The Problem of Free Will

[NOTE: This essay is overdue for a hearty edit, so in the meantime I recommend you check out “Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will” instead.]

Knowledge can only be gained by first admitting ignorance. The human race has been reluctant to acknowledge uncertainty, opting instead for shallow answers that preclude serious investigation about our lives and the world around us. Such stubborn certitude blinds us to fundamental truths while allowing firm conviction in judgments of how the world is or ought to be. This trend is evident in our historical views toward most natural phenomena – such as diseases, crop death, and weather – which were explained as being caused by a deity as judgment for poor behaviour. Secular society now recognizes the epistemological problems associated with attributing causation to an omnipotent God. We also realize that effective inquiry requires a suspension of bias-inducing judgments. However, because a belief in free will pervades society we fail to apply this rational attitude to our dealings with members of our own species. Assigning causality to God, feeling justified in our judgments, and washing our hands of understanding is no longer fashionable. A belief in free will grants humans God-like powers of causation, allows us to justify (im)moral judgments against individuals, and impacts our understanding of the true causes behind people’s actions.

Free will does not exist. Our brains are complexly assembled matter entirely within the web of causation that describes the universe. Every action or thought is the result of a brain-state, which is dependent upon a prior brain-state. It is impossible to act independently of a previous state of the universe, which includes our brains. We do not have unconstrained agency. Convoluted logical arguments have been presented to legitimize the idea of free will, and the majority of people become disgusted at the suggestion that we don’t have it. But close inspection of one’s subjective experience renders the feeling of free will a nullity. Pay attention to your thoughts and actions: they just happen. There is no warning or indicator of what will arise before a thought or action bubbles up out of the void of the subconscious. Once a thought or action has arisen in consciousness, though, we claim ownership and falsely feel that all of our thoughts and actions are something that our conscious selves have willed into being. By believing in free will, we unquestioningly adopt the absurd tenet that we can decide to decide upon something before the decision takes place. Watts stated it more eloquently in The Way of Zen when he said, “We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide – an infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide”.

We closely identify with the voice in our heads, and feel that we consciously construct our mental verbalizations. In fact, most people feel like they are identical to the voice in their head. But the language in which we speak and think has entered our brains from the outside world. The core of what most people consider to be “themselves” has been absorbed over a lifetime, and the structure of this acquired technology is a rigid framework for every verbal thought. How could an externally produced technology be the core of who you are? We cannot will our brains to be quiet (absent consistent meditation practice to alter deeper brain structure). Wouldn’t you think that if you precisely controlled the intricate language-generating structure at the heart of your being, you should be able to shut it off at will? Like every process in the universe, neural firings in brains are a process that just happens without needing a controller (and the feeling of being a controller is something that is produced by the process of neurons firing). A simple experiment demonstrates how the firing of your brain is fully within the chain of causality: think of anything, then think a thought that is completely unrelated without any intervening related thoughts pervading the ‘mental space’ between thoughts. For example: think of a fork, then think of a space colony on Mars, but do not think any fork-related thoughts between the thought of the fork and the Mars colony (and for this to work you must do it in ‘real time’; ie. you cannot pre-decide the two thoughts and just think them in quick succession). This task is difficult to perform (maybe impossible) because our brains are arranged such that categories are contained within sets of closely arranged neural circuits. By activating portions of a specific set of neurons, then trying to leap over to an ‘unrelated’ set, ‘related’ neurons inevitably become activated in the process. Our immaterial mental phenomena do not exist outside the laws of cause and effect that describe the material world. To anyone who counters with the banal objection, “I can demonstrate free will by lifting my arm or doing a backwards somersault right now!”, the thought of performing such an action (and why not a high kick instead?) would not have occurred had it not been caused it to arise in your mind through external influence by suggestion.

