The essential objection to the existence of freewill is the
same as the objection to any seemingly non-material “entity” for which no basis
in known matter/energy relations can be found or convincingly surmised. The consideration of the issue can begin from
either of two stances: that the personal experience of freewill is sufficient
to strongly suggest its reality independent of a matter/energy explanation or
that the freewill experience is the product of discernable matter/energy
relations and not actually ‘freewill’ as it is commonly thought of. Since humans have been operating from the
first stance for a measured time of 5000 years, and most likely before, while
producing the same paradoxes over and over again, the second stance must be
given serious consideration.
* * *
Variability in human behavior, without regard to its
origin, is the source of our success on the earth. Imagine an animal like a rabbit increasing in
population by an exponent. The behaviors
of the rabbits would not also increase in variety by the exponent, but would
remain almost fixed (I say ‘almost fixed’ since there would be weak performance
variability and a small increase in variability based on genetic variety). It is the fixed behaviors of rabbits that
limit their populations to clearly defined habitats and numbers per hectare –
only by changing their behavior could they increase in number under consistent
macro-environmental conditions (I say macro-environment because the immediate
environment would be greatly affected by large changes in rabbit numbers,
precisely because their behaviors are fixed).
For an animal to add variety to its behavioral repertoire,
actual mechanisms must be acting – and posited in explanation (this is one of
the paradoxes: that an animal must explain itself to itself with the tools that
the explanations are explaining!). The
explanations that humans use are imagination, innovation and freewill.
What we perceive as and have formalized in the language as
personal freewill is a design of brain process with the overall adaptive
consequence of increasing variability in human behavior. This must be true regardless of the processes
that underlie what we call freewill. Looked as a whole, a group of animals has
a volume of behavior; most of the behavior is ‘of a type’ typical of the group,
practiced and weakly variable (weak
variability from random variations of performance contrasted with strong variability from matter/energy
systems adapted to produce variable responses).
However, in humans there is a component of strong variability in our
behavior such that when a “snap shot” of behavior structure is taken at one
time it will be noticeably different from one taken at another time – the
amount of difference is most often highly correlated with the amount of time
between looks.
The human process of storing experience over time and
distance and combining these experiences by either a “purposeful” or random
action, both in the single brain and, powerfully, in the social construction of
group-based Story, is the basis of our strong variability. The essential question is: are the
combinations of imagination purposefully arrived at, as we most often feel that
they are, or are they random combinations derived from the probability
structure created by the local environment, current social structure, nature of
language and the vicissitudes of personal experience; and then selected from by
an adaptive process within the present Story playing against the recognition
(as comprehended in Story) of present needs?
That this is ‘a mouthful’ is a clue to the understanding
(misunderstanding) of our variability as the product of ‘freewill.’ There was, in our evolution and in our
general history, no adaptive advantage to correctly identifying the functional
nature of our Consciousness Order variability-producing processes; if anything,
advantage goes to the illusion that we were exercising choice and organizing
experiences into meaningful reality-based behaviors.
So long as Biophysical Reality served as an essential
arbiter in the adaptive process, the Stories that humans told themselves about
what was driving the process mattered little: it doesn’t matter whether a
sailor thinks that the wind is coming from a giant waving a fan or from high and
low pressure areas so long as the mainsails and jibs are properly set, and
there is nothing in the two ‘understandings’ to improve the sailor’s skills,
one over the other. Except… in the big
picture, when the sailor needs to have some knowledge of the whole sea, now and
tomorrow; when the actions of sailors begin to influence the wind, then
illusions become a danger.
As difficult as it may seem, it is becoming essential that
we understand how our adaptive processes actually function. Among our biggest errors of understanding are
freewill and agency. While it is not
necessary for every behavior and behavioral change to be deeply analyzed by
every human actor, it is becoming vital that we find a way to see collective
actions in veridical terms. This means,
in part, that those “in charge” of ideas, and the collective actions generated,
be competent to perform such analysis.
Only when the Story that we tell about ourselves includes such a need
will it happen; our present Story sends some of the most incompetent people
‘imaginable’ to lead us.
This is what we need to understand about freewill and human
variability, and to have structured into a comprehensible and comprehensive
Story: freewill is one of several ways of naming Consciousness System of Order
activities that provide an adaptive advantage for our species, primarily by
increasing the variety of behaviors available to us from which actual
conditions “select”. Imagination and
innovation are closely related others.
When a situation produces a variety of options through the human process
of imagining, the typical understanding is that we use our ‘freewill’,
supported by reason, to make a choice.
There is nothing wrong with this illusion – just as there is nothing
wrong with the illusion of color when we see certain wavelengths of light. But it is an illusion and we must be ready to
realize it as such when its limitations endanger us.
Of course, this is difficult for us. The ‘feeling’ that we are evaluating and
deciding is very strong. But, just as we
can’t directly experience ultraviolet light as a perceptual form (only
indirectly as sunburn and eye damage), we can’t experience the underlying
reality of randomness. We have no reason
to. Randomness will take care of itself
and offers no guide to specific behaviors.
We are about finding patterns that we can use to advantage.
Because we can’t experience randomness directly, we are
denied the intuitive capacity to realize the primary source of all movement—and
the design of the processes that form to construct ordered systems from
randomness. Our only immediate intuition
is to search for a non-random source of agency since we can’t recognize the
deeper processes of order.
Another example may be helpful. In our evolutionary history our hominid
forebears faced dangers, actually relatively simple ones and not so many as we
tend to speculate from our present “safe” world. Daily dangers were, primarily, tainted food
and water, poisonous plants, dangerous large animals, poisonous small
animals. There were larger scale dangers
such as unpredictable weather events and starvation, but these were very rare
and did not figure strongly as designers of detailed evolutionary
consequences. As a result of these
dangers, today, we have responses to smells, tastes, situations (e.g., heights)
and certain animals that seem instinctual or nearly so. These responses continue to serve us, but
only on the margins of our lives; our greatest dangers come from chemicals that
we cannot smell or taste, radioactive elements for which we have no sensory
tools, situations that we routinely misestimate (e.g., auto travel) and
geopolitical and geo-economic behaviors that condemn billions of people to the
greatest suffering in the history of humanity.
The point is that our primary tools for sensing the world and for understanding it derive from an
evolutionary history of adapting to very different realities from those that we
face today. The tools of our thought
processes are more like the male peacock’s tail than the crisp formulas of
physics. The design of science process
is a constant and vigilant struggle against many of these processes of
thought. Belief in our own agency with
its “freewill” is just such an evolutionary product; a product that we can no longer
afford to appeal to uncritically.
This is not to say that we must deny the use of the
‘freewill process’. Just as we can
successfully use the language and idea of color and still understand, when
needed, that visible light is a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, we
can feel that we are deciding and choosing with reason. However, we need to be ready to realize the
deeper reality that this is a process for increasing options in behavior and
not a reality of agency. In this way we
have the potential to design yet another way to extract a new level of order
from randomness to meet our present dilemmas, a change that can only be made by
realizing the true nature and potential of the Consciousness System of Order.
