The Limits Of Free Will In Human Action

Several times on this blog I have mentioned that Free Will is largely an illusion, but I have never delved deeply into the subject. I intend to rectify that situation today. What is Free Will?

the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion

There are two levels to which Free Will applies, the individual and the collective (society, nation, culture and so on.) I do not intend to talk much about individuals today, except to say that in so far as most "decisions" are made in unconscious, which by definition is outside of awareness, Free Will does not exist in those cases. At least to those of us who a psychologically inclined, it is clear that individuals much more often than not have little idea what they are doing or why they are doing it, despite constant human chatter which explains next to nothing. The untrustworthy, slippery Ego, the aware part of the psyche which chatters, the source of all that meaningless babbling one sees on the internet and in daily human interactions, fools itself into thinking it is running the show, but that is mostly an illusion. That said, there is what I would call trivial Free Will in individual decision-making—am I going to do my laundry today? Will I apply for that job? Will I go talk to my girlfriend about things she does that bother me for reasons I can't quite pinpoint? (Maybe you've hooked up again with a person just like your saintly but troublesome Mother, but that tendency is outside of awareness.) There are a million other trivial examples. Most of the important stuff happens outside awareness. Psychological studies, starting with people like Freud and Jung, have made this fact abundantly clear in the last century. Yet humans act as if these findings do not exist. Imagine that!

At the level of societies, you can see what little Free Will exists in political decision-making. In the modern world, there are basically two kinds of complex societies (with many subtle variations). In traditional societies, which are historically vestigial and almost invariably politically repressive, the will of the society is the will of the leader or small group (oligarchy) which runs it. In this case, the Free Will argument reverts back to the case of the individual leader(s), who are strangers to themselves in the sense just discussed. For example, these people do not know in any deep sense why they believe power is their birthright, or, in other cases, why they are hopelessly driven to acquire, maintain and wield it. If there is an oligarchy, as in China, small group psychological dynamics will affect decision-making, but these dynamics exist largely outside of awareness. I will therefore dismiss this case and move on.

In "advanced" modern societies such as the United States (or Sweden, or South Korea, etc.), politics confers the appearance of Free Will, but discretion in politics is also largely an illusion because the scope of decisions which can be made is disappointingly small. Yes, it is true, laws are passed, human "rights" are granted or taken away, certain behaviors are discouraged and punished, policies are enacted, and so on. But it is here that we must remember the definition of Free Will given at the outset—the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate. Unfortunately, all the fundamentally important "decisions" humans might make conflict with biological necessity (fate).

I will illustrate what I mean through a list of crucial examples.

• Human violence — Surely it not necessary to argue that humans are violent, aggressive animals. Violence is perpetrated by individuals and collectives (organized war). Can humans or societies refrain from violence? Do they have Free Will in this regard? In rare cases, they can, both in individuals (pacifists) and states (neutral Switzerland). By in large, however, neither individuals or states will refrain from violence if they have convinced themselves that aggression is called for (leaving out crimes of passion). In modern societies, the situation is complex. I covered this subject to my satisfaction in Thinking About The Nation State, so I suggest you read it.

• Technology über alles — The love of technology is so central to the human enterprise that it is hard to know where to begin. Once invented, if successful, a technology is always mindlessly adopted, regardless of any destructive consequences it might have when applied. This consideration alone tells us Something Deep is going on, and largely removes Free Will from the picture. Think of it this way—technologies might be invented but simply rejected as undesirable (e.g. robots replacing humans who need work, nuclear weapons). Yet, this kind of rejection never happens!

  An equally compelling argument regarding technology concerns how problems are solved. One example which is widely applicable to other things will suffice. As you may know, the world's fisheries reached "peak fish" sometime in the 1980s (if the exaggerated Chinese data is corrected). That obviously poses a big problem for humankind. There were two responses, both technological in nature, although a third option was available. First, there was the invention and widespread adoption of aquaculture (fish farming) accompanied by "improvements" to fish-catching technology (bigger boats, sonar, more effective nets, etc.). The road not taken required a behavioral change—refrain from overfishing the oceans to let fish populations recover, establish protected areas, and so on. Needless to say, the only "behavioral" change humans can implement is to apply more and "better" technology to fix their self-created problems. (Actually, there was another important behavioral change—fishermen harvested unexploited or deeper waters, which amounts to more of the same behavior which created the problem in the first place.)  All these considerations strongly imply that Free Will is not operating in this overfishing example, and many others we could bring up, for example, in mitigating global warming. This is why I am very confident that geo-engineering will eventually be tried on a very large scale—humans particularly love Heroic Technology. See my post Horseshit Stories.

