“Spinoza says that if a stone which has been projected through the air had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own will . I add to this only that the stone would be right. The impulse given it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature the same as that which I recognize in myself as will, and what the stone also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognize as will.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
I came across this quote and thought that it might have something to add to our discussion. Schopenhauer, a German philosopher and contemporary of Hegel is here referencing the Dutch philosopher Spinoza. In the context of our discussions on freewill is it possible that we are like the stone, projected through the evolutionary process and imagining our actions to be the result of our own freewill? Perhaps freewill is simply the term we use to describe the result of evolutionary forces that create all evolutionary movement forward including our choices. Because we are conscious, we see this movement in ourselves and from our perspective it “feels” like we are doing something, when in fact it is just something happening to us.
After all, isn’t the main reason we believe so strongly in freewill simply because it feels like we can make free choices. Isn’t that freedom always contextual? A young man may decide he wants to be a doctor and he may feel that it is a decision based on his own freewill, but if we find that his father, his father’s father and his father’s father’s father were all doctors we might wonder how free that choice really was. Is there not some aspect of family expectation or even simple familiarity that plays a role in that choice? Many American’s love cheeseburgers, many Indians love dhal (an Indian dish made with lentils) and many Israelis love having salad with olives for breakfast. Are these free choices, or are they culturally conditioned? Aren’t all the choices that we make, and the range of options open to us completly limited by the physical characteristics of our bodies, the mental characteristics of our minds and the environmental characteristics of our planet? How free is our will?
One of the things that I find very powerful about the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce is his insistence that we must always remember how fallible all of our understanding is. Human beings are studying life forms on a single planet in a huge universe. We are studying through a physical form with very limited capacity for sensation. We may find that what we are currently examining and calling the universe is in actuality a minuscule part of the actual entirety of the universe. Perhaps our conviction of freewill is a result of our limited understanding of ourselves and the universe of which we are a part. I believe that my insightful commentator Brian, sometimes uses this logic to point out the fallibility of the sweeping generalizations in my own thinking.
Pragmatically I suppose William James would settle the question of freewill by asking what difference in action would result from my either believing in or not believing in freewill. If I believe in freewill, does that belief leave me with a deeper sense of my creative powers? Does it make me a more productive and useful human being? If I don’t believe in freewill does it make it easier for me to feel victimized and give up all sense of responsibility?
The strong negative response that many people have to materialistic and deterministic notions of reality arises from the fear that it will strip us of our moral sense of responsibility. If we believe that all of our actions are the simple result of past actions and external forces then we are not ultimately responsible for what we do. Our actions occur not as a result of will, but because that is the way that it had to happen.
Does this morally debased state necessarily result from recognizing that there is no freewill? Is it even truly possible to give up belief in freewill? We may say that we do not believe in freewill, but in the end we still make choices and when we make a choice it seems almost a prerequisite that we believe we are making it. If we sit before two options and wait for a choice to be made for us nothing is likely to happen, and isn’t the choice to sit and wait also a choice?
Or are we more like the stone flying through the air? The evolutionary air that we are flying through is “change” itself. We see ourselves passing through this ocean of change and think “I am changing” and we assume that the change we see is occuring as a result of our own freewill. We mistakenly assume that ”I am choosing to change.” But everything in an evolving universe is changing and what is propelling that change is something we are not clear about yet.
Kim Blozie
/ June 15, 2009After reading your blog, I am left with thinking that maybe the awakening human is actually freeing up will? Is the awakening human (AKA us) disembedding ourselves from our DNA and our cultural predispositions and as a result, beginning to free up our will so that we can participate in actual selection versus natural selection thereby bringing sending evolution’s capacity into a whole other stratosphere of possibility? Very cool and important contemplation you are opening up Jeff.
Carl
/ June 15, 2009Yes! But there is also a wrinkle in this evolution, something that makes us different from the stone.
Self-awareness and self-referencing is the product of social, conceptual, verbal behavior — a form of behavior that seems to have emerged in primates, but which can be taught to non-primates to varying degrees.
