On the idea of Free Will

What you do in the dark will reflect of your character in the light. What you do in the light will still be there as invisible hands that shaped your personality, even when you hide in the dark. You cannot run. You cannot hide. The external forces have created you and you cannot escape from that. One can suppress his real self in his most conscious state. One can fake himself in public, wear a mask and fool some people. But the moment you leave that state of consciousness and open the gates of your subconscious, your real self will shout out before everyone. We have all felt that. We see our most pervert desires and most heinous ambitions come true in our dreams. We have seen sane people acting insane when they are drunk. If only men can study themselves in their dreams or in their inebriated states, they will be able to know more about themselves.

The idea of free-will arises from the idea of acausality. It is in some ways like the idea of a supernatural God.  God is the first mover; the first cause and he does not need to have a cause. In the same way people think that their decisions, their everyday actions, even their own ‘’self’’ come from a separate ‘’I’’ which is a free agent. Let me illustrate:

You are given two coloured blocks to choose from, red and blue. Let’s say that you choose red. So why did you make that choice? You would say that ‘’you’’ made a conscious decision to choose red. That means that ‘’you’’ did not choose blue because you decided not to do that. Let me ask, what is ‘’you’’ here?

If you say that ‘’you’’ is your brain than it is actually your brain that decided to choose the red block. But, don’t we make a separate duality between our brain and what ‘’we’’ are?

I asked a sage and thus he replied,

Sage: Tell me Sourabh, who are you?

Me: I am Sourabh Tiwary, a Marketing student.

Sage: But it is just your name, son. Who are you? You call yourself ‘’I’’, what is that ‘’I’’?

Me: I am my body, my hands, my feet, my abdomen...I am my body?

Sage: But if in some accident you lose your hands, won’t you still remain that ‘’I’’ that you like referring yourself with?

Me: But Sir, If I lose my brain someday, i won’t remain the ‘’I’’. I would cease to exist. I will turn into soil and dirt.

Sage: No, my son, you can never cease to exist for you are more than just your body. You are a soul, entrapped in a body.

Me: Evidence for a soul, sir.

[And thus the sage quietly picked his bag of hokum and left]

The idea of soul is based on dualism, meaning that the people are divided in body and soul. While the body is finite and mortal, soul is infinite and immortal. There is no evidence to believe that there is a soul in us. This concept is entirely based on faith. I can understand that religious people will certainly have difficulty understanding this concept but I am writing this article for people that have an open mind for inquiry.

I am soulless, I am not the body, I am the brain and my body’s name is Sourabh. I and the other organs in the body live in an interdependent organ system that has a symbiotic relationship with each other. Sourabh might think that he is someone different from me, but that is just an illusion, an evolutionary benefit that has been created in him through natural selection.

We human beings or I must say, Homo sapiens are highly conscious species. The level of consciousness decreases as we move down the evolutionary ladder. Look at your pet dog. Do you think that he is as conscious about himself as you are? Now look at the insects in your garden. Look at the trees. We refer ourselves as ‘’I’’, ‘’me’’, ‘’Self’’, yet it is only our brain that makes that illusion. This illusion comes with a larger brain in us. Perhaps, a million years back, our ancestors were not as conscious as we are. Perhaps a million years from now, our descendents will be super conscious. What that can mean, can only be imagined in science fiction.

But how does it matter about if I am ‘’the brain’’ OR ‘’the soul’’? It matters because in case of the former, we do not have a free choice. In order to understand that, one must understand what is our brain. Our brain is only a naturally evolved system of response. It responds to external stimulus. In many ways, it is like the CPU of our computers. In the same way that a CPU processes and responds to an external stimulus, so does our brain. Our brain is just a highly developed CPU.

The first digital computers were built in 1940 in United Kingdom. These were spacious machines that required power of up to hundreds of modern day PC, s. The computers of today are billions of times faster and efficient than those. This is 2012 and only in eight decades, we have been able to manufacture super intelligent computers. Currently, many scientists fear that only in a century, computers would be so capable that they would develop self-consciousness just like us. The only hurdle in this road is to find a substitute for silicon micro-chips.

