Freewill Is An Illusion
Philosophy ·Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills - Arthur Schopenhauer.
What does Schopenhauer mean when he says “he cannot will what he wills”? This is the realm of philosophy of freewill verses determinism. Freewill, as one can comprehend intuitively, means the freedom to make a particular choice out of possible choices, which is not impelled, affected or caused by any physical (external universe), non-physical (environmental conditioning) or metaphysical (mental states and awareness) factors. As one can begin to sense, such a notion of freewill is too stringent. One can argue that most of the, if not all, transactional actions or decisions - those actions which directly or indirectly renders effect on the society, taken by a person (person here is a technical term meaning a human being with personhood - possesing moral attributes) is motivated by one or all of the factors mentioned above. To put things in perspective, consider the following thought circumstance.
There is a shopkeeper named Harish who earns a living from his grossary store. One day, as Harish was ready to open his store, an accident took place in front of his eyes and one of the victims was severely injured needing immediate hospitalisation if he was to survive (physical factor). Harish was thrusted to act and call an ambulance because the victim would bleed to death otherwise (environmental factor). Being a humble and compassionate man, he accompanied the victim to the hospital, got him admitted, called his relatives but lost the whole day in formalities (metaphysical factor). Do you think what Harish did was free? Meaning that why could he not have done otherwise?
Harish’s decisions were affected by the three factors highlighted above. This is obvious right! Every rational and social man would do the same thing. In what ways did the physical, non-physical and metaphysical factors motivate his action? The thought that appeared just after he encountered the accident was motivated by his previous experience with pleasure and pain. The immediate routine response was to check if the victim needs hospitalisation and the next set of events were the aftermath of the accident motivated by the ethics and values that Harish had acquired over the course of his life. These actions are examples of what are called transactional actions. The way we speak, the choice of words that we make while communicating, our attitude - good or bad, are all affected by environmental and metaphysical factors and hence cannot possibly be free. This example would feel that we are pushing to extremes because there are simply not many choices here to make. Think about another event. Why did you decide to read this blog post when you had the option to just move by? After reading this line, if you are still going on reading this post, congratulations! your decision to do so is not free. Remember the thought that just popped up in your mind when you read the title of this post. You went on reading the content maybe because of your predilection for philosophy, or maybe because you just want to know my views on certain things. Whatever it is, it is motivated by the factors mentioned above. If you had decided not to read the post and you actually did do so, it must have again been affected by one or all of the factors. Is Freewill an illusion then? Such a strong stand is sometimes called hard determinism.
What about our strong internal feeling of freedom? All of us experience a very compelling feeling of freedom. All of us feel that our actions are free - nobody dictates (I am not in the domain of religion which asserts that God dictates our actions and will not delve into this part in this post) our actions. I am going to argue that all of it is an illusion - a stand that a hard determinist would take. I begin by reminding an experiment which is well known to philosophers and cognitive scientists: The Libet experiment performed by the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet in 1986 building up on the conclusions of Hans Kornhuber. Kornhuber had asked subjects to move their right index finger and measured the electrical signal in the brain that occured along with this physical action. Remarkably enough, Kornhuber found that the electric blip occured one second before the physical movement of finger - the blip of freewill! Libet followed up on this and asked volunteers to move one of their finger whenever they feel the urge to do so. He measured the electrical signal in the brain confirming Kornhuber conclusion that the signals are observed one second before the actual action took place. This is not it. Libet compared the time it took for the subjects to will the movement of the finger. The results were astonishing: The spark of freewill appeared 200 milliseconds before the volunteers felt the urge to lift the finger. In this way Libet was able to predict what a person would do even before the person had decided to do so. It seems that freewill has vanished into thin air. If somebody knows just by looking at some sparks in my brain, what I am going to do, how am I free. What should we make out of this conclusion? One plausible explanation, which is quite popular in the scientific community, is that we exercise our freewill unconsciously meaning that we don’t consciously know about the choices we make unless we have already picked a choice. Really? What kind of a freewill is it if we are not conscious of it. This is not what we feel like. We feel quite alive when we make a choice in all our awareness. Even if we were to go by definition of freewill, it has to be a conscious choice. Science tells us that its just not on our table!
A more logical argument to prove that freewill is an illusion is the causal chain argument. Think about what led you to open my website and read this post. There is a particular chain of events that may have occured which only you can tell and it is also true that given the particular set of events that happened, what happened was the only course of events that could have happened and not otherwise. This is the disposition of determinists. Let us analyse the thrust of these arguments. Our universe is causal, meaning that every effect has a cause. If there is smoke then one infers that there must be fire because there is just no way there could be smoke without a cause i.e, smoke is caused by fire. When we apply this to the chain of events that occurs in our day to day life, then we see that there is no slot for freewill to fit in. Let us reconsider Harish’s incident again. Let me prove to you that what happened was the only course of events that could have happened. Let us start with the accident itself, it must have happened due to the errors of the driver or some external factor, slippery road for example. External factors are already determined as these are causal. The road could not help but be slippery if it rained (which is also determined!). There could be other factors involving conscious action of a human - that again can be argued to be not free using the same set of arguments as in the present case - that may have led to the given physical factors. If the cause of accident was not physical then its origin must be in some error of the driver. An error which is beyond his control and hence he had no freewill in order not to let the accident happen. For example the driver may have been drunk but the fact that he got drunk was again causally connected to the moment just before he got drunk, friends pressurising for a drink and then a compulsion of liking for example. Once the accident happened, the pain that was incurred upon the victim was beyond his control becuase being physical events, they are determined by the law of nature and hence deterministic. Now comes Harish into the picture. The fact that he encountered the accident was beyond his control. He could have arrived late or earlier to his store but the fact that he was present exactly at the right time and at the right place can again be causally connected to the earlier moments of Harish’s day. He had no choice but to encounter the accident. But now one could argue that it was Harish’s freewill to choose to act and take the victim to hospital. He may have left the victim to his condition and let him die but chose to help. But the fact that Harish chose to act can be causally connected to the earlier events of his life. Harish was compassionate because he was brought up in an environment where people were compassionate or that his parents taught to be compassionate. All these conditions are beyond his control. So no freewill in choosing to act (sorry to know that Harish!). Similarly one can argue that each of the events that happened in Harish’s life that day (why only that day, infact his whole life) was beyond his control. He could not help but to do what he did. Baruch Spinoza put it in a consise way
Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined - Baruch Spinoza.
What should we conclude from this set of arguments? It does not make sense if we cannot do otherwise to what we do. How can we be held accountable for what we do if it is just a result of some physical, non-physical or metaphysical factors beyond our control? How are we different from animals which posseses only a given set of routine responses? How should we reconcile our lives with this understanding? According to me, what makes our lives different from animals is that we really don’t know what is going to happen even if it is in some way already carved out in terms of the external and internal factors. We don’t know what kind of thougths will appear in a given circumstance even if these thougths emerge from a well defined pattern of our mind construct and character. In some sense the idea that we exercise freewill unconsciously (although it is no more freewill if its unconcious) makes out for the causal chain that determines our responses and behaviour.
There is a whole lot of philosophers arguing on the existence or non existence of freewill. What I did was just to sketch my views on the subject with my own understanding. You are free (I think not!) to take your own disposition and work out your arguments. This is the beauty of philosophy. There are no absolutes.