“I am glad I studied so hard.” Yes, your studies were the cause of your success. But that does not mean your success was the purpose of your studies. Perhaps you studied because your mother was always making sure you did your homework, while you had no understanding yet of how important it was. As we become aware of purpose and aspiration, we become free agents to an ever higher degree. This freedom is itself a source of joy. We are willingly stretching toward the future, rather than being pushed blindly onward by our past.

In my previous entry I showed how time is actually hidden to our senses, but is reconstructed in our mind to such a degree that we are honestly convinced that we experience it continuously, despite the evidence of our senses.

To continue this topic, I want to bring up something strange and disturbing. It deals with how we, at least in English, merge two very different concepts – two almost opposite concepts, in a sense – into one. And then we apply them where they don’t belong. Or at least that is a strong tendency.

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If we look at our own mind, we can see that we have reasons for everything we do. Well, sometimes they can be hard to see afterwards, but generally we always have a reason. However, this word “reason” actually hides two very different concepts. These will become obvious when we look at the line of time that stretches through our life.

The first reason is “cause”, as in cause and effect, causality. It can be said to push us from behind, from the past, into the future. “I started eating because I was hungry” is an example of this.

The second reason is “purpose”, which pulls us from the future toward a goal there. “I stopped eating after one small portion because I did not want to get fat” is an example of this.

In practice, however, we don’t really differentiate between the two. We may not even be sure ourselves which was which. You may say you ate because you were hungry – a cause from the past – but didn’t you actually eat in order to stop feeling hungry, a purpose that was still in your future at the time?

The answer in this example is pretty obvious because dogs, garden snails, even amoeba will happily start eating when hungry. It does not require any awareness of purpose. In so far as there is a purpose, it is not in the animal doing the eating, but is somehow imposed on it without its will. The creature does not reflect on this and then come to the conclusion that, on the whole, eating is better than this gnawing feeling of hunger, so it would be best to take action.  It happens automatically. But in the opposite case, when we choose based on purpose, we don’t have the same enthusiastic support from our instincts. I am sure you can testify to this from your own experience.

But even though this particular case was pretty easy to solve, we can often kid ourselves if we are really motivated to do so, and see a purpose in what was a cause. This is particularly easy for ourselves, but as children we are even more slippery than that.

It is perfectly normal for a child to attribute purpose to lifeless things. Particularly if they move, but even if they just stand there, as long as they somehow get in our way. It is not uncommon to see children get angry at furniture. And pets, who admittedly have their own will, are suspected of quite convoluted plots.

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Once we grow up, it seems to me that people tend to favor either causes or purposes, depending on their attitude to religion, and regardless of whether each particular instance is a cause or a purpose. Let me explain.

People who are strongly against religion tend to believe that there can be no purpose. The universe is determined from the start, the effect of one cause is the cause of the next effect, an endless chain of reaction like falling dominoes. Humans are powerless to stop this, because we are matter like all other matter, and follow the laws of matter. We are made of atoms, which follow quite simple rules. Therefore the same applies to us.

Conversely, those who are strongly in favor of religion tend to think that everything happens for a purpose, and this purpose is the reason why the things happened in the first place. The roof tile fell down to teach me a lesson. Since everything has a purpose, the cause is irrelevant: God is every cause, and studying laws of causality is a kind of blasphemy.

I believe these intense opinions come from a lack of understanding of the time axis.

The problem with them both is that they are contrary to observable reality. There can be no doubt that causes and purposes both exist, because we can directly observe them. Even if we manage to define one or the other out of existence, that does not change reality. It will be there despite our protests.

Think of water. It consists of hydrogen and oxygen, and without the both of them it would not exist. Remove all the hydrogen from the water and there is no water anymore. But that does not mean the properties of water are simply an average of the properties of hydrogen and oxygen. When things combine, at different levels we get changes that we call “emergent behavior”. Molecules are different from the atoms that make them, but cannot exist without them. Cells are different from the molecules that make up the cells, but cannot exist without them. And so on.  You cannot predict from an existing lower level what the property of the next level will be. It is not possible. Only when the combination has occurred can you say what it ended up being.

In the same way you cannot define purposes in terms of causes, but this does not mean there are events that have no cause. It is just that at a certain point it makes more sense to define the event by its purpose rather than by its causes, since the causes are no longer obvious but the purpose is. Again, compare this to insisting to talk about hydrogen and oxygen whenever we mention water. You don’t need to remind us what water is made of. At some point it makes more sense to focus on its properties as water, OK? And likewise the fact that water is thoroughly different from hydrogen and oxygen does not mean that it must necessarily be made from water atoms. It is a matter of what level or domain we look at.