Because we are conscious and self-aware, THAT OF WHICH we are conscious itself becomes a part of the causality of our actions. Our actions have consequences, and those consequences subsequently affect whether or not the actions will be repeated, and with what probability. The environment, changing as we act upon it, changes our behavior. And as we become aware of this dynamic, that awareness enters into the equation as its own variable.
As we become more aware, the chain of causality that influences our actions comes to include what we learn from our experience, which then influences how we pursue or create subsequent experience. This is ever-expanding.
Like the serpent swallowing itself, we become factors in the causality of our own action, because we are caused to do things that in turn cause us to do things that in turn cause us to do things, ad infinitum. And those things that we do mix with all the other interdependent streams of causality that seem to come from “separate” sources, into a single stream, producing new actions and new consequences, creating new “swirls” in the pattern of this unfolding.
As the Taoists observed, there is only one Thing — the unspeakable Tao. But the patterns in that Thing, the swirls and eddies and knots form what appear to be boundaries of separate things, some of which become loci of awareness, creating the illusion of independence or self-originating causality. But it truly is an illusion, and we can come to this realization from either a scientific understanding or from direct spiritual experience — or both, which is very satisfying.
We’re all eyes of the same increasingly conscious Being seeming to be looking from and acting from separate centers. But truly, underneath, there is only one center, one Source, the same as the Big Bang is said to be. This has been revealed countless times over the centuries in many different ways.
Choosing is a natural process by which parts of a single universe behave one way rather than another. Conscious choosing is when those parts are aware of themselves choosing. Perhaps increasingly conscious choice is, indeed, increasingly free choice.
So, yes, we are like the stone being aware of itself. Except that the awareness itself causes us to act differently than if we were not aware. It is as if the stone, aware that it were going to smash into a harder stone, were caused by that awareness to alter its course, thus landing instead in a pool of water to avoid being smashed to smithereens.
There is this emerging and yet primitive experience of intention or volition — an ability for the Thing to take charge of its own evolution at many points in time-space (us) due to the expansion of awareness at those points, and a corresponding expansion of options for choosing.
God really DOES depend on us, because we are It. And I believe, to address the moral question, that as we become truly aware of this, there is a natural recognition of responsibility, a sort of recursive or self-propelling impulse to make it happen in the right way. Our Spiritual Teachers, being more aware of this truth than we, become accelerators of the process.
I hope this is not just a stream of babble, trying to say the same thing in various different ways. But it makes sense to me, and aligns with both my scientific understanding and my deepest spiritual experience.
Juma Wood
/ June 16, 2009Thank you for this thoughtful discussion Jeff.
Both comments above add importantly to your inquiry.
Like Kim, I had an instinct to want to separate Free and Will. Freeing up will is a nice image, activates responsibility, but at the same time recognizes embeddedness, and frees one by limiting them.
And while Carl makes some leaps of logic (which I am about to do as well), the important thrust of recognizing the central linkage of causality at the physical and phenomenological levels sheds light on the dichotomy.
It seems to me the answer is: both/and and linked.
It is impossible to untangle our common choices from our cultural and historical contexts. The choice to write this comment can reasonably be traced back to some decision my great great great grandfather made one day on the farm. It is silly and narcissistic to hold that we are wholly autonomous agents acting alone.
But echoing Kim’s phrase, we do seem to have scripted in our latent potential the power to free ‘ourselves’ from merely habitual choices that define our narrow lives.
(leap of logic coming)
If it is true that the ‘chain of causality’, the human project itself, is on aggregate progressing, or rather, I prefer, waking up (ie. has ‘its’ own will), then the decisions we make, in whatever limited capacity these decisions are ours to make, to align to that movement, empowers that mysterious will as it informs the scope of our actual choice(s).
Or said another way, if will is in some way a collective endeavor, acting unconsciously, the gesture of our turning towards ‘its’ movement activates and enlivens the universe itself. Wakes it up.
These are really the only two choices: to turn or not to turn. Having not turned, the illusion of choices that follow are really small tangles and irrelevant dramas consonant with a will not being utilized. There is then no real will (at the ‘individual’ level), free or otherwise, but only conditioning.
If we have any role in this, it is the determined act or gesture of freeing up will by becoming aware of its action. Or, to treat the topic with the sacredness it demands: our will is designed to recognize thy will be done. And then get the hell out of the way.
