Nietzsche said that free will is like the commander who takes responsibility, after the fact, for the actions of his troops.
Modern brain science has proved him remarkably on-target: Gazzaniga’s split-brain experiments, Libet’s work and a lot of other data shows that when we feel like we’re making a free spontaneous decision, very often there’s an unconscious brain process that has already made the decision beforehand.
So Are We All Just Automata?
So what does this mean? That we’re all just automata, deterministically doing what the physics of our brains tells us, while deluding ourselves it’s the result of some kind of mystical spontaneous conscious willing?
Not exactly.
Science’s capability to model the universe is wonderful yet limited. Contemporary science’s models of the universe in terms of deterministic and stochastic systems are not the universe itself, they’re just the best models we have right now.
The evidence clearly shows that our feeling of our “willed decisions” as being distinct, separate and detached from our unconscious dynamics, is often inaccurate.
But this does not imply that we’re deterministic automata in any simplistic sense.
It does imply that we’re more enmeshed in the universe than we generally realize—specifically, that our deliberative, reflective consciousness is more enmeshed with our unconscious dynamics than we generally realize.
Intentionality Beyond the Illusion of Will
Might there be some meaningful sense of intentional action that doesn’t equate with naive “free will”?
Yes, certainly.
But this meaningful sense of “intentional action” must encompass the enmeshed, complexly nonlinearly coupled nature of the mind and world.
I.e., it’s not intentional action on the part of the deliberative, reflective consciousness as a detached system.
It’s intentional action on the part of the cosmos, or a large hunk thereof, manifested in a way that focuses on one mind’s deliberative, reflective consciousness (perhaps among other foci).
The “intentionality” involved then has to do with the particular kind of patternment in the sequence of actions.
“Choice-like” action-sequences tend to involve reductions of uncertainty—reductions of “entropy” one might say ... collapses of wide ranges of options into narrower ranges.
When our deliberatively, reflectively conscious components play a focal role in an entropy-reducing dynamic in our local hunk of the cosmos, we feel like we’re enacting “free will.”
But rather than focusing on the erroneousness of some of our causal ascriptions related to the feeling of free will, why not focus on the joy of transcending one’s individual boundaries via experiencing unity with the larger entropy-reducing processes of which we sometimes form the focus?
This brief article is part of the overall Cosmist Manifesto.
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