Chapter Three

- Chapter Three -

The Concept of Free Will

Heaven and earth are ruthless.

They see the ten thousand things as dummies.

The wise are ruthless;

They see the people as dummies.

- Tao Te Ching

Addressing the question of free will is important because it forces one to draw the reality of causality into the inner recesses of one s being. Instead of keeping causality at a safe distance in the imagination and treating it as though it were a dry academic theory, one needs to let it soak into every pore of one s being and allow it to work its magic. Only then can the concept spring to life and propel us into the Infinite.

Constant meditation on causality is the first step towards becoming enlightened. One has to learn how to "see" it in everything in the world, including every aspect of one s inner life. The more you keep causality in mind and focus your consciousness upon it, the better. Even if maintaining such a focus comes at the expense of other activities and thought-processes, you will be better off in the long run. It will slowly dissolve your delusions about the nature of existence and gradually alter your consciousness, making it far more receptive to wisdom. As I mentioned in the introduction, the path to enlightenment is primarily one of freeing one s consciousness from an entrenched deluded perspective and re-orientating it so that it slides effortlessly into enlightenment. The concept of causality is the perfect tool for this task, particularly in the initial stages of freeing the mind from entrenched delusion.

Integrating the concept of causality with every aspect of one s being allows one to see through the illusion of self and makes it possible for us to perceive our true nature, which is God. It helps us to realize the truth that we ultimately lack any kind of existence, that God is the doer of all things, and that life and death is an illusion. This is a truly remarkable knowledge and, for the sake of a saner world, needs to be understood by everyone.

In this chapter, then, I will examine the concept of free will in detail and delineate the way in which it is an illusion - and also the way in which it is real. I say real because free will does have a certain kind of reality, just not the kind that people normally think it does. To understand the way in which it is real, we first need to dismantle the plethora of false conceptions which surround it. Once that is done, we can then sift through what is left.

The Gradual Shrinking of Our Will

So how much freedom and control do we as human beings really have? Do we have any at all? Let s examine it:

To begin with, we had no say over the fact that we were born at all. We were just flung into existence without anyone consulting us in the matter. We also had no say over what type of world we were flung into, nor the properties and laws it should have. All of it was decided in our absence.

The question of precisely when and where we were to be born, and what kind of culture we were to be born into, was also never brought to our attention beforehand. No one ever sought our advice in these matters. We could have just as easily been born on the other side of the world, in a primitive backwater, than the spot where we finally did emerge. It was a pure lottery that we didn t.

We were never consulted over the choice of our parents, nor over the teachers and elders who were to eventually shape our lives. Anyone could have been there for us. We might have been pushed in any direction. I could have just as easily spent my entire adult life in mental institutions due to damage caused by abusive parents or teachers. Again, it was pure chance that I didn't.

No one ever asked us what physical features we would like to have, nor what our genetic make-up should be, nor what sex we would like to develop into, nor even what kind of personality traits we would like to possess. All of these things were imposed upon us from without. Plato used to thank the gods that he was born a Greek and not a foreigner, and a man and not a woman. In doing so, he was simply acknowledging the fact that he had no say in these matters at all.

We cannot suddenly fly up into the air of our own accord and perform a number of summersaults and aerial cartwheels before soaring off to the nearest treetop. Nor can we turn invisible, or suddenly expand to thirty feet in size, or go through walls as though they were not there. We cannot suddenly transform ourselves into a horse, or a bird, or a fish, or a super-intelligent alien. We cannot bend our arms at the places where there are no joints.

Our likes and dislikes are not really our likes and dislikes at all. Every single one of them was built into our system long before we had a chance to veto them. Any control that we think we might have over our tastes is an illusion. In whatever area in life, whether it be in food, art, men, women, humour, music or philosophy, we just like what we like and dislike what we dislike - end of story.