With an increased understanding of the brain, knowledge of neuroscience and related fields will make belief in free will more difficult. That said, science cannot actually prove that something doesn’t exist, so giving up belief in free will shall depend upon admitting the incoherence of the idea. Rejecting belief in free will parallels rejection of religious belief; science cannot disprove religion so we must recognize its logical failings which become more pronounced the more we learn. Secular society no longer believes that evil spirits or temptation by the devil control bad behaviour, but when thinking about human agency we are still gripped by the doctrine of the soul. We view our conscious selves as the ‘first cause’ of our actions, despite the fact that the only true first cause was the start of the universe (to the best of human knowledge). By imagining that thoughts and actions may take place outside of physical law, our rationalist worldview falls back upon an irrational stopgap to explain human behaviour. We must not be tempted to conceptually excise human agency from the environment in which it arises. In so doing, we shut the door to genuinely understanding the human world.

Time has not been kind to the idea that humans exist on some separate and privileged plane of existence. Perhaps we’ve had a tendency to feel this way because our attention can only focus on a limited number of variables, and because our brains devote so much processing power to facial recognition, social cueing and the like, we think of humans while ignoring the permeating background environment. It is strange that people resist the idea of ourselves as ‘something the universe does’. To be solely an expression of the cosmos is a gorgeous concept. Being something the universe does, rather than a separate agent, does not lessen any traditional sources of wellbeing. Feelings of ecstasy are just as accessible. In fact, the etymological roots of the word ‘ecstasy’ come from the Greek ekstasis, meaning to stand outside oneself. When ecstatic, we are able to forget about ourselves and everything seems to flow effortlessly. When self-conscious, we have a strong sense of agency that comes paired with increased anxiety. If anything, the basic truth that we are not free agents should lessen our own neuroses that result from the false sense of total importance imparted on everything we do. Realizing that our conscious selves are not the source of our faults still allows for learning and behavioural modifications, but without the incessant crippling blame we often thrust upon ourselves.

It is appreciated that on a general level people’s environments shape their behaviour. Cultural norms, religious views, language and political ideas are undeniably distributed among demographically identifiable trends. However, when dealing with specific actions we imagine that people can operate against the grain of environmental factors (note that by environmental factors I’m including genetics and brain structure, which are environmentally determined over long timescales). Scrutiny makes it clear that specific intent cannot operate outside of the environment from which it emerges. The intent to perform an action is dependent upon acquired knowledge and past experiences that are collected within the organization of our brains. Take an action as simple as walking – had you not spent many months learning how to walk (and building up intricate neural connections and muscle memory in the process), you would not form the intent to walk on a regular basis. The fact that intent can manifest itself in an infinite number of scenarios involving humans is a testament to the complexity of the brain and environmental interactions, rather than evidence of unconstrained agency. We must not mistake our inability to understand complexity for the impossible power of free will.

The absence of free will is acknowledged with people suffering from mental disorders, brain injury, or psychological trauma. When a person with an obvious mental deficit commits a crime, some level of legal exoneration exists to account for the lack of freedom experienced. We separate our ideas of mental function into binaries of “normal” or “abnormal”, and connote the former with free will. Such an overly simplistic reduction fails to account for the complexity of the brain, which exists on a continuum (rather than in binary). Nobody on the continuum has free will. No one is “normal”. Everyone is “abnormal” in multiple ways. Society conceptualizes a form of normal behaviour, and when people are constrained by past conditioning, legal constraints, and social pressure, such that they fall in line with our ideas of normal, we consider them to be in possession of free will. This is insane. Yesterday I walked by a man happily spastically dancing on the streets of downtown Vancouver. He clearly has a mental problem, and would be regarded as having less free will than I do by the majority of people. However, I wish I could be happy to dance down the street. I wish everyone could be happy to dance down the street. But because my will is constrained by factors beyond my control, I am unable to dance on a public street with any semblance of enjoyment. And although I may be making it seem like mental problems grant more free will than mental ‘normalcy’, the dancing man’s uncontrolled impulses arise in his conscious brain without his control just as my inability to enjoy public dancing arises in my conscious mind even when I wish (ie. will that) it wouldn’t.

Our thoughts allow us to imagine scenarios that don’t exist given the current organization of the universe. We often imagine that our agency is less constrained than it really is by projecting ourselves into such fantasies. When envisioning hypothetical scenarios, we neglect the power that our subconscious has over our behaviour (ie. what is possible given the current state of the universe, including the structure of our brains). As a result, we feel that we could act in a variety of ways that we actually couldn’t, hallucinate that we choose not to act in those ways, and attribute it to our own volition. I hope that a few examples will make this clear.

