General Absurdism: A Framework for Practically Living in a World Without Free Will

The current Free Will debate is broken, and it's broken for one main reason.

Most Free Will Skeptics still behave—99% of the time—precisely as if it existed.

Over the last 20 years or so, I've spent thousands of hours studying the various sides of the discussion—Determinism vs. Indeterminism, Compatibilism vs. Incompatibilism, and all their various offspring. I've read dozens of authors and books on the topic, come up with my own takes, I've done some deep analysis on some of the modern classics, such as Dennett vs. Sam Harris's book Free Will, and Sam Harris even tweeted out one of my arguments back in 2013 or so.

To give the briefest recap, here are the main players, with a flowchart to identify your own beliefs.

A Free-will Flow Chart ​

• Determinism vs. Indeterminism discusses whether everything we do was going to happen anyway, regardless of what you choose
• If you believe that, then there are then two splits:
  • Compatibilists believe that you can still have free will even though Determinism is true, so we do have free will
  • Incompatibilists believe that if it was going to happen anyway, then our choices are illusions, so we don't have free will
• If you don't believe in Determinism, then you usually branch into the following paths:
  • You believe quantum randomness makes things unpredictable, and therefore gives you room for free will
  • You believe quantum randomness makes things unpredictable, but you don't believe that affords any freedom because it's essentially like rolling dice
  • You believe Determinism is true at the level of physics, and we don't have free will there, but God gives us free will directly

Left holding nothing ​

The problem with that breakdown—and the whole debate actually—is that if you end up in the Incompatibilist (the universe is mechanistic, therefore free will can't exist) camp like myself—none of the discussions land anywhere useful.

This is largely true for Compatibilists too, who have to play a constant game of "when free will applies and when it doesn't" for real-world situations.

But the problem is biggest for those like myself and Sam Harris, who believe free will is an illusion—full stop.

I just finished Determined, the book by Dr. Sapolsky of Behave fame. It was absolutely brilliant. Along with Sam Harris' Free Will, they are the best cases for both why free will is an illusion, and why that matters.

The inconsistency of the incompatibilists ​

But both Sam and Robert (their Ph.D's are a configuration of the universe, so I'm going to refer to them by their names), still fail to tell us anything tangible about what to do with this information.

They tell us that retributive justice is bad, and that praise and blame are bad, and that we're not making any choices even when it seems like we do.

But they still praise their loved ones. They still create a schedule. They still get angry at jihadists and scam artists. They still feel pride in their accomplishments. They still limit their social circle based on the quality of the people in it.

In other words, they still wake up every day and behave—almost exactly—as if they have free will.

Neither they, who I believe have the best and most thorough treatment of free will in existence, nor anyone else I've ever read, has ever given this blinding contradiction the full treatment it deserves.

And that's what I am going to attempt here.

And not just with words, but with a practical framework that we can use in our daily lives. It's not perfect, because Absurdism dictates that's not possible, but at least it's honest.

Let's start by finding and naming our problem.

The distance between experienced and actual reality ​

Our main problem with these types of deep, existential problems is the disconnect between what we want, what we experience, and what's real.

I think Absurdism, coined by Albert Camus, is one of our most powerful and practical philosophical concepts for capturing and dealing with this. It's often defined as:

The conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless, chaotic, or irrational universe. Wikipedia

To be clear, Absurdism is the conflict between those two things, i.e., the desire for meaning, and the fact that there is none built into reality.

General Absurdism ​

That's classical Absurdism from Camus, but I think the concept is so powerful that it applies to much more of life, and thus deserves its own term. I call this General Absurdism, and define it as:

In this model, Camus's Absurdism is an instance of General Absurdism, but there are many other instances, and the human experience of free will is perhaps the biggest.

We Incompatibilists know/believe that free will doesn't exist, but we live almost our entire lives as Compatibilists anyway. Why? Because we must. Our human experience is simply incongruent with behaving any other way. Unless we are specifically thinking about Determinism and free will while in a philosophical and intellectual mindset, we might as well believe we have freedom granted by God.

Let's call that what it is—a contradiction. It's behavior in opposition to our beliefs. It's hypocrisy.

I believe the only solution to this is to build a framework for explicitly managing this hypocrisy.

Such a framework should:

1. Explicitly acknowledge the dual nature of our human reality (experience vs. reality)
2. Allow us to knowingly pivot between various practical and contradictory behavior personas based on the situation and our stated goals.

Goal-based Persona Shifting ​

I've created such a framework which I'm calling Goal-based Persona Shifting, because it involves taking on completely different perspectives on reality (personas), that prompt different behavior (action), based on the situation (context) and what we're trying to achieve (goals). It also shortens to GPS.