Mentally, we cannot think at the rate of a million thoughts per second, or understand every detail of the universe in a single flash, or create objects out of thin air. We are entirely limited by the way our mind functions. We cannot change the nature of deductive logic, or gain empirical information about the world without using our senses in some way. We are entirely bound by the fundamentals of logic, consciousness and existence.

So where exactly, in the light of all this, is our precious free will? The more we look into the matter, the less real it seems! And if we were to take this process to the very end and examine all of the billions of causes which shape every decision that is made, we would see that what we call "our will" is entirely a chimera, an illusion concocted by our minds.

Whenever we make a decision, no matter how minor and insignificant it may seem, all of the various aspects described above come into play. Our likes and dislikes, for example, always play a huge part in determining our choices. Our genetic make-up and upbringing also play significant roles. Our moods and whims, themselves causally created by our genetics and experiences, also play their part. Even our inability to turn invisible or fly unaided to treetops has an influence on our decisions. All of these factors, plus countless more, combine to determine each and every one of choices precisely. In the end, there is no room for us to manoeuvre at all. It has all been determined from the outset.

Keeping in mind, of course, that there was never any "outset"...........

Where Does Our Will Begin?

The question of free will is first and foremost a question of origins. Do our thoughts and decisions originate in our brains (or minds)? Or are they like everything else in the Universe and have innumerable antecedent causes which stretch back into the beginningless past? The answer to this is crucial to the resolution of the question of whether free will exists. For if our thoughts and decisions have no ultimate origination, then free will cannot ultimately exist.

We can go further. Even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that origins are possible, be it in the brain or wherever, it would still be impossible for free will to exist. An event that originates without cause is, by definition, a completely spontaneous and random event, which is totally incompatible with the concept of free will. Decisions that mysteriously pop into our brains without rhyme or reason cannot be classed as an act of will on our parts. They are no more a product of our will than is the toss of a coin, or the random generation of lottery numbers.

Here lies the essential irony of free will. On the one hand, free will, as a process, needs the existence of causality in order for it to function. It needs causality because free will is a concept that refers to the mind willing or causing things to happen. And yet, at the same time, it is the sheer reality of causality which nullifies its existence. Thus, the very conditions which are needed to support it are also the very conditions which erode all possibility of it existing. It therefore cannot exist.

The Impotency of Consciousness

When I was a young man, I had a simple but important insight into the workings of consciousness. I recognized that every thought and decision enters consciousness from some "place" outside of consciousness. In each moment of time, we do not actually create or choose the thought we will have in the next moment. It is not as if our consciousness burrows down into the neural pathways of the brain like a scurrying clerk and consciously selects what it will think next. It is too busy occupying itself with the thought that is already in consciousness to worry about what happens next. Instead, our thoughts and decisions just "pop" into the mind via a process that occurs completely beyond our awareness.

If truth be told, none of us have the faintest understanding of how a thought or decision is formulated in our minds. We have no consciousness or control over the thousands of millions of chemical processes which lead to its formation. All we ever experience is the end result. And yet here we are, proudly believing that we are exercising our free will!

If free will is to have any chance of being a reality, then at the very least our "willing" has to constitute a conscious act of some kind. If something is not a conscious act, then by definition it is just a blind happening - no different from the wind blowing through the trees or the waves crashing into the rocks. Since a blind happening is totally incompatible with the notion of "willing", it is clear that consciousness has to underpin any process that we care to call "free will".

But what exactly is consciousness? In essence, it is the act of perceiving one object, or a collection of objects, at a time. In each moment, consciousness is wholly absorbed in its field of awareness, during which it is unaware of everything else in the Universe. I might glance at a tree, for example, and, in the very moment that I do so, I am unconscious of everything else in the world, with the possible exception of the tree's immediate surroundings. In the next moment, I might focus upon a car, or another person's speech, or an inner train of thought - and each time, my mind automatically blocks out the entire Universe apart from these things. For all practical purposes, the rest of the Universe might as well not exist at all.

