The Most Terrifying Theory Philosophers Don’t Want to Talk About

As soon as I stop talking, try to predict your next thought. Could you do it? Perhaps you thought about what your next thought might be, thinking something like, what will my next thought be? Or how can I beat this and predict it successfully? Maybe you simply thought the word thought, or something like, hmm. Or maybe you thought about this video and what's on the screen. In all cases, of course, that was your next thought, not your prediction of it. And even if instead you experienced a strange kind of brief absence of thoughts altogether, of course, that's not a thought you predicted either. The point is, you didn't, and apparently can't, spontaneously predict your next thought. In this example, it's clear. Your next thought appeared in your awareness as a consequence, at least in part, of an external influence. In this case, my words and tone, and the screen you're watching. The sense of you being the author of the thought appeared after the fact. After the thought had already arrived in your head. Suddenly, it was what you were thinking, even though you never determined it beforehand. Is this not the case for everything? For all our thoughts? Are not all thoughts spontaneously appearing in our heads before we ever truly choose or author them? Even if you think to yourself, the next thought I'm going to think is the word apple, and then you think the word apple, where did the prior thought about predicting the subsequent thought come from? Did you predict that one? The Misunderstandings of Free Will. If we can never seemingly spontaneously predict our thoughts, what does this mean about everything that we experience? That we do? What does it mean about free will? The nature and implications of free will have been the subject of philosophical and scientific debate going back centuries. From theologians like St. Augustine, to materialist philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, to psychologists like William James. All the way up to today with neuroscientists like Michael Gazzaniga, Robert Sapolsky, and Sam Harris, as well as popular philosophy communicators like Alex O'Connor. Despite this extensive history and breadth of examination, and despite free will's significant implications on essentially everything humanity does and believes, the problems and questions surrounding it still remain largely unresolved with no accepted consensus. I would personally go so far as to say that the question of whether or not humans have free will is one of the most interesting and consequential in modern philosophy. Its implications at both the individual and societal level are extraordinary. Free will is largely what we define and understand our uniqueness and identity through. It is at the foundation of our assessments of relationships, society, justice systems, and moral understandings. It is why we consider success, failure, responsibility, and culpability in the ways we do. It is one of the most apparently obvious things to us. We appear to know and exercise it every day in every one of our choices. Everything from deciding to get a cup of coffee instead of a water, to choosing to go to the gym instead of doomscrolling on the couch, to choosing to date or break up with the person we've chosen to date or break up with, and so on. And yet, when we put our free will under even modest levels of inspection, something definitively strange happens. Its otherwise obvious surface seems to begin to dissolve away, revealing something much more uncertain and unsettling, and perhaps unlikely. Before going any further, it's crucial that we quickly define the term free will. Many of us will likely have at least slightly different assumptions or intuitions around it, which can easily lead to confusion or unneeded friction. For our purposes here, free will refers to the ability to independently decide what you think and do, for yourself, by yourself. Put differently, it is the ability to have thought or done differently than you did in the past, even if everything leading up to that moment remained the same. Sam Harris is one of the most articulate and clear-headed thinkers on this subject, and this video was made in part in collaboration with him and his work. He defines free will as follows. The popular conception of free will rests on two assumptions. The first is that each of us was free to think and act differently than we did in the past. We chose A, but we could have chosen B. It certainly seems to most of us that this is the world we're living in. The second assumption is that we are the conscious source of many of our thoughts and actions in the present. Your sense of deciding what to do in each moment seems to be the actual origin of your subsequent behavior. You feel you want to reach and pick up an object, and then you do. The conscious part of you that wants and intends and perceives seems to be in control of at least some of your thoughts and actions. A new brain. Imagine you're working on a railroad. You're the foreman of a construction crew laying a new track through Cavendish, Vermont. You're the foreman for good reasons. You're hardworking, disciplined, responsible, patient, and considerate. You know and do what you understand to be right on a daily basis. Today is an ordinary day on the job. Your crew is blasting rocks to clear a path for the tracks, when suddenly you become disoriented and confused. You look around and see your crew staring back at you with absolute horror. Your vision is off and something feels wrong. Your hand is compelled to reach up to your head, but as soon as you do, one of your crew members reacts and stops you. They, along with a few others, begin frantically scrambling in a panic, grabbing what seems to be cloth and wrapping it around your head, almost holding you up. How are you still alive? One of them says with the most puzzled shape a face can possibly make. They quickly begin directing you and taking you into town. As they do, they explain that the blasting