• Inevitable Social Inequality — Both the anthropological literature and honest observation of the current state of the world are quite clear on this point—social inequality in large, complex human societies is an inevitable fact of life. No amount of "progressive" legislation has changed the situation, nor will it change the situation in the future. Social inequality, expressed through money, power and status, is universal and pronounced everywhere we look, which strongly indicates that we are looking at something which is deeply rooted in Human Nature. Social inequality is what I term an emergent (latent) property of the human animal in the sense that it was only after the creation of large, complex societies during the Holocene (as Hunter-Gatherer societies were replaced) that this tendency become obvious. Even if "progressive" policies were to hold sway temporarily, as they did in the United States in the decades just after World War II, the tendency toward great social inequalty eventually reasserts itself, as it has in the United States. To be fair, "progressive" policies do have a limited scope which has been successfully applied—the worst abuses, like slavery, were abolished, and other desirable outcomes like freedom of religion & speech, were established, at least for now. However, these limited "victories" do not entitle us to conclude that Free Will is operating in the choice of the kind of society humans will live in. Humans have never been able to implement an equitable social arrangement in a large, complex society. That this is possible is the central delusion of "progressive" politics.

• The Growth Imperative — Of course, this is the Big One, and one look at this curve proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  

  I have often argued on DOTE that making babies and increasing their material comfort (i.e. their survival chances) are biological imperatives which are non-negotiable. See my post Is Global Economic Growth Persistent? I will not rehash those arguments today. The only (minor) exceptions I can think of which conflict with that view are China's "one child" policy, which was implemented by an authoritarian communist government when China's economy was resource-constrained, or infanticide in similarly constrained human societies (e.g. historic India), or other measures like abstinence and prolonged nursing (pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers). When not resource-constrained, human populations and consumption will grow. There is also a relationship between fertility and living standards where greater material prosperity slows the rate of child birth. Thus there seems to be a sliding scale

  procreation <——> wealth/consumption

  which needs to be explained. (An increase in one correlates with a decrease in the other.) I will need to comment on this another time.

Generally speaking, once a pattern of behavior is established, if it is rooted in biological necessity, it will not and can not be changed. Therefore, Free Will simply does not apply. For example, climate activists argue reasonably enough that the remaining exploitable hydrocarbons must be left in the ground. They are laboring under the illusion that Free Will can (and will) be exercised in this case to prevent a future climate catastrophe. But those hydrocarbons give modern societies the energy they require to function and grow, and without that energy the very existence of those societies is in doubt. Those hydrocarbons will be exploited if they can be. And if those hydrocarbons run out, humans will burn trees, other biomass, or  any other flammable thing they can to keep warm and keep the lights on. You might look at my post The Inherent Contradictions Of Pro-Growth Envionmentalism. Case closed.

Surely I would have to write a book to properly flesh out the limits of Free Will in human action. However, I am confident that if I did write that book, I would strengthen, not weaken, the case I've made today. Humans like to think of themselves as self-determining beings with the wherewithal to decide their fate at every step of the way. Simply put, this happy delusion is not the way human life works. Just because humans don't think of themselves as limited does not mean they are not.

I will leave it at that today.

Comments

[Batalos]

"social inequality in large, complex human societies is an inevitable fact of life" -
well, that's right, unless we have a society which doesn't allow consentration of wealth. Such a society could grant everyone satisfaction of basic material needs and basic social ones like health care (everyone have to participate). More than basic material consumption is discredited within society by strong negative feedbacks and vise versa.

[Batalos]

So after that we could have inequality based on common good: the more sbd is doing voluntary after basic compulsory participation - the greater his social position is. Arts, science, education, innovation, nature restoration and so on

[Don Levit]

Dave:
I agree with much of what you wrote.
Years ago, I remember saying to my father "We have control over about 2% of the things that can happen to us.
It is up to us to take control of that 2%."
He was fascinated with that concept, and not too many things I said could move my dad like that.
We can say that humans have limited free will.
It is important psychologically that we feel we have some control over our present and our future, that the acts we do or do not do can make a significant difference, at least for a few people - the more, the better.
Thinking that free will never exists may be true, but thinking we can make a difference gives our lives significance.
And to feel that our lives count gives us a reason to more than just survive.
So, to maintain 2 conflicting ideas in our minds simultaneously, is what is required to realistically deal with this important issue.
We are big deals, but in the whole scheme of things, we are no more important than worms - what our bodies eventually turn in to.
Don Levit

[Clyde]

Batalos, yes, we could have many things. But the fact is that we don't. Just as we don't have free will.

[Mike Roberts]

I hadn't read about hunter/gatherer societies practicing infanticide. I can't think of a reason why that would be a common practice in such societies.

