When I enrolled in Columbia College in the fall of 1967—as a naive and immature 17-year-old—I did two things that shaped my outlook for years to come:
I signed up for an introductory experimental psychology course to meet the college’s science requirement.
And I dropped acid.
At the time, Columbia’s psychology department was a stronghold of behaviorism, the theory developed by John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner that rejects introspective methods and seeks to understand psychology strictly in observable behaviors and events. My introductory psychology professor was intelligent, provocative, and skillful. Behaviorism seemed logical and pragmatic. Within weeks, I was a convert, trying to see how all human activity was the conditioned product of rewards and punishments. I became an evangelical idiot, doing my best to spread the good word.
LSD also led to a conversion of sorts. My high school preppiness transformed into hippiness, complete with anti-war, anti-establishment fervor. That eventually led me to spirituality, yoga, and finally, Buddhism, all with an evangelical flavor.
In recent years, I’ve become concerned about how behaviorism, materialism, and other reductionist approaches to the mind present major obstacles to realizing the profound truths of the Buddhist teachings. Insights into this conflict crystallized when I watched Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky talk about his recent book, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.
Sapolsky is emblematic of a cohort of free-will deniers whose manifestos are grounded in advances in neuroscience, and he delivers his remarks with the force of a true believer. Some Buddhists have hopped onto this bandwagon. Others are horrified by this version of determinism. That’s why I’ve been pondering whether Buddhism really has any dogs in the free-will race.
Age-Old Questions
People have debated free will for millennia, but what they have meant by that has shifted dramatically over the ages, in step with prevailing intellectual preoccupations. The central question remains: To what extent do we control our actions?
Ancient Greek philosophers were deeply concerned about the relationship of reason to emotion. For them, free will meant the ability to rationally decide a course of action and carry it out, undeterred by contrary impulses and emotions.
Medieval thinkers were concerned with the relationship of human will to God’s will. They (like many modern Christian schoolchildren) grappled with questions of why an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful god would allow humans to disobey his will and commit evil. On the one hand, this seemed to mean that people must have the freedom to obey or not obey God’s will. On the other, this seemed to suggest that there were limits to God’s power.
In the modern age, two competing conceptions of free will are on the table. One view is aligned with our common-sense notion of free will: you have free will when no outer force or inner disorder compels your actions (for example, you aren’t hypnotized, no one’s holding a gun to your head, and you don’t have a tumor impinging on your brain that makes you act irrationally).
A very different conception of free will revolves around ideas that first circulated in the 18th century. Causal determinism was first scientifically articulated by the great French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace. He contended that if you knew the location of every particle in the universe and the laws that governed their interactions, you could perfectly predict all future states of the universe. This would mean that the future—including all human action—is wholly “determined” by the past.
Most contemporary arguments about free will are between thinkers who believe free will is compatible with determinism and those who think determinism negates free will. Compatibilists tend to emphasize the common-sense conception of free will. Incompatibilists tend to emphasize the determinist conception.
What Are Real Causes?
Rapid advances in neuroscience over the past few decades, including the development of tools for imaging the brain and techniques for studying individual neurons, have given neuroscientists tremendous confidence in their ability to understand the material basis of experience. They have also generated a new wave of skepticism about anything that cannot be objectified, quantified, and independently verified.
Free Will Essential Reads
Sapolsky is a prominent spokesman for what I think of as “neuro-skepticism,” a philosophical stance that argues against the existence of free will based on the deterministic nature of brain functions. He sets out his no-free-will agenda in Determined like this:
When you behave in a particular way, which is to say when your brain has generated a particular behavior, it is because of the determinism that came just before, which was caused by the determinism just before that, and before that, all the way down. The approach of this book is to show how that determinism works, to explore how the biology over which you have no control, interacting with environment over which you had no control, made you you…. Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will.
My first encounter with neuro-skepticism came decades earlier when I read this quote from Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul: “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
Sam Harris, the neuroscientist, philosopher, and meditator, presented a less didactic version of this view in his best-selling book Free Will: “There is no question that (most, if not all) mental events are the product of physical events. The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature—and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions.”
In general, neuro-skeptics do not distinguish between minds and brains. In a recent discussion with a prominent University of California neuroscientist, he explained that the prevailing view in his field was that, “Mind just is what the brain does.” The late philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett articulated similar materialistic beliefs in his 1991 best-seller Consciousness Explained: The idea of mind as distinct in this way from the brain, composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff, is dualism, and it is deservedly in disrepute today…. The prevailing wisdom, variously expressed and argued for, is materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain.
In their attempt to remain faithful to scientific materialism, both views fail to recognize that knowing, which is what mind does, is a mental phenomenon not dependent on some “special kind of stuff.”
Mind has a cognitive primacy that materialism doesn’t see. The “physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology” is only known through cognition, whether it is observed directly or inferred by the mind from observations of scientific instruments and computations. The objective world described by science is a construct of the mind. All scientific theories and models are mental models. They are not part of the furniture of the world.
The belief that only science reveals reality is theological, not scientific. Scientists and philosophers steeped in neuroscience are deeply invested in scientific methods and conceptual models. Because of this, many assume that all knowledge must be scientific knowledge and that anything that is not susceptible to scientific inquiry has no reality. These materialistic beliefs remind me of the old saw, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”
Science studies objective reality: Things that are measurable, quantifiable, and independently observable. Neurons and brains, quarks and galaxies, and skyscrapers and iPhones are objective realities. Subjective reality is the realm of phenomenal experience. Colors and sensations, feelings and awareness are subjective realities. (Subjective, in this sense, doesn’t mean opinions or ideas about reality, but rather direct phenomenal experience.) Subjective reality is the realm of first-person inquiry.
Materialism is blind to the realm of subjectivity. Sapolsky provides a perfect example of this myopia in Determined: Once you work with the notion that every aspect of behavior has deterministic, prior causes, you observe a behavior and can answer why it occurred: as just noted, because of the action of neurons in this or that part of your brain in the preceding second. And in the seconds to minutes before, those neurons were activated by a thought, a memory, an emotion, or sensory stimuli. And in the hours to days before that behavior occurred, the hormones in your circulation shaped those thoughts, memories, and emotions and altered how sensitive your brain was to particular environmental stimuli.
In Sapolsky’s version of reality, objective phenomena—neurons and hormones—are real causal factors. However, subjective phenomena—thoughts, memories, emotions, and sensory stimuli that occur prior to the neuronal activity andactivate the neurons—are not considered causal factors. Even when he describes the functional role that thoughts, memories, emotions, and sensory stimuli play in causing behavior, all the work seems to be done by neurons and hormones, and nothing is attributed to subjective phenomena. This is an astounding oversight. But it is not a trivial one.
Sapolsky’s ideology is that “biology over which you have no control, interacting with environment over which you had no control” determines everything you do. While Sapolsky and other neuro-skeptics sometimes say that determinism is not the same as fatalism, the clear implication of this ideology is that you are screwed. Whatever you think, understand, or decide does not affect anything. Your entire future is determined by material things that you cannot directly experience or influence. You have no direct access to your biology. You do not experience your brain. You might have seen illustrations of brains with various areas labeled according to their functional significance. You might have watched operations being performed on other people’s brains. If you’re a surgeon, you might even have performed such operations yourself. However, you cannot directly experience or control the activity of your brain.
Materialism is a philosophical position that suggests an utter lack of human agency. It has infiltrated and subtly undermined modern culture. I can’t help but wonder how much of the anxiety, depression, addiction, and despair of modern life are caused by this materialist ideology. When people believe that only physical things have causal power, it’s not surprising that they resort to alcohol, drugs, consumerism, and even suicide to change the course of their lives.
