For a longer time than I can remember I’ve been fairly convinced about the non-existence of free-will. The notion struck me strongly enough to take a formal note to myself in my later teens, consequently I had it scribbled somewhere in a little black diary of poems and prose (which I lost in the process of migrating across continents). But one's twenties usually turn out to be more exciting in a worldly manner than otherwise, and so I loosened my grip on the relevance of this somewhat firm conviction, allowing myself to be consumed actively in more concrete engagements and in-the-throes-of-survival tasks like hopping countries, universities, jobs, cities and conversations rather than introspecting over the problem of free-will or the certainty of determinism.

A very recent reading of Robert Sapolzky’s essay 'The Danger Of Inadvertently Praising Zygomatic Arches' (highly recommended reading) brought me back to it . The more I began to consider it again, the more I realized what my concern with the issue of free will was: Even as I was supposedly convinced of the non-existence of free will, I didn’t know what to do about it, or how to apply the conclusions of this revelation to my daily life. Even more irritatingly, given that free will was an illusion (of course one of many) that has fallen on mankind, I could not garner the means to concede to the reality of determinism in the daily ritual. At this point, if you are wondering what I’m talking about, I need to stop and clarify with an example.

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Suppose you are to make a choice of destination for your vacation. Say for argument’s sake the choices are between a)exploring the wilderness in Alaska or b)spending time at the beach in the Bahamas. One would like to think that in choosing one or the other destination, one is entirely ‘free’ (barring external constraints such as budget, visa issues and the like, and so for argument’s sake let us assume all external constraints are equal or non-existent). Now you may be more disposed to feeling ecstatic on roughing up to extreme weather conditions, exerting your body physically and feeling more at home in cold wilderness rather than enjoying a slow lazy day of soaking up the sun and doing practically nothing, except perhaps sipping on an occasional margarita at the beach. Much of this natural disposition and inclination towards a certain state and environment of affinity is determined by genetics, nurtured inclinations, practiced and endured sport , memories from previous mental states in similar circumstances etc. Effectively, there is a series of thoughts that converge to allow one’s mind to make the decision of choosing an Alaska vs a Bahamas. If one’s decision making capability is dependent on these ‘non-free’ attributions of genetics, evolution and memories, then one would have to concede that there was no true free will in this decision. In order for there to be a true free will, there would perhaps need to be a secluded and uninfluenced sector of the brain aside from the thick mesh of neuron transmitters, memory triggers, chemical ions, synapses and all other biological phenomena concluding in 'decision affecting' parameters. It would have to mean that this secluded sector would have its own command center which stands apart from the spheres of influence of all the 'non-free' criterion, in order for me to say I have made a “free” decision.

But there is no such compartment or ‘box’ of freedom generation. Hence, to say that I make any decisions based on free will is to delude myself that I could have chosen to make alternative decisions, lived alternate realities. If one were to follow the chain of causation of events and the various physical interactions of biological and chemical phenomena in the brain, one could even accurately predict decision making, and realize beforehand what choice I would make.

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The central theme of determinism that philosophers have argued for years is that we live in a deterministic world - that our actions, choices and events are ‘pre-determined’ by natural physical laws or ‘inevitable’ due to the lack of free will. In this deterministic world, there is only one outcome for an event or action of choice. The only reason one cannot accurately predict natural outcomes, or by extrapolation - the future - it would seem, is that the natural and physical world is so complex that it is impractical to calculate it with the faculty that human beings are equipped with. Perhaps if I possessed a map containing full disclosure of various states in my brain, and a means to calculate it, I would in fact be able to know the determined reality in advance. But because it is too complex to a) get all the facts right and b) outline and solve for all the deterministic equations involved , a real and accurate prediction is next to impossible. However, that is not to say that determinism is false, just because we are incapable of carrying out these calculations, at least with the means available to us in the present day and age.
Perhaps then the commonly held notions of freedom belong to a man-made abstract level that operates above the natural world of physical laws of determinism. Because of the difficulty of calculation, social rules and constructs have evolved at this abstract layer above the veritable physical rules, in order to simplify our understanding of the world, of people and of actions. If so, does that mean that our social behavior which operates in this meta-layer is oblivious to the real underpinnings of causation? Or is it derived from them? Either way, the challenge would lie in unravelling these equations, in recognizing these complex constructs in the same way as we understand science. In fact, to a great degree understanding psychiatry and psychology to be able to make more and more accurate predictions about human behavior is akin to this kind of analysis, albeit incomplete and only scratching the surface. Again, fundamental to the drive to unravel these mysteries is still the underlying assumption that there is really no such thing as free will.


However, and coming back to my earlier point and one that Sapolzky resonates in his essay as well, somehow it doesn’t feel to me that I am not free. It is hard for us, as we go about our daily lives to think that we are not really in control of ourselves, that we don’t really do as we truly wish to, or that it is a predetermined state of the universe where alternative states were impossible. This is a bit of a problem if you think about it, because if you know you are not really free, but at the same time feel that you are, what you are subject to is a double standard of being aware of living in an illusion. Additionally, there is the problem of moral responsibility. If one is to believe that one’s actions are not free, can one really be expected to be held accountable for them?

