Free Will? Part II
Concluding from Part I:
The 20th C. argument between nature or nurture has segued into the 21st C. conversation that no clear distinction between the two can be found. We may continue to untangle their relationship, but nonduality is the nature of nature. Who we are and how we behave is not a matter of belief in one or the other. Experience is the integral nature of both, all the time. There is no internal environment distinguishable from the world ‘out there.’ The illusion of free will entirely depends on and only exists in a dualistic frame.
As much as we continue to regard ‘others’ as others, buying into individualism vs. collective consciousness, human behavior cannot shift toward operating within a unitary field. We become too susceptible to fudging or altogether dropping moral codes for the sake of expediency or personal gain. Adopting a nondual framework which imagines no others, holding that we are all equal partners with equal impact in the creation of collective consciousness and evolution, requires a profoundly different quality of personal confidence and mutual trust. How likely is it that such a view could become universal? It depends on how clear the alternatives become. But if we never make this shift, we remain in a state of mistrust, driven by the narrowest of interests, more likely to revert to amoral behavior as we adapt continuously to the zero-sum mentality.
Integral to the dualistic frame is the association of free will and identity. Deconstructing that linkage further, our immediate attachment is to the flow of our experience. Our raw experience is so thoroughly captured in milliseconds by egoic concerns that we don’t even notice the automatic responses that ensue, including analysis, evaluation, planning and striving—all the hallmarks of ego-driven behavior. So, of course we believe in will because we are the ones constantly reinforcing the illusion of being in control. We are constantly generating an ongoing mutual reinforcement between will and identity. If we were not reinforcing identity in every moment, no distinction between a being and Being could be made. In a broad sense, what we imagine is choice is a wholly illegitimate imposition of a separate identity upon nature strictly to sustain the gratifying illusion of continuing to experience ourselves as separate. That separation is determined in the ongoing drama of sensation, perception and feeling by what we identify as us vs not us.
What we regard as will is none other than the aggregate interactions of ongoing and pre-determined biological phenomena with our continuing attachment to immediate experience. We are under a continuous illusion of making ‘choices’ from among an array of options. But those options themselves are determined by a complex matrix of biological phenomena beneath conscious awareness. In looking more closely at those options, we begin to recognize the depth of influences acting upon us. In this sense, we navigate those influences on our decision-making process every day, unresolved trauma, chemical imbalances, environmental impacts (including unevaluated toxicities), incipient or ongoing health issues, the impacts of sophisticated marketing utilizing language as a tool of persuasion, all influencing many of the choices we make in ways we do not even fully grasp.
It mostly never occurs to us that even beyond the go-to biological and physiological factors we started with, regardless of whether they are even valid, we are influenced by social and cultural factors operating on a global evolutionary scale merely by participating in and measuring options in the moment either by confirmation bias, selective attention, or historical experience. We are each fractals of the sole imperative of nature—to continue. To accept our porosity is to realize the quantum nature of reality, the paradox of indeterminacy at the nano-level combined with the agential realism of Karen Barad (2007). The intra-active nature of influences constantly acting upon us as well as those emanating from us contests the belief in some pristine faculty of the human superseding all conditioning. The appeal of my will is the operation of ego.
The transpersonal view recognizes the true sense of our material relations with the world. It is an exploration of the mutability of biological boundaries, the body of society, the embodiment of collective knowledge, collective choice, collective action, collective evolution. The nature of nature. The emergent properties of evaluation and decision-making may appear through the individual, but, as Kastrup declares, they are merely the operation of nature observing itself and determining its course through us. From the nondual view, acting solely according to subjective interest at the expense of the common good, would be considered anti-social behavior. If the individual cannot be isolated from its local environment, let alone from the whole, then who or what is free to decide anything?
So long as there is the ongoing attachment to experience, there is the ongoing creation of the experience-er. A Buddhist understanding is that desire is the primary attachment to our experience that generates suffering for the experiencer. That attachment is the engine of karma, affirming that consequences naturally follow from our actions, regardless of whether there’s any true freedom whatsoever involved in their making. None of the perspectives on will referenced here make any mention of karma, though nature is surely learning from aggregate personal and collective actions.
Kastrup claims our inability to transcend ego-based actions, interrupting both our attachment to experience and to the experiencer, is what will eventually doom modern culture. Because we are so captured by our selves, we are failing to discern or act according to the nature of nature. Whether driven by ego or a more wholistic view, culture must evolve to continue. To transcend the subjective ego-self suggests meta-cognition is necessary to engage with and respond to the momentum of nature that may be completely out of our hands, but which is always carrying information lifting us out of our default self-centered orientation.
