Psychology and Free Will

I've been discussing free will online with a Christian university student who happens to be a psychology major. He believes in free will, and I not only don't believe in free will, but I also don't understand how a psychology major, of all people, could. This is what I wrote to him a few minutes ago:

If I'm not mistaken, you're a psychology major. Now what is psychology if not the scientific study of behavior and mentation, and how can there be a science of uncaused behavior and mentation? And if you say that the cause of human behavior and mentation, including human will, is the individual person, I say that it is unscientific to assume that the proverbial buck stops with the conscious choices of the individual without taking into account the biopsychosocial factors, many of them undoubtedly unconscious, that cause those conscious choices. In other words, it seems to me that modern psychology implies determinism. Thus, if you really believe in free will, it seems to me that you should render serious consideration to changing your major.

Introducing Yet Another New Blog

I just kicked off a new blog today and posted my first entry to it. The blog is titled Freedom or Necessity?

I know what you're thinking: "That guy has had other blogs that fizzled out after a few posts. Why should this one be any different?"

Well, it should be different because it's about something I've been interested in since I was a teenager. It's the issue of free will vs. determinism. Are we free to will what we do or only to do as we will? That is, when we will something, were we free to will anything else at that time, or did we have to will what we did given our nature at that time?

This is one of the thorniest and most enduring and engaging issues in the history of philosophy, and it draws upon all kinds of philosophical and scientific disciplines for answers. I want to learn more about what those disciplines have to say on the matter and report and reflect on what I've learned in my blog.

I've posted several commentaries here on what I currently believe regarding the issue, but, let's face it, I'm an ignoramus when it comes to all this stuff. I've been talking off the top of my head instead of marshaling strong rational arguments and adducing persuasive empirical findings to back my airy speculations.

It's time for a change, and my new blog will usher in that change. I hope you'll check it out, like what you see, and take your shoes off and sit a spell.

The Mind as a Pair of Scissors

Jonah Lehrer, author of the delightful neuroscience blog The Frontal Cortex, posted an entry today about his new book How We Decide. This entry explains that the book examines the various factors that go into producing the various kinds of decisions we make including everything from choosing which flavor of Cheerios to buy at the supermarket to whether to take out a subprime mortgage.

In a Q&A section extracted from Amazon, Lehrer likens the mind to a pair of scissors. In this metaphor borrowed from Nobel Prize winning psychologist Herbert Simon, one blade of the scissors represents the brain and the other represents the brain's environment, and, just as we can't understand the operation of the scissors without understanding the simultaneous movement of both blades, so we can't understand the choices the mind makes without understanding the interaction of brain and environment.

In the comments section, this is what I wrote:

Jonah--
I look forward to reading your book, and, judging from Publisher's Weekly's starred review, you have nothing to be nervous about.

No doubt you address the free will vs determinism issue in your book. Herbert Simon's delightful metaphor of the brain and environment as the two blades of a pair of scissors reinforces my view that brain and environment are what the philosopher Alan Watts called a "unified field" and that the choices issuing from this field are the inevitable products of the conditions within it.

In other words, there is no freedom to choose other than what the conditions within the field produce, and there is also no determinism of something outside the field causing it to choose as it does, because, ultimately, the field encompasses everything of which there is nothing outside.

I do look forward to reading this book and to reviewing it here someday.

Why I Ask Why

My wife learned recently that her cousin's former boyfriend and father of their child was in a Bangkok jail for theft or some such charge. This news comes as no surprise to any of us, for this young man has been nothing but trouble for my wife's cousin and her family for a long time, and it seemed to be only a matter of time before he got in real trouble. No place is a good place to get in legal trouble, but Thailand is probably less of a good place than many to spend time in jail or prison.

I don't know what's going to happen to this young man, but I hope that, whatever it is, it serves as a wake-up call that motivates him to change his life for the better. That is, I hope he's hit bottom and now has nowhere to go but up.

My wife doesn't care what happens to him. She seems to feel nothing but contempt for him. She says he's now getting what he deserves or reaping his karma.

I asked her why she supposes he's acted the way he has, and she answered, "Because he's lazy. He doesn't want to work." I asked her why he's lazy, and she replied, "Because he wants to live the good life and enjoy expensive things, but he won't do the work necessary to earn them himself. He expects people to give them to him." I asked why he expects people to give them to him, and she replied, "Because his mom and dad spoiled him. He got everything he wanted when he was growing up just by asking for it, and now he expects the people around him to keep giving him what he wants." "So, he's the way he is because of the way his parents raised him?" I ask. "No," my wife replied. "He could still have turned out like his brother and worked hard and treated people decently. He didn't have to act the way he has." "Well," I ask, "if he could have acted differently but didn't, why do you suppose he didn't?" "Because, like I said before, he's lazy." "Yes, but why is he lazy?" "Don't keep asking me these questions!" she said in exasperation.

