The Unexpected Comeback of the Conscious Universe - Pt. X

Free will? What's that?

One question that nowadays seems to be in fashion again, is whether we have free will. This is not a new philosophical issue but, with the advent of increasingly intelligent machines and the advancement of neuroscience, it gained renewed attention. Because it isn’t clear if our actions are free and self-caused or, to the contrary, we only live in the illusion of possessing free agency but, in reality, are conditioned by subconscious and unconscious physiological processes. Maybe we are just biological robots that believe to be free but aren’t at all. On the other hand, if this is the case, wherefrom then does that undeniable sensation of having the freedom of choice come from?

One of the main arguments goes as follows.

Consider the universe as being a gigantic material clockwork, like in an immense billiard table, where the trajectory of the balls is uniquely determined once the initial and boundary conditions are set. Every event is caused by a physical causal determinism where every event of the present was caused by another event in the past, and every event in the future is strictly dependent on the physical state of everything that exists in the present moment. And, if you are a physicalist who believes that there is no distinction between your mind and your brain, then there is no way out: We also, as physically embodied beings, are the result of what we were in the past. Every action we take now is only the result of a past physical state of our brain. While, our present brain state will determine our next action, thought, emotion, etc. Ultimately, we are also a clockwork, nothing more. Therefore, if this physical causal determinism is true, then free will is an illusion. This is the standpoint of the determinists.

There is a philosophical movement, represented by the so-called ‘compatibilists’ who claim that, nevertheless, this physical causal determinism is compatible with free will. However, in my opinion, they only resort to an obscure wordplay that desperately tries to defend what is logically indefensible. If everything is pre-determined, even all the activities of our brain, and you are convinced that you are no more and no less than your brain, then you have expunged free will from the outset. And this must be true per definition!

On the other hand, the so-called ‘libertarians,’ try to save free will, speculating that the universe might not be so deterministic as the classical theories of physics seem to suggest. In fact, in quantum physics, this naive form of classical determinism has been shattered into pieces. In the quantum world, events can be random, with no apparent cause determining a specific outcome. The counter-objection is that if our brains are dependent on quantum events, then randomness doesn’t save free will either. Randomness would only cause us to act randomly, so the saying goes. However, what we call “randomness” is not something we can associate with a lack of agency or lack of purposeful action, and it even may be the signature of agency, as I have shown in this paper here.

Even though, as you can see, I like to work on these philosophical questions starting from a scientific and materialistic viewpoint, I also see how this scientific approach is limited and will forever only scratch the surface. Therefore, let us look at this issue from the complementary and integral perspective I outlined in the other nine parts.

Once we see things from the integral perspective, the perennial question of whether we have free will appears in a new light—that is, it reveals itself as an ill-posed question from the outset. The question does not specify who is supposed to be free from what. Whose will are we talking about? Are we talking about the privilege to indulge in whatever lower instincts of our outer self, the mentalized ‘desire-soul’ of the life plane, the ego? Or is it about the will and freedom of our true soul, the inmost being? By ‘will’, do we mean the mind’s volition that clings to the appetites of its egoistic individualization? Or do we mean the Will of the universal consciousness, and of which our real soul is a spark? Or, again, are we talking about something in between? These are all questions that are ignored in the orthodox scientific and philosophical debate that conflates all planes and parts of being into a low-dimensional monistic or dualistic theoretical framework and that, instead, in the integral paradigm, gains a new meaning and clear interpretation.

Here, we can see things from a completely different standpoint. The true soul in us is free from the subjection to Nature but, as long as our mind identifies itself with the outer physical and emotional personality, which are caught in the web of forces and instincts of the lower planes, we will continue to be subjected to it. In particular, the identification with the mechanical determinism of Nature dictates a mechanical and deterministic subjection of our being to its rules and laws. We can free ourselves by learning to detach from this identification—that is, to learn by means of some psychological or spiritual practice—to stay back and observe first, and then sanction and govern the workings of our nature from above.

In between these two poles—the total subjection to Nature’s instincts on one side and, on the other side, the release from an ‘enslavement’ to it as the result of the ascension to progressively higher planes of consciousness—life finds itself in many intermediary stages of development and degrees of detachment from a binding and mechanistic life to a free and luminous existence. Humans are creatures largely under the spell of the material nature and far from real freedom of willed action, thought, and feeling. We are free only inasmuch we can free ourselves from the deterministic aspect of the universe. Because we are individualized beings identifying ourselves with the subconscious, material, life, and mental planes but are still scarcely aware of the supraconscious planes. Though we still live in the illusion of freedom, most of our thoughts and choices are the result of subconscious impulses we are not aware of. If we live, as most humans still do, in the instinctual planes prevalently dominated by a subconscious individuality or, at best, a half-conscious mentality, we are still chained to a mechanistic and impulsive life with a lesser degree of freedom. However, it is also true that we are no longer the nerve-driven animal that a worm or an insect is. We are partially free and partially not. But, by progressively ascending toward higher states of consciousness, transforming and purifying our being in the light of a higher spirit, a ‘soul-freedom’ begins to emerge and take over the determinism of matter and the blind instinct of the lower life.

