Free Will – what is it?
If you’re a Christian, it doesn’t only mean you believe in the Bible, in Jesus etc, it also means you subscribe to a particular architecture of thinking. Architecture is an interesting metaphor, because we know you get functional architecture, aesthetic, and then architecture that is meant to take your breath away [but fucking expensive to maintain, and otherwise impractical and rarely functional].
In these ‘Chronicles’ I aim to demonstrate, using very simple explanations, why our conventional views are – not flawed or slightly off – but entirely misinformed, entirely mistaken.
In order to be a believer requires that believers subscribe to a set of pillars to hold up their faith. These are, in no particular order, free will, the soul, guilt, sin, heaven [and thus hell], life after death [which is a separate concept to heaven in a sense, which I will explain], and a personal God. 7 concepts. I will be discussing each in turn, as briefly as I can, starting with this one:
Free Will
According to Christianity, God gave us free will, in an act of incredible kindness, and almost having faith in us that we would, wisely, choose to ‘pay back’ this generosity by recognizing that he – sorry, He – gave it as a gift in the first place. In other words, to not recognize [and in some ways thank/worship] the giver of this gift, to not pay Himback with worship and adoration we ought to feel guilty or ashamed.
What are we to use our free will for? Well, in Christianity we’re offered this choice. Call Jesus our saviour, and have eternal life with him, or reject him and go to hell [apparently an unpleasant place]. Is that what free will is for? To make a choice a butterfly or a rat would intuitively make – flames or forest, I’ll take the forest.
But let us leave Christianity’s inner workings for a moment, and look at Free Will as something standing on its own. Let’s forget what Christians say it is for, or where it apparently came from [a gift from above]. Let’s look at the mechanism of it.
On a daily basis we make hundreds of choices using our free will. We decide which clothes to wear, whether to take our cellphones with to work, what to have for breakfast, which route to take to work, what time we mean to arrive, which colleagues to greet, how productive we mean to be etc etc. Perhaps God cares what color socks we wear, and whether we brushed our teeth. Those are decisions we make each day using our free will. You might not think so, but each movement we make is also a matter of free will. You use free will to get up out of your chair, and the manner that you get up is a function of your free will. The manner in which you walk, and swing your arms comes from your free will. Every stroke on a keyboard, every click, is your brain wanting to know something/see something. Every movement you make, whether you smile, or wink, your tone of voice, it all comes from your free will. God’s gift to you, right?
It might surprise you to think of Free Will as something that comes from a particular part of the brain. No, it’s doesn’t materialize out of the ‘heart’ or ‘soul’ or some amorphous idea of consciousness. Free Will actually resides in a particular area of the brain. How do we know this? When that part of the brain is damaged, our free will evaporates.
Before we look at a few examples [science likes to use specific cases, things like facts and evidence] first an experiment to test whether your free will is working. First, use your eyes and look to the top left corner of the screen. If you did that, you exercised your free will. Even if you didn’t, perhaps because you’re a Christian hunting for disagreeable and unjustifiable comments here, you didn’t, but then you exercised your free will not to do so. Try it again, glance to the right corner of this screen, and hold your gaze there for a period of time, you can decide how long. It is quite a magical experience to see, hey, I can actually order my body around consciously whenever I like! Trick is, to remember to do this with our thoughts, to discipline our appetites. As the pilot of the incredible thing that is a human being, each of us – in terms of our free will – has a tremendous responsibility. [Sadly, few of us even realize we have a free will, so few take ownership of it and maintain coherent discipline over ourselves, and what we do – how much TV we watch, what we do with our time and money etc.]
Last exercise in free will. Close your eyes for a few seconds.
Now that you’re back, and buzzing with the potential power free will has for you [to control you in positive and powerful ways using your own sense of personal power or, forgetting about it, to relinquish control to mindless oblivion], let’s look at a case or two where free will is absent, and try to imagine what that is like.
A woman with brain damage to a supplementary motor area of her brain appeared unresponsive in hospital. She lay quietly in bed with an alert expression. She could follow people with her eyes but did not speak spontaneously. She gave no verbal reply to questions put to her even though she appeared to understand the questions since she nodded in reply. She could repeat words and sentences, but only very slowly. In short, her few reactions were very limited and rather stereotyped. After a month she had largely recovered. She said she had not been upset because she had previously been unable to communicate. She had been able to follow conversations but she had not talked because she had ‘nothing to say’. Her mind had been ‘empty’. I immediately thought she had lost her Will – where was the damage [to her brain]. It turned out to be somewhere in or near a region called the ‘Anterior cingulated sulcus,” next to Brodmann’s area 24…I was delighted to learn that this was indeed a region that received many inputs from the higher sensory regions and was at or near the highest levels of the motor system…You normally only have a single will at one time, although a split brain can have two.
[Later] I was reading a paper by Michael Posner in which he mentioned a curious condition, produced by a particular kind of brain damage, known as the ‘alien hand’ syndrome. A patient’s left hand for example, may make movements – usually rather simple and stereotyped movements – that the patient denies he himself is responsible for. For example, the hand might spontaneously grasp an object placed nearby. In some casesthe patient is unable to get the hand to let go and has to use the right hand to detach the left hand from the object. One patient found that he could not make his ‘alien’ hand let go by his own willpower, but could make it release its grasp by saying ‘let go’ in a loud voice!
