…each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom
W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
Do we have free will or not?
A huge question, not to be dismissed. There’s a reason people have worried it so. Our default belief that we are not compelled in our choices, that we are freely responsible for our lives—this belief is central to our sense of self, of the universe, our sense (if we have one) of the purpose of life.
Experiments in neuroscience seem (to some) to threaten all that. And a recent surge of books and articles has frothed the waters. Most visible, perhaps, was New York Times columnist Dennis Overbye’s column in January titled “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t”. Overbye largely accepts that free will—at least, as it’s often and traditionally defined—is an illusion. An invigorating and necessary debate.
Will free will survive? As we forge into the future and encounter more and more new, hard dilemmas, what we think of human choice and responsibility could affect public policy. Suppose it’s determined we really are not in control. That might change our notions of justice, human rights, reward and punishment. And much else.
So do we have it or not? Allow me to hazard a guess, a guess that gives as it takes away.
In many ways—most of them good—we don’t have free will, and—ironically—that’s the way you’d want it.
But in many profound and challenging ways—including some you might NOT want so much—we have it, all right, and always will. As Isaac Bashevis Singer was fond of saying, we have no choice.
What was free will? One view, often called the “traditional” or “naïve” view, was that we are not constrained by the universe or its creator in our daily choices; we are in complete control of our conscious decisions.
But some scientific experiments –all madly controversial and hardly dispositive, no matter how their supporters crow—suggest the traditional view cannot be right. Much-cited experiments were done by Benjamin Libet of the University of California at San Francisco starting in the 1970s. Libet’s team found that unconscious neural impulses, which they called “readiness potentials,” preceded conscious decisions to do apparently voluntary things, such as turn a hand over this way or that. These impulses seemed to precede conscious choice by about half a second.
In other words, even before you decide, your brain decides. And it’s not conscious. So you actually can’t be in conscious control. Uh-oh.
Actually, it’s a good thing that much decision happens unconsciously (with the conscious mind always catching up, and thinking it’s leading!). You want it that way. Human learning, after all, is largely the process -- through emulation, repetition and habit—of submerging the difficult, the awkward, the unfamiliar beneath the threshold of awareness.
Good thing, too. You’re on the sidewalk: “OK, time to move my left leg… OK, good, it moved… now how about that right leg? Here we go… good.”
True, walking is governed largely by a part of the brain not involved in this discussion, but you see what I mean. We could not function if we had to ponder all our daily choices.
Instead, we have astonishing leverage to be original, surprising and creative. Consider the jazz flutist leaning into a solo. Exquisitely trained, she is a master of music, her body, her instrument, and the tune at hand. Learning submerged! Her solo (can you hear it?) amounts to hundreds of decisions and choices, second by second, and they’re not “OK, now I’ll lift this finger, and now I’ll take this breath.”
Yes, as a genetic being, predicated and wired in a particular way, she has absorbed information, done thousands of exercises thousands of times. Her music operates by certain rules (although jazz is based on breaking the rules!). And as an animal, she is subject to the conditions around her.
Yet she will seldom play the same solo twice.
Check that: She will never play the same solo twice, even if every single note were the same. No one ever does. That’s music.
Such variability derives from the kind of machine we are: the kind that makes up its own mind, sometimes vetoes its own decisions (even Lubet acknowledged we could do that), sometimes makes different decisions in different ways when faced with similar circumstances. Truth is, we are machines. Some people get upset when they hear that, as if it were saying we have no soul, nothing special about us. Why would that be? Machines are beautiful. And of all the fair machines, guess who’s fairest?
What’s interesting is that the “deterministic” explanation of the human mind—in which everything is engineering, innately and predominantly automatic—matters less and less as it gets more and more complex. Remember, the statement the human mind is a machine is meant to be reductive, to simplify the human mind, the most complicated thing that mind’s owners have ever discovered.