[Oliver]

Good exposition Dave. I agree that free will is largely illusory - except for the odd action we might take to deliberately go against our natural inclination to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances, as if to prove we have free will. However, this truism doesn't stop the idea of free will being put on a pedestal as some kind of pinnacle of human superiority, by a number of species propagandists. We really are deluded if we believe we have the ability to freely choose how we act at every juncture. We will ordinarily act based on our genetics, our conditioning and our experience, all of which is hardly freedom of action.

For this reason alone, it is pointless expecting human society to be any different than it is now and always has been - namely unjust, unequal and violently survivalist in the Darwinian sense (give or take a few fleeting experiments in utopian social engineering, doomed to quick failure as human nature reasserts its ugly face).

On this basis, I have concluded that it is time to stop gnashing my teeth and bemoaning the terrible and primitive society of mankind. I now realize it's like baying at the moon for shining, or complaining that rain is wet.

What's left is to derive some kind of contentment wherever it can be found, including developing a camaraderie with whichever fellow prisoners of earth are on your own wavelength.

[Ben]

Excellent essay. I'm reminded of the essay you wrote a while back about "luck".

[gretchen]

Mike, infanticide in hunter-gatherer societies was practiced (and may still be practiced) in certain situations. For example, when I lived in the Marshall Islands, I was told by my "family" that after a terrific hurricane, children under the age of 5-6 would be killed because there would be little to no food for a very long time. The thought behind that is pretty clear and very realistic...all humans would be needed to find/plant/make food and children could be made again. A quick merciful death was better than watching them starve to death.
Under normal circumstances, the custom is that women and children eat first, especially pregnant women were and are given first choice at mealtime, while the men ate what was left over.

A great and timely writing Dave. I woke up this morning thinking about self esteem vs self control re my students. Self esteem has absolutely no bearing on one's "success" in any endeavor, but self control certainly does. I wish I could share your writing, but unfortunately the world of education is still pandering to self esteem, a BIG part of the problems facing the current human condition.

[Mike Roberts]

Thanks, Gretchen. However, looks like I might have misread Dave's essay today because it doesn't include the example of hunter/gatherer infanticide, as I'd earlier thought. But I can see that your explanation might be a reasonable reaction to low food (though I can think of others) that I hadn't read before.

[adam]

This is one of your best posts. That's really all I want to say.

[James]

True free will seems to come only with some degree of self awareness. That is, if you aren't even aware of why you do things, you have little to no chance of changing that behavior. Yet, if we look at historically more prosperous societies with relatively educated populaces and more equitable resource distribution (I am thinking Golden age Greece/ Rome, post WW2 US, modern northern Europe, etc.) the societies seem to place greater emphasis on improving things (recognizing rights and education, lower crime and violence, etc.) and acting with something resembling a conscious. Poor, ignorant nations tend to do the opposite, especially when resources are scarce/locked up.

I don't think that this is a coincidence. As you point out, there are two levels of free will- the individual and the collective society. But the collective is nothing more than a collection of all the individuals within it. Thus, a violent society tends to reflect violent people. A peaceful, educated, egalitarian populace is likely to produce a society that reflects that.

Of course, even in the greatest societies, human flaws are ever present. But at least it is something of a step up, yes? AT least until inevitable corruption brings them down.

Batalos: Your statement speaks from an ideal. The problem is the survival imperative. Our base drive is to secure resources to promote survival including procreation. Since humans must cooperate to survive, this generally manifests as humans trying to manipulate and screw each other as much as possible. Every once and a while, some realize that such behavior is self defeating and counter productive and, even rarer, sometimes something is done about it. But generally not and the most cunning, brutal, and vicious tend to benefit and, therefore, pass on those traits. Those who are too anti-social tend to suffer (since the group turns on their obviously destructive nature), but so do those who are not mean enough (since they make easy marks). Depending on the level of stability, violence is either outright, or hidden through political and social devices.

Historically, more peaceful societies such as primitive farmers tended to get dominated by more warlike ones. So it's not that it can't be done, it's that it cannot be maintained.

[Makati1]

What 'free will'? The average American is brainwashed even before they are born by the previous brainwashing of their parents. It is then reinforced at every step of your life through every media outlet you access, every day you spend in school, your parents religion, and now the internet. You don't even see it happening. Do they teach you how money REALLY works in school? How the banking system really originated to gain control of you? How it enslaves you for life? Do they teach you all about the Constitution and how it works and why? Or the Bill of Rights? Do they teach you ANYTHING of real value besides basic reading, writing and math? Nope! Educated slaves are dangerous. They might wake up and think for themselves, if they still can. And I won't even get into fluoride, etc.

[P.S]

Great post. I nod with assent, yet the pain of acknowledgement lingers.