The Jury Is Out and the Verdict Is We’ve No Free Will

The absence of free will is not a threat to human dignity, it’s an opportunity to build a humane society

“Everything is embedded in what came before.”(Robert Sapolsky)

For centuries, philosophers, scientists, and thinkers, have wrestled with the hard problem of free will.

Humans have a problem accepting they have no free will, that the choices they make are determined not through exercising their autonomy, but influenced by hidden forces.

The entire story about human progress is built around the theme of agency and rational exercise of choices. The humanistic worldview will collapse like a house of cards if people questioned the notion of free will. If humans are puppets whose strings are pulled by unseen puppeteers like our unconscious minds, progress seems like an accident, not as a great achievement.

There’re broadly two views about free will. There’re free will deniers, and there’re ‘compatibilists’, who believe in determinism and nonetheless say we’ve a fair amount of free will.

Biologists and neuroscientists have been increasingly joining the camp free will-deniers, while philosophers are mostly compatibilists.

A layman’s thought experiment about free will

You wake up one morning and decide to wear a blue shirt to the office. Did you make a free choice? ‘Yes,’ is the obvious answer. You may say, blue is your favourite colour.

Now, think of the following possibilities. Did someone compliment you a few days back that you looked attractive wearing a blue shirt? Does your boss or manager often wear a blue dress?

Was your decision subliminally induced? The intention to wear a blue shirt did not originate in your consciousness, it appeared in your consciousness and you’ve no clue as to how, why, and from where it appeared.

“Life is not a problem to be solved. It’s a paradox to experience. You can believe one thing and also believe its opposite.”(Derek Sivers)

Scientists like Albert Einstein and Sam Harris don’t see the absence of free will, a threat to human agency. The paradox is, humans flourish despite the absence of free will.

Albert Einstein said,

“I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. … We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilised community, I must act as if the man is a responsible being.”

According to Einstein, the absence of free will is not a licence to act irresponsibly or passively. We must exercise reasonable choices, and strive to be the best versions of ourselves.

He said,

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely from the imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

The human spirit can soar high on the wings of curiosity and imagination. The lack of free will does not constrain our creativity.

In his book, Free Will, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, said,

“Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

According to Sam Harris, the absence of free will has not made him a fatalist, but has increased his feelings of freedom. It has made him realise how malleable humans are. We evolve continually, our thoughts and beliefs change, our personality undergoes transformations over time.

The lack of free will is an opportunity to be conscious of the background causes that influence our transformations. It makes us responsibly pause and think before we exercise our choices. The absence of free will paradoxically make us more creative in our choices and more accountable for our actions.

He said,

“This understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet, of course, but it also allows you to grab hold of one of your strings.”

A recent addition to the free will debate is the scholarly book, Determined: Life Without Free Will, written by the behavioural scientist, Robert M Sapolsky.

Sapolsky unequivocally said, free will is an illusion. “There is no free will, or at least… there is much less free will than generally assumed when it really matters,” he said.

Our biology dictates our behaviours. Every behaviour has prior causes all the way down.

When a criminal shoots another person, the decision to pull the trigger was taken at the moment, but the chain of antecedent causes can go as far back as their childhood or the quality of their life inside the mother’s womb.

Sapolsky said,

“The biology over which you had no control, interacting with environment over which you had no control, made you, you.”

The belief in the non-existence of free will, will liberate us from the indefensible illusion that our choices are self-determined. The absence of free will is not a constraint; it’s an opportunity to make well-informed choices after considering all the likely causes lurking in the background. The absence of free will does not absolve us of any accountability for our choices; it adds an additonal layer of responsbility to not view behaviours in isolation, but to evaluate them in the broad biological and cultural contexts.

“If I conclude that there is no free will, it doesn’t mean that I should go run amok in the streets. I’m no more free to make that choice than I am to make any other choice.”(Janna Levin, cosmologist)

The realisation that we’ve no free will, is an opportunity for us to build a more humane society, where we stop judging people as if they’re entirely responsible for their behaviours. We’ll have to punish criminals for their crimes, not with a vindictive mindset, but with a reformative attitude.

Once we comprehend the illusion of free will, we embrace humility, tolerance, and curiosity, to understand the multi-splendoured tapestry of life, in all its hues and contradictions.

Thanks for taking the time to read this story.