Will o' the Wisp: Why We Are Not Free
from Chapter 8 of Maya (2015) by Joel Marks
Freedom can be a strong feeling that makes us believe we really are free. Here I will give my reasons for denying that we are.
How or why deny that there is free will? There are several avenues to this conclusion. One of them is simply to lose the feeling. This happened to me one day when I came downstairs to begin making my breakfast in the kitchen.[1] As I went from station to station of my morning regime, I suddenly noticed that every action I took was ether strictly habitual or else the immediate effect of a prior cause. Thus, the whole routine was set in motion by my habitual descent from the bedroom to begin making breakfast. Once in the kitchen I (out of habit) walked to the refrigerator to obtain the orange juice container. But finding the container almost empty (cause) I reached behind a shelf for an unopened carton (effect). Then I brought the two cartons to the counter and, wanting to pour and drink the juice (cause), I reached to the cupboard to get a glass (effect). Et cetera.
It was astonishing to realize how many individual steps there were. But even more astonishing was the realization that it was going on seemingly without any input from me. One event followed another of its own accord. There was no need for me to direct the proceedings. I might as well have been a pinball. If there was any room for me, for a self, it would only have been to upset the course of events. For example, I might have spontaneously decided not to open the cupboard even though I wanted to pour some orange juice. But why would I do that? And would that be acting freely? On the contrary, such a quirky decision might astonish me and make me wonder if some evil genius were fooling around with my psyche. Furthermore, even if I calmly accepted the decision, its occurrence would surely have been caused by something, whether the firing of an electrode by the evil genius who had implanted it in my brain while I slept, or some synaptic discharge caused by a stray cosmic ray penetrating my skull. No free will there.
This then is phenomenological evidence for our not having free will – the evidence of what it feels like to do things. But a believer in free will could use the same kind of evidence to back up her belief. Thus, suppose you had a terrible tooth ache but you really really hate going to the dentist. But you went anyway, despite feeling that this was the last thing in the world you wanted to be doing. Doesn’t that show you must have been exercising your will, since you were opposing your own desires? This seems to buttress not only the existence of your freedom, but also the existence of you as the entity – the self – who had to wrest control of your actions from mere feelings.[2]
That won’t work, however. Phenomenology goes hand in hand with interpretation, and in this example, it is clearly possible to interpret your behavior as evidence that you were only doing what you desired to do. After all, if you did not want to end your tooth ache more than you didn’t want to go to the dentist, why would you have gone “of your own free will”? And even more to the point: If you really really didn’t want to go to the dentist, doesn’t the very fact that you did go show that some very powerful force must have been overwhelming your “free will”? Isn’t that what it “felt like”?[3]
So let’s look at another kind of evidence for the absence of free will, which comes from the psychophysiology laboratory.[4] Some experiments appear to show that a person’s experience of deciding to do something, say, raise her arm, occurs after the initiation of the action at the physiological level. This supports the hypothesis that, say, the incoming stimulus of hearing the command, “Raise your hand if you know the answer to this question,” is sufficient to set in motion the internal apparatus that results in the arm going up, without the need for any input by the agent herself; and furthermore, the agent’s sense of having raised the arm is itself caused by the operation of the apparatus. In other words, as one’s brain is responding to the external command (“Raise your hand”) by sending efferent signals to the arm muscles, that part of the brain is simultaneously stimulating another part of the brain to experience responsibility for the resultant arm rising. In short, both the movement of one’s arm and one’s sense of having decided to raise it are effects, rather than the latter being the cause of the former.[5]
But by far the most impressive evidence for me of the illusoriness of free will and free agency are the many experiments in social psychology that reveal our susceptibility to unseen and even trivial causes and, especially, our rationalization of the resultant actions we take.[6] A typical experiment could go like this. Have two matching groups of experimental subjects watch a short video of a speaker arguing for a position on some topical issue, such as the morality of abortion. But serve one group a foul-tasting beverage and the other a sweet-tasting tea. Afterwards ask the members of each group what they thought of the speaker and her arguments. It will not be surprising to find that the second group was far more sympathetic to both. This is already a startling finding. But the clincher is that if you ask the subjects why they liked or disliked the speaker and/or her arguments, the members of the respective groups will not hesitate to provide abundant reasons. And none of these reasons will make any mention of the type of beverage the person drank while watching the video. Yet the type of beverage was the only independent variable that could causally account for the difference of sympathy displayed by the two groups to the speaker and her arguments.
The obvious conclusion to draw is that the reasons we give or feel we have for our preferences and consequent actions are often (if not always) so much hogwash, and much of the time our actions are governed by forces of which we are quite unaware, or at least unaware of as the causes of our actions. Thus such commonplaces as bigots denying that their decisions and actions are caused by racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism, sexists by sexism, nepotists by nepotism … and the average human, even the professional philosopher, insisting that he or she is deciding things rationally!
But even in those cases where we are correct about a reason that has motivated us, we do not see the whole picture, simply because the causal landscape is so vast. This we already know to be true for causes that are not reasons for action. For example, a short circuit might be the cause of a fire; yet that fire would not have occurred without the presence of oxygen. Was the oxygen also a cause? Normally we would not think of it as such; and yet the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the Apollo 1 capsule was surely the key factor in causing – indeed, our language allows us to say, one reason for – the catastrophic fire that engulfed the astronauts within. Just so, someone’s action might be accurately attributed to a specific reason and yet have additional causes besides.
