Great Illusion

by Paul Singh

  The Judeo-Christian concept of the self or soul has been most confusing, so much so that it hasn’t been able to offer a coherent definition of the self. Sometimes the soul is understood to be inseparable from the body and sometimes not. How did such confusion come about? This happened because the soul was not really a Semitic idea to begin with. It is talked about but not dealt with seriously in Biblical and Islamic literature. The Jewish and the early Christian view was that the body would be resurrected. They did not believe that when we die the soul separates from the body. That is a Greek idea that comes from Pythagoras and Plato. The Platonic view is that a human being is a soul trapped in the body. The body is a prison and death is seen as liberation from this prison. It is at death that the soul can be truly free. The soul is immortal, the body is mortal. This Greek idea might actually have originated in ancient Hinduism, which was adopted by Greeks and later transferred to Christianity through Greek philosophers. The Christian emphasis on the soul was taken over from Plato, and Christianity is now stuck with the idea.

  The illusion of free will—the third topic of this book—is the idea that refers to our ability to be able to make choices independent of our genetic predisposition and the conditioning caused by our interactions with the environment. It can also be defined as our ability to make decisions or make choices that are uncaused or completely independent of any external influence. Free will, in other words, has traditionally been seen as a property of conscious selves.

  From a scientific perspective, our experience of free will is an illusory emergent phenomenon of the brain. Does that mean we humans are just automatons? The answer is unequivocally yes. We are robots, but we are enormously complex robots. The bewildering complexity of our brain is capable of giving us the grand illusion of being a self—an “I”— that has experiences and that has free will. It is the brain doing what it does best.

  During the past century scientists have collected literally hundreds of thousands of case studies of the brain, the most important ones involving injuries to the brain. These studies have shown that there are no subjective experiences that are independent of the brain. This means that our “self” and our conscious experience are identical to brain processes. To use Gilbert Ryle’s phrase, there is no “ghost in the machine.” There is just the machine. The so-called self (the “ghost”) is nothing over and above the brain (the “machine”). This is the modern scientific view, and it is very difficult for most people to believe. But it was also once very difficult for most people to believe that the earth orbited the sun.

  As for free will, it turns out that everything in the universe is determined by cause and effect, and therefore free will is simply not possible. The brain is subject to cause and effect like any other physical thing in the universe. Free will is an illusion that even many philosophers—including John Searle and Noam Chomsky— who should know better, defend. And one way they defend the illusion is by cleverly defining free will in such a way that free will seems to be real. They make it look like determinism is not the whole story. Everything is determined by the laws of physics—yet, we still have free will. Kant is perhaps the greatest advocate of such a position. John Stuart Mill also argued for the compatibility of free will and determinism, but from a very un-Kantian perspective.

  As a matter of fact, the question of whether free will exists is a misleading question. And, as Wittgenstein has taught us, misleading questions generate a lot of nonsense. A more accurate way of posing the question is to ask, “Do we have a will that is free or independent from laws of nature?” And the answer to this question is obviously no. Some philosophers —like John Stuart Mill, for example—define free will in terms of doing what we desire to do, and conclude that of course free will exists because we often do what we desire to do. This position is known as compatibilism because free will (understood as doing what we desire to do) is compatible with physical determinism. But this is to confuse the issue, as Kant never tired of pointing out. The philosophically significant problem is whether our will is free in the sense of being independent of the causal laws of physics.

  Everything in the universe—our will included—obeys the laws of nature. We are certainly free in the sense that we can do what we desire to do, but—and this is the important point—our decisions are not freely chosen. We choose, but we do not choose to choose. Our choices are ultimately determined by what is going on in our brain, and what is going on in our brain is determined by genetics, stimuli from the environment, and a myriad of other causal influences. Thus it turns out that our will is not free at all. Everything in the universe is determined by causal law. Nothing escapes the laws of cause and effect, which goes as far back as the beginning of the universe with the Big Bang. There is, we might say, no free will, only God’s will. If, that is, we understand by “God” what Spinoza understood by that term. And for Spinoza “God” was simply another name for Nature—Deus sive Natura. Einstein, we might note, was a Spinozist in precisely this sense—when he talks about God not playing dice with the universe, for example, he is talking about the laws of nature. There is no human thought, word, or deed which is uncaused. Every cause, in turn, has its own cause which becomes the effect of a previous cause. In order to clear the clouds of bewilderment among those who are perplexed by the propaganda machine of “quantum physics vs. free will” often advanced by those physicists who are religiously inclined, there is an entire chapter devoted to debunking the myth of quantum indeterminacy of free will later in this book.

