Make It So

I have found an excellent way to fall asleep. The default is that at 9:00 p.m. I stop whatever I’ve been doing, usually working at the computer, and perform my evening ablutions. (It’s later if I’ve been out late.) Then I dim the lights and read a novel in the comfy chair by the bed until I can no longer keep my eyes open. At that point it’s all I can do to move to the bed. Sleep follows. 

If instead I had stayed at the computer or got involved in some other activity with the lights on (not to mention, eaten a meal or drunk some coffee just before bedtime, etc.), sleep would have been indefinitely elusive, even if I were fatigued. But I’m an early to bed person because I like to get up early and well rested, so I have developed this method for inducing sleep. 

But what I cannot do is will myself to sleep. I am sure you have had the common experience of needing to be up early the next morning and trying to get to sleep, to no avail. The method is actually counterproductive, as the effort to fall asleep keeps you awake. 

However, I do will myself to stop working at 9:00 p.m. and then to follow the rest of the routine. Hence I can truthfully say that I have voluntary control over my sleeping; I can “make myself” fall asleep. But it’s indirect. 

In this way it is shown that the will is more powerful than one might have unthinkingly supposed. For even though there are a great many things we cannot simply will to happen, as if we were Commander Picard declaring “Make it so,” we are certainly capable of willing things in order to intentionally make other things happen. 

Perhaps the most impressive examples of this are believing and desiring. Suppose you don’t know whether the planet Neptune has a ring and are curious. You could will yourself to Google “Does Neptune have a ring?” and find the answer at a reputable source, whereupon you will believe that Neptune has several rings. But you could not simply have willed yourself to believe that (although you might have mistakenly believed that it didn’t because you hadn’t heard about them). More simply, suppose you have quite lost track of the time and want to know it. Then simply will yourself to check the clock, and then you will believe that it’s 8:25 a.m. 

You can even direct yourself toward having a specific belief. Jerome Shaffer told the story of his father undertaking an intensive study of the Bible after being told by his doctor that he could reduce his chances of a heart attack if he believed in God. I don’t know the outcome, but I don’t doubt that such an effort could meet with eventual success. But what his father could not do was simply will himself to believe in God if he did not happen to already. Even if somebody put a gun to your head and said he would shoot if you didn’t believe in Santa Claus, you probably couldn’t do it. But human beings have demonstrated amply that given the right conditions they can come to believe anything whatever, and so it is prima facie plausible that we are also capable of ourself deliberately setting up the conditions for believing something we don’t believe but would very much like to. (It would be nice to think that the truth of a belief would make it easier to pull this off, but, alas, I don’t believe it!) 

Similarly for desire. Joel Kupperman once made this suggestion: If you want to experience pleasure, simply go without drinking anything for a day and then have a glass of water. We could just as well say that by willing yourself to do without, you had brought about the desire to drink something. There are any number of variations on this theme, from inducing a new desire to changing or ridding yourself of an old one. 

I find these thoughts empowering. They indicate that with the application of intelligence we can make a great many things happen by the power of will. We might even surmise that this power can be increased indefinitely, and, correspondingly, the effort needed to implement it decrease indefinitely, the more rationally we plan to meet our objectives. A nice metaphor for this, I think, is the Taoist tale of Ting the butcher, who explained his technique as follows: 

A good carver changes his knife once a year; by which time the blade is dented. An ordinary carver changes it once a month; by which time it is broken. I have used my present knife for nineteen years, and during that time have carved several thousand bulls. But the blade still looks as though it had just come out of the mould. Where part meets part there is always space, and a knife-blade has no thickness. Insert an instrument that has no thickness into a structure that is amply spaced, and surely it cannot fail to have plenty of room. That is why I can use a blade for nineteen years, and yet it still looks as though it were fresh from the forger’s mound. 

https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/chuang-tzu.htm

I also think the idea informs the free-will debate, for it shows a way in which we can exercise will power even though, if we accept Laplacean determinism (which I generally do), everything that we do has been caused by factors ultimately out of our control. The even larger point, then, is that the answer to a question, such as “Do we have free will?”, is (sometimes … often … always?) “Yes and no … depending on what you mean.”