Why are you reading this?
For some reason, in recent weeks I keep bumping into Robert Sapolsky’s ideas. He is certain that you had no choice but to read what you’re reading, because there is no such thing as free will.
You may think you chose, but there was nothing doing any choosing.
Biologically, you can’t argue either – because of the evidence, not because your actions are predetermined. Whatever you do is caused by neurons firing, which are physical, and work by physical causes, combinations of sensory input, connection between them, environment and history. There’s still a lot we don’t understand about the brain and the mind, but few people think there’s any room for non-physical input in that process.
So your choice is always based on everything else, and you can’t have any free will.
Something troubles me about that, though, which is why I think about it so much. It feels as though there’s something missing, looking at it this way.
(That’s leaving aside the sort of argument made by Roger Penrose, which is that the brain does something fundamentally different from any kind of deterministic calculation we know, even if we can’t say how.)
Turn it around
If we look at it backwards, though … what would you want to be otherwise? What would free will even mean, if it isn’t that you can make the decision that you do in fact make?
I think of it this way, for me: when I do something, I have a sense that there is a distinct person who does that thing, who is me. What is it that makes me, me? Well, exactly the things we’ve just said meant there was no free will – the blend of genetics, experience, environment, previous experience and preferences that led me to decide to do that thing. I decided exactly because I am me, and I am the person who, in this situation, chooses to do this thing.
We can’t have it both ways, can we? Either we do what is particular to us, because we do have a distinct choice in how we behave, or there is something else that we would do, other than what we choose. And why would we?
So are we stuck, doing what we must do?
No.
This is the beauty of seeing how this works.
OK, your decision today may be inevitable because of everything you are and everything that brought you to this point. But the next decision is based on this one, and shaped by it. So if you consider that, it feeds into today’s decision because you know it will affect your life.
Tomorrow’s you is not set in stone, part of your choice today is what experience will feed into your environment and personality tomorrow.
That still doesn’t mean you can find traces of free will in today’s decisions, but now that knowledge will be part of the way you decide, and may shift the balance on some things.
Even having read this is now part of what makes you, you, and the way you think about things and decide things. Assuming you have built up the kind of character who can get to the end of a piece like this.
In some small way, I’ve just changed you.
No need to thank me.