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TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
I finished reading a short book by Sam Harris called Free Will and listening to several of his podcasts on the topic and some related ones, specifically with Daniel C. Dennett, Robert M. Sapolsky, Robert Plomin, and Charles Murray. Some people say Sam Harris is a midwit but personally I like listening to his podcast from time to time, even though there's a lot we disagree on. So I do want to give some credit to him and those guys as getting me started on these thoughts. Someday I would like to talk about the problem on a more scientific level after revisiting a lot of scientific studies of things like genetics and heredity, but for now I have some more personal reflections on the idea of free will and determinism insofar as it informs our experiences, our values, and our morals.
I grew up watching the classic anthology series The Twilight Zone as a kid and a lot of its episodes still hold a very strong place in early influence on me. One of my absolute favorites, both as a child and today, is called "Nick of Time." It's episode 43 (S2E7) and I advise everyone to go watch it if you haven't seen it already. I'll try to avoid spoiling it here, but the basic point I want to bring up is what you might call the moral or final message of the episode: That it would be truly horrifying to not have your own free will. Even if the future is determined in advance, it would be better not to know that and to go on being able to live with confidence and the apparent autonomy make our own decisions and sketch out our own destiny.
As a child, I felt this fear quite accutely. More than anything, I feared the possibility of certain doors closing to me and losing certain possibilities and potential sources of experience, of happiness, of meaning, and so on. I count my greatest strength as a child and one of the greatest qualities my parents fostered in me to be a sense of curiosity. To a mind that is curious, nothing is more intolerable than a route to knowledge or experience that is closed off, all the more so if it seems to be closed off in advance, arbitrarily, with no chance to even try. You could say that perhaps, on some level, it is a sense of "FOMO" or fear of missing out. Although I do think that while knowing for the sake of status or reputation can corrupt this experience, for the most part it is a genuine insatiable curiosity and desire to know more about the world, anywhere and at any cost. Knowing the capitals of every country in Africa got me no "cudos" or "cred" with kids my age.
And yet, we do have to make some peace with the fact that we cannot know or experience everything. As a child, I remembered feeling an acute frustration and anger when reading that there were insects that could experience spectrums of color that humans could not! I was so jealous that there were potentially colors out there that I could never experience! How unfair! As silly as this example may seem, it has basically been what motivated me throughout my life: I want to know things and experience things that few others have. It is what drew me to difficult philosophy, to difficult works of art, to foreign languages, and so on.
I have to admit that I have a mind that always wants to take on an intellectual challenge. When I studied art and aesthetics from around the world, I over and over again would have certain people say that X piece of art or literature could not be truly understood unless you were French, or German, or Russian, or whatever else. The example I particularly remember was a critic saying that only a French speaker and someone acquainted with French culture could really appreciate Jacques Rivette's film Celine and Julie Go Boating. And my immediate response, I have to admit, was always "Fuck that. I'll show you!" Now, I would never have phrased it so arrogantly. But if I am honest enough, that's basically what the response was.
I suppose I had such a strong reaction to this sort of saying because I hated the idea that something I could experience, feel, etc. could be closed off to me in what I deemed an unfair way, that is on the basis of the country I happened to be born into. I didn't like what I interpreted as someone rubbing my nose in the fact that they had access to some special elite knowledge that I didn't have the fortune to be able to experience. Of course, these days I've become a bit less autistic and able to understand that what someone really means, nine times out of ten, when they say a line like "you have to be French to understand it" is not an ironclad rule but a somewhat hyperbolic statement of its centrality to French values, history, language, etc. But hearing that kind of thing motivated me to do my best to try to acquaint myself with even the most difficult forms of art and thinking to try to incorporate them and not be left on the outside again.
Of course, there is no culture that people romanticize in this way as much as Japan. I've been guilty of it myself, of course. And I do think that there is much in Japanese art and aesthetics that demands some training to come to appreciate. But my thought was never that these things were closed off to others in principle. In my mind, things like values, aesthetics, etc. all amounted to ways of thinking and feeling. And in principle those kinds of things have to be communicable to others. No matter what their genetic background may be. To say otherwise would be limiting my future and my freedom. It would close off potential sources of meaning, of beauty, of morals, of spirituality, and all that. And that was simply not an idea I could live with.