Let me now make an analogy between a computer and a human being:

a.      The human body is analogous to the body of the computer. It protects us and has systems that provide us energy.

b.    There is a memory drive in the computer in the same way that human brain has a memory. Though there is a difference in the way they grasp and store information.

c.   There is processing unit in the computer analogous to the various parts of brain that process information and data.

d.      There are input devices in both, computer and human beings. In case of computer, it is the keyboard, mouse etc. and in human beings, it is the five sensory systems – skin, nose, tongue, ear & eyes.

So, why did you choose the red block again in the above example? Okay, it is not ‘’you’’. It is your brain. Why did it choose that? Perhaps it chooses it randomly. That means there was a 50% chance of choosing any coloured block. If the choice was only because of randomness, where was the choice than.  Let’s say that there was a reason to that. There was a processing in your brain and ultimately the result came out as ‘’the red block’’. But nothing can come out of just thin air because it would imply acausality. When you saw the block and when you heard the command to select one, the stimulus reached your brain and your brain acted accordingly. There must have been some process that occurred in your brain which led it to produce one ‘’specific’’ result to choose a ‘’specific’’ colour – RED.

Now we do not know the process. The process that decides anything in our brain is very, very complex. There are a billion neurons and we cannot yet trace their every action. But from my above arguments, one can safely say that there must have been a process.

Have you ever been chased by a dog? (I was once and that was scary) When you are being chased, you increase your speed and change directions in order to escape from that dog. If you are doing the same with your bike, you know your acceleration and speed but in case of yourself (your brain actually!), you know nothing. The process runs deep in the brain and yet it is able to provide you the exact speed and acceleration at which you should run. You cannot perceive those calculations because your foremost necessity to survive is to run. Your subconscious part of brain does all the mathematical work. In the previous times, in a jungle when you are running to escape from a lion, your conscious brain should have just thought about the danger and not about the precise calculations at which you should run. Natural selection ‘’naturally’’ prefers such species.

Let me give you another analogy:

a.      There is hardware in our computer which decides its memory and processing capacity. In the same way, there is a hardware part in our brain and spinal system which decides our memory and processing capability. Don’t tell me that you haven’t seen some of your classmates struggling with simple math problems in the school. People have different logical and memory capacities and we all have experienced that. Just like computers.

b.    Even if a computer has the best of processing systems, latest graphic cards and advanced microchips, it can’t even do a simple calculation like ‘’2*2” if it does not have the necessary software. Someone needs to programme that computer so that it can function. In the same way, we need our programmers. We humans are programmed by external sources and systems. We are programmed through education, the people we meet, the things we see and hear, everything outside us programmes us.  There is a difference between computers and human being’s memory systems. A computer does not memorise everything. If I watch a movie on my computer, I can always delete it from its memory. On the other hand, the memory system of a human brain remembers everything that it perceives through its five sensory systems. The quality of the memory actually depends on how closely you perceive something.  This is one of the reasons why we shouldn’t strive to live for infinity. In such a condition, our memory would be full only in a century or two and we won’t be able to remember anything after that. 

If we do not have any free-will than it means that whatever we think we do is only a response based on our programming (through external sources) and our internal brain mechanism (our hardware). We are not the conscious agents of our decisions. When I am writing this article, it is just a super advanced self conscious computer (S.A.S.C.C) that is doing that – Think about it. I will discuss the implications of this in my next article. Do you now understand the meaning of my first few lines? (What you do in the dark will reflect of your character in the light. What you do in the light will still be there as invisible hands that shaped your personality, even when you hide in the dark. You cannot run. You cannot hide). Everything that you do in the hiding and in secret programmes you. Everything you do in the morning before everyone programmes you. The external environment shapes you. How can you ever hide or run from yourself.