powder you were packing ignited and shot the three and a half foot iron rod you were using straight up and through your head, clean out the other side of your skull, and landing dozens of feet away. Somehow, you not only survived, but regained consciousness. Once at the hospital, after much confusion regarding your condition, they confirm the obvious. You now have a hole in your brain. The rod went through your left cheek, past your left eye, and through your left frontal lobe. Three months later, somehow, against all odds, you make a near full physical recovery. There's only one problem, and it's a big one. You don't really recover. In fact, in some sense, you sort of died. You are no longer you in any relevant personal sense. You are now impulsive, unreliable, indifferent to consequences, irreverent, and profane. You swear all the time and are crude to others. You can't readily hold down a job, follow through on plans, or maintain social relationships. You are a completely different person who makes different choices and now lives a different life. This is all based on a true story. It happened to a real 25-year-old foreman named Phineas Gage in 1848. Everything that made Gage who he was, his beliefs, decision making, personality, attitudes, discipline, and so on, were dramatically altered by an iron rod that accidentally shot up through his skull and left a hole in the front of his brain. The story is famously summarized with the line that Gage was no longer Gage. This case might seem obvious. Of course, a man with a large hole put in his brain is likely to act differently after. But the obviousness is the point. If this individual's personality, beliefs, choices, abilities, actions, and life can all be meaningfully altered in this way by a physical modification to part of their brain, then the state of one's brain matters a lot for these qualities. That one particular chunk of missing brain contributed enormously to who Gage was. But if these qualities of selfhood and the conditions of our lives are dependent on and modifiable by the brain's physical state, then what else alters and molds our brains that we simply don't see being shot through our skulls? Here's Sam on this. Everywhere we look, we see patterns of events, and all these events have prior causes, which is to say they depend materially and functionally and logically on other events that preceded them in time. And most relevantly for our purposes, all of our conscious experiences, our thoughts, intentions, desires, and the actions and choices that result from them are caused by events of which we are not conscious and which we did not bring into being. Before getting into some of the interesting arguments around what creates and affects the nature of our brains, selves, and lives, and whether or not free will exists, it's useful to understand the more immediate personal applications of these ideas as well. According to Sam, understanding the truth of the mind conceptually is one thing. Experiencing the truth of it directly is another. All the excerpts from Sam in this video were curated from his The Waking Up app. Sam and the Waking Up team were gracious enough to have partnered on and supported this video. On Waking Up, you can find not only Sam's complete free will series, but dozens of other beautiful series and talks about the mind, meaning, reality, joy, and everything that can help make us fully who we are and thrive as such. From ancient wisdom to modern knowledge, from theoretical to practical, experts from various fields provide insights and lessons that can completely change the way you think. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of what Waking Up offers. Experiencing the nature of the mind directly is not done through knowledge and thought. It's done through practices like meditation. And Waking Up provides a huge array of guided meditation practices and series with leading teachers and scholars, which you can follow daily, from any level of meditation experience and with a wide range of meditation styles. I've been using Waking Up for at least a couple years now, and incorporating these sessions into my daily routine has equated to something profound and sort of hard to articulate. They serve as almost existential resets during the day. But more than that, they create reminders and insights about existence and consciousness, what it means to be aware and to experience that awareness purely, that reverberate out throughout the entire day and help keep my mind and body in a pleasant, more manageable tune, which I often need. As Sam puts it, recognizing what consciousness is like prior to the sense of self can be a profound source of psychological freedom. And that's truly what it is. You can try Waking Up for free for 14 days and receive 20% off your annual subscription through the link in the description. The Free Will Arguments The primary camps surrounding the free will debate are typically divided into two broad categories, compatibilism and incompatibilism. Both essentially refer to whether free will is compatible with the apparent nature of the universe. That is, specifically, the universe's deterministic nature, how it functions through cause and effect processes. For something to happen in the universe, it appears to be that something else must always happen before it to cause it, or at least contribute to its cause, amongst other things. Nothing, at least at our level of reality, happens or comes into existence spontaneously or randomly. One domino falling requires a prior domino falling. If not a prior domino, then a finger pushing it. If not a finger, then the wind blowing it. Or whatever else. In no case does a domino spontaneously fall without any cause at all. The concept of determinism extends this to humans, suggesting that every human event, choice, and action is also the result of prior events and causes. The problem for free will, of course, is that if everything is deterministic, caused by prior physical states and conditions, in an unbroken chain, all the