There are many implications of this strain of thinking in the justice system. For instance, if a man were to be punished for the murder of another human being, if it turns out that it was done because of a ‘free’ desire to kill, it would be deserving of the highest order of punishment. However, if it turned out that the man was being inhumanely bullied by the other person, or had suffered severe emotional or mental torture and continuing abuse or had acted so in a manner of self defense at the scene of the crime, the sentence may be reduced. In fact, defendants of criminals involved in gun-shootings who suffer from mental illnesses that put them beyond control of their actions to any plausible degree often subscribe to this line of thought when trying to explain their behavior. However, given the causal nature of actions and the inevitability of determinism, any action, however morally catastrophic or irresponsible could then be justified by invoking the clauses of determinism.


From a common sensical point of view, that would seem like stretching it. As a society, we cannot afford to discount moral responsibility for our actions, it is simply not done. In fact, the adverse effects of accepting the theories of physical determinism that have resulted in denial of responsibility have been well documented. Rebecca Roache, a scholar of philosophy writes “In the last five years, empirical evidence has linked reduced belief in free will with an increased willingness to cheat, increased aggression and reduced helpfulness, and reduced job performance. Even the way that the brain prepares for action differs depending on whether or not one believes in free will.If the results of these studies apply at a societal level, we should be very concerned about promoting the view that we do not have free will.”


How then, does one wrap their head around the free-will debate? If one is to believe in determinism, but if one feels free, and one also believes in moral responsibility, how does one reconcile these seemingly incompatible odds? One explanation offered by David Hume is that moral accountability, or the sense thereof , is driven by emotions and feelings rather than the hard facts of determinism. To that effect, if my knowledge of a certain kind of behavior invokes anger, frustration, or feelings of social injustice, I will be more inclined to demand moral accountability. Hume’s argument to fit morality into behavioral frameworks despite the causal nature of being, is to steer away from founding it on pure logic, but instead to assign it to sentiment. Hume is hence considered more of a classical compatabilitist who attempted at reconciling liberty and human freedom with mechanistic determinism invoked by the laws of physics.

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It has also been argued that the existence (or not) of free will is a matter of how free will is defined. As we have seen previously, there are incompatibilists who hold free will in direct antagonism with determinism. However, there is also a class of compatibilists - those who define free will differently and outside the reference of determinism, and they hold that free will is compatible with determinism. A compatibilist will say that given a choice between various options, at the point at which the decision is to be made is made, one in fact does have a choice to make a decision otherwise. And so, by the very notion that the choice exists as does the potential for one to chose otherwise from what they ultimately do, is evidence of free will. So perhaps all events finally led me to choose Bahamas for my vacation. But in theory I could have chosen Alaska because I had that choice. Among determinists, hard determinists who believe that choice does not exist (note that this entails defining the notion of choice as well), reject the notion of free will and choice altogether and are hence incompatibilists. On the other hand soft determinists believe in causality, but are open to the potential of human agency and choice in action, and are compatibilists.


Daniel Dennett, the modern compatibilist philosopher has yet another interesting take on the issue. He denies the 'inevitability' of the future based on classical theories of determinism. Instead he asserts that since the future is going to happen whether or not determinism is true, we should take to speaking about particular events being inevitable or not as opposed to the ‘future’. He even takes apart the word ‘inevitable’. Here is a very interesting video that captures his ideas around free will.



Another chronicle comparing the views of compatibilitst Dennet with Peter van Inwagen (a modern American analytic philosopher who is an incompatibilist) reads:"Dennett asks, what is it we want to know of a person when we wonder, could he have done otherwise in a particular situation? Are we asking, given the exact brain states he had and the exact state of the universe as it was at the time of the act, could the person have done otherwise? Dennett rejects this formulation of the question as unanswerable, and even if answerable as unhelpful in determining responsibility. Unanswerable because it is impossible for us to duplicate a model of such complexity; unhelpful because even could we by some stretch of the imagination lay out such a model, we will never naturally find ourselves in such a state – even were the external condition the same the cognitive conditions would not be (at best we might experience some sense of déja vu). So we are left with the problem of how to interpret the question so that it does illuminate:We ask [the question] because something has happened that we wish to interpret … we want to know what conclusions to draw from it about the future. Does it tell us anything about the agent’s character, for instance? Does it suggest a criticism of the agent that might, if presented properly, lead the agent to improve his ways in some regard? Can we learn from this incident that this is or is not an agent who can be trusted to behave similarly on similar occasions in the future? If one held his character constant, but changed the circumstances in minor – or even major – ways, would he almost always do the same lamentable sort of thing? Was what we have just observed a “fluke”, or was it a manifestation of a “robust” trend – a trend that persists, or is constant, over an increasingly wide variety of conditions?Thus, Dennett argues, we would still hold people morally responsible whether we accepted classical concepts of free will or not, because the considerations we have in mind when we ask whether someone “could have done otherwise” are irrelevant to issues of free will and determinism."

Given the various ways in which modern hard determinists, libertarians and compatibilist philosophers have argued in the rather long-winding history of the free-will debate, it is clear that while talking of free will, at the very least it is important to understand the framing of the issue, its semantics, and to acknowledge the concepts of causation and the importance of responsibility. Moreover, unlike the criticism that theoretical philosophers are often met with of 'This may be interesting to think about but is ultimately irrelevant or useless ', understanding of an issue as free will also has practical implications in shaping human behavior and societies, and their judicial and value paradigms, whether in its acceptance, rejection,embrace or denial.