I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
Lately I’ve been thinking more and more: I don’t have free will. And I’m fine with that. No, way better than fine. That’s what I want to be the case.
Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues in his 2023 book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, that we don’t. Our sense of having control over our actions is illusory. Every action is a result of a chain of prior causes, whether in the past seconds or months or years or millennia. Each of us has certain brain chemistry, hormone levels, history, and a context we live in that all conspire to produce our seemingly free behavior.
Some thinkers want to rescue free will and do so with a theory called compatibilism which says “yes everything is caused but there is still room for freedom.” Compatibilists think that the world can be causally deterministic but there can still be free agents operating within it.
Compatibilists might say that if a person has the ability to comprehend a situation, weigh alternatives, and choose an action, they have freedom of a sort. And this is the only kind of freedom that matters in practice. They might say that if a person has autonomy from immediate compulsion, then they have enough freedom to consider them as having free will.
It gets to the heart of the idea: what is a person? What is this self that has freedom to choose? The self may have been caused by a myriad of influences — its genetic makeup, its pre-natal and post-natal history, the culture it was born into, and so much more — but there is a line between all that and what has resulted, that bundle of instincts, thoughts, intelligence, biology, and emotions that is that person. If we take that bundle and say, “can she act freely?” maybe we say “yes [she] can” meaning [she] as that bundle. And there is some sort of bracketing of that self that clarifies that the creation of [she] was out of her control, was causally determined and continues to be in large part.
I’m thinking about this today because realizing that causal determinism can be real — this was all caused, including my actions — and [I] can still have moral responsibility for some of it. But I — that ineffable observer part of me — do not have responsibility for [I], the entity that has free will. I did not and do not have free will in her production or in her ongoing choices.
I’m skeptical that this rescues free will.
Nietzsche was skeptical of the idea of free will too. Here’s what he wrote about it in Twilight of the Idols (1889):
Error of free will. —Today we have no sympathy anymore for the concept of “free will”: we know only too well what it is— the most disreputable of all the theologians’ tricks, designed to make humanity “responsible” in the theologians’ sense, that is, to make it dependent on them (…) the doctrine of the will was essentially invented for purposes of punishment, that is, for purposes of wanting to find people guilty. All the old psychology, the psychology of will, is predicated on the fact that its originators, the priests in the elites of ancient communities, wanted to create a right for themselves to inflict punishments —or wanted to create a right for God to do so.
If you read about why people want to rescue free will, it’s mostly about wanting to make people morally responsible for their actions. This is what Nietzsche takes aim at.
Perhaps anyway we are all living out some form of the box universe, where the three dimensions of space exist along with the fourth dimension of time, all here at once, but we only perceive one moment of the timeline at a time.
Perhaps what I’m seeking again is the releasing of the will, the releasing of the egoic concerns, the releasing of the idea that I must turn my life into something meaningful and worthwhile via my ambitious efforts.
I wrote before about free will and Sapolsky’s book on Day 125. I was more sure of its existence at that point. Now I find myself coming down on the side of the hard determinists more and more. I find the concept of the box universe, Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return, Meister Eckhart’s idea of releasement much more compelling to me right now than the idea of compatibilistic free will, which feels too much like a Judeo-Christian theological attempt to make a trick (tricking one into thinking there is free will) into a treat (so that you can hold people accountable, punish them, and perhaps also redeem them of their sins).