Two of my friends (Carl and David) and I have been having a long email debate about free will. They believe in it. I don’t.

It’s been going on for multiple years now so I won’t attempt to summarize here. But recently there has been a sub-debate spawned from a recent post of mine: Concepts vs. Convention.

In that post I talk about people being asleep, and I express my wish that they wake up and become more than animal automatons going through the motions of life as defined by their ancestors thousands of years ago.

Carl and David are exasperated by this. They see this as a complete contradiction with my belief that humans lack free will. The particular portion that drives them crazy is:

Wake up. Don’t sleep. Be human. Be better than the animal you are. And don’t fall prey to the narrative that it’s endearing for others to conduct their lives as if they were living 50,000 years ago.

My explanation for this has been simple: you don’t need free will to be positively (or negatively) affected by inputs from the environment. It’s a matter of giving a new perspective that can be used in a variable cocktail for future decision making–just like a chess computer.

Example: if you show someone from a low-income family who doesn’t value college at all how important college is by hitting them with salary differences in adult life, lists of successful people who went to college, taking them to college campuses to show them the girls and the dorms, etc.–you have changed the inputs into an equation that will take place in that person’s mind.

Notice that when a poor boy from a broken home in a poor neighborhood gets involved with the wrong people and makes bad choices–this boy is considered to some degree divorced from his actions because that’s the environment he grew up in. “He got involved with the wrong people.” “He never saw how good life could be outside his neighborhood.” Etc.

Those are valid statements because inputs matter.

And it’s the same for a motivational speech or seminar, or a blog post challenging one to question their motives in life. Either way, they are inputs into decision processes, and having good inputs can yield positive results. People who are never encouraged to challenge why they make the decisions they do are not likely to do so.

So, I happen to believe that we lack free will. I think that when we go to make a decision we experience the sensation of making a choice, but that in fact all the variables that will make up the outcome are outside of our control, and thus we don’t truly have control over the decision.

But this has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it’s good for a child to hear that college is positive. Or that one should question why they behave in certain ways. Or whether people should be encouraged to be nice to others. Those are injections into the collective variable stream which are positive, and it matters not whether the decision mechanism is with or without freedom. Either way it is likely to improve outcomes.

Let me state it as I did in our email debate:

1. We are, ultimately, on rails. It could be that the rail is being put down randomly in front of us, but we’re not the ones putting it down. Hence, we are not in control.

2. From the inside of our experience, i.e. as humans experiencing life, we are able to respond to stimuli. If we hear a motivational speech we can decide to lose weight or pick up painting. We can also read blog posts about not being asleep, and decide to question why we do the things we do. The fact that our responses to that stimuli are outside of our control DOES NOTHING to diminish the fact that we’re able to perceive and respond to these inputs.

So yes, you absolutely can both “make choices” as a human responding to stimuli (that’s what we experience) while simultaneously having no control over what you will “choose”. There is no contradiction here.

I’m curious as to where any interested readers fall in this debate, but it may be that I’ve argued too much for my position and not given my opponents enough stage time. Here again is the crux of their argument: They claim it’s a contradiction that I say people shouldn’t be blamed for their actions because we don’t have free will, yet in that blog post I seem to admonish people for being cogs in a wheel when they have no option to be anything different.

My response is simple, and very consistent with both the concept of improvement and a lack of free will: I’m using the post as an input stream for improvement. So people who perhaps hadn’t heard the idea before, or hadn’t heard it enough, will perhaps make a better decision next time they have an opportunity to.

So, to any interested readers, respond below with how you see it:

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. ~ Hypatia of Alexandria

I realized recently that I value most those who are able to step outside convention when living their lives. The most powerful manifestation of this is being acutely aware of why one does what one does. Examples include questioning why we seek mates, why we have children, why we work 9-5 jobs to make money and have the things other people think we should have.

To say it plainly, I think people who don’t question such things are basically asleep. People who move through life doing exactly what they’ve been prodded to do by their surroundings are no more than complex animals. There is no spark there of what makes us human.

What interests me most, though, is being able to classify groups and systems based on this criteria, for the purpose of identifying that which we should nurture or phase out. For example, there are many cultures that are today, in 2012, encouraged to behave precisely as their ancestors have for tens of thousands of years.

This system goes like so:

1. Birth.
2. Learn to love your god(s).
3. Get any job that makes money.
4. Find a mate and have lots of kids.
5. Teach your kids to love your god(s).
6. Teach your kids to find any job that makes money.
7. Die.

This is a system that worked great for tens of thousands of years. Respect. But things are different now. The worst thing smart and caring people can do is pretend it’s somehow charming for millions of people to hold onto this system of life in the 21st century.

It’s immoral to do so.

It’s immoral to watch millions of people attempt to live a lifestyle of 50,000 years ago in the middle of the modern day. They cannot thrive. They will only suffer. It’d be different if they were isolated and lived as if our world didn’t exist, but that’s very rare (and likely temporary).

The right thing to do is to try to help them wake up. I propose a different model:

1. Birth.
2. Learn to appreciate our joint, global human struggle.
3. Learn to revere continuous education.
4. Strive to do work that helps others, ideally through creation.
5. Continually question how we can maximize happiness and reduce suffering.
6. Be curious about the universe.
7. Have children only when it’s good for the world to do so.
8. Teach those children these same values.
9. Die, maybe.

Many people recoil at this list. Why? Because it’s weird. It’s different. It’s not natural. But remember, lions eating human babies on the plains of Africa is natural, too. The point of being human is evolution–becoming better.

