I had been thinking on and off about free will for some time now. To anyone who has some time to think, the pandemic is bound to raise some serious questions about control and free will. The following marathon conversation between Lex Fridman and Sam Harris rekindled my interest in the subject.

Do humans have free will?

At the most fundamental level, the answer has to be no as we are all bound by the laws of physics. This doesn’t mean that our actions are predetermined but rather the probabilities of our actions are. This is being proven more and more true today, as the machine learning algorithms employed by the giant ad sellers manage so successfully to predict and manipulate our wants and desires. Even before we know what we want the algorithms do. They know us better than we know ourselves. Everyone has had this creepy experience where you start seeing ads about things that were “only on your mind”, things that you never searched for on the computer. Many people think that our phones are eavesdropping on our conversations, and perhaps they are, but it is also not unlikely that the algorithms have a version of us in a “data form” which can be used to simulate us and predict our behaviors.

If you take science seriously and leave behind a human-centric worldview, then this is not surprisingly at all. It is in fact inevitable and there is no alternative. The same laws of physics that govern the physical world also underlie the human world. And irrespective of whether we know, or will even know, all the laws governing our world or not, the central law of causality has proven unshakable. That then must be the central law that governs human behavior as well, the great law of “cause and effect”. As a corollary, free will in the sense that it evades this cycle is a myth. There is no preternatural entity, like the soul, that has agency beyond the whims of the particles and forces that make us up.

What I loved about the above interview is the precise questions which Sam Harris is able to frame that really makes this point evident. The simplest of which is: “Where do thoughts come from?”. If you try to clear your mind and pay attention to when the first thought emerges then you notice that there was a time when there was no thought there and then suddenly there was one. No one willed it into being, certainly not you. Same with actions, if you just sit still for a while then suddenly you’ll get an urge to move some body part. More likely that you’ll just move a small body part like your eyes or your fingers without even noticing that you did so. To me this just points to the fact that we are constantly doing involuntary actions which go unnoticed which we attribute to “reaction to stimuli” but then the same underlying mechanisms are also producing our thoughts so why should their origin be any different?

This doesn’t lead to fatalism. This is not saying that the future of the world is prophetically predetermined. Rather this is simply saying that there lies nothing beyond the realm of physics. Just like all of physics is fundamentally probabilistic so is human behavior. There is something to be said about complexity. Even though chemistry is “completely determined” by physics, it is does not mean that we can predict what is going to happen in chemical reactions based on the equations of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics provides us deeper understanding of chemistry but it neither subsumes not replaces it. Just because some fundamental laws govern human behavior does not mean that our actions can be derived from them. Nevertheless realizing this and accepting it is freeing.

This could potentially lead to nihilism but I like to think of this as more of a choice than an inevitability. I personally am more of an absurdist. Actions still have consequences and there is meaning to be found (discovered? invented?) somehow but I need to think more about how. More on this (hopefully) later.

In Daniel Kahnemann’s terms, the System 1 is in control. It is the one that makes all the decisions but then it creates an illusion that the System 2 is in control. Harris goes further to say that “there is not even an illusion of free will”. I don’t quite understand what he means by this. He is interested in understanding the nature of consciousness but I’m more curious about “why we feel like we’ve free-will?”. Much of my worldview and understanding rests on the assumption of human agency and takes free will as an assumption. Ironically, I never made this choice but rather this view was imposed upon me by society. If you throw free will out of the window then the question becomes “how to reframe living without the assumption of free will?”

I have started listening to Sam Harris’ meditation app to see if I can find answers to some of these questions.