It was a strange request.

The inquirer wanted to know what my thoughts on “free will” were?

His interest revolved around his thirty-year struggle with the concept as it related to drug addiction issues in his family and recent neurology research that challenges our assumptions about the existence of free will. I am only one of many people he will ultimately interview for his book on the subject. He emailed me: “I think your background as a police captain, a fighter for justice, an author, a degree in social work, and not least, a lover of animals (I’m familiar with stubborn horses who have wills of their own) makes you uniquely qualified to talk to about the subject.” 

Hmm. Well, okay.

“Free will” and its opposites—determinism and predestination—are concepts found in various philosophies and religions. But outside of religion, is it an important question? 

The concept of free will has been part of American society since our founding, the assumption that an individual can choose, and those choices guide his/her destiny. European culture, on the other hand, is rooted in the idea one is born into set classes—nobility and serf. Only rarely did choice play into a person’s destiny. 

It has been a key reason for America’s successes and its sharp divisions.

Without the concept of free will, the tower of individualism crumbles and with it, we must question the parts of our society we built around it.

People (all the ones I know, anyway, including myself) work on the assumption that they have choices and that what they decide determines the path of their life, although for too many, life has severely damaged and/or limited their choices and perhaps their ability to choose. 

Some scientists (from B.F. Skinner to current day neurologists) have challenged the existence of free will, proclaiming it an illusion. Their position is that we do not make decisions. In this, they are in the camp of determinism (a philosophic doctrine that whatever is or happens is entirely determined by antecedent causes, i.e., all that came before.) 

Wow. That is a blow to my whole concept of myself and life. But I am wondering if that digs deep enough. Maybe the question of whether we have “free will” is the wrong question.

Perhaps, the deeper question is: Who is the “I” that has or does not have free will? 

Eastern thought has long maintained that the existence of “I” is the ultimate illusion, a trick we play on ourselves, a story that stitches together our memories to make a singular entity. The  “reality” we construct about the physical world is also just a story about reality. We think chairs are solid. We don’t experience the essence of the world directly at all; we only “see” a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum and none of the underlying reality of nature, the quantum stuff. For that matter, scientists don’t even know the nature of most of the matter and energy in the universe. It’s all dark. Maybe we are dark to ourselves.

There seems to be an “I” that makes decisions, but perhaps it is not the little guy/gal at the “control panel” as we think of our conscious mind. Alan Watts described the conscious mind as being like the beam of a flashlight in a vast, dark room. We are only aware of whatever that beam illumines in the current moment. The rest of the room (us) is surely there, but “we” (our conscious minds) are not aware of it. The flashlight can be pointed at things, to our heartbeat, for instance, and we become aware of it, a memory, a smell, but for the most part, we are unaware of the constant activity and decisions being made at chemical and electronic levels in our own body (we even have a brain in our gut!) and brain (the one in our head). 

“I” (whatever that is) can’t imagine that we don’t really make decisions, even if we are unaware of them. 

To get even weirder, electrons and photons can exist in a kind of limbo in every possibility state (in quantum physics called a state of “superposition”). Then things happen (a beam of light bumps into them, they are forced through a tiny hole, we sneeze. . . ) that makes the superposition collapse, i.e., “choose” one state, and that causes consequences in the macro world, the world we perceive. Fortunately, these states are predictable, and we can sit in chairs with reliable expectations that they will be there.

Looking at it from another perspective, what would have been the purpose of evolving a conscious brain? Is it to weigh factors and imagine consequences so that we can plan? A being that can’t decide to change or do again what worked before is handicapped in the survival race. But even sea worms can make simple decisions—move to the light = get food. I don’t think worms are conscious, but maybe I am wrong about that. It seems preposterous on its face to say we don’t decide anything. Does a dog make decisions? As a proud and loving dog-owner, I can say, absolutely. Is my dog aware of the factors that go into his decisions? Umm. . . Are we?

Decisions are made, but who is the “I” that makes them?  

I’m thinking “I” is the total mind/body including:

• Our conscious and unconscious mind; 
• Our inherited and expressed (modifiable) genetics—genome;
• Our experiences (input from our senses, our interactions,  our interpretations, and our recall, i.e., memories);
• all the microbes that share our body—biome; as well as
• Environmental and cultural input. 

In other words—everything.

It’s possible that from all this emerges a quantum field where all is potential until some cluster of the above reaches a point where the system coalesces (decides?) and feeds thoughts into our brain. We are not aware of the thought that the field (“I”) produces until it emerges into our consciousness. And sometimes, it never even makes an appearance; we just act on it. Have you ever been startled in the middle of watching a movie or reading book to discover you are crying? Or maybe the first inkling that you have eaten an entire box of crackers is realizing the box is empty?

Robert Wright in his fascinating book, Why Buddhism is True, talks about the scientific observation that different parts of the brain show increased activity before humans report having different thoughts. And different kinds of thoughts emerge from different areas in the brain. A thought about an ethical question shows activity in a different section from a thought about napping. 

I think of thoughts like popcorn emerging from different parts of the brain. I have ceretainly looked at a piece of seriously chocolate cake and thought, I want that, while at the same time, I’m are thinking, I do not need to even think about eating that!? Just because those thoughts are available to the conscious part of our mind, doesn’t mean the conscious part of our mind generated them. It just became aware of them.

When people meditate, they focus on something that requires no thinking, and the conscious part of the mind watches diverse thoughts bubble up. (Your brain is always active, even when we sleep or are in a coma. If not, you are in deep medical trouble.) Instead of having the sensation that the conscious mind originated the idea, the meditator feels a distance from the thought and just observes it. Even if it is an emotionally-ladened thought, having this distance helps understand it and gives the conscious mind a space to make decisions about it. 

Hmm.

Maybe it boils down to the same thing those neurologists are saying—that I think/act based on the entire gestalt of everything that has gone before. Even a thought instantly becomes something in the past and part of the Everything Soup. Or maybe there is a little guy sitting in the control room. . . .

Does it make a difference?

I don’t know. I still can’t figure out why I was chosen for an interview about this. But I am comforted that it is a debated topic by professionals. Still, it feels radical, understanding the “I” in this way. It feels like it should have consequences in how we live our lives. 

I feel like I am, whether I am or not.

Regardless of whether you exist as a consciousness exerting free will or whether these words you are reading are inputs into the quantum field that is the temporary manifestation of energy and matter pretending to be you (my head hurts)—I wish you Happy Holidays and hope your choices, wherever they come from, includes Joy.

I would love to hear your thoughts, just don’t make my head hurt anymore.