The illusion Of Free Will: Are You Choosing To Read?

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Written By Matthew Hillcrest

Matthew Hillcrest is a pseudonym for an American born writer living in Australia. He answers questions on religion and explores the sciences. Matthew also takes a great interest in geopolitics and talks regularly to his cat.

The illusion of free will is often characterised as the brain deluding itself. When you perceive that you’re making a decision, the brain has already chosen for you.

Can you choose your next thought? Can you know why you did? Did you choose your nurture, or your nature, or where in this world you were born?

If we have free will, it is of a severely limited variety dependent on our level of our self awareness and perception of our surroundings.

The topic of free will has been taken for granted throughout history. Either as a gift from biblical texts, or self evident from our day to day subjective experience. Those who have challenged this concept ascerting it to be an illusion have not done so without any tangible or lasting effect save perhaps in eastern philosophies.

These philosophies lack the tools of our current standard of science to prove their insights as testable truths, or at least leave behind physical evidence for us to verify and study.

Through recent advances in the field of neuroscience, and through the invention of EEG and MRI, and the cooperation of volunteers – many of them monks, to assist in mapping the brain during meditation and various states – we have learned more on the subject.

The common scientific consensus now for those in the field of neuroscience is that the concept of free will as we know it does not exist. There is something inside many, perhaps most, that rejects that concept outright, for the concept threatens to leave that something on the inside a falsehood and an illusion.

The illusion of free will and it’s role in your map of reality. Were you the cartographer?

It is no surprise we perceive our own experience as one of free will, or at least to some extent. The illusion of free will springs from the ego – the mind identified self – which maps out reality in a way for us to negotiate through the trials and tribulations of our perceived continuity of our reality. 

Those maps that graph closer to reality are more likely to give rise to more meaningful action than a mind that has devised a map of reality based on dwelling on the past and planning, or worrying about the future. Unfortunately the latter describes just about all of us.

Excessive thinking can  lack one of access to a realm of what Buddhists call ‘Beginner’s Mind’, or in the west presence or spacious awareness is used for conversational purposes.

Our senses take in information from all around us and only a small fraction is perceived by the conscious mind. 

Many have an understanding of the unconscious mind to some degree – Carl Jung and many others have written on the subject – and so by this basis alone, we can conclude that much that goes on behind the scenes in our minds prior to a conscious thought or action. Decisions are taking place without your conscious awareness’s involvement.

Did you choose the next thought?  Pay close attention to your mind and you may find out.

Let’s tackle this from the most practical way, doing thought experiments and being honest with ourselves about the implications.

Thought experiment #1

Pick a color, any color. First, close your eyes for a moment and allow the color to rise spontaneously. Alteratively, choose it with your thinking mind.

Now that you’re eyes are opened again — if they were ever closed — think about why you chose that color. 

Immediate reasons should pop into your head.  Like:

  • I saw a purple flower recently.
  • A yellow school bus passed my window minutes ago.
  • The sky is blue and I like looking at the sky.

But can you be certain these are the reasons that led you to choose that color? 

We can digress with every step of the process until you’re convinced.

There is a continual stream of cause and effect in our lives. We can never understand it fully on the subjective level.

Minds that start consciouly connect the strands of cause and effect are either brilliant (science or otherwise), a yogi, or potentially conspiracy theorists. It can be a fine line between them all.

Thought experiment #2

Choose the name of a book.  Any book at all. 

Now why that book? 

Again the same mechanisms of self justification spring into play. These stem from our penchant for pattern seeking and justification that our thoughts and free will are our own.

To a large degree almost everyone makes decisions based on nature and nurture. There was a debate as to whether it was nurture or nature that influenced a being’s behavior and attributes. But, in light of recent scientific observation and common sense, I decided it is a blend of the two.

Can you give yourself any credit for your nature? For your DNA, for who your parents are? Your nature was preordained on the genetic level without your consent.

