The topic of free will has puzzled me for a long time. Probably because I have felt responsible for things in my life that have happened out of my control. The big kicker would probably be depression. When you're in a depressive state, you act and think differently than you'd like to, and it is largely out of your control. But those around you may (and for your own benefit) think you are choosing to be the way you are. Here I would like to outline what free will is, what it isn't, and some of the arguments for and against it.
Free will is the sense that you author your own thoughts and actions independently of causes that are out of your control. It's the ability to choose outside the realm of cause and effect. It's opposite, determinism, holds that every thought and action we have has been determined by previous causes, and that we are not separate from or independent of that system of cause and effect. Mind body dualism and monism (the brain and consciousness are the same) applies here. Because, if we have a soul (or consciousness) which is independent of cause and effect, it can author of itself our destinys. But the more seated we are in our brains, the more deterministic our lives look. Our brains are records of our experiences, and they may work by acting on those experiences in a determinable way to deal with new experiences. The degrees of freedom we experience are cut short. However, It's my two sense that consciousness is much more independent and powerful in shaping our perceptions, thoughts, and actions than many determinists believe.
Like I said, I became interested in the importance of free will because I felt much of my life was out of my control. Even core parts of me seemed to be the effect of other causes. For example, my personality has been shaped by my parents, and my temperament is largely genetically determined. I've been successful at some jobs, and not in others. Leaving one of my jobs was not an easy “decision”. I held on and did everything I could to be successful. In the end, I fell into depression from exhaustion. There was nothing (it seemed) I could do to change myself. My experience has shown me there is much that is out of our control. And perhaps, much that is in our control. How I judge myself and navigate the world has a lot to do with how much control I have over the situation, and whether or not the causes and effects work out so that I fit the pathway through life that I want to take. You can't argue with fate. But maybe you can wrestle with God.
It makes sense from a scientific perspective, that everything is cause and effect. This is based on the supposition that we can conceptually connect the dots between events. The rule in this system of thought is, “Everything must have a cause”. It's based on the conceptual, and associations between events. It's not really embodied in experience, other than in those with experience in meditation, or at extreme times in one's life where one's ego is overpowered.
What does Sam Harris have to say?
Culture seems dependent on us being conscious agents capable of free choice. Moral responsibility applies here. Free will means you were free to behave differently than you did in the past. That you could have chosen to be someone else. In other words, the buck stops here. But the buck never stops. All is cause and effect. Or chance. Or a combination of both. None of these give us free will. It's all neurophysiology. Experiences. Genes. Bad childhoods. Did a psychopath commit his crime of his own free will? Did he choose to have the thought to kill someone? Did he consciously will himself to feel like doing it? If I were to trade places with him, atom for atom, I would be him. We can't take credit for not having the souls of psychopaths. No one picks their parents. No one picks the life influences that shape your nervous system. A brain tumor in the prefrontal cortex may cause someone to be a killer. If we fully understood the neurophysiology of a murder's brain, that would be as causational as the brain tumor. If this is true, we would treat people differently.
There may not even be a subjective sense of free will. If you pay attention, you will notice you don't think up your next thought. They just happen. It's a voice in your head that just says things. Reading this, you probably have thoughts emerging in your consciousness that are competing with you reading. Where did they come from? Physiologists can use an fMRI to see the brain light up before the person decides to do something, like deciding to press a button to the left or right.
Let's do an exercise to show how arbitrary our choices really are. Think of a city. STOP. Which one comes to mind? Pick one of the many that come up. Pay attention to the conscious process of doing it. Once you have a city. Did you feel like you had free will? Did Kiro come up? Did you have the free will to choose Kiro? It just wasn't in the cards. If you chose New York over Paris. Perhaps you chose it because you went there recently. The cities that come to mind just come to mind. You don't think them before they pop into your head. That wasn't totally free will. If you don't know what your soul is going to do next, it means you don't have control over your soul.
