Think about something you’ve accomplished or a characteristic you are proud of… now consider that you probably had no say in it’s manifestation. Your intelligence? No contribution on your part. Your nationality? You had no choice. Your physical ability? Thank your mom & dad. What about all of your wealth that you’ve accumulated throughout your life due to your hard work and sacrifice? It might be difficult to think about, but Newton’s laws of physics basically indicate that every event in the universe, including your birth and all of the decisions you’ve made in life, could be traced back mechanistically towards the big bang when the universe and time were created. This concept is called causal determinism, it’s the antithesis to the concept of free will, and it’s gaining a lot of ground in the philosophical and scientific community.
While I had heard of this concept peripherally throughout life, I didn’t take any serious consideration until I heard Sam Harris talk about it on a podcast. My initial reaction was to laugh at it. If there was no free will, how do we make decisions on a day to day basis? If there was no free will, pretty much every social construct we know would be based on a lie. To me there was no way this could be possible, because it went against every intuition I had about how society worked. And then I put aside my intuitions and tried to follow the logic. The scary thing was that it didn’t take long for me to adopt this outlook that sounded like heresy against my previously established worldview.
So how did I get there? I first went back to a key point I took away from my high school psychology class – that the majority of our behavior and actions can be explained by nature (your genetics) or nurture (the environment that you are raised in). My next question was – what else is there to explain who we are besides nature and nurture? Of course, our good friend free will! So it looked like there were 3 factors that made me who I am – nature, nurture, and free will. When I tried to go a level deeper, it was pretty easy to understand the precursors to nature and nurture. Nature, or our genetics, is determined by our parents and the 4 billion years of evolution before them. Nurture is basically where in time and space we were born and have lived, which was determined by the billions of years of physics since the universe was created. The problem was I had no intuition where free will came from. It was always something I assumed I had, and assumed that someone a lot smarter than me knew the answer of it’s origin.
However, when I went looking for a logical explanation of where free will came from, I couldn’t really find one. I even took a look at it from the perspective of faith & religion. I don’t believe in a “man in the sky” type of god, but for the sake of argument, I assumed that maybe God is the origin of free will. So maybe God gave each of us our own unique parameters for free will (because obviously some people are better decision makers than others). But doesn’t that cancel out the idea of free will really being “free” if it originates from outside of ourselves? What determined whether God gave us a “good” set of free will operating parameters vs. a “bad” set? In this example, you can replace God with any explanatory cause of how the world operates (the big bang, chaos, Allah, the flying spaghetti monster, etc.) and there are no logical explanations for any possibility that free will originated from inside ourselves and is really “free” from any type of external determining factor. Huh… So what do I do with this understanding? Do I just stop making any effort and live a life of hedonism? Do I give up entirely and become a passive object that receives the actions of the universe because I have no control over them?
I can’t really say for sure. I can say that I feel lucky my mind’s ability to grasp the true nature of reality at all times is far from perfect. How is this a good thing you say? Well, even after I followed through all of the logic, and accepted the probable truth that free will doesn’t exist, the existential dread that everything is meaningless didn’t set in. Weirdly enough, I didn’t feel any type of anxiety about this scary prospect for maybe days or even weeks later. When it came, it was fleeting in nature, lasting for only moments at a time. I think that because our belief in free will been so beneficial for our evolution, it is almost impossible to overcome that hard-wiring in our brain and actually experience the feeling that we have no control of our lives. Even while writing this, and believing that the logic is sound, the majority of my being continues to operate as if I am in full control of my actions, so I don’t have to dread about the meaningless of it all. And for that I am thankful.
So how can this understanding be positive, and why do I even think it is beneficial for this information to be shared? Well, on an individual level, it has really helped me be kind to myself whenever I start getting down on who I am or my circumstances. Without this understanding, I don’t know if I would be able to practice the “self-compassion” that I have talked about and that has helped me so much recently. I think when we make first attempts to improve ourselves, we are forced to face the reality of our situation, and it’s not always pretty. I think this is a big mental road block for a lot of us, because it is too uncomfortable to look at ourselves in honest light. By giving up the notion of free-will, you can be easy on yourself and not blame yourself for the situation you are starting from. This makes progress a lot easier. It also allows me to keep my ego in check. Whenever I start to feel high and mighty about myself or my accomplishments, I can humble myself by knowing that I am just a product of my genetics and environment.
I think this concept is also extremely valuable at a societal and interpersonal level. The next time someone harms you, or when you see a group of people doing something that you hate on the news, you can more easily realize that, because they also have no free will, you would do the exact same thing if you were them in that same circumstance (i.e. if you were in their shoes). I think this is the type of thinking that can make us be kinder and feel more connected with each other. Certainly it can allow us to take a closer look at our societal policies that focus on harsh punishment instead of rehabilitation. I think it can help unite us as well in a time of political and ideological fragmentation. At the end of the day, we are all operating in the same crazy universe as each other and are not really in control of our actions, good or bad.
Gaining Ground Blog 