  Without delving into the neuroscience right now, two useful metaphors are presented here which can help us understand how the brain generates the impression in us that “I” am in charge of what “I” think and do. The first metaphor is that of the ocean and its waves. All decisions, choices, planning, and thoughts are made at the level of brain processes that are completely unconscious. These unconscious brain processes are a synchronized activity of neuronal networks that wire and fire together—without our having any awareness of them at all. The “I” is not in charge of the brain. It’s the brain that calls the shots.

  The unconscious brain is like the vast Atlantic Ocean which stretches tens of thousands of miles merging into other oceans, and, like the Atlantic Ocean which is miles deep and has vast mountains and valleys below it, the brain is a vast world of its own totally unknown to the conscious self. It is only with recent advances in brain technology that we are beginning to get a tiny glimpse at what lies beneath our conscious awareness. Tiny waves pop up on the surface of the ocean everywhere, one after the other, sometimes in rapid turbulent succession and sometimes on the calm seas, as a result of the enormous complexity of mechanisms at work under the vast body of water, which remains invisible to us. These superficial waves are our conscious moments of awareness, most of which do not last more than a moment. Our memory and vast storage of data in our unconscious mind has already done the hard work by undergoing myriad calculations of a non-computational nature, for hours, days, weeks and in some cases for years, only to surface as the final act on the visible top—our conscious experience. And we have the presumption to take credit for these conscious experiences, when in actuality “we” (our so-called free selves) have absolutely nothing to do with producing them.

  For laymen, the “I” that we all are so intimately acquainted with is our spirit or soul; for scientists, however, our “I” is just our fabulous brain giving each of us the illusion of having this precious soul. Our souls are the waves of that vast Atlantic Ocean, mere ripples that come and go. These waves of consciousness at the surface of the vast ocean of the brain have billions of prior causes that can be traced back millions of years in our genetic history. Trillions of neuronal connections—all embedded like the fingerprints caused by the turning on and off of thousands of genes simultaneously or in sequence—result in a final outcome that we call a moment of conscious awareness. That moment does not last longer than a few milliseconds before our brains move on to something else.

  A
nother way to visualize how consciousness is related to the brain is to think in terms of the metaphor of the interior of the earth and its surface features. The magma inside the earth, nearly fourteen hundred miles in depth, is constantly renewing and reshuffling its paper-thin crust (our consciousness), without which nothing could be alive on the surface of the planet. Neither the crust (the consciousness) nor the life on it can exist without the activity underneath in the deep recesses of the earth. Surprisingly, most of us don’t seem to have a clue that the planet would be dead without the magma; all its flora and fauna, water sources, minerals, atmosphere, and magnetic sphere could not exist without the earth’s mantle (the unconscious) doing its job underneath the surface of the earth, completely hidden from our eyes (our conscious awareness). This applies to all mental phenomena, from the simplest—such as throwing a ball, driving a car, or moving our arms—to the most complex—such as deep contemplation about our own origins or the creation of the universe.

  Another way (perhaps more intuitively obvious) to understand that “we“ do not possess any free will is this. Think about your choices. Where do they come from? Yes, we choose to do things because we desire to do them. But where do our desires come from? Do we choose our desires? Obviously not. We simply desire what we desire. And when we choose to do what we desire, we don’t choose to choose. We simply do what we desire, and we call this choosing. In fact, there is no “I” that chooses—what chooses are billion of neurons. It is important to understand that there is no difference between the reality and illusion of free will, because illusion appears as real to us as reality itself. The problem is that our brain is hard-wired to think that there is some special “I” or self that is making the decisions.

  You might wonder why these issues still continue to be so controversial, if science is so clear about the illusory nature of the self, consciousness, and free will? There are essentially three reasons, in my view, why so much controversy still surrounds these ideas.

  First, the beliefs, that have been found to be illusions by science, are essential for human survival. Since we cannot think any other way than to believe that we are, somehow, independent of our bodies, such a belief must have played an important role in our evolutionary past. We don’t know where the “I” or "self” resides, but we all feel there is such a self. That is what led philosophers for thousands of years to think there is a “ghost in the machine.” Ancient Hindus wrote thousands of treatises on this subject and they are still writing them today. But science has demonstrated that these philosophers and religious thinkers were all wrong.