The only way to defend free will is compatiblism. A puppet is free as long as it loves its strings... If your body stopped producing blood, would you be held responsible for it? Why with depression? The choice that you make will be brought out of a wilderness of causes that you can't see or understand. You didn't chose to be born. You didn't chose to build your brain the way it is. You can blame your parents.
But as an open system, the self can be open to all kinds of causes. You are discovering what your life is in each moment. We can chose. And it matters. We just can't chose not to chose. We have to go with it. Free will or not? When you feel like you have free will, what you really mean is: “I'm not sure why I did that, but I don't mind that I did”. You didn't pick your parents, genes, or the interactions you had with people and how they effected you. Right and wrong and good and evil may be threatened by determinism. Free will is the backbone of our legal system. People as neuronal weather patterns. Would that work? Maybe. People can be treated like dangerous bears. We don't blame bears for their free will. But we still deal with them as safety hazards to the general public.
On the side of free will, why would we feel like we have free will if we didn't evolve to have it. If you believe in God, It is the cause of the uncaused. There's an interesting idea in Christianity of mankind being made in God's image. The thing is, we don't know what that means. We don't know what God is. Perhaps, like the big bang, our free will is a creative act that is independent of our known laws of the universe. Maybe cause and effect breaks down, at the level of consciousness (which we don't understand well) allowing for some new property to emerge. The property of self authored thought and action.
What does Jordan Peterson have to say?
We don't have infinite free will. Our choices are constrained. Free will is like playing a game. Say chess. You're constrained, and there are rules, but it allows you to play a near infinity of moves. Free will is deeply limited. Once an action is released, you don't seem able to change it. The longer down the road, the more freedom you have, and the closer to the present moment, the less freedom you have. It's like driving a car. There's choice in the future, but not directly in front of you. You look ahead, down the road to plan where you're going. Consciousness is the thing that chooses between alternative futures. It isn't obvious why we have consciousness if we don't have free will. Consciousness looks like a field of consciousness where we have the ability to program a sequence of actions before ballistically unleashing them. Effort is needed for conscious programming. Effort doesn't work like a clock. It has a different quality to it.
Life is anti-entropic. We take in energy and transform it into higher order more complex things. Brains are doing this, taking lower order things, and turning them into higher order things. Perhaps consciousness and free will are a higher order thing. What we see in front of us is an array of possible universes. And we make choices with this chaotic potential and cast that into reality. If you treat people like they're free agents, and you reward or punish them properly, relationships seem to work. They don't seem to work when you assume the person doesn't have free will. And functional societies seem to be organized around the free will of the individual. So there is a gradient of free will from the near infinite future to the constrained present. And there's a belief that what you really believe is what you act out. We all act out that people have free will. And we all at bottom, believe in it.
Why it matters:
I think there's a mix of free will and determinism to differing degrees. It works better to believe you have free will, because if you don't believe in free will, you fall into unconscious patterns of thought and behaviour. I'm speaking from experience. I “tried out” determinism as a worldview, and that's where it got me. It was a journey to the underworld, so to speak. When you get quiet with yourself, you may start to notice, like Sam Harris pointed out, that thoughts just happen. Movements, impulses, and desires run our lives. And we often have little to do with it. Especially if you have been doing something so long you can do it blindfolded. Free will doesn't apply here. Where your subjective feeling of authoring your thoughts breaks down. It's simply a relaxing of the mind to a place where the automatic part of our brains takes over. Just because a person doesn't feel their ego at work in their life, doesn't mean they don't have an ego. It just means he is acting in the automatic systems of the mind. Another thing that bothers me about the lack of free will, is that it doesn't promote the use of conscious voluntary action. These actions are seen as determined or random. And we need to think like we are independent of the universe to take the responsibility necessary to think consciously. According to Erich Neumann, the ego develops to a stage where it is beyond the Uroboros, and must rise up against it's creator and say, “I am not That”. With differentiation of the world, comes the struggle between right and wrong. Up and down. Women and men. The war of the go with the unconscious world is like a fight with a dragon. The bird, serpent, lion of our ancestors. Confrontation and ruling of the unconscious is the job of society in regulating the development of the human psyche. That being said, there is a danger of becoming too separate. This is where the lack of free will argument has weight.
