Philosophy/Life
You Don’t Have Free Will
Why you don’t choose to choose what you choose
Some things are firmly outside your control, for example, what kind of universe you live in, where were you born, and whatever that has happened in the past — these are the things that are no way up to you to determine. There are also many features of yourself that you don’t control — when you will die, what’s the color of your skin, and what drew you to click this article.
If you haven’t already guessed it, we are talking about the notion of “free will”. Philosophers have been battling about it for millennia. Our societies are built on the belief in free will too. We punish wrongdoers and reward good deeds. If you think you have free will, unfortunately, generations of philosophers and scientists would beg to differ.
Like it or not, free will is just an illusion
Think about it, did you freely choose to read this article? What attracted you towards reading this one but not the other one that you just scrolled over? Do you determine your interests? In other words, do you choose to choose what you choose?
We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of “things” that are going on inside our heads. Things seem to appear in our consciousness from a dark underground and then author our actions. That ‘dark underground’ is our unconscious mind — a repository where everything you don’t remember consciously is stored — childhood traumas, good memories, bad memories, instincts whatever it may be.
Consider the time when you are trying to remember something, and then finally you remember it. Where did the thought (the one you were searching for) appear from? If everything is in your control, why did you search so hard for the thought to appear?
From a hard-nosed philosophical lens, free will is impossible. Because for a will to be free, it has to be uncaused; that is, unless the ‘will’ is practiced completely without any external influences.
And as we know, there is no will that can be practiced without any external influence.
Our choices are made by the brains and brains are objects that obey the laws of causality — the state your brain is in now, determines the shift to the next.
The evidence from neuroscience is also hard to counter. Psychologist Benjamin Libet, in a classical experiment in 1982, asked volunteers to sit for a while and then move a finger at their volition, whenever they wanted to. What he found from the research changed the way we looked at things.
From recordings of their brain activity, he discovered a neurological signal that occurred about 550 milliseconds before they moved their finger and, uncannily about 350 milliseconds before they became aware that they were going to.
Physics isn’t friends with free will either. Sir Isaac Newton imagined the universe to be a giant clockwork obeying the laws of causality. If you could determine the initial conditions of one thing, then you could predict what road it might take down to the last detail.
Such a deterministic universe has no room for free will. So everything that has happened and will happen was determined at the big bang. Even when Newtonian gravity was superseded by Einstein’s theory, nothing was changed as far as determinism is concerned. In fact, according to Einstein, the universe exists all at once, everything that has happened and will happen is already in the ‘block universe’.
Perhaps quantum physics may offer you a way out of this causal chain, but unfortunately, quantum theory has changed the picture of the universe into a fundamental random one. When a quantum particle, such as a photon, hits your window, its behavior isn’t determined by any former state. There is a chance that it will go through and a chance that it will be reflected.
At first glance, it might seem to leave space for free will, but even then, what happens in the universe is completely out of your control. You don’t have control over the quantum randomness. Let’s say that quantum physics leaves room for free will, and the universe — including your brain is fundamentally random, how can you ever say to have freely chosen to do anything?
Imagine a criminal who is convicted of killing 5 people or a pedophile convicted of abusing a child. Most people would want both of them dead, as far as we can surmise. But weren’t the pedophile and the criminal once babies too?
What made them to be like they are? In retrospect, if we keep removing years from their lives, at what point would you stop hating them?
Their choices are determined completely by their unconscious mind. Imagine if they were born in a good family with good parents and received a good education, wouldn’t they be any different?
If a person was born in a bad family with bad parents, received no education, and instead, went through miserable stages in life, what gives you the ground to say that they acted badly on volition?
