#241: Final Thoughts on Free Won't

I have an ingrained objection to the claim that we don’t have free will. Maybe I don't have a choice in my objection because I have no free will. I guess that's what Sam would say.

Why am I so obstinate? Because in my experience, I feel I am freely willing myself to do stuff... every minute of every day. Yes, I understand that science says that's just my left brain trying to trick my consciousness into thinking that it's making the choices freely. But here's the thing. Science doesn't even know what consciousness is. So can any scientist really make a pronouncement about whether this unknown thing--the consciousness--is self-deterministic? Science agrees that something within us is making that decisions, and that we just cannot identify what the decider is. An unknowable entity Sam refers to as "the void." Or occasionally as the "puppet strings." But science doesn't identify who's on the other side of the strings. Or what in the void these random thoughts come from. And so, since science does not yet understand this part, it cannot conclude that we are not the ones in control.

Let's follow Sam's arguments, point-by-point:

1. You are a slave to environment and genes. A computer program that will always 100% be determined by them (or possibly also by something random, like a quantum probability) but never able to make a decision on your own. If somebody backed you up to exactly who you were at some previous point in your history, you would slavishly do and say exactly the same things that you did then.

Hey, here's a thought: just because science do not have a mathematics--YET--to describe a closed system that exerts self-determined choices, that does not mean that such a mathematics cannot exist. What would happen if, next week, someone were to discover a logical structure whereby the variables in a field get to choose what they do next? This might sound absurd, but if we can believe that crappy-ass theory called quantum mechanics, we ought to at least be open to the possibility of a "self-deterministic mechanics."

2. We don’t get to choose our heartbeats or how fast we metabolize food. That's a metaphor for how we have no control over which thoughts and impulses we act on.

Actually, the evidence that we don't have any control is not very convincing. Maybe I haven't heard about the best proof yet. I've heard about a few studies that were done where the scientists present a subject with different choices and ask him to pick one, but have predeterminedly rigged his ability to choose—via some trick like mood music or other environmental influence. They ask him to explain why he made his choice, and the subject’s left brain comes up with some BS answer, sometimes even a completely disprovable one. So the scientists conclude from this that our every action is determined by fixed factors like genes or environment, and our left brains simply go along making up stories about why we do what we do so as to provide us with the comfortable illusion that we have free will.

Anyway, just because it’s possible to manipulate a subject into picking one photograph over another without understanding why, it does not logically result that we have zero ability to control our choices. So I posit the existence of a possibility which Sam doesn't consider: that even if you, the listener, have some mysterious entity, the "void" that Sam refers to, which gives you a menu of options, there is still the "you" that Sam objects to, the "observer by the stream," who makes the choice.

3. Our morality improves if we stop believing in free will.

Obviously, this isn't a proof of anything, and he wasn't trying to use it as one. After all, if Sam would only believe in God, then he would get the happy vision of heaven. But that isn't a logical proof of God's existence.

Besides, it's possible to imagine a society which does not brutishly torture and hate criminals, but works on rehabilitating and helping them, without having to stop believing in free will. In fact, even this heathen recognizes that this is the essence of Christianity.

4. We are not the authors of our thoughts, but they simply arise within us.

Which is to say, he doesn’t know where they come from, and so he is prescribing them to some unknowable force, and postulating that this force has nothing to do with our conscious decision-making ability. So here I again push back: this kind of Aristotelian “guessing about how a system works when you don’t really know” is exactly the sort of behavior that scientists should eschew. It is nothing more than neurologist hubris.

5. There is no "observer by the stream of consciousness" based on meditation experience, since a meditator will observe thoughts arrive which are not of his/her making.

This is a ball of wax which I don’t want to get into here, so for now, all I'll do is re-phrase: is it an illusion to believe that a surfer has any control (free will) over her surfing, since the waves are not of her own making? Obviously, not. She chooses which wave to ride. She has some control over which way she rides it. Just so, her ability to choose which thought to act upon is there, even if she isn't in control of the generation of those thoughts.