So if you have a mental mastery of time, and are able to look forward and backward, you will be able to seamlessly look at causes and purposes without getting needlessly confused. I wrote out some theological implications of this, but did not publish this. Religion has great power to wound or to heal; one like me should not wield it casually. But see if you can remember that the “reason for” an event can be a cause, a purpose, or both depending on who looks at it and from what perspective. Causes shove us forward from the past, purposes pull us toward our goals in the future.

The will is not free in the meaning of “costing nothing”. It is actually quite expensive to use and may be exhausted by sufficient temptation. But it exists as a possibility by necessity – a thing that cannot not be.

I am half amused, half embarrassed on behalf of the people who think hooking the brain up to some kind of scanner can prove or disprove free will. Mostly disprove, it seems. Which is pointless indeed, since free will cannot be disproved. It exists by definition. Just like you cannot disprove the circularity of a circle, you cannot disprove the freedom of will. It is an intrinsic property of will itself, and without it we can no longer talk about will, or about choice, or even about action.

In fact, without free will, we cannot talk at all. After the stage where babies just make sounds randomly, speaking is essentially an expression of will. Even if something is true, we can decide not to say it, and often do. Even if we believe something is false, we can still say it, and this is also quite common. Furthermore, the form of our statement and its tone are also of our choosing. If we then were to say “There is no free will”, this would automatically and by definition expand to “There is no free will and I can’t help saying this”, which – since we have no control over what we say – resolves to “I can’t help making sounds”, which is not a very useful information at all if we already hear you making sounds. Since the sounds we make no longer convey any information about our internal states of mind, except perhaps in the case of screams and moans, we have successfully reverted to the animal stage of communication, and of thinking.

Free will is necessary for a human to be human. In fact, without the possibility of free will, a human would precisely not be human, but rather only human in potential. If the potential for free will was lost, then also humanity. If you cannot even choose what you think, then you don’t actually exist. “I don’t think, therefore I ain’t. I think.”

What we should be looking at instead is how science elucidates the nature of free will. To deny its existence is, as shown above, meaningless and resolves to contradiction in terms, much like the statement “This sentence is a lie.” But what we can disprove, and probably have disproved, is the idea that all choices are enacted by the speech centers of the brain. This is where the “talking consciousness” is located, it would seem. The inner monologue that translates our outer and inner experiences into a narrative, the story of our lives, which is the form in which it is usually stored and remembered in the brain.

It was a peculiar idea in the first place that this specialized brain function should be the origin of our will. I cannot offhand think of any religion or philosophy that has made such a claim. Anyone with more than trivial experience in meditation know how far this is from the truth. Most eastern forms of meditation serve to quiet this narrator function by occupying it with a different task, such as repeating a mantra, counting to ten, or watching closely some sense input like the passage of the breath or the flame of a candle.  As most meditators can attest, this does not suddenly cause the entire mind to come to rest. Rather, there is revealed a frantic activity that is not at all under conscious control, and can only indirectly be influenced.

And you had not really needed to go that far. Even the Christian concept of temptation should ring a bell here. Unless you are following some heretic wild goose and think that temptations come from other people, in plain contradiction to the Biblical claim that we are tempted as we are lured and drawn in by our own desire. What this clearly shows is that the deciding will cannot be alone in the head, otherwise there would not be anyone “else” there to present the desire to the will as an alternative. Likewise when we have the opportunity to do good and decide not to (which is described in the Bible as a sin), clearly there is some fellow occupant of the brain who is presenting the case for doing something, and we reject it.

So whether you’re a westerner or an easterner, unless you are painfully ignorant of the most basic concepts of your surrounding culture, you should be aware that there are processes in your head initiating action before you become aware of them. The later you become aware of them, in fact, the more momentum they tend to have. If a monk becomes aware of a sexual temptation when the compass needle of his mind begins to move away from Heaven, it will be rather easier to resist than if he notices nothing until the “compass needle” of his body has begun moving. By then it is quite a bit harder to stay calm. (Don’t ask me how I know this if you can’t guess.)

In any case, we have free will, but actually exerting our will takes an effort, and will can become tired much like a muscle, and can be trained much like a muscle. There is much to say about the nature of free will and our illusions about it. Oh, so much. But to just write it off as “free will does not exist” is painfully ignorant and shows an intense desire to believe something impossible. If free will did not exist, you could never know it.