Home______John Horgan, Scientific American writer, on Daniel Wegner & free will

"When I woke this morning, I stared at the ceiling above my bed and wondered: to what extent will my rising really be an exercise of my free will? Let's say I got up right . . . now. Would my subjective decision be the cause? Or would computations unfolding in a subconscious neural netherworld actually set off the muscular twitches that slide me out of the bed, quietly, so as not to wake my wife, and propel me toward the door? . . . "

"[According to Dr Daniel M Wegner, Harvard psychologist, the chief offender is the Illusion of conscious will.] What makes Dr. Wegner's critique more effective than others I've read over the years is that it is less philosophical than empirical, drawing heavily upon recent research in cognitive science and neurology. . . . "

"We think of will as a force, but actually, Dr. Wegner says, it is a feeling — "merely a feeling," as he puts it — of control over our actions. I think, "I'm going to get up now," and when I do a moment later, I credit that feeling with having been the instigating cause. But as we all know, correlation does not equal causation. . . . Wegner calls the idea of free will intention invention." More
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In regard to what Horgan says about Wegner, think about this. In 1927, puzzled by the behavior of quantum particles, Werner Heisenberg wrote, "The ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it." (Also click here for my 8 November article on Benjamin Libet's pioneering experiments which have free will implications.)

A founder of modern physics, Heisenberg questioned the classical view of an objective observer. We can also say the paths of our lives do not exist until observed. As concept, a determined future assumes an objective observer. If we cannot know the perceiver, how can there be an objective observer? How, then, can one ever say that the future is predetermined? Read the 8 December article on Perception.

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Home______Losing Control

Control is the central issue in all religions. Loss of control delivers the adherent into God's grace, the bliss of nirvana, or satori. Thy will be done, whatever phrase it takes, is common to them.

Religious doctrines hold that the individual cannot choose this deliverance, but must depend on God's grace, or the happenstance of enlightenment. Man can do nothing to achieve it. Christianity, and the two main Eastern religions help an illustration.

Jesus said that nobody can earn God's mercy. St Augustine said God had preordained who would be saved and who, damned. The later Church taught God's grace comes like a thunderclap that the individual can do nothing about.

In Buddhism, all form arises out of emptiness; all emptiness completes form. The individual (as individual) can do nothing to discover his true nature, which is form and emptiness. It offers no threshold for its discovery, just as there is nobody to discover it. In Hinduism, all is divine play, or lila, which manifests as the world, but is like a puppet shadow show, fleeting, seemingly real, without substance to realize and, again, nobody to realize it.

Some years ago, Alan Watts wrote a book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, which title implies that virtue ensues from realizing the absence of control. The book, too, suggests gaining something in that Watts' implication is we have a better life by letting go of our need for security.

The desire for achievement is inherent in humankind. Yet, the paradox is that religion, or any spiritual seeking for that matter, has as culmination no achievement at all. Control is lost, that's all. But we can't even lose control if it is something attempted by us precisely because effort is involved.

A man stumbled over a cliff and fell. On the way down he grabbed the branch of a shrub and clung to it. Then he shouted to the heavens, Is anybody there? Please help me. He waited and got no answer. Then he prayed. Please, Oh, please. Is anybody there? Please help me!

This time he heard a voice. Yes, I can help you, but you must follow my directions exactly.

Yes, the man answered. What must I do?

Let go of the branch, the voice said.

There was silence. One second. Two seconds.

Then the man asked, Is anybody else there?

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Home_____ Albert Einstein on free will & Ramana Maharshi on freedom & destiny

"If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will." Albert Einstein

Scientists in general accept that the universe is a closed system, deterministic and explainable by physical processes involving cause and effect. Yet we all experience the feeling that we can choose between option A and option B.

Does a conflict exist between the non-volitional view of science and our view of having volition? Or is it merely an apparent conflict? (See Daniel Dennett, the 15 December article, Daniel Wegner, 12 December, and the 8 November article on Benjamin Libet's experiments.)

