You do not have “free will”, but it’s okay.

 

“You can do what you will, but you can’t will what you will.”

– Arther Schopenhauer

In this article, I will argue the case that not only is there no such thing as free will, but it is a logical impossibility, a linguistic confusion. Pardon my apparent overconfidence, it is the coffee’s fault; caffeine can easily make one megalomaniac. But nonetheless, let’s begin.

I side with the German philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, that almost all the philosophical problems are linguistic confusions; and so I believe the free will is too.

To understand this dilemma, first of all let’s ask: what do we mean by “free”? What do we call “free”? Try to contemplate that for a moment.

We label someone “unfree” or a “slave” when they are operating under someone else’s command. We see someone under someone else’s rule as an unfree individual.

So from that, we can conclude that we only call someone free when no external forces influences their actions and they are operating according to their own will. However, even when the person we once called unfree is now supposedly free, he is unchained from his master’s chains, but is still operating under forces that are out of his control.

Every action we perform, every decision we make, every desire we desire is ruled by events and environments that are out of our control. It makes us think, isn’t that just another form of slavery? Aren’t we then under the tyranny of our creators and our genetic wiring to how we respond to our environment? Aren’t we then just a programmed genetic machine, working to pass our genetic material to the next machine?

You may say: what if I do things randomly without accounting for any reason? Well, where is the value of free will if all you do is based on randomness?

Now we arrive at a two-way road; the first is that our actions are by reasons, or our actions are random. In both options, we have no “free will.” Every action you do is either influenced by a reason outside of your control, which means you are not free in doing them, or it is done randomly, which also means there is no free will in the matter.

One may object and say that this dichotomy is only valid if we believe that we live in a materialistic world. But the problem is that the dichotomy works no matter what property you give to the world. Even if we grant that we have “a soul,” it still falls under those two options. Either your soul decided to do something because of a prior and out-of-your-control reason, or does it randomly, which takes us back to the same conclusion: there was no such thing as “free will.”

No matter how deep you go into this rabbit hole, you will always find yourself faced with the dichotomy.

From this we conclude that the notion of “free will” is just a linguistic misunderstanding. We label things “free” when we see no visible forces acting upon them; while ignoring the forces that are invisible to us. “Free” is a useless word in this context. What we mean when we say someone is free is: “he is slave to his own instincts and forces rather than someone else’s”. We are never “free”, we can only be “less slavish”.

Let’s consider this scenario by one of my favorite teachers, Robert Sapolsky:

You punch your friend because of a thing he said, which has upset you. Then we ask: what was going on in your mind that caused this behavior? That action of punching can be traced back to a series of incidents that were entirely out of your control.

What was going in your brain one second before punching your friend? What was the level of activity in your amygdala one second before the punch? To understand that we have to go back several minutes before the punch; have you had breakfast that day? Were you in pain or agitated? Because when you are in pain, when you are hungry and tired, your frontal lobe (which inhibits you from doing socially unacceptable behaviors) can’t function well.

Let’s go back to the days before the punch. How raised was your level of testosterone? The more your testosterone is increased, the more chance that you consider a neutral facial expression as a threatening expression. The more raised your stress hormones are, the more active your amygdala and less active your frontal lobe are.

Let’s go months back before the punch. How much stress were you under months before the incident? The more stress and exhaustion you were under, the more excited and active your amygdala is, and more atrophied your frontal lobe.

Let’s go back years before the punch. Our frontal cortex doesn’t mature until after we are 25. The experiences we have had before that age shape our frontal cortex. How much bullying you were subjected to prior to the maturation of your frontal cortex? The more violence and bullying you have encountered, the more you are liable to act violently.

Let’s go back to your embryonic life when your brain structure was being formed. How much stress your mother was under? How many fights was she having with your father? How much and what was she eating? The more under pressure she was, the more your amygdala was liable to be excited and your frontal cortex to shrink in the future.

Let’s go centuries back before the punch. What were your ancestors doing? If they lived in a tribe that honored violence and war, chances are these values have been transferred to you and remained in your society.

That one punch to your friend’s face reflects each and every moment of these series of incidents. To understand a behavior, you have to go back a second before, an hour before, days before, months before, years before, and even thousands of years earlier. The face of your friend, at that moment, is a victim of thousands of years of incidences.

It’s not a far-fetched idea to think that maybe all your current actions, all your desires, and goals in life revolve around one simple event in your childhood that you forgot a long time ago.

This thing that you call “self” and I call “you” is nothing but a collection of multiple experiences, shaped together inside a 1,5 kg brain. And your job should be trying to understand this bag of a mess, to analyze this self and be aware of how you have been shaped.

This notion of not having free will may be frightening at first, but doesn’t it call for kindness and forgiveness towards yourself firstly and your fellow human beings, secondly? Isn’t this a perfect antidote to hatred and prejudice?

We are not proposing, of course, that bad actions to be permitted; when a car has a flat tire or broken breaks we try to fix it first, and if we fail, we will lock it in the garage so that everyone else would be safe. But what we shouldn’t do is call it an “evil” car. We try to understand it and possibly fix it.

We are creatures that are here not by choice and will have to live through this life with decisions that are far from our selection; all we can do is to ease each other’s pain; but we can’t do that unless we understand one another. Because we should always remind ourselves that: “to understand, is to forgive.”