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Why we don’t have Free Will & Why that’s OK

Here we have Truman. His kind boss Lawrence has just given him the chance at a lucrative account in Wells Park. Unfortunately, Truman never meets the client because he decides not to board the ferry so he never makes it to Wells Park.

So, Did Truman have free will in this situation? What I mean by free will is, were his actions the result of conscious thoughts and intentions that he decided upon? And, Could he choose to do something different if we rewound the universe back to the moment before he walked away from the ferry?

The first part of this video will address this question: “do we have free will?” by looking at what parts of the mind we have control over. The second part will address why acknowledging a lack of free will could actually give you more control over your life. Back to Truman.

You might say I’ve set the bar too high, because the memory of having lost his father in a boating accident was too traumatic of an experience for Truman to be able to freely control his response.

So, on that note, let’s think about some situations where we would say someone wasn’t acting “of their own free will.” Let’s say for example, you introduce your friend Tom to your girlfriend and he’s excessively flirtatious with her, making you and your girlfriend uncomfortable.

You might be pissed but, you then remember Tom just had a frontal lobotomy. You also know that the prefrontal cortex of the frontal lobe of the brain facilitates inhibiting inappropriate behavior.

With this in mind, you’re probably more likely to forgive him, …but you’ll keep him away from your girlfriend. Actually, A man named Phineas Gage became very famous after receiving an unrequested frontal lobotomy when, on September 13th 1848, an explosion sent a huge iron rod through the front part of his skull.

He survived, but he became uncharacteristically brash and sometimes inappropriately sexual. I think most would agree that in this case, Gage wasn’t choosing to be a jerk of his own free will. So, Let’s categorize this as free will inhibition level 5. Another example of level 5 inhibition would be a brain tumor.

One example is the mass murderer Charles Witman. On August 1st, 1966, Witman murdered 16 people and, in something like a suicide note he left, he said: “I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts.”

In the note, he even requested for an autopsy to be done on himself to find out if there was a biological reason for his drastic changes. The Autopsy was done on August 2nd, and a “pecan-sized” brain tumor was found. There’s even a case in which a 40-year old man, starting around the year 2000, suddenly developed a disturbing interest in children.

The day before he was about to go to jail for being guilty of child mole station, he went to the hospital complaining of a massive headache and an egg sized tumor was found in his brain. The tumor was removed and his inappropriate urges and behavior disappeared. Then, about a year later the tumor came back, and so did the inappropriate urges.

The tumor was removed again and the urges disappeared again. In situations like this where the actual physical integrity of the brain is compromised, it’s safe to say that free will is greatly inhibited.

If these examples represent level 5 inhibition, then level 4 could be something like being addicted to drugs, because the user develops specific brain changes that result in uncontrollable cravings and less ability to inhibit impulsive behavior. Another example of level 4 inhibition might be someone with Parkinson’s disease.

Of course the disease itself means the person has less freedom in their physical movements, but the incidence of pathological gambling is significantly higher in Parkinson’s patients, thanks to their dopamine agonist medication. Next, level 3 free will inhibition could be being drunk or going without sleep for a very long time.

Level 2 might even include something seemingly minor like just being hungry. Jonathan Levav of Columbia Business School in New York and colleagues analysed over a thousand parole hearings for four Israeli prisons, made over a 10 month period. They found that if the judge had eaten recently, prisoners had a 65% chance of being paroled.

But The longer the judges went without food, the lower this percentage dropped, and it would often decline to prisoners having an almost 0% chance of getting paroled. After some food during lunch break however, the percentage shot back up to 65%. So Then, what would the lowest level of free will inhibition look like?

It might just be the base programming of our brains. Dan Ariely, professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and author of “Predictably Irrational,” points out that people’s decisions can be swayed in predictable ways simply by presenting the information differently.

For example, people were asked “Who’s more attractive, Tom or Jerry?” If there was a clone of Jerry that was slightly uglier, normal Jerry was the most attractive of the three. If there was an ugly clone of Tom, then Tom was most attractive. People tend pick the choice whose value is easiest to calculate.

It’s hard to say if Tom is better than Jerry, but Tom is surely better than his ugly clone. This is known as the decoy effect and it’s a great way to get people to buy stuff. Do you want a small popcorn for 3 dolalrs, a medium popcorn for $6.50, or a large for 7 dollars?

I don’t know if the small is a better value than the medium, but the large is clearly better than the medium so I’ll get that. This shows up in other, quite important situations like here, Ariely is showing the drastic difference between countries’ organ donation rates. Why are the countries on the left’s rates so low compared to those on the right?