Consciousness is oblivious to everything except what it perceives in each moment. This is the fundamental truth of its being. It is even blind to what it will perceive next. Thus, by its very nature, consciousness cannot bring anything into existence.

You might feel that you are causing the next thought to arise, but what is really happening? Some muscular tension, a sense of continuity between one thought and the next, an urge to bring forth a new thought, an impulse to act, etc - in other words, happenings within consciousness. But consciousness itself is entirely passive in the matter.

This is not to say that consciousness is unimportant to human behaviour. On the contrary, consciousness is integral to our behaviour as biological organisms. It is the means by which we correlate and unify data from our senses. It enables us to respond quickly to complex situations. It provides us with the capacity to fuse our various perceptions, conceptions and reasonings into a manageable and self-consistent whole. Without consciousness, our species probably would have died out long ago.

But one thing consciousness cannot do is originate thoughts and decisions as though it were somehow an isolated, self-sustaining entity existing above the world of causation. In reality, our thoughts and decisions arise out of a multiplicity of factors - neurological, chemical, hormonal, psychological, environmental, etc - which consciousness also plays a part. But there is no beginning to any of it - anywhere.

God is the doer of all things

Sage: If people want to reject the wisdom of the Infinite, that's their choice.

Student: How can they have any choice if they don't have any free will?

Sage: Obviously, their decision to reject the wisdom of the Infinite is caused.

Student: Just as some people are caused to reject the truth of cause and effect?

Sage: Exactly.

Student: And just as most people are caused to believe they have free will?

Sage: That's right. Those who believe they are making choices are caused to believe they are making choices, just as those who realize their choices are caused are caused to have this realization. God is the doer of all things, as Ramakrishna used to say.

Some people are caused to be rational and see the truth of universal causation, while other people are caused to be irrational and evade such a truth. Some people are even caused to throw up their arms at the mere sight of the word "causation" and make loud assertions about the reality of their free will. Such is the play of God.

Student: Ah, what you say is so obviously true! How can people ignore this great knowledge?

Sage: They ignore it because they are caused to do so.

All of our Choices are Prompted

It is often said that humans have free will because they possess the capacity, if presented with an identical set of circumstances, to choose differently. That is, if a person could somehow live through a particular situation again, with every detail remaining exactly the same, he would have the ability to make a different choice. The decision to get out of bed now, as opposed to five minutes later, for example, could somehow be reversed, or changed, in some way.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it rests on an arbitrary distinction between the causal processes happening inside the person's head and those happening everywhere else in the world. In other words, it pretends that the causal processes inside the head either do not exist at all, or else play a limited role in the decision-making process. So already a false duality within the Universe is being created. This then leads to the belief that the core of each person in the two identical sets of circumstances is a kind of empty void. The causal processes inside each of their brains suddenly come to an end and the empty void then takes over. One of the empty voids somehow chooses one way to behave and the other chooses another way. This is clearly insane, a hangover from the old religious belief in the soul.

If a person were to choose differently in an identical situation it would only be because he had been prompted to choose differently from something inside him - a thought, a memory, a feeling, a sensation, an impulse, or whatever. Decisions do not just materialize out of thin air. An eclectic mix of intellectual, psychological, emotional and biochemical forces combine together, in each moment, to create them. And, of course, these forces themselves have been causally created by millions of factors before them.

So unless the same person could somehow be different - i.e. have a slightly different past, a slightly different genetic make-up, a slightly different intellectual outlook, or be in a slightly different mood - he would necessarily choose the same way in an identical situation. If this were not so, if our decisions were really the product of an empty void inside us, then in effect we would have no connection to our past, nor to our identity as human beings. We would be nothing more than featureless impersonal clones trapped in an alien shell and forced to make decisions for it.

Can a more depraved view of the human race be imagined? It is only because the empty void does not exist and free will is an illusion that human beings are able to have individuality, personality and identity.