Hope that makes sense, and adds. Grateful to the commenters for their input, and you for the topic.
Carl
/ June 16, 2009The only thing I would say is that the word “conditioning” seems to me based on a dualistic understanding of the person, as though there were a “person” separate from the factors that conditioned it/him/her. “Control” implies a controller and a controlled. Why can’t we see it the same way we see the organism/environment unit in ecology, as one? I read somewhere recently that the essence of the Buddha’s realization was his recognition of the interdependent origination of everything. Where is the freedom or bondage in that, except in recognizing or failing to recognize the truth of it?
Shizuka
/ June 17, 20091,Coming out of nothing to something=Creation
2,Then change=creation?
3,Awareness of creation become a part of the casusality of our action.
4,Environments(universe) =the casuality of creation
5,Environments(universe) have consequence to our choise of action will be repeated and with what probability.
6,Our actions have consequences to the environments(universe).
7,Our interdependent steams of causality produce new actions and new consequences,create new set of social, conceptual, verbal behavior (culture)
8,Our actions changes the environment(universe)
9,Then,We are creator=God????
Some thought upon
(Sorry for my brocken English)
Mary
/ June 17, 2009Wonderful conversation.
I’m not sure I have anything more pertinent to offer. I sense that removing the sense of “I-ness” from our contemplation helps frame the truth: that we are nothing more than a flowing stream of potentials “becoming” and a fractal piece of the “choosing” function of the evolving universe. The more we can align with the potentials unfolding, the more potent our choices will be in the evolutionary direction. Surrendering and then taking responsibility for choice is all there is, and it is everything there is.
But that is basically the whole sense of the discussion here. Thanks to all.
Willa
/ June 17, 2009This is a great subject Jeff, thanks.
What strikes me, thinking about it, is that whenever I think I want to change, I am trying (usually in vain) to create something that isn’t, while whenever I realise I have changed and I look back over my shoulder to see what happened, the only thing that’s different is that I started doing things they way they were meant to be.
And yet there is definitely choice involved, and usually also a strong sense of something needing to happen. But it’s more about lining up with what is meant to happen, than making a ‘free’ choice.
So free will then seems more to be the privilege of consciously conforming to what is meant to happen in the Kosmos than acting like an individual who wills their own way through the Kosmos. Well yes, that does turn my ideas about free will up side down!
Carl
/ June 18, 2009It seems important to remember that this is not in any way about our being passive. We are as active as the sinoatrial node (the pacemaker) in the heart, even when we feel we are being passive.
Sometimes (I daresay too much of the time) we wind up making choices unconsciously, unaware that we are making them and of the consequences. In those unconscious choices we are leaving behind our evolutionary advantages of awareness, self-awareness, cognition, language and other “higher” functions. If we are more aware, we are aware of the consequences for others and for the Whole, and that awareness influences our choices.
When we make vigorous, intentional, muscular choices, it’s not that we don’t have to exert effort, or that working to strengthen or “cultivate” our intention is irrelevant. We experience the effort as the vigor of the choosing process and the magnitude of the consequences. “Effort” is a genuine experience during action coinciding with a choosing process that is happening with great energy and expenditure of resources (calories, oxygen, time etc.).
This understanding of effort is not in contradiction with the understanding that so-called “I” is an illusion created within the Whole as It makes choices at this place and in this time — in this body-mind.
Recognition that both “determinism” and the experience of freedom and effort can be true is part of the sometimes humorous paradox of the “enlightenment” experience when we feel our individuality (or what Andrew Cohen calls autonomy) AND our identification with and co-creation within the Whole (what he calls Communion). Like watching yourself float in a river from above while also being the one floating in the river.
Shizuka
/ June 18, 2009What does it mean to co-creation within the whole?
I know the fact that we are so deeply rooted how to relate to each others(not limited with human,) based on own survival.
It seems the development or capability of move toward coexistence and cooperation in bigger context???
