I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
This morning I worked on a chapter titled “Freedom over Fear” for my book manuscript. Each chapter presents a way of meeting the world of romance that is reckless (open, curious, bold) vs reckful (careful, cautious, optimizing). Freedom over Fear is the final chapter, and it takes an existentialist turn, promoting Sartre’s idea that existence precedes essence: you are not born with a fixed nature or predetermined purpose. You create yourself through your choices. Sartre calls this the burden of freedom. You can’t escape responsibility for how you shape your life, even if you find yourself in difficult circumstances. You are responsible, and you must choose a course of action, even if that course of action is to do nothing.
Sartre argues this from his ontology, that is, how he thinks about the nature of being in the world (and nothingness, his magnum opus was titled Being and Nothingness). To be conscious, he says, is to be capable of negating what is, to imagine alternatives, to say no. While circumstances may limit your option, they don’t take away your freedom to choose among them.
In his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (20023), neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky argues we have no free will, despite feeling like we do. He says free will is an illusion: every thought, feeling, and action results from biological and environmental causes. We don’t choose our impulses or our capacity for self-control. They arise from brain chemistry and social conditioning. We don’t have moral responsibility for our actions, because we don’t freely choose our behavior.
Sartre might say that Sapolsky’s position is an example of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), a way of shirking responsibility. A realization of total freedom brings anguish, and we wish to run away from it. Declaring that no one has any freedom to choose is a good way to run away from any responsibility for what we choose.
From a pragmatist perspective1, I find Sartre’s arguments more appealing. They leave me with the sense that I have the ability to choose in my life, and that through choosing I become who I might be. I don’t find Sapolsky’s arguments entirely convincing (caveat: I have not read it) because talking about all the influences on my choices in the moment–my history and my brain states and the environment I’m choosing in–doesn’t do anything to explain the consciousness that I feel. Without a compelling description of what consciousness is and how it works I can’t accept an argument against free will.
John Horgan “The Science Writer” had a talk with Sapolsky about his book and, after that, came up with his conception of the Sapolsky paradox, which is this:
When you decide after careful deliberation that free will does not exist, you demonstrate that it does exist.
I don’t agree that a careful deliberation and decision about the existence of free will actually demonstrates the reality of free will, because it could be that whichever way you come down on the question of free will could be entirely determined by outside causes other than your self.
But Horgan goes on to get at the question I’m pondering:
Science, I’m guessing, will never prove or disprove free will once and for all. Scientists have no idea how physical processes engender consciousness, which is a prerequisite for free will. That’s my takeaway from the terrific new book by physics writer George Musser, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists Are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Secrets of the Universe.
Philosophers know that consciousness is the key to whether we have free will or not. I’m not sure neurobiologists fully get it, steeped as they are in empiricism and a realist view of the physical world. I hold with philosophers like Hegel who argued that everything–art, nature, love, politics, rocks–is Spirit (Geist) becoming conscious of itself.
In his Philosophy of History, Hegel writes:
The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite — Matter. As the essence of Matter is Gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence of Spirit is Freedom. All will readily assent to the doctrine that Spirit, among other properties, is also endowed with Freedom; but philosophy teaches that all the qualities of Spirit exist only through Freedom; that all are but means for attaining Freedom; that all seek and produce this and this alone. It is a result of speculative Philosophy, that Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit.
Now this probably isn’t an assertion that Sapolsky would agree with, but I find it compelling. Think of consciousness as Spirit. We experience it as free, even as the material stuff of the world that we experience may seem to be unfree.
- That is, not just being pragmatic, but from a philosophical stance of pragmatism, which defines truth in terms of the practical consequences of the beliefs and ideas you take on. In this philosophy, a belief is true if it is useful, verifiable through experience, and leads to predictable outcomes in the real world. I’m surprised I have never written a blog post about it; must remedy that! ↩︎