Even if free will were an illusion, we would not be aware of this illusion

This book made me think.

Harris’s arguments against the existence of free will rest on two main observations.

The first one is that we assign a sense of freedom to ourselves by thinking over our past actions and saying – we could have done it differently. Harris says this ex-post method of giving ourselves the notion of free will is illusionary as we did what we did and there is no way to check that we could have acted differently.

This makes sense, but only because we cannot go into the past. If I were to be presented with an absolutely identical situation a few days later, I would be free to make a different choice. But here Harris will argue something along the lines that the two situations are not identical as your brain neurons aren’t exactly as they were the last time around. How can one argue against this.

The second argument by Harris, is that the choices we make are from a specific subset of all the possible choices out there, and that subset is chosen by unconscious processes in our brain which take place beyond our control. Where is the freedom in that?

This reminds me of something I came across a while back. Many kids do not like to drink milk and no amount of coaxing or incentives will make them say yes. The parents are given a neat little trick which often works. Just ask the kid whether he wants the milk in the red cup, blue cup or the green cup. They will fall for this choice subset and end up choosing one of the colours and viola! The kid chose to drink milk without being consciously aware of it. This is the gist of the Harrisian argument.

Again, I do partly agree with Harris’s premise on our false choices, but that only makes me think a deeper introspection will make the child see through the trick. If the child fails to see the false choice he was forced to make, it wasn’t because he lacked free will, but because he lacked the sense to look deeper into the choices he was presented, which could have saved him from that glass of milk. Harris confuses an ignorance of initial conditions with an absence of free will, and this is fallacious at best.

There are a few points where Harris is irrefutable, though. He says if I make a choice driven by my physiological necessity, I am not really free at all. For example, when I extend my hand and pick up a glass of water, then bring it to my lips and drink it, I take it as an example of my free will, as I could easily have drunk it from any other glass, taken it out of any other bottle, and even drunk it at any time before or after that moment. But this freedom is fallacious. I had no choice but to drink water, drinking beer wouldn’t have sufficed. I am bound by my biology.

One recurring chain of reasoning that Harris employs is that by repeatedly asking why something happened, we will fall into infinite regress and since some of the stages in that chain are events out of our control, the action itself betrays our being “free”.

Why did I choose A over B, given that no physiological reason compelled me to it – for example, why did I get down from the left side of my bed in the morning and not the right side? Maybe it was sheer habit. Or even if it wasn’t, we chose one due to some spontaneous thought in our brain which we had no control over (we didn’t choose that we wanted to get down from the left side), and then labelled our actions as suggesting free will in an ex-post-facto basis.

In short, Harris says events beyond our control (electrical connections in our brain) lead us to some of our choices, and then we retrospectively ascribe them to our free will. We can’t choose what we want to choose.

Our brains have finite capacity to process information, and to say that my choice of a specific flavour of ice cream from a set of three flavours betrays free will because that set of three was a product of unconscious neurology is to miss the point. Maybe in my life I have had ten different flavours of ice cream, and I consciously remembered only three of them at that point. That doesn’t make me less free even though I unconsciously (and without exercising choice) reduced my possible choices from a set of ten to a set of three.

I think Harris took our physiological and neurological limitations as filters that drive our choices by presenting us partial information. I may not be free to choose what I want to choose, but I definitely am free to choose any of the things from the diminished subset that my mind provides to me. And, in fact, that should be enough as we aren’t consciously aware of the seven flavours of ice cream we forgot, so we feel free when choosing from one of the three we consciously had.

And the moment we would remember that we had forgotten seven flavours the last time, our next choice will automatically be from the entire set of ten flavours.

We are not conscious of the “illusion of free will” that Harris talks about. When we are making a choice, we don’t know that we have a diminished subset in front of us and we do feel free. Doesn’t that, then, defeat his argument?