Do We Have Free Will? Almost Certainly Not

We don’t have free will. For a start, it doesn’t make sense scientifically. But it also doesn’t match our own experiences. But before I explain why, I would first like to defend the opposing argument a little bit.

But before I even do that, perhaps we should first define what free will actually is.

According to Dictionary.com:

noun

1. free and independent choice; voluntary decision: You took on the responsibility of your own free will.

2. Philosophy. the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces.

But let’s go further and say that having free will means that we could have done otherwise for any action we have taken or choice we have made. It means we had the freedom to act differently than we did.

A few words in favor of free will

There are a couple of reasons why free will is a difficult belief to let go of.

Reason #1: we feel we have free will

Most of us tend to feel we are in control of ourselves. We grow up feeling we are separate individuals with our own thoughts, feelings, and preferences.

We make free choices. We believe what we want to believe. When not forced to do things by others, we do what we want to do.

Reason #2: the importance of free will in society

When people achieve great things, we congratulate them. If people repeatedly do great things, we consider them to have a good reputation.

Similarly, if someone does something evil, we believe they freely chose to do that evil thing. Unless somebody forced them to do it, they chose to do it of their own free will.

As a society, this helps us to decide who to trust and who to stay away from. And our whole justice system seems to depend on free will. If someone does something bad, they are punished to discourage them from doing that bad thing again.

But are good people actually good because they choose to be good? And are bad people actually bad because they choose to be bad? Are their choices really freely made?

Why we DON’T have free will

There are many reasons why the concept of free will doesn’t make sense. But before we get into the real meat of things, we need to clear up some confusion.

Fatalism vs Determinism

As YouTuber Rationality Rules states from 2:44 of this video, many people seem to confuse a lack of a belief in free will with fatalism:

As he says, fatalism means that absolutely everything is predetermined and therefore inevitable. Determinism, on the other hand, means that only human consciousness is predetermined. I’m not entirely sure about that particular distinction, but I will explain how I understand the difference between fatalism and determinism.

The problem with a fatalistic view is that it could cause someone to believe there’s no point in making any effort to do anything because whatever is meant to happen will happen anyway.

But the reality is, actions and decisions do matter.

For example, let’s imagine you want to learn Chinese. From a fatalistic viewpoint, if you’re destined to speak Chinese it will happen anyway. But the truth is, to learn a language you need to actually put in the time and effort to learn it. You need to attend language classes or do an online course, for example.

But that scenario still doesn’t require a belief in free will. You can make decisions and take actions whilst still knowing that ultimately your choices originate from beyond your consciousness.

But also, the very act of adopting a fatalistic approach to life is itself a choice. Sitting around doing nothing, waiting for the world to come to you, is itself an action. It’s an action based on the decision to look at things fatalistically, and that, in turn, is a result of factors beyond your conscious awareness.

But what about randomness?

What if some things in the universe are random? This may mean everything is not completely predetermined. However, this still doesn’t give us free will. Where is the will in randomness?

When looked at in this way, free will seems to be impossible. If things are predetermined, there is no freedom. But if things are random, there is no will.

Freedom requires that things aren’t predetermined, and will requires that things are not random. But something cannot be both random and willed. Therefore, for a single choice or action, freedom and will cannot coexist.

What does science say?

As Rationality Rules says from 3:55 in the same video, there is some science to back this up:

In 1983, subjects were wired up to an EEG machine and a timer was put in front of them. They were then asked to decide to make a hand movement, make that hand movement, and report at what time they had decided to make that movement. The results showed that associated brain activity occurred at least several hundred milliseconds before they were consciously aware of the decision to move their hand.

But this study drew criticisms due to the very short time period involved. So, in 2008, another study was done using an fMRI machine. The results showed brain activity occurred up to 10 SECONDS before the subject was aware of the decision.

A helpful analogy is that of a computer monitor. Think of your consciousness as the monitor, and your subconscious brain activity as the inner workings of the computer (processor, hard drive, etc.). The monitor does not do the work of the computer, it merely displays it.

The illusion of choice

We don’t actually need scientific experiments to know we don’t have free will. All we really need to do is examine our own experience of how we make choices.

Think of any choice you have made. Why did you make that choice? Did it make sense as the best choice to make after considering all your options? Or did it just feel like the right choice?

Or perhaps you were forced to make that choice? But being forced to make a choice isn’t really a choice, so we can discard that. So, what about the other two possibilities?

If you chose something because it made the most sense as the best choice, you didn’t get to choose that it made the most sense as the best choice. Either it made sense as the best choice or it didn’t. Either way, you didn’t choose that.