It’s not the culture, but the form at the DMV. The form for the countries with the low donation rate says “Check the box below if you want to participate in the organ donor program.” the form for countries with high donation rate says “Check the box below if you don’t want to participate in the organ donor program.”

When faced with a difficult decision, the easier decision is to take no action and leave the box unchecked. Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman says in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow,” that we have two systems of thinking. System 1 “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.”

System 2 “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it… [and is] often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.” Some examples of System 1 are activities like -Orienting to the source of a sudden sound -Making a “disgust face” when shown a horrible picture, and -Reading words on large billboards (Again, automatic things) System 2 on the other hand includes activities like -Assessing whether a product is worth paying more for or not -Focusing on the voice of a particular person in a noisy room, and -Looking for a woman with white hair.

(These are more deliberate) Here’s an example: Mary’s Mom has four daughters, April, May, June and … If you said July, this is because your System 1 got in the way. An active System 2 would have noticed I said “Mary’s Mom,” so the fourth daughter of course is Mary.

We are at some level aware of the competition between these two systems, hence our tendency to ask “Is this a trick question?” when things seem too easy. Kahneman describes several ways the brain takes certain shortcuts wherever it can.

For example, if I show you this: you’ll probably think of SOUP instead of “SOAP” thanks to this restaurant scene you were just looking at. This is called “priming,” your brain was “primed” with the restaurant scene rather than a shower scene.

But priming goes farther than this. Kathleen Vohs, in a paper titled “The Psychological Consequences of Money” showed that simply being exposed to images of money made people more individualistic and less willing to be involved with or depend on others.

Over 418 pages, Kahneman paints a picture of how many of our decisions are a result of our mind’s use of several time and energy saving shortcuts, heuristics, rules of thumb. And, we are mostly unaware of these shortcuts working in the background, yet they influence our conscious thinking.

This still isn’t enough to disprove free will - Like a train conductor having the free will to choose which track to drive on, you could say these mental processes are just some boundaries that come with being human, and we have free will within the limits of these boundaries.

But which processes of the mind do we have the free will to control? Well, before conscious behavior occurs, there is a cascade of things happening in the brain. To present my next point, let’s look at just a few things that affect our choice of behaviors. 1 is likes & wants, we’ll just call this desires.

For example, liking wine will generate behaviors like… drinking wine. 2 is emotions - Different emotions will color people’s thinking patterns and behaviors in different ways. 3 Physiology will also affect behavior.

Things like heart rate, blood pressure, how much adrenaline is in your system, how much you slept, if you’re sick et cetera 4 The last thing is beliefs as in ideas and principles you feel strongly about or feel are part of your identity.

These will affect how you act and how you think. So, which of these four do we have control over moment to moment? First your desires - You can’t really control these yet they affect your behavior and your thoughts.

Right now, I have no control over my dislike of sea urchin and my liking of macadamia nuts. I could not conveniently decide to like sea urchin when I’m at a sushi restaurant, or suddenly choose to dislike macadamia nuts when I’m saving money. If we had free control over desires, life would be far easier.

On a diet? Just Stop the desire to eat unhealthy foods. Want to get a lot of studying done? Just make yourself like Chemistry more than you do video games, and so on. You might be able to distract yourself from desires, but you cannot choose to have desires appear or disappear.

Let me again clarify that I’m talking about controlling desires in the moment. Because, you may change likes and dislikes eventually. I used to really like Gummy Bears. After keeping my sugar intake very close to zero for quite a while, gummy bears now taste far too sweet and don’t appeal to me at all nowadays.

Maybe if I ate a bunch of them, I’d start to like them again, but I cannot have myself like gummy bears in this moment. This is still the case for more strongly held desires - say it is my ambition to become a painter. I cannot now decide to suddenly like math just as much as I like art, or I guess I wouldn’t want to do that.

Next is Emotions, which of course affect your conscious thoughts. Most people are more or less good at preventing emotions from affecting their behavior, but for the most part you do not control whether emotions arise or not.

Considering the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics are coming up, there’s a lot of construction going on in the city nowadays. Sometimes right outside my window. When it gets loud enough, one of three things will happen: 1 I’ll notice it without any irritation, 2 I’ll notice it, be a little irritated and then choose to ignore it, or 3 I’ll be pissed and maybe even say something out loud like “Man I’m tired of this shlt.” My response will depend on a couple things including: If I’ve been sleeping well, and if I’ve been exercising or meditating.

If all these things are going well the construction noise barely bothers me. However, if I didn’t sleep well or if I’m hungry or didn’t exercise, then I am prone to some level of irritation.

