No Free Will, No Problem
The idea that we lack free will can leave people feeling dissatisfied and directionless, so how do I use it to increase my level of empathy, understanding and drive to become a better person?
“People don’t have ideas; ideas have people” - Carl Jung”
The topic of free will is a challenging issue for many people. Whether you believe humans actually have free will or not, the exploration of the question is interesting and can have large-scale ramifications in how we, as a species, could think about issues such as crime and punishment, mental health issues, sexuality, homelessness, or charitable giving. It’s not the only answer, of course, but it’s not insignificant.
At the level of the individual, the discussion could help us with challenges including ego management, compassion for ourselves and others, or the cultivation of good and bad habits.
By free will, I am referring to the sense that we are able to selectively choose our actions based on our thoughts; the selective choosing would be, if free will exists, governed by some segment of the brain’s frontal lobe responsible for “conscious choice” or however you like to think of it. This segment of the brain would act as a proverbial arcade machine claw, being able to pick from a series of potential options and select the winner, a prize thought which propels a given action in the present moment.
I am fully on board with Sam Harris’s analysis of free will. Free will does not exist. He has talked at length about the subject and I am only starting to scratch the surface of what this all means, but this idea has completely transformed the way I view myself and others. I am a more compassionate, more understanding and less selfish person, in some small and large ways, because of this idea.
Despite this, I have come into conflict with the idea of what lies within / outside of our control, as taught by legendary Stoic philosopher Epictetus. In this long-form article, I want to share the small level of understanding I have, explain the positive benefits the ideas add to my life, and provide some practical questions for you to consider. I aim to follow up with my thoughts on the Stoic idea of internal/external control in the future and will focus on free will for now.
The Lake of Consciousness
The first building block revolves around a question I will find interesting for the remainder of my life: what is consciousness? The unfortunate thing is, I think I know but I probably don’t. I’m probably wrong in a lot of my thinking here, but I find the journey very enjoyable regardless.
I think of consciousness as a field of experience, which forms the entirety of who you are. In an analogy, the field of consciousness can be thought of as a deep lake. Subconscious, automatic parts of the brain, like breathing, hearing, seeing or walking (unless you’ve just turned your breathing into a manual, conscious process by reading these brackets), are in the murky depths of the lake and can’t be turned off even if you want to. For example, try turning off your ability to see colours and objects in your visual field, or the ability to read these words in English.
Conscious thoughts are just another form of object arising in this field of consciousness; in my analogy, it might be helpful to think of them as bubbles of gas that rise through the liquid to become observable objects such as images in the mind’s eye, or the hook of that song that’s been stuck in your head for weeks, or some internal monologue thought-speech, on the surface. When you find yourself lost in thought, before eventually snapping out of it, you are spending most of your focal energy on the bubbles, rather than anything else in the lake or on the stillness of the lake itself.
Part of what I love about meditation, as a beginner/intermediate practitioner, is that it feels as though I can, in infrequent moments, notice these bubbles as they are produced in the fluid of the lake, before they rise to the surface. They then unwind after being observed and I can return to a less thought-cluttered mental state. Part of my journey in life is to explore just how deep and interesting this could become over time.
Now onto free will. In my view, where people often misunderstand free will is that they know the bubbles of thought are there - they think about what to do or what to say, and then do them. When that is understood, how could free will not exist? If I identify as the thinker of those thoughts, surely I am also the chooser with the free will to choose?
The Binary Choice
Let’s take a simple, binary example. You are presented with two options at a coffee shop and must choose either green tea or a latte. When equalising other factors like price, your ability to make the binary choice seems like the clearest opportunity to exercise free will.
What lies beneath the surface of the lake, however, is that the bubble of thought that eventually arose - the idea to choose green tea over latte - was itself originated under the depths of the water, beyond your control.
The sum of your genetics, with its particular taste buds and interpretations by the brain, alongside numerous environmental factors leading up to this moment, structured your brain in such a precise way to choose green tea.
It might be the article you read years ago but don’t remember, which told you about the health benefits of green tea;
It might be the cup you shared with a grandparent as a child, which you remember very fondly because they died a year later;
It could be your brain’s natural high sensitivity to caffeine, which gives you heart palpitations and jittery hands even after one cup of coffee.
You could have deliberated for a million years over the subtle intricacies of each drink, but the final thought of this binary choice comes from somewhere unpredictable. None of these factors, genetic or environmental, were of your choosing. Neither was the final thought that pushed you off the cliff of decision.