This is what I’ve been noticing recently: people and cultures that are thinking beyond their animal natures vs. those who are bound to a primitive wheel of mediocrity and suffering. And don’t think this is tied to financial success or “westernization”: there are many supposedly successful people who haven’t questioned anything in their life other than what other people REALLY want them to do.

I heard somewhere once that there’s nothing more depressing than having a conversation with yourself using someone else’s canned dialog. And that’s what the majority of our world passes off as contemplation.

Wake up. Don’t sleep. Be human. Be better than the animal you are. And don’t fall prey to the narrative that it’s endearing for others to conduct their lives as if they were living 50,000 years ago. It’s not endearing. It’s not wholesome. It’s not quaint. It’s primitive, limiting, and it propagates suffering.

Demand that we improve.

::

I had an idea the other day about life achievement: if you currently have no plans to be worthy of a minor blurb on Wikipedia then you don’t really have any plans. That’s a low bar, and yet it’s miles above what 99% of people I know will ever accomplish.

Let’s unpack that.

What could you do in life that’s worthwhile that doesn’t earn one a quick footnote on Wikipedia? The easy answer is parenting, but it’s too easy. Being supportive of one’s biological offspring isn’t noteworthy to me, any more than eating when hungry is. You eat when you’re hungry, and you raise your progeny to be successful–that’s nature. Like Chris Rock said, “That’s what you’re supposed to do!”

So if those things don’t qualify, then what would? A few candidates: building schools for the poor, writing a popular book, being a successful artist, inventing a cure for a disease, being the first person to space in a homemade craft, or having a small radio show that touches people’s lives.

Again, the bar is very low. The standard is to make a ripple. To produce something. To affect the world in some positive way other than “He provided for his children.”, or, “She was nice to his friends.”

Quite simply, if you’re not working on something worthy of a Wikipedia entry, and you have no plans to, then what are you doing? TV shows, office cubes, paychecks, a couple of laughs, and then an eternity of silence.

Don’t be that. Be as least worthy of a Wikipedia entry.

::

Image from skeptically.org

In my ongoing efforts to convince others that free will is an illusion, I have found an argument vector that I’ve not yet encountered:

If you believe in cause and effect, i.e. that all outcomes are the result of previous conditions, and you accept that all causes existed before you were born, then it impossible to believe that any choice you can make is truly free.

Think about that. How could one make a free choice in a cause and effect world if every factor that determined the outcome of your choice existed before you were born? To believe that is to believe in magic.

Let’s try it in deductive form:

1. The universe is governed by cause and effect.
2. The physical components of all possible causes existed before you were born.
3. Any outcome must be the result of those causes and those causes alone.
4. Therefore the proposition of human authorship of outcomes must be false.

I welcome challenges to the logic and/or help with formalizing it.

::

This is the single best presentation of Harris’ argument that I’ve ever seen him make. He finally addresses common counterarguments, such as:

Well, I can decide to do x right now—and then I can change my mind–or even change my mind again! This proves I have free will.

This is the first time I’ve seen Harris address this line of argument directly. He also goes into the significant and positive repercussions of seeing the world this way.

I honestly see this video as one of the most important things one can do with an hour. We’re talking about nothing less than realizing that 99% of the world is fundamentally confused about the nature of reality.

Accepting the narrative put forward by Harris here is akin to waking from a sleep for the first time. This applies to how we see ourselves as people, how we are connected to others, and why we should be build a society that reflects this perspective.

Please. Watch this in its entirety. It might, without hyperbole, literally change your life.

::

JRE #192 – Sam Harris, Brian Redban from JoeRogan on Vimeo.

A number of people recently have asked me about how my position on free will integrates with a practical society, e.g. how do you get up in the morning if you know you don’t make your own decisions?

I answered this recently in an email, and here’s the response:

–

>On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 5:10 AM, JM wrote:

–snip–

He (Same Harris) also says: “Happily, we will find that we need no illusions about a person’s place in the causal order to hold him accountable for his actions, or to take actions ourselves.” So Sam Harris also disagrees with you. As far as I remember, he elaborated in this in “The Moral Landscape” (I can’t find the book, nor his blog posts about it on the internet right now). Let’s see what he says in “Free Will”. :-)

My opinion (which probably has been influenced by Sam Harris), is that we are not actually responsible for crime, for example, but it is a good idea for society to assign responsibility, because this amounts to a positive environmental influence (we will be less likely to do the crime if we feel responsible and/or there are consequences in the form of prison). So we get moral responsibility because society decides to assign it. We can call it “assigned (moral) responsibility”. We agree that it’s not actual responsibility, but it’s still a good concept for the society.

Agree or disagree?

Hi JM,

Yes, I do agree. My stance on this has always been that we should intellectually acknowledge that free will (and therefore moral responsibility) is an illusion, but that we should mostly function as if it were real.

This means making decisions as if you had true choice, and it means “holding people responsible” for their actions in most practical situations.

But it means that when it comes to designing a society’s criminal justice system, and system of taxation, and philosophy on welfare, and structure of public education, etc. — all these things are done with the knowledge that inputs create outputs, i.e. no free will exists, and that nobody “deserves” to be rich or poor.

In other words, I advocate a clear duality in our treatment of the matter. We functionally behave as if we have free will because consequentialism still yields fruit based on incentivizing good and bad behavior, but at an intellectual level we understand that this is in place for practical reasons rather than absolute.

TL;DR: Embrace the duality of behaving as if you have it while knowing you don’t. Do this because it’s the only way we as humans can function practically while remaining intellectually honest.