But here’s what’s funny. The more complicated the simplification becomes—as in “The mind is the most complex, unpredictable, creative machine ever seen! And getting more complex, unpredictable, and creative every moment!”—the less it matters. It gets down to the difference, at last, between being magical and being absolutely incredible. A word game for kids, really. Or folks trying to get tenure in science or philosophy departments.
And this supposedly reductive description of the mind—even as of now, when we’re just getting started describing it—is getting mind-obliteratingly complex. So yes, certain things are causes of human beings—but, as geneticist Francis Collins has said: “I don’t think that carries you very far.” Collins (and why wouldn’t we listen to a man who helped discover the human genome?) knows genes map our possibilities, but he rightly points out that it’s a pretty saggy determinism, within which resides big leeway for “open” experience. (By “open,” we need not mean infinitely open—just humanly so, millions of possibilities. Let academics wrestle over the gristly bits left over.) Twins, for example, have the same DNA but different fates.
So here’s a way of thinking about free will. My stance, called “compatibilism,” comes close to the position found in Daniel Dennett’s books Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves.
It says: Sure, we’re machines and subject to all the laws that govern everything. No one gets a pass from those. The human mind has a structure and a set of rules—that these produce rather than constrain its ability to make an incredibly large number of novel and creative uses of those rules. Indeed, the more we know about the mind, the more we are stunned by its ability to resist instinct and put the rules to new uses. So there’s something about those rules and that structure that produces a pretty freewheeling mind. The rules, however they may mold our fates, also produce our freedoms. Once again: The most complex, unpredictable, creative machine ever seen! And getting more complex, unpredictable, and creative every moment!
So let’s revisit “free will” and redefine it. Free will is the conscious mind’s working assumption that its ability to make choices is not constrained. A working assumption, mind you, neither philosophy nor science, made to let me keep working. If I am technically determined—if you, like God, could know the entire train of bitty causes that led to me and trace them all back to the big bang, mother of all causes—yawn. I have a mind to make up.
After all, there is a whole world of decisions the experiments never touch. In this world, we are very free, painfully free. In this world, we, in a word, are alone. This is the world of the existential decision, in which there is no clear choice, no clearly defined end point, a world in which the act of choosing is also an act of understanding. By making a decision in a landscape without signposts, we clear a new path.
These are the decisions most worth making, the ones that define self. What career should I choose? What mate? Should I have children? Will I live in the country or the city? If ordered to fight a war I don’t believe in, is it better to fight or to go to jail? Do I wish to be buried or cremated? Are social needs best ministered to via government agencies or private charity? Do I want this Tintoretto print or that O’Keeffe? Do I take up the cello or the flute?
Yes, practical and temporal and other conditions can inhere in such decisions, even the weather, but it’s a mistake to believe that therefore such decisions are wholly or even mostly determined thereby. (Compare “the decision to marry may involve many practical causes and conditions” and “the decision to marry is driven exclusively by practical causes and conditions.”)
Art and literature exist largely to figure and explore such decisions. Hamlet’s dilemma(s), Sophie’s choice, Meurseault’s choice, Gilgamesh’s choice, “I took the road less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference” (yes, but Robert Frost, you don’t say what the difference was, or whether good or bad).
Evolution is pretty wonderful. It has furnished us with a mind that can do things we have not observed (to date) anywhere else in the universe. But evolution cannot do everything for us. How could it have anticipated everything existence might throw at our heads? No way. As the eminent neuroscientist Steven Pinker has written in his book How the Mind Works, there just might be some problems the mind cannot handle. We’re equipped only with what we’ve got—and here we are. Again and again, we must face what we cannot know (the future) and cannot understand (some days, everything), and make an eyes-wide-open choice.
If anyone thinks we don’t make such decisions constantly, hey, go play.
This kind of freedom gives us life as lived. Much of the time, freedom hurts. Much of the time, freedom stinks. The process of deciding can take years, most of a life, as opposed to 0.3 seconds. No one can help us; no one is coming. As many have noted, being existentially free can both invigorate and appall.
Yet, who would wish it otherwise? If we accept our lives, if we ask only that our lives be truly ours, this is what we accept. The choice—aha!—is ours to make.