I feel that I can choose my response to this irritation, but whether the emotion arises or not is already decided before the construction noise starts. You may be able to willfully evoke certain emotions, like an actor preparing for a scene, but you are not in control of whether emotions will arise or not in the moment.

When something sad happens, you do not make a decision to be sad before you become sad. Then there’s physiology. Your heart rate, blood pressure, your immune response, which hormones are being released et cetera are not controlled by your conscious thoughts.

With enough training you can gain some control over certain aspects of your physiology, but your physiology for the most part doesn’t operate with your permission. To quote Sam Harris in his book “Free Will”: “At this moment, you are making countless unconscious “decisions” with organs other than your brain–but these are not events for which you feel responsible. Are you producing red blood cells and digestive enzymes at this moment?

Your body is doing these things, of course, but if it “decided” to do otherwise, you would be the victim of these changes, rather than their cause.” Some argue that physiology is actually the primary cause of emotion.

The James-Lange theory of emotion states that emotions are first expressed by the body, then recognized by the brain and then they come into consciousness. Anil Seth gives the example of how seeing a bear does “not in itself generate the experience of fear, rather, seeing the bear sets in motion a load of physiological changes - hormones being released, heart rate increasing et cetera - (this set of changes known as the fight flight responses) and, your brain’s perception of these bodily changes in the context of the bear being around leads to our experience of fear.“

The James-Lange theory has received some criticism, but there’s a lot of examples that corroborate his hypothesis. For example, In this lecture, Robert Sapolsky points out that someone may be given a benzodiazepine like Valium to decrease their anxiety. But someone who’s pulled a muscle and is having muscle spasms may also get a muscle relaxant - a benzodiazepine, even at the same dose.

How does that work? Part of anxiety comes from the brain monitoring the level of tension in your body. “because you’re sitting there, and you’re saying things are just as horrible as they were an hour ago!

But I am so relaxed. I’m, like, dripping out of this chair, here. It must not be so bad.” So your brain is getting feedback from the muscle tone and seeing that you’re incredibly relaxed, so your mental state becomes relaxed to match the state of the body.

Other evidence for this emotion physiology mind body connection thing is that as this finnish group found, based on data from 700 people, certain emotions seem to be consistently mapped to certain areas of the body, such that they came up with a heat map for each emotion.

Physiology will also of course affect your desires, for example even if spare ribs is your favorite food, you probably won’t have the desire to eat that if you have the flu and are nauseous. Also, Being drunk can also strongly cue various desires. And, obviously hunger or thirst will cue your desire to eat or drink.

“Um, you know I pick up the tea because I’m thirsty. Is that free will? You know” In another video I talked about how people deprived of salt developed strong cravings for it and vitamin deficient babies developed an uncanny liking for cod liver oil. Next is Beliefs - by the way, I’m lumping principles, values, and ideas in with beliefs.

With enough exposure to certain types of information, you can surely change your beliefs eventually. For example a conservative person may slowly shift to being more liberal if say they move countries and are exposed to a totally new culture for a long enough time. Or, someone could spend enough time reading the work of a compelling conspiracy writer and they might start to believe in certain conspiracies that they used to think were totally crazy.

However, you cannot suddenly decide that you believe the moon is made out of cheese. You could have that thought, but you will not truly believe that. Maybe, you could sign up for a cheese moon brainwashing service, but even then whether the brain washing works or not is not in your control.

Either the brain washing technique is effective that you come to believe the moon is made out of cheese, or it’s not. An atheist may decide to that he wants to become religious and tries his best to believe in the tenets of some religion, but whether the books he reads or the people he talks to are convincing enough to result in them genuinely adopting these beliefs isn’t up to him.

Beliefs are perhaps the hardest thing to change and control, but at the same time may most greatly influence our conscious thoughts and behaviors. So, in the moment we have at most minimal control over desires, emotions, physiology and beliefs, yet each of these affect our behavior and conscious thoughts.

So, is it the case that each of these can influence conscious thought, but we still have control? Do you control your thoughts? Think about this question for a second. You may have been unphased by my video so far and you reacted to the question with something like “Of course we control our thoughts!”

or maybe you thought “No our thoughts are controlled not by us, but by unconscious factors.” or maybe you hair vent had enough time to decide what to think. Now you might be thinking “did he just say ‘hair vent’ ?” In any of these cases, did you freely choose which reaction you had?

Here is Sam Harris giving a lecture in 2012: “From the perspective of your conscious mind, you are actually no more responsible for your next thought than you are for your birth into this world. You can see that you no more author the next thing you think than the next thing I say.