There are those who believe our birth is an accident, that we do not choose our parents, that there’s no such thing as karma or existence beyond the material plane. Eliminating those things from one’s belief system makes it easy to claim that our biological inheritance, conditioning, and socialization are everything, that determinism rules and there’s no such thing as will. While we can claim to exercise critical thinking and make decisions every day, the boundaries of critical thinking are also constrained by the factors already covered. Because we did not become ourselves in a vacuum, and presumably also because overcoming our conditioning is not factored in, then there’s no such thing as being self-made. Apparently, what is true in this belief system is that we are fully formed before we are even able to imagine free will. Hence, whatever self-driven behaviors we might choose in the future are motivated by an identity that is already circumscribed by nature, biology, economics, and culture.
None of this intends to suggest that we don’t have survival mechanisms so deeply embedded in our nature that they can be ignored. We are always in competition with other humans for food, sex, security, and bodily autonomy. There is an entire array of instinctive behaviors falling into this category which are also driven by powerful emotion. Some people live at this level a good deal of the time. Much of political messaging deliberately targets fear and seeks to trigger survival responses. But the bottom line is this: to believe in human nature as if we are perpetually driven by inherent forces to act in certain ways is to identify with the mind, the continuous random energy of discursive thought. To identify with the mind is to believe our random thought and feelings dictate who we are. Identifying with the mind means identifying with the ego, the Self we believe we are and to be continuously drawn into the egotistical lifelong self-improvement project of crafting remedies to ignore or change the continuous flow of random ideation. Yes, science says we are mostly conditioned to perceive the world in a certain way. But it's just as likely that we can overcome conditioning or even trauma. The well-known story about the two wolves of our nature comes to mind.
Neurophysiology confirms this view. New pathways in the brain are formed by repetitive activity. It’s possible to reinforce certain responses such that future choices become more automatic, though not everyone shares an equal capacity for neuroplasticity. And that capacity does change with age. To suggest certain behaviors are directed by ‘human nature’ is to ignore the probability that brain and behavioral development are not equal in everyone, or that alternative behaviors can override choices attributable to deeply embedded automatic responses, forging their own new neural pathways which then become automatic in a nebulous future.
If one believes in pre-determined responses driven by the biochemical background, environmental, familial, and social conditioning, then exercising an imaginary will to either align with or overcome them becomes highly questionable. The ego-view, the expectation that life is about us, that we are the only ones exercising agency, that we are ‘the dancer dancing the dance,’ is the profound error of human exceptionalism. We are not solely our minds. We can objectify the mind. Yet we are not entirely pre-determined to be slaves to our emotions, to our thoughts and conditioning, or even to believe them at all. Breakthrough behaviors non-conforming to prediction or habit seem to be common. We seem to be able to exercise critical thinking, to examine the motivations behind our choices, realizing we can make more informed choices by setting ourselves apart from the activity of mind. This is the objective of contemplative traditions, that while being so attached to the exercise of will is a form of grasping, there is still the potential to realize we are not living life, life is living us.
Nondual awareness, in which all objects of consciousness dissolve, merging our internal and external experiences into a unitary field, reveals will to be irrelevant since there is no longer any doer, nor is anything done. There is no world ‘out there,’ and no identity to experience it. All that is left is to be in accordance with the reality of no others, no ego, no desires. The root of desire itself does not lie within as there is no distinction between within and without. Desire arises within the field, though its source is indeterminate. What we have regarded as free will is transformed into a practice of getting out of the way, not imposing one’s separate desires upon the world, joining nature in its performance of itself, as us.
The continued ritual allegiance to free will is doing great damage. To reimagine the human is to reimagine human agency. The damage implied by remaining at arm’s length from ‘nature’ while glorifying the pursuit of self-interest as if there are no ecosystem effects implicates a reevaluation of resource scarcity, pollution, extinction, the entire gamut of sustainability issues. By addressing these issues, we gain a new humility as our grasp of environmental dynamics widens and articulates more and more the true character (and potential) of human presence on the planet.
Free will has been and continues to be an affront to ecological and social justice. To reconstitute our relationship with the earth makes us fugitives from the familiar. It means marking a zone of sanity which would likely be regarded by the culture at large as its opposite: insanity. To rethink what we mean by free implies dramatically widening the lens, de-centering the human, distributing agency to the collective, to the inanimate, transforming our hubris into humility and realizing the entirely illusory nature of the concept of free will in the first place.