Here are the underlying premises, which mirror what we covered above.

Goal-based Persona Shifting (GPS) Premises ​

The following are the set of assumptions under which the GPS framework operates.

1. Human experience is often in opposition to, or incompatible with, underlying reality, meaning our tendency as humans is to believe things and/or behave in such a way that isn't technically true at the level of physics.

   Examples: Seeing Color, Seeking Meaning, Experiencing Love, Needing Romance, The Existence of Evil, Enjoying Ice Cream.

2. This causes us significant turmoil when intellectually/morally evaluating the morality of regular human life activities.

   Examples: The search for meaning when there is none, the drive to punish and praise when free will doesn't exist, the practice of decent people ruminating over bad things they've done in the past, and the question of whether it matters if you try when the outcome is out of one's control.

3. Because humans experience reality through our evolution-crafted brains, we cannot experience underlying reality directly.

   We see color, feel love, and have a natural will to punish criminals not because romance and beauty and evil exist at the level of physics, but because they exist at the level of humans. This makes them real to us, even if they are meaningless or noise at another level.

4. As evolving intellectual and moral beings, however, we've reached the point where the contradiction and hypocrisy of living as if free will exists when we know it doesn't, is no longer acceptable, and we need a framework for managing the gap between reality and experience that has some measure of intellectual integrity.

   If we value intellectual integrity, then we must find some practical way of dealing with this contradiction.

5. The framework will not eliminate the incompatibility between reality and human experience, as nothing can do that, but by acknowledging the differences between them, and building an action framework based on that knowledge, we will make our behavior more honestly aligned with both.

   The goal is a practical method for behaving intuitively while maintaining intellectual integrity.

6. The framework has 4 components:

   1. GOALS: Determining our Goals for human outcomes. E.g.: More children escaping poverty, fewer people committing crimes, improved personal growth, etc.

   2. PERSONAS: The enumeration and use of various Personas, which represent completely different—and often opposing—perspectives on the world. E.g.: "I am in complete control of how my day goes.", "I can't control what happens, but I can control how that makes me feel.", or, "It doesn't matter what someone does, because that was going to happen anyway." Etc.

   3. CONTEXT: Choosing (smile) the ideal Persona to use based on the Context of the situation. E.g.: You are writing a love letter, someone has just snuck alcohol into the fourth rehab center, you're feeling unmotivated to get out of bed and start your day, you are deciding whether someone is a practical long-term mate. Etc.

   4. ACTION: Taking Action as the ideal Persona for the specific real-world situation, given our stated goals. E.g.: Giving young offenders examples of where people turned their lives around, specific self-talk strategies, deciding which criminals should get third chances vs. not, etc.

7. To use this framework, we take the following actions:

   1. Articulate our human, moral Goals for each situation. E.g.: "I want to maximize my friends' chances of success but only if they're trying just as hard to improve.", or, "I want to achieve $1 million in revenue in my personal business, but I care most about my friends and family."

   2. Enumerate and articulate a number of different Contexts, or situations, in which we will need to behave. E.g.: Personal Motivation, Relationship Choices, Whether to Help a Friend or Not, How to Approach Risk in Your Startup, Etc.

   3. Select a set of opposing Personas that can be used to behave within those Goal/Context situations.

   4. For any given situation, look at our Goals for that given Context and choose the appropriate Persona to use to take Action.

8. We should be able to oscillate between these Personas as many times, and as often, as necessary to adjust to changing Contexts in alignment with our Goals.

   We oscillate our Personas based on the Goals and Context of the situation. So as often as those change, that's how often we should be free to re-select an appropriate Persona. Perhaps that's once in a day, depending on what you're doing, but during important considerations it might be needed multiple times per conversation, per sentence, etc. We change Personas based on the combination of Context and Goals.

Ok, we got through it. But captured in this way the GPS Framework is quite theoretical and academic.

Let's make it more tangible by adding visualized examples.

GPS Framework Examples ​

Let's capture a few of the types of human situations that make all us non-free-will-types into hypocrites.

Example 1: Punishing a gang member who stabbed someone ​

1. They don't have free will, so it wasn't their fault
2. They can't live in society if they're still dangerous
3. You can't just say, "don't worry, it wasn't your fault."
4. We educate them by telling them that life is hard for everyone, and that they need to try to make better choices
5. We also educate them by telling them that some people have it harder than others, and we should acknowledge the differences in the playing field
6. ???

