The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion?
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Highlights
- Itās true that since Laplaceās day, findings in quantum physics have indicated that some events, at the level of atoms and electrons, are genuinely random, which means they would be impossible to predict in advance, even by some hypothetical megabrain. But few people involved in the free will debate think that makes a critical difference. Those tiny fluctuations probably have little relevant impact on life at the scale we live it, as human beings. And in any case, thereās no more freedom in being subject to the random behaviours of electrons than there is in being the slave of predetermined causal laws. Either way, something other than your own free will seems to be pulling your strings.
- This is what Harris means when he declares that, on close inspection, itās not merely that free will is an illusion, but that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion: watch yourself closely, and you donāt even seem to be free. āIf one pays sufficient attention,ā he told me by email, āone can notice that thereās no subject in the middle of experience ā there is only experience. And everything we experience simply arises on its own.ā This is an idea with roots in Buddhism, and echoed by others, including the philosopher David Hume: when you look within, thereās no trace of an internal commanding officer, autonomously issuing decisions. Thereās only mental activity, flowing on. Or as Arthur Rimbaud wrote, in a letter to a friend in 1871: āI am a spectator at the unfolding of my thought; I watch it, I listen to it.ā
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But thereās something liberating about it, too. Itās a reason to be gentler with yourself, and with others. For those of us prone to being hard on ourselves, itās therapeutic to keep in the back of your mind the thought that you might be doing precisely as well as you were always going to be doing ā that in the profoundest sense, you couldnāt have done any more. And for those of us prone to raging at others for their minor misdeeds, itās calming to consider how easily their faults might have been yours. (Sure enough, some research has linked disbelief in free will to increased kindness.)
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Yet even if only entertained as a hypothetical possibility, free will scepticism is an antidote to that bleak individualist philosophy which holds that a personās accomplishments truly belong to them alone ā and that youāve therefore only yourself to blame if you fail.
- for our lives, adrift on the storm-tossed ocean of luck.