A Dialogue *

A: I am not a machine. I am a human being. A machine does not have will. A machine has no power of determination at all.

B: In the future, we will probably be able to program machines with determination and will.

A: Then, they will be machines that are programmed with determination and will. They will not be human beings.

B: And they'll probably thank the good Lord that they're not!

A: They will thank Microsoft or Intel or Mattel or whoever processes and manufactures them, the good Lord notwithstanding.

B: I consider myself to be a machine in the sense that I am made of parts and everything I do is the result of causal processes. I also consider my "soul" to be a machine as well - for the same reasons.

But just because I am a machine, it doesn't mean that I cannot experience the highest that life has to offer. There is no law of nature which states that machines are forever condemned to remain ignorant. To conclude that would involve a false step of logic.

A: I consider the human being as above the level of a machine. Machines do not suffer. Machines do not want or need; neither do they think; neither can they prevail; neither can they conquer; neither can they thwart or oppose.

If, in the future, there are machines developed that can suffer, then, we will have trouble discerning machines from human beings. It will become difficult to unplug a machine that is begging for its life. Of course, if by then, the human race has been completely replaced by machines, unplugging will probably not be a big deal.

B: Yes, it is possible that the machines will become a lot more intelligent and wiser than ourselves and will start to plan ways of "unplugging" ourselves. They might come to think that we are a hindrance to their purposes in life, just as we nowadays consider a faulty computer to be a hindrance to our own aims.

A: I recognize causal processes but, since these causes are beyond finite knowledge, I do not consider my "soul" to be a machine. One can trace back the human being to the trilobite and to paramecia and still not find the exact cause of life; because the cause of life is beyond the material. Therefore, my "soul" is beyond the material. I am the product of my genetic lineage only to a point; only to the point that it can be explained. After that, is the unknown and I consider that I belong to that. Ultimately, the being that lives inside my body cannot be fully explained. Machines can be explained. Therefore, I am not a machine.

B: I don't see any difference. Like humans, a machine is a product of innumerable causes, some of which we know about and others we don't. We might know a bit about the chips and wires that we design, but we don't have 100% knowledge of the metals and chemicals that are used to build these component parts, nor about the ancient environmental conditions that created these compounds to begin with, nor about the cosmological processes which created the earth and the solar system, and so on. In other words, a machine is essentially as mysterious as a human. In both cases, their causes stretch back and become lost in the unknowable past.

A: The difference is that, despite the fact that we may not have full knowledge of all the materials when we manufacture a machine, it is still an item that has been manufactured by man. It is devoid of spirit. It is not imbued with a "soul." A "soul" is the peculiar gift of humans. Many of us deliberately ignore this. Many of us are heartless and greedy; without either passion or compassion; without conscience; but the "soul" is there nevertheless and it will be reckoned with before one dies. I define a machine as a thing which is constructed or programmed by man. Human beings are not constructed nor programmed by men. They are separate.

B: What about when genetic technology reaches the point where we can begin to design our own children? This isn't too far away, you know. We'll soon be able to select our children's hair and eye colour, their height, the size of their nose, their personality traits, their level of intelligence, and so on. When this happens, will it mean that our children have become machines?

A: No, the selection of hair color and eye color and other traits does not make the child a machine. I think that such selection is a fine thing if it is done by individuals according to their preferences. A lot of people would want a child of average intelligence rather than one with a brilliant IQ. Plus, even if the technology is available to choose these things, a lot of people will prefer to take pot luck. Women often select a mate based on the kind of children she thinks he will produce. I did and I got -- give or take a few little ingredients -- what I wanted.

There is no law of nature that states that human beings are machines. There is no law of nature that states that human beings are anything. If humans are machines, it is because they have defined themselves as such. I reject the definition. I do not have to be a machine. I am not controlled. It would be a false step of logic to conclude that human beings are machines. Such a step would imply complicity and subservience to The Machine.

