If Free Will Doesn’t Exist, Then Why Does My Toe Hurt
The Debate
As humans embraced the notion that the universe is governed by thoughtless physical laws rather than by gods or other spiritual beings, a scary question emerged. If all matter is governed by physics, do I have any power to change the events of my life? Or is my desire to “be the captain of my soul” some residual wishful thinking from our primordial religious frameworks? We may feel like we are making the decision to drink chocolate milk over tea (an excellent choice indeed), but for this to be a truly free choice seemingly requires us to possess a supernatural ability to defy physics. How could a non-physical thing, the soul, actually “push” physical matter? It would be an action without any equal and opposite reaction, some external divine hand stopping the dominos from falling as they may. This contradicts a natural interpretation of things, where the universe is a massive avalanche of cascading, causally linked events, and our physical brains are just one snowflake in the mix.
The deterministic perspective of human choice appears often in psychology, and the results are compelling. Research is continually revealing how people’s behavior is the product of their genetics and environment (i.e., nature and nurture). We are, as it turns out, very predictable. More informally, determinist perspectives show up in popular ideas about mental health and human behavior. Consider the expression: “hurt people hurt people.” This highlights how people who are abusive were probably abused themselves at some point, which can help us understand and be less angry at the jerks of the world. Sam Harris fleshes out this perspective well in his blog. The underlying philosophy here is that people are the product of their environment: they are abusive not because they chose to be, but because their environment made them that way.
When deciding which team to be on, however, the camps are not as simple as religious people vs. cold scientists. It’s the big free will debate, which even divides atheists like Harris and his friend Daniel Dennett. Harris thinks free will is an illusion, but consciousness is real; Dennet thinks free will is real, and consciousness is an illusion. Figure that one out! They simply have “different intuitions” on the subject.
On the topic of free will, I mostly agree with Dennet, but I am also a determinist in the way Harris is. I’m not sure I believe in completely free will, but I do believe that the “will” is real in a meaningful sense. My argument here builds on an idea about suffering from another essay: Human Value Functions and Negative Emotions. In short: suffering is negative feedback our brain creates for us. Its purpose is to influence our choices toward better outcomes. If this is the case, why on earth would it be necessary for suffering to appear in consciousness if consciousness wasn’t involved in making decisions?
The Argument
- Suffering exists to influence our behavior
- Suffering appears in our consciousness
- Consciousness probably plays a role in causing our behavior
I’m not entirely concerned about whether my consciousness is literally breaking the laws of physics, which is the grouchy determinist in me talking. But, there is something beautiful about believing that I am making choices. Whatever the hell “I” am is open for debate, but as long as I am the one who experiences suffering and pleasure, I can be confident that I am playing a role in shaping my life. (It also seems obvious that embracing the responsibility of your choices yields positive results; in other words, believing you have free will is part of a well-functioning human creature. Dennet cites this fact often. However, this is a slightly different argument I’m not covering here.)
Again, while this argument doesn’t prove free will proper, it is a defense of the will, and of the statement “I make choices.” It’s also not air-tight, since you can argue that the true choice-making occurs outside of consciousness completely, somewhere else in the brain. Consciousness, and any suffering which appears there, is a non-essential byproduct of other brain processes that are actually doing the work. It may feel like we are choosing things, but this is only because our conscious experience is a reflection of the processes that are actually making decisions.
This is up to the reader to decide: which explanation is more compelling? On a related note, you could also ask: is the philosophical zombie plausible? Is it theoretically feasible that a human being without any of the qualia of human consciousness, suffering, or joy, could act and behave just like any other human? If this is not plausible, that closes this loophole for us. We must concede that consciousness plays an important role in our behavior.
Ultimately, this discussion descends into many of the same questions as any other debate about free will, as this is a well-explored topic. But what I do offer is one more argument supporting the idea that the qualia of consciousness have functional purpose, hopefully making the notion that “our experience of free will is trivial” a little less compelling.
In my opinion, our subjective experience seems too rich and detailed a thing to exist without purpose. Why would natural selection expend the energy, so to speak, to create consciousness if it provided no advantage? Additionally, we experience suffering appear in consciousness as if it were trying to make us to do certain things. Suffering is no mundane check-engine light: it is a force that we cannot ignore. It would only makes sense for suffering to be designed this way if consciousness was capable of doing things.
If I were a passenger on a boat and needed to steer the ship in a certain direction, I would not waste energy terrorizing some poor waiter serving shrimp. I would go find the captain.
