Consequences of No Free Will - Society

What would it mean to live in a world without free will? We can divide the consequences into two main categories: the personal and the social. In this post I’ll address the social, and in a later one I’ll write about what this means for our personal lives (hint: it’s great news).

The first thing that comes to most people’s minds when they contemplate life without free will is crime. The thinking goes something like this: If we don’t freely choose our actions, then we aren’t responsible for what we do and thus we can’t be held accountable. Every criminal will be found “not guilty because of extenuating circumstances beyond his or her control.” Crime will explode and anarchy will reign.

A punitive justice system like the one operating in the United States is entirely based upon the belief in free will. When a person is found to be guilty, the thinking process for that decision goes like this:

1. You know the difference between right and wrong.


2. You have the power to freely choose between right and wrong.


3. You willfully chose wrong.


4. You are, therefore, guilty of willful wrongdoing.


5. You deserve to be punished.

At serial killer/necrophile/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer’s trial in Milwaukee, one of the prosecution’s arguments that the defendant was in his “right mind” - sane, aware of the difference between right and wrong, capable of rational choice, possessing free will - was that Mr. Dahmer had demonstrated prudent and rational thinking by using a condom when having sex with the corpses of his victims.

Science is Destroying the Concept of Free Will

Science appears to have killed the concept of “free will.”

A growing number of scientists have come to the conclusion that the physical universe is completely determined and that this removes any possibility of free will. Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher of science, lays out the basic scientific view of reality in his recent book, “The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.” Here is how he summarizes reality: The physical universe and the laws of physics are completely deterministic. The universe began about 14 billion years ago with the Big Bang and everything that has happened since, including everything humans have ever done, was determined in that instant by the conditions of the fundamental parameters (e.g., the strength of the nuclear force) and the laws of physics. The brain is a physical system operating according to the laws of physics and the mind is a function of the brain. Thus the mind is completely determined.

Mr. Rosenberg writes, “When I make choices—trivial or momentous—it’s just another event in my brain locked into this network of processes going back to the beginning of the universe, long before I had the slightest ‘choice.’ Nothing was up to me. Everything—including my choice and my feeling that I can choose freely—was fixed by earlier states of the universe plus the laws of physics. End of story. No free will, just the feeling, the illusion in introspection, that my actions are decided by my conscious will.”

In the last decade or so numerous studies in neuroscience have made it obvious that most of the mental processes running our lives are completely below the level of our conscious awareness, so the concept that we have control over what we do has become laughable.

Why Do I Keep Acting Stupid?

Recently a question was posed by a visitor that is all-too-familiar to me personally: “I’ve read Ekhart Tolle, and other spiritual tomes, I intellectually agree—I “get it”—so how come I keep doing the same stupid things over and over again?”

Now the classic answer to this dilemma is “You obviously haven’t sufficiently committed to dropping your shit!” Or:  “You haven’t been willing to undergo the discomfort of changing an unproductive pattern of behavior.” In other words, you’re a lazy worthless piece of crap.

I’ve spent almost forty years developing what I believe to be a profoundly logical way of looking at life; written books and a hundred songs about expanded consciousness—yet every blessed day I act like a flaming asshole in some way or another. The self-damning question is, “If you know so goddamned much, why don’t you LIVE it?

Patience

Realizing that I am insane, that I’m confused about reality, has made it easier to question my beliefs and assumptions—if I’m insane how right can I be about anything? One result is that I’ve realized how deluded I’ve been about myself. I have been blind to certain aspects of my personality my entire life!

In We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity I talk about how I thought for a long time that I wasn’t a competitive person and how startling it was when I realized that self-assessment is wrong. I am in fact a very competitive person. As long as I was convinced that my subjective belief “I am not competitive” was an objective fact, I was completely kidding myself. Now that I have exposed this belief as a lie, I may still be competitive but at least I am not so deluded about who I am.

Recently I have faced another area where I was mistaken about myself: patience. If you had asked me a few months ago if I was a patient person, I would have answered, “yes, I have a lot of patience.” One of my hobbies is weaving, and when people learn how many hours it takes just to set the loom up before weaving even starts, they can’t imagine having the patience to do that.

I hate to lose things because I feel that searching for a lost item is a frustrating waste of time and energy. As a consequence I am very organized and can almost always put my hands on anything in a very short time, no matter how long it’s been since that thing has been used.

I think of time and energy as finite resources that are extremely valuable, and I think I am right to conserve them, not squander them. So I feel justified in criticizing people who are sloppy and careless with their time and energy, particularly when their inefficiency impacts my life! If I’m impatient with their inefficiency, that’s not my problem, it’s their’s.

The Evolution of Confusion

There's nothing wrong with insanity. In fact, it was an evolutionary inevitability that the human race would go through a period of confusion and delusion as we developed the capacity for thought.

The Evolution of Confusion, a song from the musical version of We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity, explains how it all came to be.


Performed at The Altamont Theater, Asheville NC on July 19, 2012, by Arthur Hancock, Katie Brugger, and band.

Born in a Madhouse

We ask on our website homepage, "What if the entire human race were insane?" Answer: We'd all be born into a madhouse...

Born in a Madhouse from Time Capsule Video on Vimeo.

This video is from the performance at The Altamont Theater, July 19, 2012 by Arthur Hancock, Katie Brugger, and band.

Humility or Humiliation?

For most of my life I hated the idea of humility. For me humility was synonymous with humiliation, it meant saying, “I don’t know” or “I’m wrong.” I’ve always hated being wrong, so I would work hard to either be perfect so no one could find fault with me, or find rationalizations to explain my mistakes away. I also pride myself on my intelligence so I hate admitting that there are things I don’t know.

But the truth is human beings are limited creatures. I have limited knowledge. I have limited abilities. I have limited understanding.

Humility just means the willingness to acknowledge my limitations, to face the truth of just how much there is that I don’t know.

The oracle at Delphi named Socrates the wisest man in Athens. Socrates rhetorically asked, “How can I be the wisest man in Athens if I know nothing?” The answer, of course, was that Socrates was the only man in Athens who knew he knew nothing—and thereby knew more than the rest of the population! Socrates had humility.