It depends (and so do I)

Click to read the Carl Sagan
quotation (photo source)

For 47 years, I've known that I didn't create myself and do not have the power to sustain my existence for a single moment. I know it has been forty-seven years because I was twenty-two years old when I had a dream that seemed to confirm the dependence, and I'm sixty-nine now. (I described the dream a few years ago, in a post titled "Creatures.")

Sam Harris, in his latest book, Free Will,¹ describes a similar situation with respect to what he argues is the illusion of free will:

Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn't choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime—by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this? Yes, you are free to do what you want even now. But where did your desires come from? [p. 40]

Why does Harris argue that free will is an illusion? The main reason (aside from considerations like those above) seems to be that brain activity that signals awareness and initiation of action precedes our conscious awareness of it. When we become aware of an intention, for example, the intention has already happened, and we had nothing consciously to do with it.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?...People feel that they are the authors of their thoughts and actions, and this is the only reason why there seems to be a problem of free will worth talking about. [p. 31]
    ...From the perspective of your conscious awareness, you are no more responsible for the next thing you think (and therefore do) than you are for the fact that you were born into this world. [p. 36]
    If you pay attention to your inner life, you will see that the emergence of choices, efforts, and intentions is a fundamentally mysterious process....
    You are not in control of your mind—because you, as a conscious agent, are only part of your mind, living at the mercy of other parts. You can do what you decide to do—but you cannot decide what you will decide to do. [p. 38]

Even before reading Harris's book, I had written here about watching myself to see what I would do next, and writing to find out what I thought about something. I had already discovered, from my own personal experience, that what I did and what I thought were things that happened. Harris's book not only serves to confirm this, but also explores some of the implications of it, such as its effect on morality and criminal justice.
    What about its effect on me—or on you if you choose to adopt this way of thinking (or even just experiment with it)?
    I'm still observing its effect(s) on myself. On the one hand, they are, ironically, liberating. I am more accepting of other people (and of myself) the way they are, the way I am.
     But on the other hand, I wonder at times whether I'm missing out on something by giving up the option I thought I had of "using my will power." So far, at least, I haven't missed a day of blogging since my retirement began (one month ago today).
     The jury (the various parts that constitute "me") are still out.

This morning I observed a young woman who lives down the street walking her dogs and letting them defecate in someone else's front yard—fairly near the front door. She didn't pick up the poop, but blithely turned around and led the dogs back home.
     Blithely, did I say? Well, I'm not sure. I think she has to know that not scooping her dogs' poop is unneighborly (and expressly prohibited by the neighborhood covenants), for this has been discussed at some length on our private social network (on the web), of which she and her husband are members. But this is what she does (my wife and I have observed her doing it on a number of other occasions).
    Could I have gone out and let her know that I'd observed her, and reminded her that what she had just done (and had done many times) was wrong? Could I have? I did consider it.
    Some reasons why I think I didn't do it are, first, the prevalent reluctance to "confront" a neighbor, which the people who live in our neighborhood very rarely do. (I'm sure that the vast majority of them have never confronted one of their neighbors—judging by numerous discussions on the neighborhood network. I'm very reluctant to do it myself.)
    Second, I supposed that the young woman has her own reasons for what she did, and that they probably aren't trivial or negligible—doing that seems to be her routine.²
    Third, I was ambivalent about what my motives would have been. If they would have been to "make" her stop leaving the poop (or to stop letting her dogs go in other people's yards), I had little confidence that that would have been the result. She could as easily have become defensive and tried to justify her behavior [see Wednesday's post]. If my motives would have been to demonstrate my "superior neighborliness," what would have been the point of that?
    These considerations passed through my mind. According to Harris, I didn't choose for them to do so; they just did. And I didn't choose not to go confront her; I just didn't.
     It all depended on so many things, one of which apparently wasn't my free will (or hers).
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1. Free Will (2011: Sam Harris) [A belief in free will touches nearly everything that human beings value. It is difficult to think about law, politics, religion, public policy, intimate relationships, morality—as well as feelings of remorse or personal achievement—without first imagining that every person is the true source of his or her thoughts and actions. And yet the facts tell us that free will is an illusion.
        [In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that this truth about the human mind does not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom, but it can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life. (–The Free Press)]
2. What if someone had observed Jeffrey Dahmer luring a boy home and gone over to confront him? "That's wrong what you're doing, Jeffrey—you shouldn't kill people or eat their flesh." Might the young neighbor woman have been as unlikely to mend her ways as Jeffrey Dahmer his? Or you or I ours, whatever they are?
        Maybe the answer is "no," but how sure are we?