Free will is not an illusion

Whether one has freedom of will boils down to a rather simple question. For any thought or action, could I have done otherwise? Dig into the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and you will find a couple of logical arguments that attempt to define free will in this way:

“Simple Conditional Analysis: An agent S has the ability to choose otherwise if and only if, were S to desire or prefer to choose otherwise, then S would choose otherwise.

… or …

Categorical Analysis: An agent S has the ability to choose or do otherwise than ϕ at time t if and only if it was possible, holding fixed everything up to t, that S choose or do otherwise than ϕ at t.”⁽¹⁾

There are a few others. All of them have merit and suggest that should an agent somehow have the ability to change their thoughts or actions, it would indicate the existence of free will. However, defining free will is not the issue. The issue is deciphering how, given the physical nature of the universe, could an agent change the inevitable outcome of their actions? This is where the SEP goes off the rails a bit. Rather than address the problem from a scientific standpoint, the authors attempt to square the circle in light of philosophical determinism. They offer up a rather weak view of compatibilism in light of phobias, and appeal to Frankfurt-style cases where mind control thought experiments poke at the idea of sourcehood …. it is an interesting read, but ignores the basic mechanics of consciousness and how, if at all, a physical account of choice might inform the philosophy.

Think about your thoughts. Where did the last one come from? Did you decide what to think or did the thought simply pop into consciousness from the void? There is a lot of controversy about how consciousness arises, but it seems clear that whatever the origin of our thoughts, we are not the author. Even the thought that we could control our thoughts is ultimately illogical. How does one consider a thought before they think it? The concept itself is circular and fails any reasonable explanation. And what about our actions? If we cannot control what we think, we can still deliberate and chose how we act, right? Well … give it a try.

Look around you and point to any object you see. Now consider why you pointed at that object and not some other object. You might say, it was the first object you saw … or that it was easiest to point at … or perhaps you didn’t point. Presumably, there was no constraint on the choice you made. If you pointed at all, there was no coercion to point at one object over another. The freedom part of the equation was there. What about the physical process? Your brain made some calculations, prepped for movement, and stimulated your body into action. If the conscious portion of what to choose simply popped into existence, why should you think the physical part enjoyed any more control? Could you have pointed at something different? If you think so, it means that if we rewound the universe to the time just before you chose what to do, you could have chosen differently. It is to say that cause and effect at the moment before that moment broke down and the next moment for whatever reason was not determined. Is that even possible? Well, perhaps. Perhaps the choice was not the outcome of cause and effect. Perhaps it was the effect of randomness. Consider the implications of that …

At the moment before the moment, perhaps some quantum state created a random butterfly effect on whether you pointed at object A or object B. Perhaps this time, you point differently. Was that free will? I don’t think so. To me, randomness is even further from free will than determinism. If the source of our actions are random fluctuations in quantum states, or chaos theory, or whatever flavor of random causation you prefer … the effect is not freedom to choose. Instead of having the explanatory power of cause and effect, randomness renders our actions truly inexplicable. There is no agency in neither determinism nor randomness.

Without agency, there is no freedom of choice. Does that mean everything we experience is just an illusion? Some philosophers would say so. In his compelling Ted Talk, Daniel Dennett agrees with much of what I just wrote but goes on to talk about the illusory nature of consciousness.⁽²⁾ I recommend watching it, although I disagree that consciousness is an illusion. If that were the case, it implies our witnessed experience is not our actual experience. Rather, it implies what we experience from moment to moment is some trick of consciousness fooling us into feeling like we have free will despite the mechanics of it. I would argue the illusion of consciousness is itself an illusion. It does not matter that it feels like we are in control, or even that our brains try to trick us into that sense of control. It implies that we are somehow an unwitting witness of our moment-to-moment experience. That doesn’t make sense either. To be a dupe of our own experience means that we are somehow separate from the illusion.

Similarly, David Chalmers describes experience as a movie playing in your head.⁽³⁾ He describes consciousness as though we are sitting in a theater of our mind, an agent separated from the movie itself, bearing hapless witness as our thoughts and actions unfold according to our fate. Chalmers and Dennett engage in heated disagreement on the nature of consciousness, but I think they share a commonality in their approach to free will that is flawed. Both men imply that we are an impossible bystander to our own experience, that we are agents observing our agency. To imply that we are somehow separate from our own experience creates an Inception-like trap where yet another level of consciousness exists, like a movie within our movie. This cannot be the case. It would be illogical to think our actual experience and our witnessed experience are separate streams of the same agency. Even if one of them were an illusion, only one stream of experience could be witnessed at a time. It also seems unlikely we are somehow separate agents, each with its own stream of experience, or even both witness to only one. If that were somehow metaphysically the case, when it comes to freedom of thought and action, every possible agent still falls victim to the physicality of the experience. All of them lacking the free will to control their thoughts or actions.

Crazy as it seems, in my opinion, the only logical conclusion is that we lack agency. At least in the sense of freedom of will. Free will is not an illusion, rather the idea that free will is an illusion is an illusion itself. There is no movie to watch. There is only the movie. There is only the experience. If I am right, and we lack the freedom to truly control our thoughts and actions, it seems reasonable to conclude we are not agents of our own experience at all. It may feel as though we are in control, but instead, we simply witness experience as it happens, in real time, helpless to exercise any control over our next thought.

Citations

1.         O’Connor T, Franklin C. Free Will. In: Zalta EN, editor. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Internet]. Spring 2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University; 2021 [cited 2021 May 2]. Available from: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/freewill/

2.         Dennett D. Transcript of “The illusion of consciousness” [Internet]. [cited 2021 May 2]. Available from: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consciousness/transcript

3.         Chalmers D. How do you explain consciousness? [Internet]. [cited 2021 May 2]. Available from: https://www.ted.com/talks/david_chalmers_how_do_you_explain_consciousness