So, we see what appears to the mind as an exclusive binary and inescapable dichotomy because humans do not know themselves and are oblivious to the complexity of their whole being, from the integral standpoint we can find a resolution of the free-will dilemma reconciling these polarities naturally. Even though for very different underlying reasons, we find that the determinists are partially right in contending that physical laws determine us, while the libertarians and compatibilists were also partially right in affirming the opposite. Or, in other words, both were partially wrong. Once we do not limit our ideas to exclusively monistic or dualistic ontologies, but realize the complexity of the universe in all its planes and parts and understand who is supposed to be free from what, by raising our seeing to a comprehensive view and knowledge that realizes the richness of our being in all its facets and on all planes of consciousness, only then can we formulate a coherent and contradiction-free answer to the question of free will. Will is largely restrained and chained to the whims of Nature, but it can be freed by a progressive and continuous process of liberation. The will, my will, your will, can be a subconscious will, a will of desire, a will of the mind, or that of a superconscious Will. Only when all the former are aligned with the latter can we speak of authentic free will. And then, at that point, our will coincides with the supreme Will and all questions disappear.

Ooops… wait a moment… but then we are the puppets of some universal superconsciousness… aren’t we? We liberated ourselves from the chains of Nature only to become the slaves of God? Doesn’t sound like a good deal. Or is it? Well, I will leave you with this doubt… ;)

Conclusion

These were only some examples of how we can see comprehensively by adopting the integral cosmology towards all sciences and philosophical speculations that saw a part of the whole but failed to connect the dots. It is not necessary to know everything. What is necessary is that we learn to see integrally, that we practice another way of looking at the world, Nature, and ourselves. At the end of the story, we always discover the same principle: Knowledge isn’t a matter of summing the parts; it is a matter of seeing the Whole.

Materialism was a small blip in the history of humanity, an important evolutionary transition, but certainly just a transition. It had an important developmental role to play in freeing us from older thought-forms, but materialism has now overstayed its healthy function and is causing more harm than good. While, reviving old metaphysical ideas with few modern add-ons, might help us to transition as well towards wider and more advanced forms of metaphysics and spirituality, they won’t lead us much further either. My main critique of other theoretical frameworks of universal consciousness, such as cosmopsychism, panpsychism, reflexive monism, or analytic idealism was threefold. First, they are too coarse-grained lower dimensional ontologies, secondly, they ignore or address much too scarcely the evolutionary aspect of reality, thirdly they are too focused on the infra-rational aspect of life while ignoring or, again, addressing much too scarcely the supra-rational domain of our existence.

The outcome is precisely what Viktor Frankl’s laws of dimensional ontology predicted. Focusing on one dimension is the premise for causing cognitive blind spots leading to misinterpretations of what's actually going on. Frankl’s preferred metaphor was the projection of geometrical structures from a three-dimensional space to two-dimensional shadows. Studying only the shadow of things might make our understanding of reality and ourselves easier but imprisons us onto a surface. Limiting us forever to a lower dimension will always result in an ontology that will remain invariably plagued by inconsistencies and contradictions.

A visual metaphor for the dangers of dimensional reductionism.

One of the reasons for this attitude is that we resorted too much to principles of ‘parsimony’ allowing Occam’s razor to cut too deep. We insisted too much on cramming reality into a lower-dimensional picture because it is easier to handle. The idea is appealing, widely believed, but deeply misleading.

However, again, the technical and metaphysical details of this integral cosmology are not what matters here. The integral cosmology applied to the physical and psychological sciences is in its infancy and far from delivering the complete picture. What matters is that it is time to change our worldview and look further!

If we opt for a wider and richer view of reality, embracing a multi-dimensional and evolutionary perspective, that realizes that the human mind isn’t the ultimate tool of knowledge and that superconscient domains exist, then hard sciences like physics and biology, but especially medicine and psychology, economic models, and our present environmental mindset will change dramatically. The human mind and body will not be seen just as machines that must be fixed only through chemical and surgical means but will also be recognized as having a body consciousness that responds to mental, subconscious, and, perhaps, supra-rational physical stimuli. The human psyche will no longer be considered a mind-body-centered epiphenomenon but, rather, a soul-centered multidimensional being. From the multi-fold evolutionary perspective of the spiritual emergentist integral cosmology, even the most down-to-earth aspects of our life, such as the economy, finances, and the exchange of goods will be recognized as a flow of power supposed to serve the multiplicity in unity, rather than a clash of selfish beings competing for resources, all aiming only for the survival of the fittest.

If we believe that we are only the outward expression of selfish genes such that our feelings and emotions of empathy, compassion, love, and commonality are only a biochemical reaction in a network of mechanistic cells whose main goal, according to this narrative, is to guarantee an evolutionary advantage only functional to the group survival, then, we will inevitably conceive of models of society, economy, and human interrelations that see the collaboration among humans as a necessary condition for individual survival, but not as a base for a true inner collective soul-identity. This inevitably will also cascade into myriad very concrete and material consequences at the practical level. Meanwhile, if we feel inwardly a pursuit of an ideal of human unity that reflects a deeper spiritual collective soul-identity, our relationships, and our very practical and outward behaviors and approaches towards other humans and animals, other nations, other cultures, and religions would be of a very different type and quality.

Thus, most importantly, we have to recognize how our theoretical, philosophical, and metaphysical frameworks determine our actions, which regulate our very individual and also collective social and material forms of practices and expressions. On one side, the choice humanity will have to make is between a perennially externalized materialism or, at best, a strictly analytic and rationalistic metaphysical reasoning or, on the other side, a non-religious spiritual worldview that, from within, expands its vision beyond the status quo. Neither sciences and humanities nor our social and economic structure will remain unaffected by this choice; in the long run, this will determine human destiny.

This ends my brief overview of the integral cosmology of Sri Aurobindo, in a reduced and Westernized version, but updated by modern scientific findings and, hopefully, made more accessible to a wider audience.

Thank you for reading my work!

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