Beyond the Binary
Clearly, the idea is more easily understood with binary choice and, undoubtedly, the complexity increases exponentially when considering the thought processes we all go through for the big decisions in life. We get offered a job in a new city and have to consider variables like our partner’s preference, our friend and coworker relationships, family logistics, potentially language barriers and visa issues, and potential lifestyle in this new city. The totality of your genetics and experience, every intricate thing that makes you you, has left tiny, imperceptible fingerprints all over the malleable, flexible brain which dictates every action you take.
The list goes on, but each of these variables is considered through filters outside of our control. Our considered opinion of whether we like or dislike each city, our tendency to be single-minded in the face of other people’s opposition, our brain’s capability of adapting to multifaceted change; you don’t have any control of these processes, which can seem demoralising but needn’t be.
Re-framing
The key to achieving improvement in life is in the ability to change, which is a specific subset of “environmental factors” which includes your exposure to new ideas and the repeated reinforcement of the fact that your spontaneous thoughts can be influenced over time, among other things. To a certain extent, you are what you expose your mind to.
This is the core principle of self-development and the journey of living a more examined life. It is not predicated on free will and I find myself liberated in this journey by having the illusory rug of free will pulled out from underneath me.
Being relieved of the illusion of free will has allowed me to be less prone to hatred of others and less likely to be possessed by my ego from moment to moment. If I can explain every outcome in my life so far to a combination of genetics and environmental factors, then every neural pathway that told me to study a little bit harder, or go on the run rather than watch TV, or to make healthier recipes, each of these have helped refine the machine of my mind but does not allow for the erroneous feeling that I "deserve" it.
It allows me to be more compassionate to other people who are struggling due to their particular combination of genetics and environment; the best I can ever do is to try and understand their challenges in life and offer a very gentle environmental nudge to help them overcome those challenges, if I'm capable of doing so. Even writing these sentences out, though every word is guided by processes outside of my free will, helps improve the probability that my thoughts will lead me to try and be a more compassionate, understanding person a little bit more, when the situation calls for such a line of thinking.
I cannot overstate how important this has been to my own development and nurturing of a value hierarchy. It also helps separate outcome from effort in my mind - reading my words may have a range of impacts and influences on your mind (or none at all), but whatever the outcome is, it lies outside of my control and yours. You don't choose the liking or not liking, any more than I can choose the next thought that pops into my head.
To conclude, I would like to revert to the opening quote: “People don’t have ideas; ideas have people”. This profound wisdom of Carl Jung’s is an idea that has rooted itself firmly in my psyche, just like Sam Harris’s free will argument. I trust in the workings of the machine: by exposing myself to new ideas that are beneficial for myself and other people in the present and can grow stronger over time, they can be a subtle force that helps orient me in the direction I want to go in life.
I invite you to do the same:
Take the time to think about the positive ideas you would love to broadcast to other people. It might be the concept of growth mindset, or the idea of treating people how you yourself want to be treated, or any other idea which, now that you’ve been exposed to it by chance, has made you a better version of yourself (however you define that) and you cannot ever let go of.
Now take the time to turn the analysis process back on itself. Why does that idea resonate with you and what is the positive outcome you want it to influence in your life? How can you apply this conceptual idea in a practical way that improves your internal state of mind and allows you to have more positive interactions with others?
It might be awkward to pick apart conceptual ideas and the sense of self you’ve developed over your life, but by trying repeatedly, you can develop the mental muscle to dig deeply and find the positive framing in your core ideas.
Finally, if this process is useful for one or two ideas that have shaped you as a person, keep telling yourself that there is a whole universe of ideas, discussed and refined over hundreds or thousands of years, which is waiting to be explored.
All my advice here comes with two caveats: you should focus on the ideas which are a net benefit to yourself and others, and you need to develop the judgement to separate good ideas from bad. These are not trivial. Not all ideas are good and so they need to be filtered by a strong sense of self, including your unique personality and existing values. These are topics for another day, however.
Fingerprints
My thanks go out to you, dear reader, for taking the time out of your day to read my words. My thanks also go to the following people who have played a more specific role in the writing of this post and, more generally, have left their fingerprints, unknowingly, on my brain. Without them in the world, I would be a different person and they have my gratitude:
Sam Harris (https://www.samharris.org/). I am a paid subscriber of his excellent, thought-provoking podcast, Making Sense, and app, Waking Up, which goes beyond guided meditations to cover theoretical inquiries into the nature of meditation and the mind, and other sessions to provide insight as to how we might live more fulfilling lives.
Ryan Holiday. Like many others, Ryan was among the first introducers of Stoic philosophy into my life. I recommend his YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/DailyStoic) and his books The Daily Stoic and Ego is the Enemy. I have preordered his new book, Discipline is Destiny and look forward to reading it at some point in the future.