What about your nurture? Were you responsible for your childhood? How did those ingrained mind patterns — coupled with your genetic information — get beyond the scope of your conscious attention?

If you had no say to either, in what way could you truly claim to have free will?

Nature and nurture and the gradations of conscious choice

‘But despite my nature and nurture, I still have choice in any given situation’.

Unknown

The science of cause and effect plays out in the brain, as well as the world around us. An external cause impacts our internal reality, as can an internal cause, such as a thought or feeling, or unconscious thought patterns operating in dark of your conscious experience.

I would like to argue that despite these impediments to a full range of free will, the more aware we are of ourselves and to observe the inner machinations of our mind, the more we’re able to focus our attention on the present, coupled with the more knowledge and wisdom we require, allows us a greater range of choices. 

However, if your range of choices is limited to 2 or 2000 in any given situation that arises, it is still an illusion that you are truly, in every sense, free to make that choice, limited as you are from all other possibilities?

Person sitting at at a road that divides in two.

Testing the illusion of free will

Compelling tests have been conducted and repeated many times over to show that with the use of EEG or MRI a subject’s decision can be predicted up to six seconds prior to the subject being aware of having made the decision themselves. 

This is done with simple scenarios such as putting a red button next to the blue, with the subject to press either, at any time. 

The subject would report the exact time his decision was made according to a visual and extremely precise clock. Researchers made predictions while watching the experiment unfold.

The researches could then observe through MRI and overwhelmingly predict the decision based on the data prior to it becoming a conscious decision by the subject. 

One such study to look into is Matsuhashi and Hallett’s Physiology of Free Will. You could also look into studies conducted and discussed by Sam Harris.

Though my final opinion is that free will — as we commonly like to think of it — is an illusion, I do believe we have a range of choices open to us. These choices depend upon our level of awareness in the present moment, how educated the mind is in interpreting information received through our senses, genetics, experiences and the sum of our knowledge and critical thinking skills. 

I am sure there are many other factors, but this leaves plenty still to be accounted for to suffice.

Be ever vgilant or lost in illusion, or dead by piano wire

To give an example, if a person sneaks up behind you on a park bench with a wire rope and bad intentions, and you’re asleep, your range of choices are limited.

They broaden considerably if one of your skills is awakening instantly to danger with the flair of a martial artist. Even then, according to the above explained logic, you would not have truly chosen to learn martial arts as an act of free will.

To go back to the example, if you’re in a state of intense awareness at the time, you will have a greater range of choices open to you. Though, one may well still be immediately preordained. 

It was not your choice for the man to come up behind you with the piano wire. So the sheer fact you had to react at all is an act against absolute free will. That would infer we had absolute control over outside stimuli.

The question then becomes if we have free will over our reactions at least, but to elaborate on the incorporation of martial arts, training in that discipline does require muscle memory so that conscious thought is unnecessary when the art must be utilized.

A leap of logic for the illusion of free will

This scope of free will is confined and shaped by a number of choices. These are allotted to you in any given scenario. It is probably not too hard to accept when pondering free will.

We all want to believe we’re the authors of our own lives. The notion to the contrary threatens the core of what we consider the self.

A difficult leap is made when further confining the spectrum of your perceived choice. Think about your:

  • Genetics.
  • Upbringing.
  • Where in the world and into what circumstances you were born.

All are absent of choice.

In the end you’re left with some range of choice at your disposal. But you are not in a position to know how or why, on the level of the unconscious and a stream of cause and effect you have a tentative scope of, you at that moment have open to you those limited number of choices. 

Even within that illusion lays another, that the choice we settle on was made before we’re aware of it. What then does the concept of ‘free will’ mean? Is it bankrupt, limited, or a truth that defies our current knowledge.

I must credit Sam Harris for stimulating my interest in this subject. At present, Harris is one of the foremost experts on the illusion of free.

Here’s a short talk of his. He has far more talks on YouTube regarding free will, and has published a book titled, ‘Free Will’.

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