Free will has been getting a bad rap. Multiple pronouncements here all agree. There is no such thing as free will. A long history of philosophical wrestling with the nature of free will comes to the same conclusion. No less than Stanford’s neurobiologist Robert Sopolsky and Yuval Noah Harari agree. Unimpeded choice between alternative courses of action does not truly exist. Such absolute positions beg further investigation (if not challenge). The most relevant reasons free will is denied are an array of biological, historical, cultural, and environmental factors. Any number of nuanced chemical or neurological conditions, along with generational influences, collectively eliminate a pristine ‘natural’ state of subjective consciousness free of any external or internal influence.
There is no authentic possibility of consciousness decontextualized from any historical moment. We may imagine we have free consciousness, but any exercise of will independent of any influence is a fantasy. This reasoning is not far removed from the Buddhist assertion that identity is entirely illusion. Because after all, will is entirely dependent on and arises from identity. If the ultimate nature of reality is nondual emptiness, then there is no such thing as identity and therefore no such thing as will, free or otherwise.
While the philosophical case for the absence of will may be palatable, what about the practicality of everyday experience? Buddhist philosophy doesn’t deny the (apparent) material nature of appearance. And that materiality includes all the ego mechanisms of identity, presuming oneself to be an independent actor, no matter how deranged or counterproductive those views may be. Being so strongly identified with our subjective experience colors our perspective. To say an absolute view of free will cannot exist seems to contradict our experience and contort reality into an unacceptable shape.
If all the assembled internal and external factors truly impinge on the field of choice or if no identifiable source of will can be located, where does the notion of free will come from in the first place? Is will, like that of identity itself, strictly a contrivance? Well, yes, in some respects it is! Even if Robert Sopolsky’s long list of ballast weighing on the free exercise of will seems to go out of its way to avoid some immediate, objective, and material influences on the field of choice we all encounter in the world, there’s plenty of evidence of its non-existence. Is it all luck, then, all random, as he would have us believe? Is it all pre-determined? Isn’t that a fast-track to nihilism?
The modern notion of will rests on the belief that we are separate individuals, self-made, responsible for the course of our lives. We must take responsibility for ourselves however life unfolds. In the modern conception, will is regarded as a given, centering the individual. Selfhood and will are mutually dependent. The universe revolves around me! But this concept of will only exists within what is sanctioned by the prevailing socio-economic ideology. Aside from whatever embedded neurophysiological influences are operating, will only exists within the boundaries of that order, i.e., exercising will or, for that matter, any personal agency is sold back to us as evidence of our freedom to submit to the belief system that says we are truly free and independent actors and that our choices are authentically our own. In its extreme (which we approach with increasing certainty), this is a form of totalitarianism, inverted to promote a reality which does not objectively exist.
The purveyors of the illusion of will, linking its existence to the ego, sustain the narrative that we are separate and that we each make choices according to the freedom we presume is ours. But is that truly the case at all? We may make scores of choices every day, but they all exist within a narrow lane of self-interest. Are emotions even ours? Perhaps we do not own them. Perhaps they own us. If will does not exist, what is ours? The structural limits on choice, what ensures isolation, is determined in places like the assemblage at Davos, the boardrooms of the Fortune 500, the executive suites of the World Bank, the corridors of the EU, the vampire financial strategies of private equity, the cocktail party conversations of Wall Street and the Fed. We have never been solitary or free in any material sense and the field of choice we imagine is ours is limited by ground rules that are set in those stratospheric realms occupied by the billionaire guardians of the master narrative.
Man’s obsessive consciousness of, and insistence on being, a separate self is the final and most formidable obstacle to the unitive knowledge of God. To be a self is the original sin. To die to self, in feeling, will and intellect, is the final and all-inclusive virtue. — Aldous Huxley
What we aspire to for ourselves is also limited by genetics, hormonal conditions, family history, education, social and environmental conditions. That field of choice is proscribed already. Considering an economic model based on scarcity, extreme economic stratification, unequal access to education, health care and political influence, we cannot say unlimited real options and opportunities exist equally if there are structural barriers to transcending one’s circumstances. Not entirely insurmountable, but unequal opportunity means unequal outcomes for the same, or even greater, effort. Sopolsky strongly affirms this view, declaring our personal formative experiences which continue to influence us in every moment to be entirely attributed to chance.
Modernity’s obsession with the individual is elevated to a supreme fetish. The individual is sacrosanct, sequestered from other individuals atop a personal pyramid of history. Its deliberations are final. They only exist within a narrow context of a single identity or at best a limited matrix of relations most relevant to that life. At some point, any certainty as to the limits of influence of that life dissolves. Nevertheless, if this is what modernity has to offer the world, every individual an independent actor neatly siloed from the collective and from the biosphere, believing in the false freedom of selfhood and will, then we can’t separate the turmoil we observe in the world from the dominant worldview of the collective. Sopolsky would say it’s all pre-determined by the aggregate personal histories and environmental influences upon all actors. So, while identifying with our subjectivity may appear emblematic of freedom, it is not true freedom at all. It’s closer to a prison.
