Free Will? What's that?

Going beyond binary answers

One aspect, that I strongly feel needs much more attention, is whether the answer to the question of free will could be only binary? Whatever the truth is, must the answer be either ‘yes’ or ‘no’? Might not reality be a bit more complicated and admit another possible alternative in between a purely affirmative or negative reply?

Even among professional philosophers, one finds this question only rarely addressed. In most cases, the debate is dominated by the pro and contra free will factions, not much more. Physicalists say we have no free will, while so-called ‘compatibilists’ and ‘libertarians’, even though following very different lines of reasoning, claim we have the freedom of choice. All sides built their trenches around one or the other front, no other possible front is considered.

I find this way of tackling the problem deeply unsatisfactory. Why can’t there be a more sophisticated answer to this perennial question?

On the other hand, what could it possibly mean to have only a half, or a quarter, or ‘three-quarters of free will’? Let me unpack this.

One thing is for sure: No, we can’t do whatever we will. I can not materialize out of anywhere a ton of gold in my cellar. I can not become immortal only because my instinct for survival wills me to do so. However strong my will is, I can’t fly just by flapping my hands. In other words, there are physical limitations imposed by the environment and physical laws that strongly constrain my freedom of agency.

So, you might object that this is not what people mean when they frame the question of free will. We are talking about the freedom to choose, say between buying a chocolate or vanilla ice cream, dressing in one or the other way, marrying mate X instead of mate Y, etc.

But, at closer inspection, one can see how this objection originates from our too outwardly focused consciousness that looks upon things with an exclusively third-person perspective, and an intellectual inability to look inward by a first-person approach. It rests on the more or less unaware assumption that our choices–that is, our mental preferences–while limited by the environment, aren’t constrained by bodily and emotional limitations as well.

To clarify, let me start with the easy part.

Suppose you have strong physical pain, say you suffer from a terrible toothache. Would your mind be free to float harmoniously from thought to thought on whatever it wishes without any interference from the toothache? Or would it rather be compelled to focus its attention on how to relieve that pain? The obvious answer makes it clear that our thoughts are not independent of our bodily sensations, feelings, instincts, and appetites.

But let us suppose you are perfectly healthy, and no organic necessities need to be addressed. Would your mind be free to think and choose whatever it wills?

The answer is negative, again. One has only to realize introspectively how our emotions, passions, and desires condition our thinking as well. If we honestly look inside of us, we can clearly see how a constant whirl of more or less strong or subtle emotions, desires, affections, and passions, continuously determine our thought patterns.

Let us make a bit less obvious and more positive example: You are in love with someone. What else could there be more desirable than fixing our thoughts and feelings on that person, triggering that elating emotion we have when we think of someone we love? But what if you have to go for your daily business and need to focus your attention also on something else? We are rational beings who can do that, to a certain degree. But when you are head over heels in love with someone, that detachment is very partial. Something impels the mind to focus its attention over and over again to connect emotionally and mentally to that person. The mind is not completely free from a vital-emotional force that compels it to return over and over again to some thoughts.

This is just to say that it would be naïve to believe that our choices make an exception to this state of affairs. Like it or not, our choices are strongly affected by our emotions, feelings, and desires as well. There are inner psychological forces in us that determine how and what we think and, consequently, also how we act–that is, what we choose.

Moreover, we shouldn't forget how our mind is highly dependent on more or less subtle forms of cognitive biases that determine what and how we perceive and how we interpret things. We see the world through cognitive filters, desires, and predilections that create interpretations and mental formations influenced by emotional impulses over which we haven’t much control. How much contact do we have with the truth of things without any deformations, independently of our mental constructions, desires, attachments, and whatever kind of preferences filtering and coloring reality? Modern psychology has amassed numberless experiments showing that we translate reality wrongly in our consciousness. And isn’t our mind strongly influenced and conditioned by our past education, memories, experiences, and cultural context? Does our religious affiliation, or non-religious or anti-religious identification, our political and ideological background not determine, or at least influence our choices? Do you believe that commercial advertisements or political propaganda leave your thoughts, emotions, and worldviews unaffected? Have the opinions of others no influence on your choices? Are your personality and the way you think free from the influence of society? Are you sure that your apparently sound conclusions weren’t guided by an unaware ideological bias?

Answering all these questions would probably require a doctoral dissertation, but I hope you get the point. There are good reasons to conclude that these internal psychological conditionings don’t leave much space for genuine free will.

If we see things from this perspective, another rarely addressed but decisively missing point becomes crystal clear: When we ask if we have free will, who is supposed to be free, and from what? Many philosophers will answer that you alone make choices, not anyone else. But who is that ‘me’, ‘I’, or ‘ego’ that supposedly makes free choices? The mind? My emotions? My body? My brain? Or are we talking about a ‘soul’ or a ‘spirit’? And I don’t even begin with opening the Pandora box of the subconscious, unconscious, subliminal, or superconscious (whatever these words might mean.) How far are we conditioned by these unaware layers of our personality? This is a whole chapter apart that would only add on top of what I’m trying to point out here. But is that submerged part of ourselves that defines ‘me’, that 'I’ and ‘my personality’ which is making choices?

Thus, if we train ourselves to take also the first-person perspective, we don’t need a Ph.D. in neuroscience or psychology to realize the self-evident fact that, we have no idea what we are really talking about and that, if we have any free will, it must be quite limited.

Nonetheless, we might still assume that we may have a certain amount of self-determination–that is, we may be able to choose freely if we make an inner effort not to be conditioned by our emotional states and mental preconceptions. That’s, after all, what the Age of Enlightenment tried to achieve: let rationality, analytic reason, and crude facts determine dispassionately and ‘objectively’ (whatever that might mean) with the third-person empirical approach of the scientific method what the truth is, without emotional and ideological interferences. This was, and still, is the great ideal. The truth, however, is that this also is something that scientists, who are humans like everyone else, are not always able to do either.

Maybe we can become free if we learn to detach from our physicality and transform our passions from enslaving impulses to enriching feelings that delight but don’t subjugate us. This would also make more sense from an evolutionary perspective. The stone is subjected to purely mechanistic and blind material laws, the animal is only scarcely beyond it and must obey its instincts of survival, humans are, in principle, able to take control over the impulses dictated by Nature, but can do so only limitedly too. Maybe a future more evolved species will be less determined by outer physical and inner psychological forces that determine our thoughts, choices, and behaviors.

Whatever the case, the bottom line is that the question of free will can’t be answered in binary terms. There are different ‘degrees of freedom’ between the completely constrained and automatic behavior of the machine, and a completely self-determining entity. We are neither the former nor the latter.

Failing to realize this, has led philosophers of mind to the construction of philosophical castles on very shaky grounds. Let us go beyond this binary black/white thinking, by looking inside of us, going beyond an anthropocentric worldview, and honestly admitting what we are: semi-animal forms of life, still, and quite strongly driven by the outer and inner forces of Nature.