Thoughts simply appear in consciousness. What are you going to think next? What am I gonna say next, I could suddenly start talking about why we don’t eat owls. Why don’t we eat owls? They seem perfectly good. Where did that come from? It came out of no where as far as you’re concerned but the same thing is happening in your own mind at this moment.

I’m standing up here trying to reason with you and you, you will think ‘He does look a little like Ben Stiller.’ Thoughts just emerge in consciousness, we are not authoring them, that would require that we think them before we think them.” When I was watching this part, I nodded my head in agreement.

I didn’t consciously decide to agree and then nod, it just happened. Why did I select this reaction and not scoff in disagreement? Well, because it made sense to me. So, why did I decide to have it make sense to me?

Well, it’s in line with the other information in my brain that came from books I’ve read, and conversations or experiences I’ve had. Why did I choose to insert such information in my head? Questions like this could go on and on until we’re asking why my parents chose to be born from their parents.

Even if you could trace what life experiences led to the way you talk or the desires and beliefs that influence your thinking patterns, when you analyze your thoughts close enough you realize that they just appear out of a void.

If you sit down, close your eyes and attempt not to think, you’ll immediately see that this is close to impossible - your mind is flooding itself with thoughts almost all the time, and the thoughts that we feel we consciously chose to think are merely the ones we happened to agree with.

We of course we have a will to do things, my will to make this video is what caused it to exist, but I did not freely choose this will. “So, our choices matter and there are clearly paths for making wiser ones. There’s no telling how much a conversation with a smart person could change you, but we can’t choose what we choose in life.

And when it seems that we choose what we choose, perhaps when going back and forth between two options, we don’t choose to choose what we choose.” This kind of discussion might provoke someone to perform arbitrary actions to demonstrate their free will. “Look, I have free will, I can sit in this chair and do nothing because I want to.”

But all this would demonstrate is that your past experiences have created the type of person that would choose to sit in a chair when someone challenges the existence of free will. I have to agree with Daniel Dennett’s point on Free Will: Realizing the US dollar’s value is an illusion, since it went off the gold standard, is not going to have people burn their dollars and start bartering. In the same way, coming to the conclusion that free will is an illusion doesn’t necessarily have drastic repercussions.

All the drivers that had you survive and live your life in a way such that you’d be watching this video right now are for the most part still going to drive you going forward. The repercussions of committing a crime will still prevent people from being criminals, fulfillment and compassion will still drive people to help others, ambition will still drive us to achieve goals, and boredom, an aching butt, a hungry stomach and a full bladder will still prevent you from sitting in a chair forever.

In that case, why am I even talking about this? Acknowledging that we don’t have free will is useful even if you’re not looking for an existential crisis. If you accept that conscious thoughts, decisions and behaviors spur from a cascade of prior events that occurred in and outside your body, you are better equipped to understand why you operate the way you do.

Rather than blaming an immaterial self for your shortcomings, you can acknowledge the fact that what deserves blame or praise is not you, but the information put in your head, your interactions with other people, the food you put in your body and the habits you engage in. This kind of thinking allows you to control your behaviors more effectively.

Any aspiration you have that involves changing the type of person you are - becoming more disciplined, more productive, more caring will benefit from a logical examination of how your physical body and brain have come to operate they way they do.

When you don’t succeed in say finishing everything on your to do list, you can be curious about what factors affected your focus: didn’t sleep well, ate a poor quality lunch, drank too much coffee, the office was too loud et cetera. Then you can start making modifications: Am I more focused if I exercise in the morning or at night? Which makes me feel best: cardio, strength training or HIIT?

Would meditation or yoga help my focus? Maybe if I remove X and add Y to my lunch I won’t get sleepy afterwards. This approach is an assuredly better use of your time than blaming yourself for not using your ‘free will’ to stay focused and just saying “Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll really work hard.”

The other thing about dismissing free will, is that it promotes compassion, hatred for others doesn’t make any sense, and people can become more interesting. Like the example with Phineas Gage at the start of the video, if someone is a jerk it of course makes sense to avoid them or be critical of their actions, but wasting your energy on hating them doesn’t make any sense.

They were unlucky to be afflicted by the circumstances that caused them to be a jerk. You might even become interested in the factors that had them turn out this way, and if you choose to continue associating with them you’ll understand how to better deal with their behavior.

This kind of thinking may also lead you to be curious about the people you do like, wanting to learn what about their past made them the way they are and what things are most important to them and why.

In the process you’re sure to strengthen your relationship with this person. The idea that we don’t control our conscious thoughts and our actions are governed entirely by complex algorithms running inside a squishy hunk of meat inside our skulls can be a harrowing thought, but being curious about how these algorithms work can actually make life easier and more enjoyable.