way back to the big bang, then where does free will fit? There is apparently no moment where any individual can step outside the path of the dominoes, escape the chain links of causality, and say, no, I'll do something differently than I would have done. Compatibilists, however, argue that free will can still be true and is fully compatible with determinism. They suggest that if our desires and reasons drive our actions, even if those and reasons were shaped by prior events, we're still acting on free will. You're still a free agent in the world. But if we're assuming free will is to mean the ability to have done differently than we did, and to have chosen for ourselves by ourselves independently, then making decisions based on desires and reasons that formed prior to our conscious awareness does not seem to fit that definition. To call this freedom seems more like a semantic sleight of hand. When we say free, we typically mean that we are free to determine and control our desires and reasons and how we act on them, not free to be compelled in specific ways by desires and reasons which we didn't choose or control to begin with. This is what incompatibilists argue. If determinism is true, it destroys the possibility of free will. But what if determinism isn't true? What if the of the universe? We, of course, remain, and will likely always remain, deeply limited and incomplete in our understanding. For example, in the theory of physics known as quantum mechanics, we know that at the quantum level of microscopic particles, the universe appears to not be deterministic at all. Rather, it appears to be random, with particles popping in and out of positions, states, and existence in general, without any apparent cause. And we don't know why this is happening or if this is actually what is happening at all. Additionally, in chaotic systems of the universe, like weather, gravitational systems, solar systems, and some biological systems, everything appears to become chaotic and unpredictable, with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions and no conceivable way to fully measure or predict outcomes. And so there are clear cases where our scope of understanding does become limited and opaque. But none of this appears to change anything for free will. Even if the universe is not fundamentally deterministic, and somehow randomness or chaos or something ethereal sneaks into human consciousness, where is the free will in this? Making a decision not based on your past experiences or prior states, but instead based on random, spontaneous mental occurrences or some supernatural force you never made any agreement with, does not seem to output any free will either. As Alex O'Connor puts it, you can ask if mental activity is determined or is it not. If it's undetermined by anything, then it's random, and you're by definition not in control of that. If it's determined by something, then it's either determined by something further inside yourself, or it's determined by something external to yourself. If it's determined by something external to yourself, then clearly you're not in ultimate control of that. If it's something inside of yourself, then all you do is push the problem back, and you ask the question again, is that determined or is it indetermined? You keep going back until you either terminate in something outside of the self, or something indetermined and therefore random. Doing what you want is not wanting what you want. To bring everything down from the level of theory and terminology into something more empirical, let's consider your first person experience. At this level, the bases for choices seem quite clear. We either do stuff because we want to, or because we have to. Of course, if we have to do something because we are inescapably forced to, that is the antithesis of a freely willed choice. So that's out. But having to do something can be more nuanced than that. You can choose to do things you in fact don't want to do in a particular moment, but do anyway because you have to or should do them. Perhaps you don't want to go to the gym, eat broccoli, help your friend move, pick your child up from school, or answer that email from your boss. But you feel you have to or should. And so you do. At first this might seem like a wholly separate category. But it isn't. It's just a different kind of want. It's a deferred or perhaps meta want. Even though in moment you don't want to go to the gym or answer your boss, you do want to have a job and be healthy. And those wants merely outweigh your immediate wants to not do the difficult or annoying thing. But nonetheless, you still want to do the thing you don't currently want to do, just for non-immediate reasons. This would even go for instances when you do something that is the opposite of what you want to do both in the moment and have happen for you in the future because you're trying to prove you have free will. In such cases, your desire to prove your free will would outweigh your desires surrounding the action you commit and its consequences. That's still just a want. So all that's left for free will is whether you independently determine what you want. Think back to the beginning when I asked you to predict your next thought, and presumably you couldn't. Where do your apparently conscious wants and decisions come from if not your thoughts? And if you can't fundamentally predict or control your next thought, how could you fundamentally predict or control your next decision? And if you can't, then where is the free will? What if instead I said, before your next decision, decide what your next decision will be. As soon as you decide what your next decision will be, you'll have already made it. You can't get in before it. For example, if I ask you to pick a movie to watch tonight, the options arise in your head and you pick one. But you can't predict or control what options you think of and which one feels right for you to choose before you do. You make a decision and the moment you do, you're not predicting