Free Will

What do you mean I might not have free will? Look here, I just decided what I wanted to write. See there, I just changed my mind. I might do so again. Or I might forget the whole thing and go for a walk. So, you see, it’s me, it’s mine, it’s free – the will to do as I decide.

That’s a myth, maintains Free Will NYT Robert Sapolski, reflecting determinism, which postulates that all our decisions and behaviors are invariably determined by previous events and by natural law. Free will advocates, on the other hand, point to the human capacity to make uncoerced choices.

Libertarianism holds that individuals have complete free will and is thus incompatible with determinism, while compatibilism attempts to reconcile free will and determinism, arguing that they are not mutually exclusive (though suggesting our underlying desires and preferences may be influenced by previous events and experiences).

The Western world seems tangled up in its own underwear over this debate given the difficulty in establishing causation with any sort of scientific certainty. While specific studies have been hyper-focused on select causal links e.g. the role of genetics as a factor, the application of determinism to predict future states with any degree of certainty beggars the imagination given the menu of deterministic factors: physical (physical laws); biological (genetic factors and physiological conditions); psychological (past experiences, memories, and learned behaviors); and social (social environment and cultural norms).

So perhaps the best we can do at this stage is to simply hold up the idea of determinism as a rebuttable presumption, pending the demonstration with scientific certainty of some actual human action that is at odds with any and all antecedent influences.

So what would that mean in terms of free will? So much for agency. It would suggest we are beholden to forces outside our control. The self is disengaged from all notions of morality and responsibility. How bleak the idea of a life where our thoughts, beliefs, and actions have all been mechanistically predetermined. Theologians are out of business. No room for mystery.

But now turn the glass a little and a different vision might appear i.e. the reason no one can resolve the question of free will versus determinism is because, fundamentally, it is the wrong question. Perhaps the real question is not whether “I” have a choice, but rather, “Who is the “me” asking the question?” (Zen Freedom, Tim Lott, Aeon).

We are thereby invited to contemplate the following simple think piece (previously pondered in our MM 12/6/21 Ego Is The Enemy):

It's a pre-dawn morning and you're lying quietly in bed. There's virtually no sensory input, no sound. The mind is clearer in that darkness than it ever is during the day. You survey your universe in the manner and scope of your choosing. Then the perspective changes. You are now on the outside looking in and you realize that this survey of infinite vastness is nothing more than an illusion produced by three pounds of wetware. Is there any doubt you are, at that point, lord of your skull-sized kingdom?

And so it continues with realization that this is the default setting throughout your waking, walking, talking, interacting, hating, loving, working, playing, acquiring and hard-wired existence -- is essentially a deep, unconscious, and literal self-centeredness.

The skull-sized kingdom from the Western perspective might see the subject of free will versus determinism as a koan, with a blend of frustration and exhilaration. What do you mean there’s no first-cause “I” deciding, acting, thinking, and pushing against the universe? There’s that reference to Carl Jung’s suggestion the ego as simply a complex of the unconscious, a mere concept, itself quite powerless.

All that, of course, bumps up against everything we’d been taught and experienced since we were first assigned a name. Yet the skull-sized kingdom visual might open the way to a glimmer of insight in which the whole question of free will is seen through a different lens i.e. the previously-imagined “you” as some discrete agent is now simply one more connecting element in a wave that’s expressing everything else that’s going on i.e. life living you rather than you living life.

Free dessert, then, to those open enough to Zen teaching they are comfortable answering the free-will question with . . . absolutely . . . . and absolutely not.