I can imagine myself performing the guitar solo in Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd while driving my car, but because I have knowledge of how poor my guitar playing actually is, I am aware that I do not have the requisite neural connections or muscle memory for such a feat, and the thought remains an obvious fantasy. My subconscious will not magically grant me David-Gilmour like abilities without many hours of practice to change the composition of my brain (ie. alter the complex state of the universe located between my ears). I do not pretend that I choose not to play guitar well, because experience has proven that I can’t. While air-guitaring in my car like an idiot, I might imagine myself crashing my car into oncoming traffic, killing myself and others in the process. But because I remain between the lines, I falsely believe that the decision not to crash my car demonstrates my free will. Seriously think about this. I am almost certainly not free to decide to crash my car, and act upon that decision. The brain is hard-wired for survival. When faced with true danger humans enter the worst imaginable states of anxiety that they would do almost anything to escape. Unless you are in a severely depressed or impaired mental state (ie. the organization of your brain is different, so allows for different actions), it is close to impossible that you could knowingly take your own life.When I try playing guitar, and fail, I understand that my failing in that instance is not a freely made choice. How, then, could I believe that I’m free to crash my car in any moment when I cannot even try to do so? Every action that we can perform is constrained by the structure of our brains. In fact, because every thought is also a product of brain function, even every thought is constrained by our present neural arrangement.

The actions that we perform do not align with our thoughts about what actions we believe to be possible. Concepts often fail to adequately map out reality, and hanging on to belief in free will allows us to operate with false perceptions of agency and possible behaviour. We cannot draw firm conclusions about behavioural boundaries merely by thinking about them. The thought of behaviour is different than behaviour itself. While I can imagine a line between what I would or would not do, in reality that line almost surely differs from where I imagine it to be. Because I cannot consciously imagine where my behavioural cut-off exists, how can I consciously choose to behave a certain way? Behaviour – like everything in the universe – is something that just happens. Behavioural boundaries are determined by the structure of our brains, which are a result of our environment. I like to think of myself as acting (reasonably) appropriately in most situations. However, what I consider to be appropriate is a result of what I’ve learned and absorbed through my life. Different people have different environmental backgrounds, so just because you can imagine a scenario in which a person acted differently does not actually mean they could have. Because behaviour ‘just happens’ from our subconscious – and note that even deliberation must originate subconsciously, so imagining that someone should have deliberated more before acting is also imagining a state of the universe that did not and could not have existed in that specific instant – we do not consciously decide our behavioural boundaries.

Because we don’t have full conscious control over our behaviour, we don’t consciously control what urges we do or don’t experience. Most people occasionally find themselves taken with sexual urges. Such urges can be exceedingly persistent, to the point where people feel the need to act on them. People do not choose to have these urges. They just happen. The majority of us are fortunate that our most extreme urges do not involve harming others. But not experiencing harmful urges is not of our own accord. The absence of pernicious urges is just as uncontrollable to our conscious selves as the urges that we do experience. Yet we somehow feel justified in blaming others for experiencing urges over which they have no control. As Andrew Solomon stated in Far From the Tree, humans have an illogical tendency to regard themselves as morally superior when not taking part in behaviour for which they never felt a compulsion in the first place. Foisting opprobrium upon others over feelings of moral indignation only makes sense where it may lead to beneficial changes in people’s behaviour. A belief in free will legitimates sanctioning people’s behaviour without regard to the resulting utility, because by believing that people were free to act differently at any given moment we believe that people are inherently deserving of blame for having chosen to act or not act in a certain way.