anything. It's a fully formed decision that comes out of the darkness of all the colors of the variables that led to it. Here's Sam on this. I say pick a film and there's this moment before anything has changed for you. And then the names of films begin percolating at the margins of consciousness. And you have no control over which appear. None. Really, none. Can you feel that? You can't pick them before they pick themselves. Someone else might as well be whispering the names of films in your ear for all that you did to summon them. And the same can be said for the process of choosing among the candidates that do appear. Having no free will doesn't change anything. The mere possibility of all this, for many, can be kind of existentially devastating. Since our sense of free will is where we derive so much of our subjective worth and identity from, how we evaluate other people, relationships, and society, free will potentially not being real in the way we intuit and have come to accept can feel like the rug of selfhood and meaning has been pulled out from underneath us. Who am I and what is my life if not my choices? What matters and where does meaning come from if not my control over my authored thoughts and values and decisions? Why bother doing anything if it's all predetermined or determined by forces beyond my control? Though this reaction is fair and understandable, I don't think free will being an illusion changes much of anything, at least not in the first person experiential sense. Sam puts it like this. There is no free will, but choices matter. And this isn't a paradox. Your desires, intentions, and decisions arise out of the present state of the universe, which includes your brain and your soul, if such a thing exists, along with all of their influences. Your mental states are part of a causal framework. So your choices matter, whether or not they're products of a brain or a soul, because they're often the proximate cause of your actions. Determinism isn't fatalism. Choices, reasoning, discipline, all of these things play obvious roles in our lives, despite the fact that they're determined by prior causes. You don't need to believe free will exists philosophically to act and experience life as if you do. The acting it out is part of the illusion. It is inescapable. And knowing it's illusion doesn't suddenly make it escapable or less illusory. No matter what we think or believe, we don't ever get to go backstage of the magic show of reality and suddenly know how everything works, know everything that's at play, or know what will happen next. Even when you don't believe in sorcery, magic shows still evoke wonder and awe. They are still worth watching and participating in. And you will still fall in love with what you love and call it some amount yours. The show goes on. And of course, we don't know for sure what the show is made of and what is true. Free will could perhaps be hidden somewhere in the trick that we just can't see or make sense of. Having no free will changes everything. Throughout history, epilepsy has always been a condition that inflicts certain humans. It results from sudden abnormal electrical activity in the brain, with the source being genetic or environmental, including head trauma, strokes, brain tumors, or simply inherited genes or developmental disorders. The symptoms can be rather extreme, repeated seizures that can include staring spells, loss of awareness, body convulsions, weakness, or uncontrolled shaking. We of course know that a person with epilepsy having a seizure is not in control of the condition or the episode. But this wasn't always the case. Not so long ago in parts of medieval and early modern Europe, individuals exhibiting these seizures were interpreted as being demonically possessed or experiencing some kind of divine punishment. These epileptic individuals were viewed as being responsible for their condition and their episodes. Worse, their seizures were seen as evidence of sin, evil, witchcraft, or demonic influence, resulting in negative perception and treatment by others. Of course, we now know how ridiculous this is. And now, alongside our better understanding of the and its causes, both our medical treatments for it and our perception of individuals suffering from it have risen to the appropriate levels of effectiveness and compassion. By realizing these individuals are not responsible for the through-line that led to them having epilepsy, we did not lose our humanity. We improved it. There are countless cases like this, where we have realized that there is a clear source, a clear physical scientific explanation, for why a kind of individual is how they are and does what they do. And each time, we become more effective and compassionate in our handling and understanding of them. How many other conditions and behaviors right now, in this moment of history, are like epilepsy? How much more effective and compassionate could we be if we saw the truth of how little we each know and control and understand about who we are, what we do, and why? In the words of Robert Sapolsky, This does not mean there should be no consequences and no sense of responsibility in the world. Dangerous people should be treated as dangerous. Harm should be mitigated and deterred as much as possible through the most effective methods. Responsibility and accountability should be But deterrents and incentive structures that are designed to maximize human and societal flourishing are not examples or proof of free will. They merely show that a species can be compelled to design systems to create behavioral patterns that are more aligned with the shared goals of said species. But that is just as beautiful as anything else. Arguably, it's more. If framed properly, the concepts, questions, and changes that arise from the skepticism of free will are fuel for the deepest experiences of connection, openness, compassion, and wonder. We are all in a kind of absurd existential universal vehicle, each doing the best we can, in every moment, with what we have.