We came out of an environment that shaped our psyches. Getting with how it works seems like a philosophically good idea. To avoid fragmentation of the mind, unifying it, and stepping aside from it as an observer, can be helpful. You know, “I am not my depression”. Or ”There are reasons why I'm depressed”. These kinds of thoughts are like medicine that makes sense of the world. It's comforting to know everything has a cause. It's also important for happiness to experience “flow”. States of losing yourself in your work. Where the working and you are the same thing. This has a unifying effect, like a Zen practice. But where do these thoughts and actions come from? From the depths? Spontaneously? On purpose? That's when we're truly alive. At those moments when we say something we didn't know we would say, because you're speaking it out into order as you go. That's what I'm doing with this essay.
I tried to escape responsibility for the state of my life by explaining everything that happened. What about the un-explainable? The soul. The part that decides. Whatever consciousness is, it seems to need to believe it is responsible for what it does, even if it really is a manifestation of the whole of the universe. Perhaps if things are deterministic, and there is no free will, the goal of evolution is to evolve a consciousness that is so complex it can get lost from it's original state of being one with Being. The goal would then be to get to a place where we feel ourselves as the universe again (like Christ who says, I and the father are one, or Buddha who sees the Buddha nature in us all). See my article on Zen. Maybe the goal of life, according to that, is to approach the ideal state as much as possible. Perhaps we are doomed to be separate from the universe (like Adam and Eve kicked out of The Garden of Eden). Or maybe we budded off of the main structure of unconscious Being into consciousness, and are now independent systems operating separate from cause and effect, in our own little sub system of mind that runs itself. Separate, but the same. Well, born of the universe, but independent children of it. In this way, our relationship to creation or creator or the Other (the environment that made us, and our very biology) is one of finding the correct way to live while separate.
There seem to be two options. Get with life to such a degree that you become It, the Other, and experience yourself as a flow of the universe as consciousness. This lets you escape the problem of separateness. It's about getting with nature. Your inner nature. Or if you want to take on the challenge of separateness, you will have to have the courage to be apart and an individual, taking on the responsibility of a free agent with the weight of the world on your shoulders. Both seem to be valuable. Getting with the universe for unconditional being as we are. And conditional responsibility and human relationships for the ego (hatred, rules, forgiveness, grace).
How do some of the world religions deal with problems like mistakes made with our free will in the past that we can't change? Or how do we get out of cause and effect when we're stuck in it? In Christianity, which is dualistic (the soul and the body are separate and there is free will). There is a fatherly forgiveness of sins in Christianity. You are responsible, and you can be forgiven of your past if you let go of it and decide to behave differently. In Zen Buddhism, there is less dualism, and more non-dualism. The saying in Buddhism is, “no self”. Which means the Hindus and their “Atman”, or self doesn't exist. The motif is, “You are That”, or “You're It”. They see the world as karma, cause and effect, and notice that everyone is where they are for reasons out of their control. Their past actions in other lives (the behaviour of other people). The way to get out of karma, is to not cling to the past, and act spontaneously in the present. To not be attached to what happens and be the observer of what is happening. Letting everything take it's course, and not interfering with your mind or the world. That's more of a Zen approach.
So all in all, I believe we both have free will and we don't at the same time. There's a gradient of unconscious and conscious reasons for behavior. Basically things happen, and we do things. But we can shift things from things happen to we do things based on our worldview (determinism or indeterminism) and how we want to experience life. I'm still meditating on free will. Sometimes I feel like I have it, and sometimes I don't. I hope this bit of writing here, helps clear up determinism and indeterminism and helps you find out how to judge yourself for your actions and those around you. Maybe we can cut ourselves some slack in areas, and tighten down our conscious voluntary control on other areas. Resources:
Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESM43eA9u6o