A good justice system should emphasize deterrence against harmful activities, safety of the public from harm, and rehabilitation of offenders. Our justice system pursues these goals to varying degrees, but falls back on the idea that punishment as retribution is justifiable because people could have – and should have – acted differently. This faulty logic facilitates great suffering in the world through the eager infliction of punishment (too often regardless of any utility), which only perpetuates more harm in the world. We know that lab animals develop poor mental health and anti-social tendencies when repeatedly subjected to physical harm or seriously deprived environments. We know that harsh traditional parenting attitudes (as epitomized in Proverbs 13:24: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son; but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes”) are not conducive to the flourishing of children. Why, then, should we think that subjecting criminals (or even those whose behaviour is just ‘morally’ – not legally – wrong) to harsh treatment will lead to behavioural reform? [Side note: At this point in time, our knowledge of the brain and human behaviour is still in its infancy. Unfortunately punishment still has to be used to some degree because of our inability to adequately rehabilitate individuals or assess the danger of recidivism. Future knowledge will better position us to rehabilitate, deter, and assess the risk posed by offenders. In the meantime, we would do well to realize that belief in free will impedes progress towards that future state. Although we can’t yet see the full picture behind people’s actions, free will is clearly not even in the frame.]

Humans experience some level of emotional satisfaction when people get their ‘just desserts’. This emotion/desire must have deep evolutionary roots. Because killing or exiling wrongdoers would have ensured the proper functioning of ancestral tribes and societies, selection pressures likely favoured an emotional response that unthinkingly condoned such acts. Just because emotions are natural, though, does not mean that they are morally sound. Modern society has required us to shed and repress a number of our more primal natural tendencies in favour of well thought-out modes of operation. We must attempt to bypass our visceral craving for punishment in response to disagreeable behaviour, so that we can more objectively analyze situations and respond with utilitarian solutions (instead of our current methods which are largely exacerbatory). Emotions are so deeply ingrained into humanness that hoping to nullify them is unrealistic. With sufficient awareness, though, it is possible to view our feelings of hatred and desire for what they are: yet another mental phenomenon, the arising of which lies outside of the control of any conscious self, but the experience of which need not determine subsequent behaviour.

I should make clear that I do not advocate abandoning judgments of what is good or bad. Such judgments are necessary. What I am advocating is abandoning judgments of whether a person is intrinsically good or bad, and whether they are deserving of moral blame. We must look to the effect of their actions on the world, and respond appropriately not on the basis of emotion, but on the results of open inquiry. A couple of analogies help clarify this distinction.

Nuclear technology is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It can be used as a weapon, or as a near-endless source of power. The former use is generally thought of as bad, and the latter good (notwithstanding issues to do with radioactive byproducts). We can make both of these judgments without forming a judgment about the intrinsic moral value of nuclear technology, which, when viewed on its own, is neither good nor bad.

Few educated people alive today would morally blame a natural disaster for havoc wreaked, even though the effects of natural disasters are bad. Natural disasters can devastate populations, but rather than blame the disaster, we apply our knowledge to repair the damage and take steps to ensure that damage is lessened in the future. Forming a moral judgment about a natural disaster is useless. If anything, moral judgments lessen our ability to think rationally by activating emotional neural networks that occlude our logical abilities. When a person commits a wrong we should view it as more akin to an exceedingly complex natural disaster than as actions of a free agent (after all, what are humans if not natural processes?).

Our species has a habit of latching on to premature answers. We have built our notions of moral responsibility upon a non-existent foundation. Free will allows us to feign knowledge when we are actually largely ignorant of the causes behind people’s actions. No good comes from our belief in free will, just as no good came from believing the Earth was flat or the centre of the universe. Our illusions must be dispelled, as they mask genuine knowledge and understanding, hindering well-being in the process. To quote Stephen Jay Gould, “Wonder and knowledge are both to be cherished. Shall we appreciate any less the beauty of nature because its harmony is unplanned? And shall the potential of mind cease to inspire our awe and fear because several billion neurons reside in our skulls?”

*Note: After writing this essay I read The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker and realize that my emphasis on language as an externally produced technology is somewhat misguided. If children are immersed in incomplete versions of languages (say, if their parents spoke a 2nd language extremely poorly – known as pidgins), they develop the incomplete languages into something resembling a grammatically correct language even when not taught grammatical rules (see creoles). Even though the brain seems to have intrinsic language generating abilities, I still think that identifying ourselves with our thoughts is misguided, and I will explain why this is so in a future essay on the self.