Free Will

The following are my thoughts on the quintessential human idea we call Free Will : Humans consider themselves vastly different from other animals because of this notion that we are self-aware (while other animals are not) and are hence more "in control" of what we do, because we can view our own brains objectively and thus arrive at a conclusion from a given set of parameters - ie. we can "prove" to ourselves that our decisions are "correct" (not in the right-or-wrong sense of the word, but in that we do not do things contrary to our own internal set of principles, however loose those morals might be).

However, let us closely examine this notion of Free Will from a very simplistic perspective - one of making a day-to-day decision of, say, "Should I study today or should I just relax and have a good time?" - I choose this not because it is important, but quite the reverse - it seems to have all the qualities of an unimportant decision and therefore the best guinea pig for any theory about decision-making. Also, it so happens, this was the first decision I made today before deciding to write this article.

Now, when we make such a decision we would like to imagine that we are making it to satisfy some need (in a very hunter-gatherer sense of the word) as against doing it because circumstances force us to choose one instead of the other (ie. there did not seem to be any compulsion to study or do otherwise this morning). So why did I choose not to study? If we believe in Free Will (as we would like), I did it because I consciously wanted to give myself a "better life", and this choice pointed towards that "better life" (albeit temporary, it is better nonetheless). So now comes the harder question - How do we know what a "better life" is?

Here again, we have two options - either we have an intuitive sense (coming from emotions such as hope, joy, satisfaction) that relaxation is better than study/work, or someone has, in the past, told us that relaxation is better, and we have naively believed them (note: the second option includes the possibility that everyone we have ever met believes that relaxation is better, and therefore we also believe it - this does not make the decision any less naive - reliance on a collective human "knowledge" is even worse than reliance on one person's statement). So, again, if we believe in Free Will, we would like to believe that this notion of a "better life" arises out of our own emotions, and, eventually our brain/soul.

We go down one more level - where do these emotions come from? The notion of joy is only tangible at the level of a joyous moment. This can be likened to living a moment vicariously : for instance, when we watch a movie, we feel happy if "they lived happily ever after". Similarly, we experience happiness "through" those events in our own lives - ie. If a person had never had a single happy moment in his life, he would not know what happiness is!! Hence, we see that when we talk of an emotion, we are actually talking about the experiences that give us that emotion - the emotion itself is lost in a sea of memories and day dreams of the future. By itself, an emotion is vacuous. I do not mean to be a wet blanket, but it seems like any emotion is so intangible, that it actually IS only a collection of experiences which we categorise into one.

This is a hypothesis, but I hope whoever reads this is convinced of its veracity.

So now, we can explore this emotion further to find the root of Free Will. As we have seen earlier, it is these emotions that lead us to make a decision - but what precedes these emotions in this "flowchart" of decision-making?

The experiences : An experience (by this, I mean, any event in our lives) is, at the end of the day, defined by our perception of it (This idea is borrowed from Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", or, more recently, the Matrix movies). Hence, any experience, is governed by our five senses - which in turn, are governed by the electrostatic forces that move through our neurons from the various sense organs to the brain. Here, I mean that people with synesthesia, for instance, would have a very different experience watching a movie from a person who doesn't.

So now (and we appear to be closer to the destination), we see that any decision is made because of the firing of neurons through our body, which, in turn, (most of us would agree) are based on the "immutable" laws of physics.

Hence, if we believe in Free Will, we must believe that these laws of physics are, in fact, very much mutable (This idea arose last night in a very interesting conversation with a friend, and from a scene in the movie Waking Life, which has culminated in this article - the conversation revolved around the idea that all of physics can be viewed as a forest where each axiom/hypothesis is a tree, and the only axioms that survive are the ones whose roots do not interfere with those of a larger and longer established tree. We humans are merely blindfolded creatures walking around, bumping into the occasional branch. The questions of "who planted the seeds?" and "Which tree came first?" were not addressed due to intellectual cowardliness). Back to the laws of physics - if these laws were not mutable, then "they" would govern everything we do, and hence we have no Free Will. So, if we believe in Free Will, then we must believe that physical laws change continuously as we make decisions.

Many mathematicians, and physicists, would like to blame all of this on "quantum" behaviour ie. the fact that all matter is not actually "particles", but at a subatomic level, everything is a "probability", and particles cease to exist. It is difficult to disagree with that - it seems "too appealing not to be true" (an idea widely accepted in mathematics is that something that is beautiful is more likely to be true than something that isn't - a contrapositive idea to that of G.H. Hardy : "Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.")

So we have arrived at a conclusion (somewhat) that if Free Will were to exist, then all our actions, and all the reasons behind those actions (note that I consider the very decision to do something an "action", and not the "reason") are governed by probabilities, and hence are in a constant state of "flux" as it were. This leads us inexorably towards an idea made popular by Buddhism (here I am definitely leaning on a very Fritjoff Capra-esque argument) - that of "Impermanence". Buddhism, of course, even goes further to say that since Impermanence is so fundamental to life, that the best way to cope with life's travails is to avoid attachment to all things in life, because everything is ephemeral. I don't consider myself learned enough to make such a bold statement, and I feel I have been arrogant enough in the expression of these ideas that I must stop here.

In closing, we examine the conclusion - I use the word "conclusion" rather loosely. For what is a conclusion? As in the case of most complex questions, a "conclusion" is merely a restatement of the original question with an emphasis on a different aspect of the question, thereby introducing us to a new line of thought, rather than making a final fullstop. Of course, I never did state the original question - a situation I must remedy. The question is this :

Should we believe in Free Will? And if we do, what are the logical conclusions we must arrive at?