I don't think there's any such thing as free will. This sounds like a terrible thing to say only if taken too quickly to mean its arguable opposite: we're robots. We are not robots, we are odd miraculous living systems of biologically collaborative 'parts', the job of one of which, largely the prefrontal cortex of the brain, is to decide for the survival of the whole that it knows what's going on and therefore can make decisions which will keep it alive. It's the job of that Deciding Mind to hoodwink itself into thinking it's the boss.
Actually (I now believe -- sorry, Prefrontal Cortex) when we
'choose' to do something instead of something else, what we're reacting to
is a reflexive struggle in us between impulse and restraint. Not a
purely mental tug-of-war (I don't believe there is such a thing), but one engaging
our most potent hormones and neurotransmitters - adrenaline to dopamine.
If we 'choose' restraint instead of impulse, or vice versa, we like to
think this is evidence of free will: that our waking consciousness
(sense of self) managed to be the boss. But really it's evidence of a
whole-system reaction to desire and fear. It's more unconsciously innate
(better word than ‘hard-wired’) than any easy notion of
"choice." We may decide after the fact it is 'wise' in a
pragmatic way. But to me the whole system at work is responding to
its own in-the-flesh imperatives: its biology. This means a whole lot
more is going on than any singular decision or observation we can articulate.
William James tackled, addressed and finally agreed
with the idea - now largely corroborated by
technology (brain scans, etc.) unavailable to him - that when we (for
example) "decide" to get out of bed, in fact the body has decided a
fraction of a second before the mind has caught up with it. What the mind
is really implicitly deciding (after the fact) is that the choice to get
out of bed was its choice. The only pragmatic, indeed
possible solution for William James, save madness (which he believed himself to be on the
brink of, torn as a young man for years by his many ambivalences),
was to believe that he had free will to decide what to do. "My
first choice was to choose to believe in free will." This has a
wonderful sonorous American ring to it, not least because it reassures us, I
suppose, that we can exert "agency." It has great provisional
use. (12 step tenets are based on it.) It's part of the way we do the best Alan Watts says we can do: muddle through. But it doesn't address enough of the
whole strange phenomenon of our humanity - our Being. Therefore it remains as
hollow a pretense as any other.
Back to the 'body' deciding before the 'mind' knows about
it. And that being part of how the whole system of each of us works.
A brain (prefrontal cortex included), is of course as much the body as
a toe or a pancreas. A thought is as biological as
a sneeze. No part of the animal is greater than the unity of its
billions of collaborative parts. There is an already complete complex and largely
successful universe operating in you, hard at work at what Quentin Crisp
called (and claimed as his occupation) "The Profession of
Being." Which suggests (surely not only to me) what we might more
profitably be considering: not so much our power to choose what to do, but to
learn what by nature we are. That is,
what we by nature are already. To investigate
what that suggests about the wellsprings of our behavior. Perhaps first of
all to value this truth about ourselves: not that we're imprisoned by an unchangeable
template, but rather that we each are inimitably configured to respond in ways
that make me Guy and you Alphonse. Actually I don't know an Alphonse, but there
must be many, so here's a shout out to all you Alphonses, and everyone else
too: to look at yourself first and always as an already operative complete
sentient being whose behavior is endlessly telling you what and who the miracle
of you is, therefore never not revealing your loves and your aversions,
what you want and what you don't want in your life.
.
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