As I was fascinated by many sources of Japanese culture and thought, I found myself changing many traditional ideas I held about how things could be. This was especially the case when I lived in Japan for six years. I wanted to be an ideal immigrant and cleanse myself of any possibly non-Japanese ways of thought or values. I wasn't under the illusion that I could ever become Japanese or be seen as anything but a gaijin, but I was clear that I at least needed to do my best to think Japanese. In a lot of ways, I erred too far in the other extreme. I came across as very strange to some people. I tried too hard to prove that I was respectful by learning the culture and instead came across as a show off in many cases. For that, all I can do is apologize, own my mistakes, and not make excuses. I was too self-centered and prideful.
At the end of it all though, I must admit that some things became very clear, especially after I started meditating regularly in the last few months I was there. That realization was this: Some of my inner thoughts and beliefs had not been changed even a bit, no matter how hard I tried. I more or less found the same resonance and familiarity in many Japanese ways of thinking and feeling as I always had, and found some as alien and hard as ever. I had just gotten better at learning to go along with those I had trouble with.
I will give some examples. I saw many cultural values in Japan that I only felt more kinship with and more of a desire to protect while I was there. Most of these I've talked about at length in other videos, but they include: a fluid sense of religiosity with a robust polytheistic tradition, a love and legitimization of sexual desire as a foundation for love and care, an aesthetic sense that prioritizes mystery and indirectness, a tendency towards living in a healthily divided way that allows for robust subcultures that are not at the expense of smooth cultural cooperation, and so on.
But there are some little things which were harder to sit with. I don't know if "culture shock" is the term to use for them, because these are the kinds of things that for me at least I had to be living there for years to gradually understand, so it couldn't really occur in an instant as a "shock." And even if I did have some theoretical understanding of these, it took a gradual awareness of my own feelings, sometimes after cutting through a lot of self-deception, to realize what they meant to me personally.
Despite the sort of cult of overworking that everyone points to in East Asian societies, the one thing I had a lot of trouble coming to terms with and ultimately had to admit defeat to is a comparatively "loveless" view of relationships and marriage. What do I mean by this? Well, the truth is that for most of human history, marriages have been a sort of contract to unite people for the purpose of producing more members of a community and sharing property. I find this view of romantic partnership to be repulsive and inhumane. But that is in a sense just because I grew up in the west. And the west in a fairly recent era, in fact. I remember watching a pretty interesting video arguing that the idea of a romantic partner as a source of this kind of all-encompassing love and transcendence is what used to be provided by religion in pre-modern Europe, and it was only with the Enlightenment and Romantic era that these feelings got transplanted to a partner of the opposite sex.
And this never happened in Asia. They always held onto the idea of coupling as an essentially pragmatic thing. Does that mean that couples don't love each other? Of course not. But the process often seems reversed. You marry your partner and then come to love them rather than loving them and then coming to marry them. You see some discrepancies between expressions of love for this reason. It's one reason why Asian couples rarely verbalize their love for each other and are a lot less "lovey-dovey" and given to touching and hugging and all that. Of course, I can't say what goes on behind closed doors for every couple in like 2 billion people. But as an impression it generally has proven right.
So that is an example of a very deep cultural difference that I have come to understand and respect intellectually. And I do my best to accord with it. I think public displays of affection are tacky and narcissistic even in western societies, so I wouldn't think of doing them even here, but I certainly wouldn't do that in Japan. But I have to be honest with myself: No matter how much I intellectualize it, the image of married life in traditional Japanese media seems very loveless and boring to me. It seems no doubt to me, I suppose, that all the best love stories in Japanese history are of illicit or at least strange love affairs that are often doomed from the start.
So here is an example of something I finally ran up against: something I couldn't overcome with my will alone. The taste of nattou I could learn to find delicious. The rustic beauty of Japanese pottery I could learn to find appealing. Telling white lies to allow others to save face was something I could learn to find solace in. Crooked teeth giving each smile a sense of uniqueness just like each person's individual fingerprint was something I could learn to find cute. All of those became second nature and in fact in some cases seemed more natural than what I had been brought up in. But I could not change what I desired in a partner. Perhaps I hit the bedrock of something that was written in my very DNA. It was a source of major disappointments when I tried to date Japanese girls and found a major disconnect in the level of emotional intimacy expected and desired, let me tell you.
I've always considered myself to have a strong will and a tendency towards firm resolution. So the idea that there are things I could not hold sway over in my own mind and feelings seemed upsetting to me. As the old Japanese saying goes, 「心頭滅却すれば火もまた涼し」, that is "clear your mind of all worldly thoughts and even fire will seem cold." And yet, here is where I started to become skeptical of the idea that my free will was total in my own mind. And if it couldn't be total even in my own mind, certainly it couldn't be in the world that I had much less control over. Because I had seemed to run up against an immovable wall when it comes to changing certain values at my deepest level. And I had to appeal to perhaps the conditions of history that I was "thrown" into, to use Heidegger's terminology, as a ground for them. I found these even at the ground level, and especially so, as they had been so hidden. Deep experiences of my own thoughts in meditation only made this more apparent. This thread would soon unravel completely. Now I really don't believe in the idea of "free will" at all.