Example 2: Praising your kid for doing something nice for someone ​

1. They don't have free will, so they don't deserve any praise
2. But they're your kid and you love them and want them to be happy, and you're strongly compelled to praise them
3. You also want to encourage them to do that behavior more
4. You also don't want to encourage the idea of free will because it'll subtly nudge them over time towards blaming those who don't make good choices, i.e., the thinking that they're worse people for making worse decisions
5. ???

Example 3: You're trying to become a nicer and more disciplined person ​

1. I don't have free will, so why don't I just stay in bed? Won't that result in whatever would have happened anyway?
2. I can only get as good as I would have been in my career anyway, so isn't "trying" already priced in?
3. What does it matter if I actually succeed? I can't take any credit for that anyway. And same if I fail. That's not my fault either. Again, why even do any of this?
4. But it feels good to achieve, and thrive, and to be nice to people. And it's nice to have a house and to be able to go to a restaurant with friends. And I want that for other people too.
5. So I guess I'm just acting like I have the ability to change things even though I don't? That's silly.
6. ???

The Framework in Action ​

GOALS: These are some of the main things that we as morally progressive and aware humans are trying to accomplish at the same time.

1. Keep the public safe from the offender while he's dangerous
2. Give the offender the highest possible chance of turning his life around after being caught
3. Make the victim and/or victim's family feel as if justice was done
4. Discourage future behavior by others in society given the knowledge of what the offender did and how they were treated
5. Avoid the concept of moral guilt that deserves retribution, i.e., the idea that the offender is simply a bad person, and that he should feel horrible guilt for this
6. At the same time, encourage the offender to wish that it didn't happen, and feel sympathy if not empathy for the victim, and to put in the work to do better in the future

Notice that even these goals are in conflict with each other.

PERSONAS:

1. POSITIVE RESPONSIBILITY: You were raised better than this and you should have known better. Reflect on your wrong and spend the rest of your life doing good to counterbalance the bad, and help to make a world in which this doesn't happen to other people.

2. STACKED FACTORS: Society is unfair and some people have worse upbringings than others. You were unfortunate and got put in some bad situations, running with the wrong people, and you made the wrong choice at the wrong time. But it's not 100% your fault. Take some responsibility and do better in the future, but also do your best to work to improve society so that other kids don't end up in similar bad situations where they might make similar choices.

3. LACK OF FREEDOM: You were the victim of circumstance. Genetics. Upbringing. Environment. Bad situation. Anyone in the exact same body with the exact same upbringing would have done the same thing in the same situation. You are not at fault here. In fact nobody is. All we can do is try to make it so fewer people, including you, are in that situation in the future.

ACTIONS: And here's what I would do and say to such a person, in an ideal society.

1. Isolate them to get them the help they need
2. Educate them on the impact of their actions
3. Encourage them to develop sympathy and empathy for the victim(s)
4. Encourage them to make better choices in the future
5. Educate them about the effects of their past on their actions
6. Convey that their past and circumstances technically exonerates them at one level, but that they should behave as if they are in control of their actions going forward, and always try to be their best self, and the version of themselves that they would want to be and look up to

Contradictory and Simultaneous Truths for Consideration ​

• They Had No Actual Choice: The accused stabbed someone because of the state of the universe after the Big Bang combined with the laws of physics progressing across time—neither of which he controls. So at the level of underlying reality, he has precisely zero responsibility for his actions.

• Stripping Belief in Free Will Might Make People Act Worse: When regular people in the early 21st century are stripped of their belief of moral responsibility due to the lack of free will, it is likely to have a negative effect on their behavior and their temperament. And for would-be criminals, it could actually serve as nihilistic justification for continuing to do bad things.

• Believing in Free Will Might Make People Act Better: For would-be criminals who are close to the boundary of making either a good or bad decision, an appeal to their moral goodness and willpower might be precisely what they need to make the better choice.

• Dangerous People Need to be Isolated from Society: We don't hate Avalanches or Polar Bears, but we also don't want them around us, and it's the same for someone who is currently—for whatever reasons—likely to cause harm in the future. Such people do need to be isolated from the general population until they can be helped.

Conclusion ​

The GPS framework isn't about resolving the fundamental contradiction between our experience and reality—that's impossible. It's about acknowledging this contradiction honestly and building a practical system for navigating it.

We can continue to live as if we have free will while knowing we don't, as long as we're conscious of this dance between personas. This isn't hypocrisy if we're transparent about it—it's adaptation to the constraints of human consciousness.

Perhaps the most absurd thing of all is that this framework itself requires us to choose to use it, even though we know that choice is an illusion. But that's precisely the point: embracing the absurdity rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

In the end, we're all just configurations of matter following the laws of physics, but we're configurations that experience meaning, love, and purpose. The GPS framework is simply a tool for making peace with that beautiful contradiction.