Consciousness and freedom have a curious habit of eluding science. Three centuries ago, Leibniz said that we could not find consciousness or free agency even if the mind could be expanded to the size of a mill so that we could walk inside. Today we know we would find an expanded model of billions of neurons and pathways. We would observe physical events obeying physical laws. Whatever we observe always remains an object to us, not the subjective that is consciousness. Similarly, we would not find the point where a decision is made.

This is partly because we assume it to be a point in time and that we could intervene at that point. (See the 20 November article on Peter Lynds and time.) If we think in terms of time (past, present,future), why not instead assume that things happen gradually, that they build up as a result of something called intent? (See 8 November, Fait acompli and Daniel Dennett, 15 December.)

Of course, Ramana Maharshi had a wholly different take on time, one in which it is merely another concept, which is to say, an illusion.

He answered the question by saying that there is neither freedom nor destiny.

What did he mean?

Consider what he said in 1936 to a physics lecturer visiting Arunachala. The visitor asked about free will and destiny:

Maharshi: Whose will is it? "It is mine," you may say. You are beyond will and fate. Abide as that and you transcend them both. That is the meaning of conquering destiny by will. . . . I was in the past and I shall be in the future. Who is this "I"?

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Home______Looking for Reality: Billiard Balls, Einstein, & Nisargadatta

A billiard ball strikes another and moves it across the table. The proximity of the one effected a change in the second. Right?

Einstein said so. He, of course, took it further and asserted that the speed of light is an absolute, a constant, that determines physical effects, none of which can be transmitted faster than its own speed, 300,000 kilometers per second (186,000 miles per second). Things happen locally, not across great distances, he added. Although Einstein didn't put it in the same manner, his principle also holds that when nobody is in a forest to hear a tree fall, there is sound nonetheless.

Then along came Quantum Theory and a physicist named Werner Heisenberg who challenged Einstein's theory. Einstein's view had reality as something with falling trees making sounds, and particles giving simultaneous position and velocity--something like a car crossing a railroad track at twenty miles an hour. (This is not a good comparison, but it helps impart the idea of position and velocity.) Heisenberg found that he couldn't have it both ways. He could either "snapshot" a particle's velocity or its position, but not both, which is akin to saying that we can describe that the car travels at twenty miles an hour or that it crosses a railroad track, but not both. On the quantum level the world simply didn't behave as Einstein conceived it on the large, gravitational level.

The point here: if things happen locally, if the local implies the real, then why can't both position and velocity be described at the quantum level?

Things happen locally?, somebody might ask, then reply, Why of course they do. Reality is based on conditions right in front of us. Things, and the conditions for an event, can't happen anywhere else but where we see an occurrence. Right?

Not necessarily.

John Bell had problems with this. In 1965 he wanted to determine whether reality could be described by a theory supporting local variables. For this purpose he developed an Inequality Theorem. This didn't work as it, too, implied non-locality. Subsequent experiments by other physicists indicated that reality, if there is one, cannot be local. (This, of course, comes as no surprise to a Zen master who teaches Big Mind, or a Hindu sage who speaks of Consciousness with a capital C. That art thou, as an ancient Sanskrit saying has it.)

In 1982, Alain Aspect conducted experiments at the University of Paris-South to determine if reality is non-local. His photon detectors were forty feet apart (12 meters) in order to record events at Track X and Track Y, sufficiently distant from one another. For purposes of this explanation, here is a key element of his experiments:

They were measured so that they could not "talk" to one another across Tracks X and Y. (Thus if reality is local, then the photon in Track X is independent of that in Track Y.)

What implications for the outcome? If reality is local, then measuring the photon in X would have no effect on measurement of the photon in Y. If non-local, then measurement at X can affect measurement at Y.

What did Aspect discover? That measurement at X affected measurement at Y. The findings imply that Einstein was wrong about locality and that the speed of light may be irrelevant to some events, or (horror! heresy!) something there is which travels faster than light. In any event, reality is non-local.

A humble Indian merchant, Nisargadatta, had a different view of the entire matter. This is how he put it in I Am That:

"There is no such state as seeing the real. Who is to see what? You can only be the real, which you are, anyhow. The problem is not mental. Abandon false ideas, that is all. There is no need of true ideas. There aren't any. " (359-60)

Click on the link in the side bar to read about Nisargadatta.

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