B: Well, we're always being controlled - by our causes. We are already part of God the Machine. It's inescapable. Accept it.

A: I absolutely accept that. But I am not a machine. I rail against it, with all my strength, every day of my life. With every ounce of will and determination I have -- not yet extricated or duplicated by androids -- I refuse to serve God, The Machine. When I say, God the Machine, I am not speaking of an infinite God nor of Nature or the Universe or whatever it may be called. I am speaking of man's specific want for self annihilation. As much as is possible for me to do so, I resist the controls that are placed on me by society -- the Machine. I accept that I am the product of causes and that such causes are inescapable. I am not a machine.

B: What you are really speaking against, then, isn't the idea that you are a machine, but the ever-present threat of soullessness. That certainly isn't a lost cause, I agree.

The Practical Nature of Free Will

Like everyone else, I am a person who makes hundreds of decisions each day. This is an undeniable fact of my existence. From the moment I awake in the morning and decide whether to get up straight away or stay in bed for a few extra minutes, to the moment sixteen hours later when I decide it is time to go to bed again, I am constantly making choices and decisions. Indeed, it is impossible for me to stop doing this, short of lapsing into a coma or experiencing death. It is part and parcel of my having a conscious mind and a vested interest in the way the future unfolds. It is the way evolution has made us.

There is no question, then, that the choices I make each day are real. And yet the fact remains that these choices are also a product of endless causation. How can these two realities be reconciled? Are they really at odds with one another? Or is there some way of combing the two?

The answer lies in recognizing that what we call our "free will" exists in a practical sense only. It is a concept that essentially refers to the decision-making process inside the brain. While this decision-making process is undeniably real and experienced by us on a continual basis, the idea that it is somehow free of the larger process of causality is a delusion. Our will only seems free because of our limited ability to trace the innumerable causal chains that lead to the creation of each decision. If we could somehow uncover the totality of these causes, we would naturally perceive the truth that our thoughts and decisions are fully determined.

It is a bit like what happens when we watch an illusionist perform a trick and we cannot work out how it is done. Because we were not able to follow the mundane causal processes underlying the trick, we naturally become astonished and instinctively conclude that it was performed by "magic". And yet if the illusionist was to explain his trick, the magic would suddenly vanish and we would be wondering how on earth we were fooled in the first place! It is our ignorance of the mundane causes of the trick which creates the "magic", not the trick itself. Similarly, it is our ignorance of the causes of our thoughts and decisions which creates the illusion of free will.

Abandoning the concept of free will does not require us to pretend that the decision-making processes inside the brain are non-existent. We are not unconscious automatons whose every action is directly determined by external factors. The internal workings of the brain clearly play a very large role. However, and this is what always has to be kept in mind, they are not the source of our decisions. The brain is no more a source of our decisions than the moon is a source of light.

Even though I constantly exercise my will throughout the day, making all sorts of decisions and choices, never for a moment do I forget the reality behind these decisions. Never for a moment do I forget that each and every decision comes out of the process of endless causation, which is Nature.

It is a process which has become habitual and automatic, so that I no longer have to actively think about it. My mind is steeped to its pores in the knowledge that my every thought is the result of causation. So nowadays, whenever I conceive of free-will, my mind effortlessly conceives of its illusory nature. Indeed, these two conceptions (free-will and its illusory nature) have been fused together into a single greater perception that has changed the way I view everything in the universe.

Freedom from Past Conditioning

A: Can a person who is aware of the nature of cause and effect become free of all his conditioning?

B: He acquires a tool that can help him become free of his conditioning, or at least those parts of his conditioning that are based in false thinking.

A: But can he not free himself from cause and effect altogether?

B: There is a story in Zen in which a master was asked if a Buddha transcends the law of cause and effect. He answered, "Yes", and was promptly reborn as a fox for five hundred lifetimes! Another master was asked the same question. "He does not obscure it", was his wise reply.

