Free Will
This morning I read an interesting article about Professor Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University. He is a professor of biology and neurology who is an atheist who was raised as an Orthodox Jew in the heart of Brooklyn. He has spent his career studying the behavior of both primates and humans and has come to a rather bold conclusion. He believes there is ample evidence to prove that when it comes to man’s behavior, there is no free will, but rather, everything we do, we do due to external influences and factors. In fact, he goes so far as to say that it is impossible for brain neurons to act without external stimuli or influences, and thus, free will simply cannot exist.
Sapolsky is a certifiable genius, at least according to the McArthur Fellows Program that gave him a so-called Genius Grant. Since graduating from Harvard summa cum laude, he has been showered with accolades, awards and grants and is now an accomplished author of a number of acclaimed books, the most recent of which has just been published, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. The analogy he uses is the person who is considering a camping trip only to find himself inundated with online personalized solicitations to sell camping equipment. That outcome is not random and not a function of any marketing free will. It is driven by the online search habits of the potential camper where all of his preferences and search patterns are captured and provide the governing algorithms the stimuli they need to direct their marketing initiative to seize the initiative.
The issue of free will is about as fundamental as any in human existence. It is the basis of morality, culpability and, indeed, success and failure. If you asked me about what I personally consider the defining principles of life, the governing concepts as John Nash in A Beautiful Mind might say in his most twitchy moments. I would randomly state that achievement, accountability, goodness, kindness, and humility are certainly in the top ten. I have written before about my friend Josh who always felt it was important to “stand for” something. That strikes me as the same thing as Nash’s governing principles, and I cannot think of better things to stand for than those five traits. And it would not be crazy to assume that one must choose to stand for something and thus that those governing principle traits should be something to which we consciously choose to adhere. But this Sapolsky premise kind of throws all that into a cocked hat doesn’t it?
Achievement, at least, should be a more objective standard. It implies that something has specifically happened or has been achieved. It is not intended to stop at effort, but is supposed to run all the way to accomplishment. Can you be achievement-oriented if you try and try and try again, but keep falling short? I guess some might say you are achievement-oriented by virtue of all that trying, but I would argue that achievement is only an inherent trait if, indeed, a positive outcome (perhaps whether specifically intended or not) happens. I know Mark Zuckerberg is thinking that the metaverse is where its at in the future and that artificial intelligence is going to create many alternative universes, and that would suggest that achievement can happen in ways and on planes that we cannot touch or feel. But I don’t think that derails the notion that whether physical or metaphysical, something that is achieved creates a new state that is a positive creation of some sort. That, to me implies that achievement might be the first of these governing principles that might righteously adhere to the Sapolsky notion that free will is not a necessary ingredient and that all that is really needed is stimuli or factors that occur either from within or outside to happen. Phew! That was staining the seams of my brain.
Accountability is straightforward enough by my standards. If you do something, you own it, pure and simple. It is about truthfulness and being willing to take either credit or blame for an outcome you have created or at least actively promoted. In some ways accountability seems factually based and not biased by perception, but I suspect there are many examples where multiple influences or factors determine an outcome and what is precisely the cause and effect of something is harder to determine. But accountability is less about certainty and more about a willingness to accept the possibility or perhaps even the probability that your actions are the cause that has led to the effect.
You will notice that the notion of will has crept into this diatribe in terms of accountability. And that is just the beginning. Now that we have dealt with the hard and easy governing principles, let’s get on to the tough ones. I think we can all agree that there exists both good and evil in the world. We cannot watch the nightly news without acknowledging the existence of evil. But what is evil? The definition is that it is something that is profoundly immoral or wicked. Immoral is easy enough to understand since it is defined based on our fabric of what is right versus wrong, something we should inherently understand, at least in the broadest or most obvious circumstances. But defining what is wicked is harder and quickly becomes a case of circular logic or a petitio principii. Wicked is defined as being morally bad, so we have circled back on ourselves. I guess as far as goodness is concerned, we are back to the normative fall-back of knowing it when we see it, and it probably most often engenders various forms of kindness, which is all about being friendly, generous and considerate of others. Doing no harm onto others works well as a definition of goodness, but kindness seems to be a step further down that road and involves a proactive positivity about it, a choice if you will. That’s starting to sound like free will.
I have left humility for the last because in some ways it seems the hardest to define. We know that to be humble is to not hold oneself in especially high or important regard. There may truly be people who feel they are not worthy, but mostly I sense that human beings are forced by nature to understand and acknowledge that the world as they know it, life as they know it, is about them and their place in that world and life. I would suggest that the world is supposed to revolve around each and every one of us from our own perspective, and that that is not necessarily a wrong or bad thing. One might even say that notions of achievement, accountability, goodness and kindness all require us to be VERY self-aware of our place in the world. And this is where I conclude that there is something missing in Sapolsky’s thinking.
Let me begin my notion of humility by saying that I am NOT a genius and therefore the odds of me being right and genius Sapolsky being wrong are slim at best. My choices may well be driven by external stimuli and things that have influenced me along the way. To be sure, we are rolling balls of metaphysical moss that accumulate bits and pieces of experience and stimuli as we progress through life, and all of those help determine which way we roll and how we roll. But I would argue that we all also have this cognitive spark that is not external, but is rather part of what man tends to call his soul, that tells us to do this or to do that and that this is wrong and this is right. My ultimate defense of free will is this simple. We have all come to forks in the road, decision points, moral choices, where we must actively choose to go this way or that way. You can try to derive the reasons for that choice, but I suggest that free will is the culmination or accumulation of all that experience, wisdom and innate sense and thus, it has become a separate entity and does exist, just as life exists as more than a gathering of protoplasm. The spark is the free will and life only exists with that spark.