Freed Will: Escape from My Fib’s Goad

 Freed Will: Escape from My Fib’s Goad

A review of "Free Will" by Sam Harris

We are our upbringing, our genes, our friends and animosities. We are randomness and deep-seated urges, but are we more?
My close friend Pankaj once asked me this deceptively simple question: if I upend a bowl of rice onto the floor and then try the same experiment again under exactly the same conditions would I expect the grains of rice to end up in the same positions? Naturally, I answered “No, the pattern would be changed.” But the conditions are the same: wind speed, the starting positions of the rice grains, the height of the bowl, EVERYTHING is the same. “Well, what about randomness?” The grains fall according to laws of physics, under identical conditions random outcomes cannot occur. I relented before this thought experiment left my dinner without a starch.

But what has this to do with the question of free will and whether we are more than just cause and effect? Thanks to modern techniques, scientists can detect our decision to act almost a full second before we know our own mind is made up. In some experiments, a technician can tell, with a 4 in 5 success rate, what a subject will choose 7 to 10 seconds beforehand. This means the center of our consciousness – the ghost in the machine, what I call “I” – is merely a radio tuned to receive and not the transmitter; that physical processes, not a spiritual conductor, are wholly responsible for what bobs up into conscious thought. “Where is the freedom in that?” as Sam repeatedly asks.

If those myriad factors that create “I” were grains of rice in a bowl, they would fall the same way each time. There is no outside force to nudge them. What we perceive as a clear-cut decision to alter our course is an un-felt, unheralded cause leaving us only with posthumous pangs of power.

The motivation to read this, eat cereal for breakfast or drive a different way to work was not decided by your conscious brain even if it feels like it was. This does not mean one can go into autopilot or that everything is predetermined. What it does is allow us to see people as they are: products of a genetic lottery caught in the crosswinds of chance and drifting affiliations. A point that is made most real by remembering you would do exactly what another did if placed “in their shoes”. How could you possibly do otherwise?

Knowing that, how do we then mete out justice? Sam draws a distinction between the sociopath, whom society needs protection from, and the unfortunate. The latter could include a man who is beaten as a child and ends up beating his own children just as easily as it does a brain tumor-afflicted person whose condition makes them violent. Both have physical causes for their crimes and can be remedied.

Disillusioning oneself is a tricky affair. There is only so far one can take a thought’s regression. Why am I writing this? Because I enjoy reviewing books I’ve read. Why do I enjoy it? I could guess but don’t truly know why. Thinking about effort and motivation have similarly confounding effects. Why do I give up in some projects but persevere in others?

In the end, I suppose we all maintain lies. Some we find useful and others just habitual. It brings great comfort to many to know a heaven exists in which they will meet loved ones again. Some lies are borne out of our highly social species and the primitive urges we feel for revenge and lust. Comfort is found in the crowd caught up in the same lies, and so we go along with it. Many lies we may never uncover but free will is demonstrably false and unveiling it is, ironically, freeing.