Free Will is Dead and This Man Killed It

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Before philosophy dug its claws in me, I used to take free will as a foregone conclusion. But, leaving university and carrying the insurmountable debt out the door, I felt that the decisions that led me there were influenced by the environment and the people around me. It didn’t feel like a deliberate choice made by a sound mind, I mean, I made the decision when I was a nervous 17-year-old, when the only source of certainty was from my teachers who hated their job.

Not only do most philosophers concur that free will is an illusion but even neuroscience backs this up. Turns out the choices we make are the result of complex brain processes influenced by our genetics and the environment we’re in. Our brains may even make decisions before we are consciously aware of them, I don’t decide to eat six biscuits in a row, I take one and the rest is a blur. Or when I open YouTube on my phone it feels like a reflex sprung from boredom rather than a well-thought-out decision. Why is it that so often we follow what is actually worst for us? Is it fully our doing or is there something bigger weaving the web of our lives? Well, in this video I’ll be looking into what I think is the most convincing yet controversial argument for us not having free will, penned by the 17^th Century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. So, sit back and let me take you to the mid 1600’s, when Spinoza’s ideas were stirring the discourse.

So what makes his view controversial?

Well, aside from the worrying idea that we’re cogs in a pre-programmed machine, what makes Spinoza’s view controversial is his notion of God. Spinoza includes God as a counter-measure to show how our freedom is tethered to our finite nature and isn’t true unbounding freedom. I’ll get to the meat of his idea later but let me first unpack the can of worms that is ‘God’. Spinoza was a substance monist, meaning he believed in a single, infinite substance that exists in all things, even ourselves, with nature providing us with valuable clues to our role in the universe. This might sound like some tame spiritual speak but at the time, to Jewish and Christians he may as well have burnt the bible in their faces.

No-one could communicate with him, read his writings, or even be within 6 feet of anyone. Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.

It’s a shame as, despite his writings often giving me a headache at first, the wisdom that’s in his words about understanding our place in the world still rings true.

As he writes:

“The more a man knows about individual objects, the more he knows about God”.

Even the writer Aldous Huxley who wasn’t tied to a secular religion, believed in a universal divine reality and would concur with Spinoza. In his words:

“The more a man knows about himself in relation to every kind of experience, the greater his chance of suddenly realising who in fact he is”.

The polymath Leonardo Da Vinci also lived his life by this maxim, urging us to:

“Study the art of science, study the science of art. Develop your senses, especially learn how to see, realise that everything connects to everything else”.

So with this outlook, God is inseparable from nature. When Spinoza uses the word God, he may as well say the one unifying substance in nature, which isn’t bound by cause and effect like we are, but for the sake of word economy I’ll stick with ‘God’. With this out of the way, let’s get to his view.

Spinoza’s Free Will

To Spinoza, humans can’t have freedom of action. For there to be logic and coherency in the world, everything, even our thoughts, must be determined by an external cause as there has to be an explanation or a causal link as to why something exists. I.e. something can’t arise from nothing, we can’t escape from the cause-and-effect exchange of our choices being in space and time. God on the other hand is independent by nature and isn’t compelled by any external factor.

The reason Spinoza thinks only God is free is because of his freedom of spontaneity. This concept refers to how something is free because they are a cause of their own actions, in other words, it must come from their own nature. As we’re influenced by our environment, experience and other people, we’re incapable of making a truly spontaneous decision.

To Spinoza then, God is the only substance to possess this attribute because nothing compels him to act.

This leads Spinoza to go a step further and argue for the necessity of an all-powerful and all-knowing God, more in line with the secular view. I know this might lose some of you but let me explain the logic.

If God were to exist, God must possess all possible attributes, one of which being self-causing i.e. independent. This means there can’t be another substance that has common characteristics as it would mean they aren’t independent from one another. Think of it like the creator of the Sims games. The creator programmed the environment and so, has all of the elements within the game at his disposal, the Sims cannot create something which wasn’t programmed in there in the first place. Likewise, all of what makes up our world derives from a unifying substance, and the creator must be free of cause and effect, acting ‘from the necessity of its own nature alone’.

The Stone Analogy

Spinoza uses an analogy of a stone to embolden his claim. Picture a stone moving through the air due to it being thrown. If the stone became sentient, it would be sure that it was moving of its own accord. This isn’t an unscientific position, Albert Einstein used an example of the moon obtaining awareness, coming to the conclusion that it had freely decided to orbit the earth. So similarly, our own perspective comes with it a tunnel vision, attributing free will in moments when the reality was determinism. We, as humans, presume we are free as we do not see our prior causes, like the stone who only knows it is striving to move. It’s more out there to presume we’re being propelled by nothing, only our independent thoughts.

There’s another analogy David Attenborough uses to show how blind we are to the bigger picture. 3:32 So maybe from being finite, we lack the sense to even imagine something that’s infinite and truly free...

Another parallel can be made with Plato’s allegory of the cave in which prisoners are chained inside a cave, and they are only able to perceive the shadows of figures on the wall. If this is all they see, they’ll believe that these shadows are the only reality. I realise I’ve thrown 3 analogies at you in a row, I got carried away sorry. Moving on...

If we come from God, why don’t we have the same level of freedom?

The philosopher Leibniz questioned why we have a different form of freedom to God in the first place, if we are in essence a part of God. Well first, we can never have the same freedom as God because by his necessary nature, he made us and, as finite beings, we couldn’t possess his degree of freedom as he’s propelled by nothing but himself and we’re tied to the parameters of space and time. It’s also a fallacy of composition to suggest we should be free in that sense as just because we are a part of God, it still doesn’t get us to being God; in other words, it makes complete sense that we would not hold the same freedom because we’re only a part of God.

If we don’t have freedom are we innocent of any wrongdoing?

The French philosopher Rene Descartes runs with Leibniz’ idea of different forms of freedom to explain why we’re responsible for our actions. Descartes sees us as free when we take into account the will, which provides us with the ability or power to act or refrain from acting. Descartes would associate the term compelled with reference to the will, meaning if one is compelled to do something then they would be acting unwillingly. This interpretation of freedom opens up the debate for accountability of our own actions as, having the capacity to affirm or deny our actions enables us to take moral stances, despite in Spinoza’s view there being a causal link with our thoughts and actions.

This fair criticism prompted Spinoza to accept that, in Descartes sense, we do have degrees of freedom as, with our actions and passions, there has to be some part of you contributing and we are not always compelled to do something.

However, although there are degrees of freedom, I think he’s got the wrong grasp on what pure freedom is in terms of ‘one who acts necessarily’. It is this which distinguishes us from God and why he is the only substance to hold this freedom that many of us claim to possess. With Spinoza’s sound stone analogy and Attenborough’s termite hill analogy, maybe we’ll always be blind to what true, untethered freedom really is.

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Thanks for reading,

Brandon

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