Do We Have Free Will Or Is it an Illusion?
“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
What was I going to have for breakfast? That was all I was thinking about during my shower after an intense gym session.
My options included boiled eggs, waakye (a Ghanaian dish which is basically rice cooked with beans), a slice of sourdough bread with za’atar (a prepared condiment made with ground dried thyme, oregano, mixed with toasted sesame seeds and olive oil), and a protein shake.
These were the only options that my mind offered me.
I didn’t think of what many Mexicans would have had for breakfast—chilaquiles, a Thai breakfast, minty spicy fish with sweet and spicy pork served with rice, or tofu with fish and rice soaked in soy sauce from Japan.
Even though there are thousands of choices, the only ones that came to my mind were the few I’d been brought up on.
Where is my free will then? Where are the unlimited choices that are supposed to flow out from my mind?
Sam Harris, PhD in neuroscience from UCLA and author of The End of Faith, a best-selling critique on religion says in his short book Free Will:
“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 assume that we could have made other choices in the past, Harris continues, and we also believe that we consciously originate “our thoughts and actions in the present. . . . Both of these assumptions are false.”
Harris backs up his argument by citing a famous EEG experiment conducted by Benjamin Libet and others in the early 80s, which showed that our brain makes decisions before we are conscious of them. He puts it, “activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.”
Harris begins Free Will by citing the case of two murderous psychopaths, Hayes and Komisarjevsky who entered into the Petit family home and committed hideous crimes—beating up the husband and tying him up, driving the wife to the bank to withdraw $15,000, then taking her back home where one of them raped and then strangled her to death. They then proceeded to burn the house, killing the two young daughters inside. Somehow, the husband luckily escaped.
Harris conceded that we would be justified in thinking that they should be put on Death Row, but we should also consider their history. Hayes was remorseful afterwards, and Komisarjevsky was repeatedly raped as a kid. He argues controversially, that if our lives had followed the same pattern as theirs, we would’ve acted in the same way. They were unlucky. Their fate was determined when they had such bad childhoods.
Harris is an atheist and a hard determinist and as such his world is one of a non-believer in anything supernatural, souls or a God, he thinks that all causes are ultimately physical. He argues that since all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined.
Another view is presented by other philosophers known as compatibilists that include Harris’s friend, Daniel C. Dennet. They believe that “a person is free as long as he is free from any outer or inner compulsions.”
This viewpoint is championed by the Stoics, Thomas Aquinas and Enlightenment philosophers like David Hume and Thomas Hobbes. Compatibilists argue that as long as we have the freedom to act according to our own motivation without coercion or restraint, then we have free will.
What about the issue of Moral Responsibility without free will?
Sam Harris believes that we are better off morally without the whole notion of free will. He says, “We should accept that even the worst criminals—murderous psychopaths, for example—are in a sense unlucky. They didn’t pick their genes. They didn’t pick their parents. They didn’t create their brains, yet their brains are the source of their intentions and actions.”
In a real sense, their crimes are not their fault. Realising this, we can dispassionately examine how to manage offenders to rehabilitate them, protect society, and reduce future offending.
However according to two psychologists; Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler, we become morally irresponsible if we believe that free will is an illusion. In 2002, they ran an experiment to see what would happen if people lost their belief in their capacity to choose. The results were conclusive, as when people stopped believing they had free will, they felt they were not to blame for their actions. They consequently acted less responsibly and gave in to their lower instincts.
Another experiment ran by Roy Baumeister extended the findings to prove that students who didn’t believe in free will were less likely to offer their help to a fellow student. They were also less likely to give money to a homeless person. Further studies indicated that not believing in free will led to stress, unhappiness, less creativity and less gratitude.
The feeling I get when I’m powerless to choose makes life somewhat fatalistic and hopeless. It’s like I’m living a Groundhog Day where what I do every day is recurring in a tedious and mundane way.
I find myself agreeing with the psychologists’ findings and the Compatibilists’ point of view. Schopenhauer’s quote at the top encapsulates my belief—We can do what we will, but we are not always in control of the thoughts or choices that are presented to our mind.
The choices my mind offered me came directly from my conditioning; what my parents fed me at home. The thyme bread came from Lebanon, my heritage. From Ghana, the country I was brought up in—the waakye. From the media that I consume—the protein shake.
I had a choice to make from not a thousand different breakfast options but rather from the five that are always on my mind. That day, I chose the protein shake because I’d wanted to get to work earlier than usual and the shake was the fastest way to get some right nutrients into my body.
For us to have more ‘Free Will’ then we need to widen our choices. To do so means we need to broaden our experiences. If during my formative years, I had travelled extensively and sampled much of the local cuisine, then I would have had different choices come into my mind.
Maybe, we don’t have the free will that many think we do, but our life—determined or not—presents us with many choices. The trick is to make the right ones at the right time. Or if we make the wrong ones, then to quickly acknowledge so, correct and reset our path.
What do you think?