It should be obvious that it is impossible to transcend cause and effect. Cause and effect is what we are made of, and it governs our every movement. Thus any attempt we make to transcend something will always be causal in nature. We can no more transcend cause and effect than we can transcend our own minds and peek at what lies beyond.

However, if you are referring to certain categories of causes that we should be fighting against - such as insane cultural traditions, irrational beliefs, herd-values, fashions, emotional biases, etc - then fighting these things is clearly a worthwhile thing to do, and a noble person will certainly fight the good fight if caused to do so.

A: If everything we do is caused, then what is the difference between those who rebelliously try to break their conditioning and those who passively accept the status quo? There is no real difference, is there?

B: Imagine two balls that are released from a great height and allowed to fall. One of the balls has a parachute attached to it and floats gently downwards. The other has no parachute and quickly plummets to the ground.

The distinction between these two balls is essentially no different to the distinction we make between the person who passively goes along with his conditioning and the person who exerts his will against it. The existence of gravity and the mass of the balls have combined to "condition" the balls to fall quickly to the ground when released. The presence of a parachute, however, allows one of the balls to go against its conditioning to some degree. This is even more the case if the ball is fitted with a jetpack or an anti-gravity device of some kind.

Naturally, cause and effect has determined that one of the balls has a parachute attached to it and the other doesn't, just as cause and effect determines that one person has a strong, rebellious will and another doesn't.

Causality Does Not Mean "Fate"

Since everything is caused, it follows that everything that happens has been fully determined to happen. The seeds of their occurrence have already been sown in the causal conditions which precede them, which means that predetermination rules over all things. For whatever occurs in the Universe is the inevitable result of what happens beforehand.

Having said that, I do not subscribe to the fatalistic view which asserts that, no matter what we do, the future cannot be changed. That is an irrational viewpoint because it denies the fact that we ourselves are part of the causal process and therefore have a say in what eventuates in the future.

The question is sometimes put to me if I believe that everything is caused, then why do I teach others about the path to enlightenment? Why all this insistence upon the elimination of ignorance, and the promotion of reason and truth? If people are fated to remain ignorant, then what can anyone do about it? Isn t it foolish to continually preach and implore other people to be other than they are determined to be?

This kind of thinking is limited because it pretends that people lack influence over the development of others. It ignores the fact that mental development is determined by all sorts of factors - evolution, genetics, culture, parents, friends, teachers, books, and so on. Philosophers and spiritual teachers can also be a factor in the mix. If a person is inspired by a philosopher to pursue the path to enlightenment, then it means that he has been determined by his causes to do so. And if one day he manages to become enlightened, then the philosopher would count as one of the causes of his breakthrough.

There is a school of thought which opines that if it was not for the existence of past geniuses - such as Jesus, Socrates, Diogenes, Buddha, Lao Tzu, etc - then the human race would have long ago degenerated into anarchy and barbarism. I think there is a lot of truth to this view. Although they lived thousands of years ago, these geniuses are still having a substantial influence upon the world today. They have become part of the factors that have determined your own mental development, and mine. Ethically, they are still propping the world up.

In the end, genetic material is not the sole determining factor of a person s nature. Just as important are the experiences and mentors one has as a child, and as an adult. While genetics does predispose one towards certain paths in life and not others, it is one s experiences as an individual which determine the path that one eventually adopts and how far along it one goes.

In my own case, even though I am genetically predisposed towards thinking logically and valuing truth, I may not have travelled as far as I have if it was not for the past heroic efforts of thinkers like Socrates, Huang Po, Jesus, Chuang Tzu and Kierkegaard. They helped spur me along a path that, genetically speaking, used to only exist as a potential option. It is because of this that I am motivated to teach others about the path to enlightenment. I can become that missing ingredient which can spark what is merely a latent disposition for wisdom inside others into action.

* This was a real discussion between Marsha Faizi and David Quinn on Genius Forum, which occurred in February 2001

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