Mary Adams
/ June 21, 2009Thank you, Jeff and everyone. …a very interesting and thought-provoking exploration of the topic of free–will, and conscious evolution’…do either even exist? The point derived from Spinoza’s assertion that if a stone became conscious of its airborness, it would assume it is ‘flying’…and therefore we, as integral self-aware parts of an infinitely changing/evolving cosmos, assume we are choosing to change when really change is the very currency we exist in, is very powerful to contemplate.
I want to pursue the point of intention/volition…..because as we know (and probably experience daily) an increase in the depth and breadth of our awareness, in our capacity for consciousness, and even our appreciation of the sacred context for human life, does not necessarily determine or inform our choices….We can (and do) still respond to lower impulses even with increased levels of consciousness and knowledge of causality (karma). It seems that the beauty, and challenge of free-will is fundamentally a moral one …What at the deepest level (beneath biology, psychology and cultural conditioning) is motivating our choices in relationship to our level of self-awareness at any stage of our unfolding development? what, or whom do our choices serve? – the universe’s story, or our own imagined personal agenda? This question is probably only relevant now, at our postmodern stage of development.
It seems we are at an interesting point in the universe’s evolutionary trajectory, where for the first time we recognize our place in the universe as non-separate from it, and we are highly individuated beings. Therefore as beneficiaries of perhaps evolution’s greatest gift – choice, are we consciously striving to bring our human vehicles (our selves) in service of this miraculous Process, or not ?
At this moment, the progeny of 13.6 billion years, we are centaur-like in our consciousness (half human/ half animal) with both higher and primitive instincts potentially highly activated at any one moment, therefore it seems the significance of choice, and the freedom to choose, perhaps has never been greater?……Maybe in our near or far future, humans will be choicelessly aligned or calibrated to the universe’s trajectory of higher, deeper, ever more refined and complex singularity?
Carl
/ June 22, 2009Mary, I agree that we seem to be at a relatively primitive stage in this development, as your centaur comparison makes clear. But there is the “human” part, and it does seem to be getting more influential!
The choices we make to act in service of the miraculous Process are themselves influenced and made more probable by communications such as yours, particularly when multiplied and magnified by others who are participating in the various circles, layers, and networks of the collective communication in which we participate.
Our choices are influenced by their immediate consequences. But in this evolution of collective consciousness and culture, even more so by the awareness we gain through the shared insights, clarifications, and projections of alternative futures and paths we receive from others. We are participating together in the “determination” of one another’s choices and evolution.
Frank Luke
/ May 11, 2010Hi all, re: ” If I don’t believe in freewill does it make it easier for me to feel victimized and give up all sense of responsibility?”
Should that be (do believe in freewill) rather? Wouldn’t a belief in freewill be to act in whatever way you feel like without much thought to morality or harming others or society? I wonder if a lot of aetheists may adopt that mindset as a pushback to having been force-fed on religion or having become so cynical and cool to believe in faith of any kind except maybe a kind of misunderstanding of freedom? I don’t want to characterize all aetheists this way but would hope that new aetheists don’t throw out morality or any kind of spirituality in their freedom. As we know, it’s possible to be good w/o a belief in organized religions or even a belief in God, IMO. What I would hope is to adhere to the tenets of Perennial Wisdom and the Golden Rule, cause as little deliberate harm to society, others and even to self.
Jeff Carreira
/ May 13, 2010“Wouldn’t a belief in freewill be to act in whatever way you feel like without much thought to morality or harming others or society?”
I would rather think that a belief in freewill means that I am not forced into choices, that I am responsible for the choices that I make and that is why I am not a victim. If I don’t have freewill, then I had to do just what I did and the consequences cannot be pinned on me.
Frank Luke
/ May 14, 2010Hi again Jeff, re: “If I don’t have freewill, then I had to do just what I did and the consequences cannot be pinned on me.”
I guess it depends on how freewill is defined. By the terminology, it seems that freedom is connoted and as we see, freedom and license is often confounded by those who seem not to be able to act responsibly in the name of being free to do what ever (the hell) they want. Determinism has a connotation of being unfree to have any choice in the matter but spiritually Awakened people have this sense of obligation, of being obliged to behave within the limits of spiritual comportment. They do not allow themselves to do certain things the less awakened and less conscious folk will do. As you may know, yoga means “yoke”.