Reflecting on these things has led me to several conclusions about reasons for intentional action by human beings. First is that such reasons are only a kind of causes, and so even when a human being is acting for a reason, her action is part of the causal world; hence in this sense neither her action nor she is “free.” Second, even when we act for a reason, additional causes are influencing what we do. Third, even when we are correct about our reason for acting, we may be quite ignorant of, or at least inattentive to, the other causes that are influencing what we are doing. Fourth, often we are incorrect about our reason for acting. Finally, it is to be noted that the giving of a reason for why one(self) is doing something is itself an action; and hence it too has a cause or causes, which may have nothing to do with the action the reason supposedly rationalizes.
So one or another cause of one’s behavior, including speaking behavior, may be unknown to oneself, which explains why the bigot denies being a bigot, etc. But on some occasions a genuine cause can be known, and this knowledge acknowledged and legitimately utilized on pragmatic grounds, for example, to explain to a puzzled onlooker why you did something … even though there may have been other reasons or causes at work. I say “on pragmatic grounds” because, given the multiplicity of causes, one could be choosing to highlight just one of them for a specific purpose.
All of the above insights have themselves influenced me (causally! but I could also say “rationally”) in various ways. Thus, I was recently asked by a religious young man why I don’t go to church. I could easily have replied, “Because I’m Jewish.” But then he might have asked if I go to synagogue, and since the answer is No, there was no point in my bringing up Judaism. Meanwhile my mental knee-jerk response would have been, “Because I’m an atheist.” But, quickly recalling my understanding of reasons and causes, I stopped myself. For I realized that, while my atheism is heartfelt, I was not at all sure that what really kept me from regular attendance at religious services was something so “theoretical.” It occurred to me that a far more likely explanation of my nonattendance was simple habit. My parents had not been in the practice of going or taking me to services, and so I never developed a taste for it myself. Meanwhile we would often go to the country on weekends, and this became a practice of my own after I left home.
Furthermore (I did realize all of these things in an instant) I might only embroil myself in an unwanted discussion, with this young man on this particular occasion, of Judaism versus Christianity or atheism versus theism, if I were to opt for the kind of answer to his question that we would normally grace with the label of a reason, for example, “I don’t go to church because I’m an atheist.” So based on all of these considerations – call them reasons or causes as you prefer – I decided to answer his question by hypothesizing as to the cause of my nonattendance at church, thus: “I probably don’t go because my parents never took me when I was a child, and since then I’ve found other things I like to do instead.”
On a different occasion I might have welcomed the opportunity to engage this young man in a discussion of atheism etc. So had he asked the question then, I might well have chosen to ignore the causal account of my nonattendance and instead given my “official” reason: “I’m an atheist.” As I have noted, the actual causal influence of my atheism on my church (non)attendance is unclear to me; but it is plausible enough as a possible contributor to my motivation in this regard to warrant my adducing it in order to stimulate a theological discussion with my questioner. This would thus be more like the situation when the question has to do not with action but with belief. For example, if the young man had asked me, “Why do you believe in evolution?” I would normally sidestep what is probably the primary causal explanation, namely, that I was taught it in school, and instead jump right to the “official” reason (and I hope at least partial cause), namely, the evidence and reasoning that support natural selection and contemporary biology generally. After all, the young man may have the identical causal reason for not believing in evolution – that he was taught creationism in some (Christian) school he attended – so it seems better to cut to the chase.
This then is how I have integrated (my belief in) determinism[7] into my daily life. It seems entirely workable to me, and, indeed, beneficial. When I think of the idiotic ways I have behaved at various points in my life, I can see with equal clarity that they were inevitable. Since it is a firm principle of ethics that people cannot be morally responsible for acts or conditions they could not have prevented, I am thereby relieved of the burden of guilt (now doubly so in light of my prior rejection of morality itself). There are also broader social considerations that endear determinism to me, such as removing retributivism from the calculus of punishment in the criminal justice system.[8] Putting this together with the previously cited evidence from social psychology, psychophysiology, and phenomenology, the case has been made, to my satisfaction at any rate, that free will is a will-o’-the-wisp.
[1] "I Sink, Therefore I'm Not," Philosophy Now, no. 77, February/March 2010, p. 39. And see also "The Dancing Philosopher," Philosophy Now, no. 95, March/April 2013, p. 52.
[2] More on the self in the next chapter.
[3] The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is reported to have made a (brilliant!) remark that draws attention to an analogous ambiguity, thus:
He [Wittgenstein] once greeted me [Elizabeth Anscombe] with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?” (p.151 of Elizabeth Anscombe’s An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, London, 1959)
[4] Benjamin Libet et al. (1983), "Time of Conscious Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity (Readiness-Potential): The Unconscious Initiation of a Freely Voluntary Act," Brain 106 (3): 623–42.
[5] This suggests in turn that a person might continue to behave in normal ways even if she somehow lacked any sense of being in control as an agent or of being a self. And in fact there are clinical reports of people who exhibit just such an absence of self-feeling, whether as regards ownership of certain actions (see for example Thomas Nagel’s 1971 paper, “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness,” Synthese, 22: 396–413) or even of their entire being (see for example Richard J. Castillo, "Depersonalization and Meditation," Psychiatry, vol. 53, May 1990, pp. 158–67, http://minet.org/Documents/research.1990.castillo).
[6] See for example Jonathan Haidt’s 2001 article, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” in Psychological Review: 108, 814–34.
[7] Strictly speaking, so-called hard determinism or incompatibilism, which holds that determinism implies the absence of free will.
[8] See for example A. F. Shariff et al., “Free Will and Punishment: A Mechanistic View of Human Nature Reduces Retribution,” Psychological Science 2014 25: 1563.