And where was the damage? Again, in or near the anterior cingulated sulcus (on the right side for the alien left hand) but also in that part of the corpus callosum, so that the region on the left could not give the instructions to the left hand that the damaged region on the right was unable to give. *
From Nobel prize winner Francis Crick’s THE ASTONISHING HYPOTHESIS, page 267-269.
In other words, if God gave human beings free will [the freedom to move, to make choices whether to accept the reality of ‘God’ or not], he gave these choices, to move, to live, to breathe, to every other living creature also. Thus, in terms of free will, man is no different from insects and puppies in the choices we make.
A few more points to make. In the dialogues I have with Christians, many refer to Bible texts, quotes etc. This seems to me to be a ‘stereotypical’ response, which infers that the person elects not to use their free will and investigate their inner reality, but rather refer to a inflexible rule or statement or idea written, edited, polished and rearranged over centuries of Bible writing, by someone who wrote it in a different time, for a particular set of circumstances, in a different language. In all probability, if the writer, as he was writing it [for it is never a she], if the writer were told to which uses his writing would be used, he would likely be horrified. Imagine how a Jewish scholar would respond to his ideas on the promised land and the struggle to be free to be adopted in Africa, by black South Africans seeking to overthrow their white, some of them Jewish oppressors, and in Korea, who sought to rid themselves of Japanese oppression. The Jewish scribe would have said he was writing with only one people in mind – his people, in Israel, period. God’s chosen people. Of course, hundreds of years later you can add a few softening texts to say ‘er, by the way, this also refers to everyone else’ even though it’s almost always a story of Jewish people facing a majority of non-Jews.
Of course free will goes to the heart of Christianity, where new Christians promise to ‘give their lives’ [in effect their free will] to the Lord. Any person who does this can naturally be easily influenced to give their money, or do as the leader of a congregation asks. Peer pressure also plays an important role. Faith [trust, loyalty, confidence] naturally is the abandonment of a particular free willed act – thinking [knowledge/information/awareness].
Coming back to the early paragraphs above, Christianity really offers a very simple equation. God gave you free will, and once you recognize that, you have to give it back. It may seem fair and logical, except it isn’t. When you buy a pet, do you remind your pet on a daily basis how much money you paid, or that you are its owner? Most congenial pet owners have a pet for the joy and companionship of having a pet. They expect little in return other than moderately decent behaviour, and as is often the case, particularly with cats, the cats control their owners. You can hardly imagine a scenario where pet owners take their pets to a vet to have the free will part of their brain interfered with so that pets will love them, because it is part of the transaction of buying a pet that a pet ‘must’ obey its owner.
Pets love their owners because their owners love them, and care for them. We love God because we have to, and because, really, we don’t have much of a choice [without free will anyway]. And we’re commanded to do so: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, strength and mind].
So what about free will in the modern era? Are we – as consumers, salary earners – really free? Yes, but not if we never wake up and make the choice to be.
The impact of television is as powerful as it is because it is a strong form of audio-visual hypnosis. You have pictures flashing at you, scenarios repeated, with music and words to reinforce the message. People are far more susceptibleand impressionable to this than most of us imagine [which is why televangelists are also very successful]. I experienced this myself in July when I watched the Tour de France from an exercise bike. While watching the riders on a monitor attached to my spin bike, I was able to ride sometimes for over 2 hours with an average heart rate of over 120. It felt like 20minutes. In reality of course I am sitting on a machine, going nowhere, and staring intently at an LCD display, sweating profusely. But the hypnosis, the attention given to the plight of the riders somewhere in France is so captivating, it feels like one is right there with them, and so the act of pedaling with them seems hardly as hard as it would be facing the reality of being in a gym, on bike, riding like hell, going nowhere and having just few droplets of sweat and an elevated heartrate to show for it.
We ‘motivate’ and ‘manipulate’ our free will in many ways besides. From music, to alcohol, to, yes, the books we read, and the thoughts we fill our minds with. To the things we say to other people. In the end though, free will is yours to take control over your life, your thoughts, your moods, or there to give away. When you give it away it tends to be in the service of others, sometimes but not often in a good sense. Not in the sense of sacrifice, but free will surrendered as a result of ignorance, as a result of a lazy attitude to one’s own experience and sense of self. Commonly we are too lazy to think, and in this sense, offer our free will to others, who do our thinking for us. Movies, music, television.
The author quoted about, Francis Crick, is one example of someone who made an effort to find out what is happening in our brains. Those who read and investigate this area would eventually discover books like The Astonishing Hypothesis. But for a large group of people, the only book they ever really read is the Bible. A book that teaches its readers not to think, not to question, and not our will, but someone elses, be done. Whatever you do with your Free Will, each moment you can choose to allow others to steer your existence, or, at any moment, elect to once again be the captain of your thoughts, words and deeds in the real world, a world alive and of your making. Which is it going to be?
Disagree? Leave a comment or SHOOT THE DONKEY.
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