The question of free will has been bouncing around for a long time, and recent neuroscience is leading some to conclusions that I find needlessly restrictive in their outlook. I decided to read Sam Harris's latest short piece on "Free Will" to test my thinking. Here are some thoughts, driven by my reactions to various lines from the eBook.
Harris doesn't do a good job, to my taste, of defining what he means by 'free will' or 'freedom'. Early on he writes: "Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making." (p 5). The closest thing I saw to a common definition is this: "The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present." (p. 6). I'm going to ignore part 1, since it's impossible to experimentally test whether one could 'repeat' a choice situation and choose something different. So I'll focus on #2.
My take on freedom is that there is no such thing as 'complete freedom' - this would seem to me to indicate that there are absolutely no constraints in any way, and I don't see such a situation ever existing. So freedom is always a relative concept. One is more free when there are fewer constraints on one's actions, and less free when there are more constraints.
Harris does a great job in pointing out that there are many constraints on our choices. He writes: "Unconscious neural events determine our thoughts and actions—and are themselves determined by prior causes of which we are subjectively unaware." p.16. I think this is largely true - though in a way it's simply a tautology to say we aren't conscious of that which goes on unconsciously. But I think the focus should be on that which we are consciously aware: situations where we consider alternatives, think about possibilities, and finally decide upon a course of action. Even if our preferences aren't consciously created, and we don't understand the basis of our decision-making, we still subjectively face decisions and make choices. Decisions are sometimes difficult, and over time our decision-making may change, notably because we have learned something from past decisions and behaviors.
Frequently Harris poses the question "Where is the freedom?" if so much is constrained by the past, and we can't account for where our desires and preferences come from. I would say that if freedom is about movement with constraints, then it doesn't necessarily matter that we don't know why we want what we want. We also don't know why there is gravity, but there is, and we are constrained by it. So too we are constrained by certain preferences, some of which we could probably alter if we choose to, and some of which seem to alter over time without any conscious effort.
Harris dwells on the fact that we did not choose much of our past experience. "Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain." (p. 40). As you would expect from this blog, I dispute the last point, on the development of your brain. I believe that choices and behaviors we choose today will impact our brain and our unconscious processing in the future. When we attempt to learn something, we have to concentrate consciously, and think about each new choice. As we master a subject or learn how to do a physical task, we don't have to try so hard consciously - we've absorbed it in our brains, we can take action unconsciously. This adds some weight to the compatabilist position that Harris rejects, in which the individual must be considered as more than just the conscious awareness.
So my sense is that Harris does describe many of the true constraints on our will, but I don't agree with his take that you must understand and control every underlying process to achieve 'freedom'.
