I’ve been meditating on-and-off for around 6 years now and while it’s been relatively useful in regulating my mood and stress levels it hadn’t yielded the world-rending revelations that some of my friends who are “more serious” about the practice said it would. That changed a couple weeks ago when I had an experience that I suspect will have a lasting impact on how I fundamentally view the world. To be clear here, it wasn’t that I had a mystical experience but rather had a philosophical insight based upon an observation in meditation.
To be brief – I managed to observe via meditation that both the thoughts that appear in my mind with and without my seeming effort are equally unbidden. In other words, all my thoughts and intentions appear to arise from a realm outside my conscious control and further investigation indicates there appears to be strong philosophical and physical arguments for this to be the case. This insight has profound implications that directly impact concepts such as free will, equality, and justice.
The purpose of this post is to walk through the experience and briefly discuss some implications which I intend to explore more deeply in future posts.
The Experience
While there are different types of meditative practices, the style that I have pursued is a observation-style practice. That is, the intent one forms during the practice is to observe as closely and unwaveringly as possible. The specific object of one’s observation may vary between sessions and even over the course of the session.
On the particular day I had my experience, I was following one of the later sessions in the Waking Up guided meditation course by Sam Harris. During the session, Mr. Harris directed the practitioner to focus their observation on the nature of their own awareness. While I had attempted this before, this time I had a moment of clarity.
When doing observation-style practices, one becomes quite familiar with the sensations of a unbidden/unwilled/unconscious thought rising up in one’s mind. However, I had never managed to successfully observe the sensations of a bidden/willed/conscious thought, which I discovered had the following characteristics:
- I experienced a shift in mental focus
- I experienced a feeling of intent
- An action or thought occurred
This doesn’t sound immediately profound, but then I had the realization – what caused the shift in mental focus (1) and the feeling of intent (2)? What does it mean for my perception as the first mover of my own actions when it seems clear that they are driven by mechanics outside my conscious control?
How This Relates To Free Will
Before proceeding, it would be useful to have a definition of “free will” for the purpose of the discussion. The implicit definition I tend to see in American culture is something along the lines of “the ability to decide one’s course of action” or perhaps “the ability to do otherwise than one did”. While a perusal of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy’s entries on the topic indicates the Western intellectual tradition has not been kind to such simplistic definitions of the idea, we’ll use that as our basis of discussion for this post because that’s what most people tend to think of despite it being strawman.
Another assumption I’ll state up front is that I’m a monist. That is, I don’t believe that there is a soul independent of the physical substance of one’s body (the dualist position). As such, I believe that the processes of the mind are subject to the same rules and laws of physical causality as any other object or phenomena in the universe.
With those premises, I don’t see how the definition of free will outlined above can be true in a manner sufficiently robust to be satisfying. I would expect that if I had free will, I would be able to direct my life in a manner of my own choosing – and that is indeed the subjective experience I have when moving through the world. I do appear to have the ability to choose between different options based upon values I hold. However, do I have the ability to choose the decision-making structure that I use to make those decisions? It’s not clear that I do.
To illustrate this point, consider a hypothetical scenario. An inventor creates a very sophisticated android that is identical to a human. It’s able to make value judgments on who to vote for in an election, what color of car it prefers, etc. Furthermore, it’s able to make these decisions in a consistent manner that indicates it has an identity and perspective of its own. Yet every decision it makes and its identity itself is bounded and defined by the software code the inventor wrote and it’s possible to tie individual choices back to specific lines of code. Does this android have free will? Wouldn’t it need the ability to break free of its original programming and doesn’t that just raise the further problem that every decision it makes on how to modify itself is bounded by the original programming of the inventor?
If you accept the monist position, it seems inevitable that one must conclude that, at best, one has the ability to make choices within a framework not decided on by oneself, which raises the question of whether that is free will. At worst, one is merely an audience member in the movie theater of one’s sensory experiences but with just as little control over the outcome of the movie being projected as the movie-goer has.
It seems important to point out just because something is unintuitive or hard to grasp does not make it untrue. The analogy that comes to mind is that humans naturally gravitate towards a view of the universe that lines up with Newtonian Mechanics and it takes great effort to both understand and shift one’s thinking in line with Einsteinian Relativity. While it’s certainly unintuitive, it is indeed the case that time flows at a different rate for you when you get into a car and accelerate up to highway speed relative to someone standing stationary on the side of the highway. It seems entirely possible that we have evolved to perceive the sensory experiences associated with higher-brain decision making and interpret them as agency even though no agency actually exists.
The Implications
It’s clear that if this is true, it breaks many popular conceptions of how things like equality and justice work.
Equality: Views of equality along the lines of “free to live and compete under the same rules” seem to conflict with a lack of free will because they derive their sense of rightness from an agent benefiting or suffering based upon their free choices.
Justice: The common articulation of justice indicates that we should judge an agent based upon its free choices and administer punishment if those choices are poor – but what if the choices aren’t free?
In both cases it seems clear we need to, at the very least, re-phrase our definitions of equality and justice if not discard them outright.
The Examined Life 