Nature has done this to us before in certain ways, like with the illusions that the world is flat, and that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Another illusion is that our planet is completely still and motionless. The reality, however, is that we’re hurtling around the Sun at over 60,000 miles per hour. Nature, or God, or whatever you want to call the universe or reality, apparently likes to have fun with us in this way. This illusion of free will is a natural illusion that has led us to get the fundamental characteristic of human will completely wrong. There is more and more evidence coming out that what we think we decide freely with our conscious mind is actually being decided at the level of our unconscious. This is becoming a hot research topic in psychology and neuroscience. My prediction is that as we understand that our wills are not free, we will be much more understanding toward ourselves and each other when we invariably do wrong.

Next chapter

 

List of Chapters

 
Intro. to 2011 edition  Intro. to 2013 digital edition 1  (2 omitted)  3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   Epilogue  Books Refuting Free Will...


Top