The entire premise of free will relies on a dualistic conception of mind. One part of mind exercises dominion over another part of mind, a meta-consciousness (or super-ego) directing it, compelling behavior, and acting according to its whims, as if there are no antecedents determining any boundaries to the field of choice. Thus, none of the accumulating and intersecting social, environmental, and spiritual crises we see around us, the Meta-Crisis, are accidental. It is all made by the combined effect of ego-driven self-aggrandizing human actions which now threaten life itself. None of the Meta-Crisis can be claimed to exist ‘out there.’ It’s an internal crisis, an entirely erroneous metaphysics now lurching toward self-termination. This operating principle recognizes only the dominance of ego above all other possible justifications or prescriptions for individual action. Inasmuch as a meta-cognition is absent (Bernardo Kastrup), a civilization so driven is doomed.
As we investigate the conditions of the Meta-Crisis, we begin to recognize that what is at play is nothing less than the human unconscious riven with conflicts and deeply entangled with the core values of this worldview. The word free lies at the heart of how we view the individual in modern culture. Free implies independence, unbeholden to environmental or random human concerns and unaffected by the more-than-human. As Indy Johar would say, we weave spells upon ourselves through the use of words. They contain and sustain power structures that can either sustain or destroy us. They are expressed in the eternal contest between personal freedom and collective responsibility. The designation defines the human in relation to other humans and in relation to dead matter. The ethic of separation embedded in free will reinforces the worldview that got us here. Dead matter, the soil, the air, disappearing pollinators, rolling extinctions, all the environmental impacts we have wrought have no place in the complex of factors impinging on the free exercise of will. The solitary human inter-acts with the world.
The heart of the meta-crisis is the objectification of nature. Since will is anchored in the individual, we regard the individual as subject and the world ‘out there’ as object upon which we exercise influence. The independent actor pursues a narrow definition of comfort and security in a field of scarcity, enacting a zero-sum game, an industrialized metaphor of operating in the world according to the laws of classical physics. We imagine every decision occurs in its own context, yet that context is rapidly, randomly, and constantly changing. Regardless of how we act or evaluate (or rationalize) the ethics of our decisions, will cannot be truly free because we operate within a system. We cannot claim independence from the system because we are the system. Both internal and (so-called) external realities are perfect reflections of the other.
Not only this, but the pride displayed in claiming human agency is visualized as our impact on dead matter and other species and too often avoids measured impacts on other humans. We overlook our entanglements with those at great distance who are adversely affected by our decisions. Just as an example, by our self-interested personal decisions, we are undeniably weathering each other, literally causing the far-flung and increasingly devastating and de-stabilizing climate and environmental impacts on the agency of others.
We may regard ourselves as individuals, but the idea of an individual is itself becoming so porous that we can no longer speak of a firmly delineated entity, let alone an independent unit exercising solitary agency. Stacy Alaimo’s illumination of trans-corporeality elaborates this principle by examining our material entanglements with the world. We can no longer afford the luxury of imagining our self-interested decisions arise from a separate identity and occur in a vacuum as if there are no distant or long-term effects, or that the actor is unaffected by similar influences. Nor can we continue to imagine our physical bodies distinct from the environment. Our bodies are permeable and there is no such thing as nature that remains apart from the human.
The trans-corporeal view reinforces Sapolsky. Our decisions are virtually pre-determined by our long-term and complex entanglement with genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences, even those preceding birth. Our survival is also dependent on the microbiome as well as being vulnerable to the intrusion of environmental factors coming back on us in the form of multiple toxicities collecting in human tissue (e.g. mercury, micro-plastics in every human organ), all of which beg the question, “What is the individual?”
Bodies are always already more than human, entirely integrated with the environment. As we continue to investigate where a body stops and the world begins, the individual is becoming less determinate, more confounding, an overlooked limiting factor of unknown degree on the very idea of will. ‘The figure/ground relationship between the human and the environment dissolves as the outline of the human is traversed by substantial material exchanges.’ COVID was/is a direct illustration of this principal, and it could have become a moment of deeper reflection on our relationship to the more-than-human world. But alas, we reverted to the oppositional metaphor of war instead.
‘A rigorous distinction between world and body can no longer be made.’ Bodies are porous; individuality cannot be differentiated from environmental impacts any more than it can be distinguished from genetics or the random play of billions of neurochemical transactions. Beyond Sapolsky’s assertion that there is no individual will, we are compelled to accept that there is no such thing as a fixed individual. There is only a transient belonging and an ongoing becoming. We are process, and surely there is an ongoing deliberative process addressing a multitude of alternatives in every moment. But the idea of one who steps back and objectively reviews the whole before making a choice is imaginary. If there is no one capable of evaluating intersubjective influences upon the whole of any number of micro-entanglements with non-human entities, then who is the actor? Who or what is the one declaring ‘freedom?’ What trans-corporeality suggests is that a totally anarchic global consciousness is the only operating principle. The influences and parameters of individual decisions widen far beyond any parochial boundary.
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’” ---Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut.