Agency - Do We Have Free Will?

 

One of the things most misunderstood is the concept of free will. Most people have the misconception that we all have free will and (more or less) can "do whatever we want." In reality, this is actually false. While we have the ability to make certain choices, those choices are all constrained to certain norms on average, based upon the reward of dopamine. As Dave Pollard writes about a year ago, "Everything we do is dopamine-driven, based on experiences that have, through positive reinforcement or coercion, been dictated by our entirely ‘unconscious’ behavior since we were born. There is no ‘us’ somehow apart from these evolutionarily conditioned animal bodies, to intervene to do things differently." Now, Dave explains why assigning blame is pretty much useless and nothing more than theater here. Nate Hagens adds this to the mix. This article goes into great depth and explains almost every argument out there regarding this topic.

In an update (3-24-24) regarding free will, a new article about Robert Sapolsky's book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, explains that meritocracy is merely system justification and free will is, quote:

"A behavior is the end product of what happened in your brain a second ago, of environmental stimuli, which condition those neurons in your brain to do what they did a second ago. And the hormones you had in your bloodstream this morning. And what happened to you in the last few months. Your brain may have changed its structure during your adolescence, childhood, or fetal life. Either because of your genes or because of the culture in which you have grown up. It is biology, over which we have no control, interacting with the environment, over which we have no control. And when you look at all of these influences, you realize that neurobiology influences your decisions, as does genetics, geochronology and social psychology. It is not that all these disciplines are different, but that they become one discipline."

4-8-22: An interesting article I found recently is being added to this article a year after I wrote it because of the relationship to the subject material in this article as well as the explanation of the evolutionary roots of how we are "programmed" to love sugar.  

A little more than a year ago, I wrote an article about blame because of the amount of blame I was seeing constantly in the groups I am a part of. It's true that there is more than enough blame to go around; but at the time, I was seeing the assigning of blame as a complete waste of time and wanted to encourage those engaging in it to discontinue the drama. It's always easy to point one's finger away from oneself; but in reality, one often may as well be standing in front of a mirror. As the facts in that article (and many others I have written) bring to the forefront, we simply do not have the agency we often think we do. It is this assumed thought process that we have agency (which in reality we don't) over these things which lead to hubris, arrogance, and denial of reality which inevitably lead to optimism bias.

The truth of the matter is, we do NOT have agency over things that most people actually believe we DO have agency over, because those choices are dictated by our dopamine addiction. More on this topic can be found under the topic of neural or synaptic gating. I have been arguing now for many years that we really don't have agency over climate change, energy and resource decline, and the other predicaments society faces; most of these predicaments were born upon our use of technology, which itself was born upon (once again) our dopamine addiction. Even if individual humans can willingly forego certain comforts provided by the technology of modern civilization, society as a whole will be unwilling to give up the creature comforts we have been enjoying over the last 3 centuries or so. Those people and/or groups with less scruples will simply be more than happy to use the resources that others conserved (update 7-13-21: here is a prime example). Take any consumption which can be conserved - meat-eating, flying instead of driving or any form of transportation (bicycling, walking, etc.) which requires less energy use, using less electrical energy, etc., and the amount of energy and resources conserved by that action will gladly be used by someone else. So, in conclusion, while an individual has the ability to make certain choices to forego a dopamine hit by denying himself or herself a certain consumptive pleasure, society as a whole does not have this ability. A footnote regarding the update above; settling other planets and wasting energy and resources which are needed ON THIS planet now are two ridiculously short-sighted and moronic ideas given the facts.

For those who are still not sufficiently impressed that free will does not actually exist in the philosophical sense, please read this article about the Grand Illusion. As I describe or point to free will or agency in this article here, I am describing or pointing to "the freedom of human beings to make choices that are not determined by prior causes." The article contains a poignant quote:

"Spinoza, in his essay on ethics, put it beautifully short and exactly to the point:

“There is no such thing as free will. The mind is induced to wish this or that by some cause and that cause is determined by another cause, and so back to infinity”."