I believe it was Arthur Schopenhauer who coined the adage that we can do what we will, but we cannot will what we will. We all have our own will, and we can even "will against our will" so to say, such as when we avoid doing one action we want to do (steal a piece of candy) for the sake of another one we want more (not getting in trouble). But at some level we are always being pushed around by something or other to ultimately get to our actions, feelings, thoughts, and so on. At any given moment there is an incredible multiplicity of background factors that influence us and direct us to do or feel one way or another. We simply tell a story of ourselves that takes ownership of some of these, but not others. We see the immediate causes as our choices and thoughts, and they appear miraculously autonomous because we do not see the full background nexus of influences. What influences our decisions? What we feel like doing in a particular moment? What someone else told us to do? Whether or not we are hungry? What we were brought up to do as a habit? The health of our mother when we were a fetus in the womb? The survival strategies of the early hominids we evolved from? For any action of ours there is a huge manifold of conditions that bring it about and influence it in all sorts of ways.
Nor does a lack of free will have to imply that the world is laid out in a completely predictable way. As Sam Harris points out, there are plenty of biological processes which have some degree of apparent randomness like the opening and closing of ion channels and release of synaptic vesicles in our brains. Whether the influences are able to be inferred from before the beginning of the universe or whether they are constantly random and chaotic, we still never find an internal overseer to our experience that can steer itself all on its own, independent of all these other factors. We are all just along for the ride. In the Buddhist tradition, this inexhaustible and infinite cross-section of causes and conditions that stand behind every phenomenon is called "karma," and they rightly realized the indelible marks of influence that we all inherit before we are even born and that multiply and rebound out at every second of our existence. We are all marionettes, and every step we take constantly pulls each others' strings as we are pulled. How indeed could anyone somehow "jump out" of all this and act autonomously?
Why don't people want to accept this, even though it seems to be the most coherent understanding that accords with everything we know about modern physics and neuroscience? Because it goes against our moral instincts. Especially in a Christian context, which has been the underpinning of much of the western world for so long. The theologian who most famously went the other way was John Calvin. Calvinism is probably the most miserable and dreary spiritual tradition in Christianity, but if I can respect Calvin for one thing it is an honesty to not run away from the most difficult and strange implications of his faith and to uncompromisingly take them on. This includes the belief that people completely lack free will and the implication that some people, through no fault of their own, are made in order to be damned to eternity in hell and that there is nothing they can do to fix this. Thomas Jefferson once said that it would be less blasphemous to proclaim that there was no god at all than to say that he was the kind of being described by Calvin. And he was right to say so, because any attempt to unite a lack of free will with the orthodox Christian cosmology is monstrous.
But the modern secular world still seems to regard this view of a lack of free will as somewhat "dangerous" all the same. And it makes sense why. How are we able to retain any conception of morality or ethics in the face of this idea? How can anyone be held responsible for their actions if they aren't the ones who "do" them? How can we encourage others to do good things and not bad if we can't speak of them as the ones who steer their actions? Even the most minimal ways we can speak of morality, like trying to steer or nudge this colossal web of interconnected phenomena still implies a kind of control or will attributable to some particular kernel of human experience. In a sense, our entire language is bound to this fiction. So I want to be careful here. If I am going to open this pandora's box, we need to find a way to save and maintain our normal ethical instincts in the face of it.
In the Buddhist tradition, there is a teaching of two-tiered truth: The idea goes that there is a conventional truth under which we talk about human beings and their actions and motivations and desires and so on. But then there is an ultimate truth under which we talk about how all phenomena are really empty of self-essence. According to this view, there is really no such thing as a self that corresponds to what we call our "I" or "self," but the same goes for anything that we could label with some substance, be it a tree or a rock or whatever else.
So why do we refer to two truths? How are these not in conflict? I remember an interview where one of the great writers working on bridging the gap between modern western philosophy and classical Buddhism, Jay L. Garfield, talks about this. He says that we have over-complicated and mythologized this word "truth" in English and that's why we get confused about it. "Truth" is etymologically related to the archaic word "troth," which is now only used at weddings. The idea of troth means being faithful and trustworthy. And that's what "truth" really means. What makes something "true?" If I can accurately "track" things with it. If it is "faithful" to what I see and observe and that it is reliable to make predictions. That's all truth really is. I hope to talk more about this in a future video returning to the thinker Nāgārjuna, but we are mistaken when we try to search for some "explanation" to the regularity we observe in certain phenomena. Regularity itself IS the explanation. Regularity is just the bedrock of any explanation we could have.