Of course, the purpose of these questions is not to exasperate, but to get others thinking about why people do the things they do. That is, what causes them to do what they do. Yet, people don't seem to want to do this. They seem to want to stick with simplistic answers like, "He did it because he wanted to," or "She did it because she's a bad person." If you ask, "Why did he want to do it?" or "Why is she a bad person?"people want you to shut up or change the subject. They want to stick with their finger-pointing blame games and to find any excuse they can for scorning not only misbehavior but also those who misbehave.

But what's the alternative? If one looks for the causes of bad behavior or bad character, does one do as my wife suggested I do and not hold people accountable for what they do? Should the young man I mentioned earlier face no consequences for his acts? If he doesn't, won't he go on exploiting people for his own selfish ends?

I think we can draw a distinction between who people are, superficially and deeply, and what they do. I think we can find certain acts wrong and do what we reasonably can to discourage them and still feel compassion and unconditional regard for those who commit them. Gagdad says this is madness and that people must be subject to the masculine principle of conditional love lest they become foolish and narcissistic "liberals."

But it seems to me that those who do wrong are more likely to do right if they believe that they have it within them to be good and do good, and that we convey this to them when, even though we condemn their wrongful actions and punish them appropriately for them, we go on caring about them and loving them as persons and as manifestations of God no matter what they do.

A Human Tsunami

In my previous post, I asked how one becomes peace without unhealthily repressing anger and hatred toward evildoing and evildoers. This morning an anchor on CNN or one of the other news channels offered the beginnings of a possible answer when he referred to Cho Seung-Hui's murderous rampage as a "human tsunami."

It is far easier to hate evil acts that one sees as freely-willed than to hate those, like such natural "acts" as a tsunami, that one sees as the inevitable effects of complex causes. As I have explained many times, I subscribe to the latter rather than the former view. And when I can apply it to an evil act or person who perpetrated it, my anger and hatred decrease and my equanimity and compassion increase.

Thus it would seem that one way to become more peaceful is not to repress anger and hatred but to preclude or dissipate them by getting better at applying my deterministic philosophy to every person and every act.

Nirvana Is Knowing There's No Free Will?

Regular readers of this blog, if there are any, probably know that I'm fascinated by the subject of "free will." If they know that, they also know that I don't believe in it. I realize that this puts me in relatively small company, but that doesn't necessarily make the majority right and the minority of which I'm a member wrong.

Another member of the minority is Dr. Susan Blackmore, who recently addressed the subject of free will on her website. This is what she wrote:

Neuroscience and meditation practice both seem to point to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no persisting inner self that is the origin of creativity, the subject of our experiences, or the ultimate cause of our actions and decisions. In this case there can be no free will as it is usually conceived. Many people argue that life, law and society would be impossible without free will, or at least without an illusion of free will, but I disagree. We will explore what it is like to accept that “I” do not make the decisions.

I encountered this quote and more on free will in someone else's blog, in an entry titled Life Without Free Will. Here is an excerpt from that blog:

I am no expert on neuroscience. It is the kind of stuff that I like to read, but my faculties are weak and it’s hard to keep track of the arguments, let alone to grasp the complex geography of the brain. After all, the brain – when you start to poke around in it – is a complicated place. But without getting too technical, the problem with free will in relation to brain science is this: that there is no centre to the brain in some little homunculus or “will” could reside and from which it could direct operations. It’s not just that there’s no homunculus, no “mini-me”, inside pulling the levers and co-ordinating the whole show. Nor is it just that invoking such a homunculus leads us into infinite regress (who pulls the levers in the homunculus’s mind?). It’s also that there is nowhere for such a homunculus to sit. From what we now know of the brain, we can do quite well without homunculi. They add nothing to our understanding...I have been sceptical of the idea of free will for some time...So, I’ve been trying to put this into practice, seeing what it is like to lay free will to one side, to live without free will.

I left the following comment:

I have never believed in free will. To me, “free will” means the capacity to choose otherwise. That is, if one had two or more options to choose between, one could have chosen another option than what one did under the same precise set of circumstances.

I don’t believe that one could have done this, because I believe that we and our choices are manifestations of what Alan Watts called an “organism-environment field.” That is, “we” are a transaction of physical, biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual factors that ultimately encompass the entire past and present universe. Thus, “our” choices are ultimately the choices of the unified totality of physical, biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual existence and could not be other than what necessarily issues from that unified totality at any given moment. There is no magical “homunculus” or agency within each of us as individuals that is independent and can choose independently of this unified totality.

Alan Watts went on to suggest that the Buddhist nirvana is actually a concrete realization of this. I’m not sure I recall his exact words, but they were very close to the following: “Nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive. It feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything—including my thoughts and feelings—were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that “I” make them. They arise of themselves in relation to circumstances.”

In other words, nirvana is the concrete realization of “no free will.” It is also the concrete realization of “no determinism.” For in order for something to be determined, it must be determined by something OUTSIDE itself. But if there is ultimately nothing outside us to force us to choose what we do, then we are no more determined to make the choices we do than we are free to make them. They simply “arise of themselves in relation to circumstances.”

I think Watts' description of nirvana is a wonderful way of understanding the real nature of self and will, and I often use it as a kind of meditation on egolessness and on what it is to "live without free will."