"My only intention is to show that freedom of choice does not automatically infer free will. That is, the choices one makes are caused by past experiences. Past experiences and genetic makeup are the molding forces that created the will, which determined the action. Choices and action are determined - determined by the person you are, which was determined by your heredity and environment."

More can be found here in The Grand Illusion, the third article in a three-part series about what we should do. 

Another article points to conscious will being an illusion.

This particular post explains a great deal about what our collective future looks like and points to several factors; namely, civilization being inherently unsustainable, climate change and other symptoms of ecological overshoot, and an inability for modern agriculture and society to maintain a constant food and water supply and also for it to be transported to where it will be needed the most.

Another update: This article goes into just a bit more about how our past also affects today and our future with regard to how our psychological makeup contributes to our behaviors. This book goes into more detail to make Umair's article easier to understand for anyone interested in a more comprehensive look. My only complaint about Umair's article is that what are essentially predicaments are labeled "problems" which lead the reader to think there might be a solution when no such thing is possible.

Here is engineer John Doyle's explanation. 

This is precisely WHY very little more than lip service will be given to most all the converging predicaments we face. This isn't being pessimistic, this is being TOTALLY and ENTIRELY realistic based upon the best science available today. Science has known about the greenhouse effect for more than 150 years. Most aspects of climate change happening today were known about 50 years ago AT LEAST, and many productions including the Bell Telephone Science Hour (from 1958!) have featured stories about it. If there were to be a serious effort to curtail industrial civilization, it would have been undertaken many decades ago. Even the so-called "green new deal" efforts being lauded as "game changers" are nothing of the sort. Switching out one type of car for another or one type of electricity for one produced by a different device changes nothing. Industrial civilization doesn't stop just because a different kind of car is being manufactured or a different kind of electricity is being used. It is civilization ITSELF which is unsustainable, because it depends utterly on all the technology which has been developed in order for it to continue. Much more about civilization can be found in this post. As long as society continues to attempt to continue unsustainable practices such as civilization, electricity usage, and practically everything else that we do today, ecological overshoot and all the symptom predicaments underneath it (such as climate change) will only worsen. 

Much of our culture today is based entirely on unsustainable practices, making most all ideas surrounding "solutions" or ideas to reduce our collective harm upon this planet laughable at best and ecocidal at worst. Ecological overshoot creates many other predicaments which are symptoms - predicaments such as pollution loading, increasing disease, climate change, and species and biodiversity collapse. An indepth look at climate change from Harvard Professor James G. Anderson demonstrates just how pervasive one symptom of ecological overshoot can be. This naturally leads into my next article regarding hydrogen sulfide and the strengthening of the current mass extinction we are already in. Once these topics are understood, a simple thought experiment based upon all of this knowledge will produce the scenario pointed out in my next article, Can We Save Species From Extinction?

These cultural and societal issues point out precisely why all ideas labeled "solutions" are in reality nothing of the sort and do not actually solve anything. They are nothing more than Fantasies, Myths, and Fairy Tales, yet another article delving into our collective delusions. 

The best prediction is that society will only relinquish these comforts once they are no longer available (in other words, we will collectively be FORCED into compliance). This message is not popular, and I cannot imagine ANYONE actually liking it. But it IS based upon the truth and the best science available today and explains WHY things are the way they are. I understand the desire to change society, and in most all cases, the noble goals established make perfect sense and I can support the efforts to improve conditions. However, in many cases, especially when it comes to ecological overshoot, understanding basic human biology and the genetic programming inside of us which responds to the dopamine-powered "unconscious" decisions and choices we all make, it becomes clear that all efforts to reduce emissions will only be accomplished through depletion of the master resources (fossil fuels) and that now that nature's own emissions now supersede our own emissions, the effects of self-reinforcing positive feedbacks will continue increasing those natural emissions REGARDLESS of what we do to reduce our own emissions at this point. Live and Love Now.