Garfield says then that there is a reason we speak of ultimate truth and conventional TRUTH rather than ultimate truth and conventional falsehood. It is because both ultimately are reliable. Both "track" the world with regularity on some level. And so I think this is how we need to think of our ethics in the face of our understanding of human beings lacking free will. We need to embrace both of these views, as seemingly contradictory as they are.
No matter whether we inhabit the conventional truth of humans deciding their own actions or the ultimate truth of humans being atoms enslaved to the laws of physics at their core, there is a way to inhabit them morally and a way to inhabit them immorally. Both can be wielded for kindness or abuse.
If we take the conventional view of people as having their own free will, we can feel motivated to take action on our own part in order to do things like teach people in the hope of encouraging their further positive actions. We will be able to encourage and reward others for their good actions and hopefully increase the possibility that others will do the same. While on an ultimate level any idea of us or another "doing" anything will fall apart, we can certainly speak reliably of these things insofar as we experience them. It's just like we might speak of something being solid or still even when we understand that at an atomic level nothing is really fully stable.
Of course, all of that is painfully obvious. What is harder to understand is how a view of human beings as lacking free will could be morally helpful. Well, I think that most of it comes to the increase of compassion and humility. In fact, I think the level of compassion and humility it could really entail would be the kind of thing traditionally only encountered in Christs and bodhisattvas. Think about what it would take to look at a serial killer or terrorist and not blame him for his actions but understand that he himself was a victim of his own brain and a million other influences he could have no control over. What if we saw his actions as tragic in the same way we do a natural disaster like an earthquake or a tsunami? This doesn't mean he would necessarily be set free. Indeed, we might still decide that he is too dangerous to ever be let outside of prison. But how much more compassion would there be in the world if we saw everyone as a victim, because they too are just along for the ride?
And what applies for others would apply for us as well. It would give us so much humility if we didn't attribute our accomplishments to our own will, as if we were some kind of god. What if we replaced our pride with a sense of gratitude that the infinite cross-section of causes and conditions managed to make us accomplish what we have? In a way I think it could even bring us back to a more ancient, pure, mysterious conception of artists as shamans and channelers of higher powers, just like Plato said they were in Ion. Of course it is incredibly hard to stay in this state of mind for an extended period of time. We lose any ability to say much about our own actions other than how we feel about the circumstances we are thrown into. But I do think there is value in trying to become attuned to this way of thinking.
Furthermore, I think that a recognition of this lack of free will can actually give us a greater lens to understand the value and worth of the individual. Some people might be surprised at this, because they might feel as if lacking free will robs them of their "self" to some degree. Of course, I'm skeptical of the idea of anything like a "self" existing at all, but I think that even on the conventional level understanding our lack of free will actually gives us a greater awareness of human variety and diversity. This is because when you come to understand the causes and conditions behind every person, you come to understand just how different, weird, and unpredictable a lot of factors are in how people turn out to be the people they are. Even from the genetic level, we really have only scratched the surface in realizing how much is informed by the kind of shuffling of the genetic cards of our DNA. So I think that we shouldn't feel railroaded on an inescapable path by our lacking free will, but should be endlessly curious and interested in what kinds of people we end up becoming, because there really is so much to be surprised by.
I want to end by saying that as usual I think of everything through the lens of one of my favorite philosophers, Martin Heidegger, and what he might think about this. At the first glance, it seems opposed to everything he believes. Heidegger talks a lot about freedom and how it is the range of possibilities we have that is part of our being from the very beginning. However, I do wonder if this thought has something to do with his incredibly difficult writings on what he calls "freedom." When Heidegger talks about "freedom" in essays like "On the Essence of Truth," he clearly has a very distinct understanding of that word which doesn't necessarily map onto the everyday use of it. I think a lot of it also comes down to a difference in language. For him, the idea of "freedom" seems intimately connected to a conception of the "free" that does not necessarily map onto a human subject. For him, the first freedom is allowing things to reveal themselves. In that sense, I think Heidegger views freedom as something that is inherently receptive to the unfolding of being itself. "Freedom" in a sense comes before any subject or object that could hold or embody it. At least, that's what I've been trying to understand when I square these thoughts with Heidegger. Maybe freedom comes largely in shifting how we understand things.