And if you chose it because it just felt like the right choice, you didn’t choose that either. You didn’t choose to feel that way about that particular option. We don’t create our feelings, they just emerge spontaneously within us.

Here is a great video by YouTuber Cosmic Skeptic:

We don’t choose our thoughts

To be able to choose your thoughts, that would involve knowing what your thoughts are going to be before you think them. That’s impossible. By the time you’re aware of what your next thought is going to be, it’s too late, you’ve already thought it.

Consider the last thought you had. Why did you think that particular thought? Did you choose it from a menu of available thought options? Or did it just spontaneously appear in your mind?

You can’t want what you don’t want

If you don’t want something, you can’t force yourself to want it. You can pretend, but you can’t actually change whether you want it or not.

And you can’t control what you desire either. If there’s something you really want, you can’t just decide to not want it. You can pretend, but deep down you will still want it.

Sure, your wants will change over time, but not because you consciously decide to change them. They will change due to other factors — a change in circumstances, a change in how you feel (we’ve already covered this), or because you’ve learned new information convincing you otherwise.

You don’t choose your beliefs

Do you believe in God? What about aliens? What about flat earth? Do you believe humans can survive without oxygen? Do you believe that if your head is cut off you will surely die?

Whatever your beliefs or disbeliefs are about these things, you can’t just suddenly change them. Of course, if you are presented with information that contradicts what you previously believed, you might naturally change your mind. But you can’t just WILL yourself to believe what you don’t believe or to disbelieve what you do.

You didn’t create yourself

Think of all the things that influence who you are as a person. Where you were born, what year you were born, your gender, your race, how good your parents were, whether your parents had a happy marriage, your siblings, how much money your family had, your health, whether or not you were abused as a child, your physical abilities, your mental abilities.

All of these things shape who you are, yet you did not create any of them.

Consider the serial killer with a brain tumor

Imagine someone is going around killing people. One day, after a particularly horrendous killing spree, he is cornered by police and shot dead.

They do an autopsy on his brain and find out he had a large tumor pressing his amygdala. It is concluded that this drastically altered his emotions and behavior which led to him killing people.

Upon learning this information, we would no longer consider him to have made the free choice to kill. He was driven to commit such awful acts due to a faulty brain.

But this is just an extreme example of what is true for all of us. We’re all born with slightly different brains. For example, some people are naturally more empathetic towards others, whereas some people are more logical, and so on.

There are countless examples of ways in which people are naturally different from each other depending on the brain they are born with. And we know that experiences change the brain too. So, if somebody was born with a slightly faulty brain and then grew up in a damaging environment, we can understand how they would go on to make bad choices in life.

I cannot take credit for the fact that I wasn’t born with the brain of a psychopath. Just as I cannot take credit for being born with fully functioning arms and legs.

But are you your subconscious as well?

One argument against all of this is: what you consider to be “you” also includes all of the subconscious factors that shape who you are. If your choices, personality traits, and preferences are all formed in the dark away from your consciousness, so what? Isn’t that all still part of what makes you “you”?

The problem with this reasoning is it ignores the common definition of free will. Will is a conscious act. Therefore, if someone has free will, they consciously make their choices free from restrictions. But if those choices are actually made subconsciously, they are not conscious choices. They are not freely consciously chosen because they are determined by subconscious mental processing.

Life is bigger, it’s bigger than you, and you are not me

Nobody is an island. We don’t operate in causeless vacuums. We are all intertwined as part of a bigger whole. Everything happens in the context of countless factors that preceded it, and many effects that follow it, most of them not consciously known.

Our behavior affects others. You might like to think you are entirely in control of your thoughts and emotions, but that’s just not true. If someone says something that genuinely hits a raw nerve, it will upset you. Or if someone gives you just the right compliment, it will brighten your day.

This is why it really matters how we treat each other. Don’t be a dick towards other people and then expect them to be solely responsible for how they feel. And if you smile at someone, you might just make their day better.

And if you see somebody being an asshole, try to imagine why they might be being an asshole. You don’t know what’s going on in their life. Maybe they just got divorced or their child just got leukemia. Don’t assume their life is the same as yours but they just consciously decided to be an asshole.

Still not convinced? I bring you Sam Harris…

If you’ve read this far but you still disagree, I would like to point you in the direction of Sam Harris’s 80-minute lecture on the subject.

I can’t force you to watch it. You can’t even make yourself watch it if you genuinely don’t want to. If you don’t want to watch it but you watch it anyway just to prove me wrong, ask yourself why. Where did the need to prove me wrong come from? Did you consciously choose it?

If you do watch it and still end up believing in free will, I have one last challenge for you. See if you can consciously decide not to believe in free will even though you really do.

Anyway, over to you Sam…