Suppose you choose to think about flowers. It's your anniversary, and you’ve made a conscious choice: "think about flowers for my Honey." Sam may be right that you don't get to choose whether images of irises or Cala lilies appear in your mind next. But it is still true that you have made a larger choice of the activity in general, and that has controlled at least which types of images will come next. You didn't generate those waves, but you did choose to go surfing for flowers in the first place. Sam would only be correct that you have no free will to think any thoughts if you tried to think about flowers but the next thought that cames into your head was, say, Charles Murray.

6. “If your next thought is ‘what the hell is Sam talking about?’ what I am talking about is that you didn’t choose that next thought."

Ah-ha, Sam, but I would claim that we have exerted already our free will by choosing to listen to your question. And so, even if our specific reaction may not have been one we chose, the class of reactions that we had to pick from are a result of our conscious choice--our free will, choosing to continue to listen.

Of course, Sam might object that we are deluded if we think we have the choice to continue to listen to him--that is just an illusion and in reality some hidden thinker is making the choice for us. That our sneaky left brain is telling us sweet little lies and giving us the illusion that we have made the choice ourselves with our own free will.

His reason to think so is because he--and science in general--can't figure out who the "hidden thinker" could be. Since empirical science does not know how consciousness works, therefore it is an illusion. (Sorry if I'm repeating myself, but so much of this podcast really does boil down to this one--very weak--point.)

7. We experience the illusion of free will. We feel ourselves making choices and wrongly believe that we have authorship of them. We are not the observer standing by the stream of consciousness, because there is no observer, only the stream.

In our finite and dim understanding of the structure of the universe, we don't understand how it is possible for matter to have agency. We don’t know where consciousness comes from--we have not solved the hard problem. We don’t know why electrons can choose to interact before they are even created. Or how matter bends space-time. Or why it even exists at all. Pretty much all we know are a few simplistic mathematical models only invented in the last hundred years. So I'm not drinking this kool-aid here. If every possible response that I can think of to the next moment of my life feels like is within my power to choose, this overwhelming preponderance of evidence that I have free will trumps whatever mystical experience you had in yoga, or on quaaludes, or whatever, Sam-o.

8. Think of a movie, and observe that since your mind comes up with movies unbidden, this is evidence of the lack of free will.

In my surfer metaphor, we are out bobbing in the waves of consciousness, and the first wave we free-will choose to ride is whether to go along with his challenge and think of a movie at all. Maybe we'll be contrary and think of something else, instead, like a City. But okay, now we're on the movie wave he threw at us. And now we see that someone else--the Void? Or even Sam; it doesn't matter--has split our wave into two parts, a Chinatown part and an Alien part. So we choose. He then says that it isn't really us who chooses, because that fits his deterministic view of the universe.

But I say back that a choice was made, and he can't prove that it wasn't us that made it. Indeed, if you think about it, the argument that we don’t really make any choices of our own free will but instead merely adopt choices made by some kind of neurological "black box" is reminiscent of those kinds of spooky models of existence that aboriginal philosophers used to make about why volcanoes erupt or how the moon and the sun split up. And any self-respecting empiricist ought to try to avoid such "gremlins in the closet" pseudo-physics.

9. We didn't create ourselves.

Okay. But I don't see how this has any logical bearing on whether we have free will.

10. We don’t get to choose whether we're interested enough to learn Mandarin. Or collect rocks.

The fact that we exert the free will to not collect rocks is not an argument that we don’t have free will. If anything, it's exactly opposite: it is the very definition of free will. And Sam's demanding why we don't choose to be interested in Madarin? Interestingly, this is almost exactly a choice I did make, eight years ago, when I began to study Russian. Which I consider to be a triumph of my own free will.

11. Brain damage (Charles Whitman) can cause people to lose control.

This is not convincing either. The fact that it is harder to maintain free will in a damaged brain doesn't mean that undamaged brains aren't capable of exerting free will.

I'll skip the last third of the episode, on the moral implications of not believing in free will. It's not relevant to the question of whether free will exists.