What if You've Never Made a Decision

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

T.S. Eliot—The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

If you choose not to decide

You still have made a choice.

Neil Peart (Rush)—Free Will

What if you've never made a decision?

That's the conclusion of Sam Harris in his book Free Will. 

Free will—the idea that we can make decisions about what we will do—has always had its philosophical problems. 

For instance, in Christianity, the entire edifice of sin is based upon the idea that we, as humans, have the capability to choose between right and wrong.  But, the Judeo-Christian God is also omniscient.  He knows how everything will turn out.  So how can we truly have free will if God already knows what we are going to choose?  Is our choice not then preordained?  There's no easy answer, and more than one Jesuit was locked up in the medieval equivalent of a cubicle trying to circle that square, let me tell you.

Things didn't get much better when Galileo and Newton came along.   According to science, up to the 20^th century, the universe was mechanistic, deterministic, unfolding like clockwork to its ultimate end.  If you knew, in theory, where every single particle was and where it was going at this instant of time, the entire future would be known to you.  So where is the free will in that?

The turn of the century saw the advent of quantum physics.  Reality was no longer deterministic.  Subatomic particles existed as probability functions—the electron could be here, or it could be over there.  When observed, the probability wave function collapsed.  One probability became equal to 1 (i.e. it happened) and all the others went to 0 (and didn't happen).  There was no way to know for certain, even in theory, which event would transpire.  So now the course of the universe was based on the roll of dice, on mere accident.  There's still no room for free will.

Compound this with some recent studies in brain science indicating that people who think they are exercising free will, have in fact, already made up their mind about issues long before they think they have made a decision, and you can see that the entire concept of free will is on some pretty shaky ground.  We're just a bunch of meat puppets.

This indeed is Harris's conclusion.  Now I admit to a bias up front.  Harris is a founder of this outfit that is called Project Reason that seeks to spread "secular values" in society.   This secular evangelism is just as annoying as Christian evangelism.  More so.  At least the Christians offer everlasting life in Paradise. The secular crowd: You are so incredibly insignificant that words in the English language cannot adequately convey how much you don't matter.  

Not only that the secular evangelist books God is Not Great and The God Delusion, which I've read, we're both, in my opinion, abysmal.  They didn't make their case.  And I'm  Scientist and an Agnostic—I should be an easy sell.

The problem, for me, is that Harris is trying to take science, which is  a useful tool to logically extend our senses to observe and predict nature, and turn it into a value-based philosophy.  But reason itself, as I've explained in the past, is a solid stone castle built in mid-air, held aloft by—you guessed it—faith.  Besides which, science is concerned with what is, not what should be.

Anyways, probably because of that, I was a little more critical of the book than I normally would have been.

We all imagine that we—our "selves"—exist, parked on top of our bodies, peering out through our eyes and instructing the machine we inhabit to make us a cup of tea or whatever, like the drivers of those big Imperial Walkers in Star Wars.

Cup of tea, then?

According to Harris, we may be in the vehicle, but we ain't drivin'.  You did not decide to have Weetabix instead of Corn Flakes this morning.  Your brain chemicals did that.   And even if you decided  that you were going to show those brain chemicals who's boss and go for the Corn Flakes, dammit, it's no good, because your brain chemicals already determined that before you did.

I can certainly go along for the ride and allow for the possibility that free will is an illusion.  After all, why should I think that I can change the course of the universe with but a thought, but a rock can't.  But If I'm going to buy that free will is an illusion, I insist that Harris takes the argument to its logical extent.

The notion that we have free will is intricately woven into our idea of self, of ego, of that feeling of continuity you have that you are you.  Harris takes this vital component of the self—will—and says that it is illusory, but that what is left of the self is still real.  Nonsense.  If free will is an illusion due to a bunch of brain chemicals burbling up to the "conscious mind," then so is the ego, your entire sense of self.  It's all burbling chmcials and dancing neurons.  The self is an epiphenomena induced by trillions of cells working symbiotically. The ego is an emergent property of a complex system.  A "transient landscape of the mind" as David Hume called it. 

So the knowledge that self and free will are an illusion doesn't really get us that far—unless you're a Zen Buddhist, in which case you can consider yourself Enlightened.  Just because you are convinced something is an illusion doesn’t mean it can be dispelled.  Ask a schizophrenic.  Ask a guy whose right foot hurts, even though he lost that foot five years ago.

The self—including the notion of free will—is an illusion that it is simply too difficult, and perhaps too valuable, not to maintain.   


And what is the difference between reality and an illusion that cannot be dispelled, especially when that illusion is being imagined by your self, an illusion?  OK, I just threw that one in to screw you guys up.