Just listened to the neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky, talk about free will on Sam Harris’s podcast. Neither of them believe in free will and neither do I.

It started in high school with a thought experiment: if you rewound your life and woke up again this morning with no memory of what had happened today, would you do the exact same things?

Please stop and think about this scenario for a second. If you reset to this morning with your memory wiped, would you behave the same way?

If you said yes, then let’s rewind a week, a month, a year, all the way back to when you were born, your life is predestined. That’s it, we don’t need to talk about brains or consciousness, just follow simple logic.

Okay, so what if you said no? So even with the exact same personal history, and the exact same events going on around you, you made different decisions? Given the same inputs you choose different outputs? Then it seems like, you’re not making the best decisions given the scenario, you’re just behave randomly. And behaving randomly, doesn’t seem like free will. You might not live in a pre-determined world, but you live in an utterly random one.

But it feels like there’s free will, doesn’t it? Voluntary Actions

It feels like we have free will because it seems like some actions are under our voluntary control, while others we have no control over at all.

I think a lot of what people think is voluntary, just has to do with to what degree that action can be modified by language or thoughts.

Actions feels voluntary if, when we want to do it or stop doing it it’s able to. However, a lot of actions fall into gray areas like bad habits, compulsions, unconscious tics. It’s especially hard to tell whether or not someone else is able to control a behavior — for example, is a good friend who’s an alcoholic really able to stop drinking if he or she just wants to enough? We know some alcoholics stop drinking, which could make you think it’s possible for anyone to stop drinking at any time if they just cared enough, but at the same time we know other alcoholics keep drinking until the day they die, or will keep relapsing after recovering. (In fact, in many ways getting over withdrawal is a cakewalk [though withdrawal from alcohol can cause seizures and be deadly], relapses are the real and insidious danger of addictions.) It’s really impossible to know if an individual can quit now, or later, given their situation.

So is it worth moralizing and lecturing your alcoholic friend? Maybe your shame is exactly what they need to overcome their drinking, maybe it’s counter-productive. That’s an empirical question — or finding out whether an average shaming to an average person is anyways.

Maybe your words can tip them over the edge into the realm of voluntary realm, if not today, then tomorrow when they sober up, or maybe your words will help by set off a complicated biochemical cascade in your friend’s brain, but their effects won’t manifest into a gain of control for months. Thinking about this same phenomena less reductively, maybe they won’t really hear what you say now, but they’ll think back to it later in a moment when it’s what they need to think about.

Knowing what’s voluntary and what isn’t is important for the criminal justice system. If someone’s brain is compelling them involuntarily to violence or crimes, we need to figure out how to stop them from doing harm, but like Sapolsky says, what good is moralizing or shaming them? And you can imagine that if there was a way to detect who was at risk of committing voluntary crimes there would be a temptation to do something about it preemptively. On the other hand crimes that are at least partly voluntary, can be controlled and prevented through education and other social systems.

But when it comes to moral judgement, in the end it doesn’t really matter what’s “voluntary” and what’s not, because the words and thoughts that lead to “voluntary” actions themselves were predetermined or random. I don’t know how this doesn’t just end in nihilism.

Personally, the way I get by with this terrible life philosophy is to pretend it doesn’t apply to me because otherwise you get stuck in really circular, unproductive thinking. I do essentially try to act though as if what I’ve outlined above is true of everyone else in the world. I do think we’re conscious, I think we all have feelings, but I think we’re all pinballs bouncing around a chaotic world.

The one silver lining, is I do think it’s increased my compassion for people — we’re all in this together, even people you disagree with in every way, or people who’ve done terrible things. But on the other hand, some studies have shown that people may use a belief in predeterminism to morally let themselves off the hook (Vohs and Schooler, 2008). Well, if spreading this anti-fw gospel is amoral, I’m going to let myself off the hook because I didn’t have a choice in the matter anyways.

Hopefully people much smarter than me have figured a way out of this logical black hole, and have arguments convincing enough to take me out of it’s orbit. Maybe I need to read Sam Harris’s book on the subject:

“Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s going to die. Come watch TV.” – Rick and Morty