  What scientists discover through the scientific method is often counter-intuitive. In the absence of science, we often draw unwarranted conclusions, based on simple observations, frequently mixing our emotions with our observations. For example, for thousands of years people saw the sun rise from one side of the horizon only to disappear on the other side. It was obvious that the sun revolved around the earth but it turned out that that was not true. Now imagine a philosopher addressing an audience a thousand years ago to convince them that the earth is a round flat disc. He could add some further seductive argument that the disc is twenty meters thick. And he would be very convincing but totally wrong. And science has demonstrated that he was wrong. Similarly, people used to believe that the earth was at the center of the universe. It certainly seemed that way. Everyone could see things revolving around the earth. But, once again, they were wrong and Copernicus was right. Science is usually right and our commonsense view of the world is often wrong. And there is no reason why it should be any different when we consider free will, consciousness, and the self. We are going to have to give up our deeply held convictions about these three “entities” and let science reveal to us the truth.

  If you get a small cut on your finger, billions of tiny cells immediately move to the sight to prevent bleeding and infection. You know that “you” have absolutely nothing to do with it. Your heart beats hundreds of millions of times during the course of your life without ever consulting your inner self. And your brain controls innumerable functions; this we can all accept. But when it comes to our thoughts and subjective experiences, why do we find it difficult to believe that our “I” is not in control? Why do we now feel the need to invoke the guidance of this mysterious self when it comes to our thoughts and subjective experiences? Are we talking about the same brain that did everything else without consulting us first? The brain determines subjective experience in exactly the same way it determines all other bodily functions.

  A second cause for the persistence of belief in free will, consciousness, and the self is the conviction that our civilization will collapse if we give up these beliefs. After all, our religious, economic, political, social, and legal institutions are all built on the premise that we are morally responsible selves who possess free will. But this fear is unwarranted. Listen to yourself carefully when you say, “Our civilization will fall apart if we were to abandon free-will.” Do you believe that you will wake up tomorrow morning and start acting immorally because now you think you have no free will and so are not responsible for your actions? Really! Think about what you are saying. How can civilization fall apart when what you do is not of your free will in the first place? I contend that we will still wake up tomorrow morning and do exactly what we have always done without paying any attention to whether we are acting out of free will or not. Absolutely nothing will change. Such a paradigm shift in our belief system will not change the neuronal circuits in our brains. Your brain will go on doing what it has always done without consulting “you,” despite your new realization that nothing “you” do is freely willed.

  A third reason why people continue to believe in free will, consciousness, and the self is because philosophers have given us a legacy that is not easy to erase. Philosophers have for thousands of years reinforced the pre-existing illusory notions that were indelibly printed on our psyche by evolution. The few philosophers who argued that we do not have free will were readily ignored because their ideas did not conform to what people feel and experience all the time. Well, you may ask, since these illusions are so important to us, why bother changing them? Why try changing what you cannot change? The answer is that our species has a deep desire to want to know the truth about ourselves. It is in our DNA. We can’t help it. Moreover, understanding that we have no free will really is the only way we stand a chance of making our world more humane, as we will later see in this book.

  Philosophy has surrendered to science in so many ways but it still perpetuates the superstition about free will, consciousness, and the self. The inflexibility of Catholicism is a perfect analogy for such philosophers; they will hold on to these ideas for as long as they can. Then they will finally give these ideas up to save embarrassing themselves. Philosophers who support the existence of imaginary entities such as the self and free will are theologians of a sort. The lines between philosophy and science had been blurry for thousands of years, till we discovered the scientific method in the seventeenth century. There have been brilliant philosophers, but unfortunately brilliance is not enough to understand the way nature works. Only the scientific method can figure out the way nature really works. Science used to be called natural philosophy, but no longer. Science has long ago separated itself from philosophy.

  The reason some philosophers still believe in unsubstantiated religious ideas is because the very roots of philosophy, in general, lie in ancient religions. Once upon a time, there were only religions. Then came theologians. They had to intervene because someone had to make sense of the religious beliefs which made no logical sense. Theologians learnt quickly to rationalize their mythologies and started applying reason to almost everything—except, of course, to God. Doubting the existence of God was not an option, because if you did, you might be imprisoned or even killed. Eventually some theologians had the courage to question the existence of God and they broke off from theology. Thus philosophy was born. Philosophy is considered to have been
born in Greece with Thales, who lived off the coast of Asia Minor around 600 BCE. Philosophy served a purpose for the time being, but ultimately proved an unreliable source of knowledge. Philosophers often disagreed with one another and no one knew how to determine who was right and who was wrong. This unfortunate situation lasted for thousands of years until the age of science in the seventeenth century.

  One of these great philosophers of what was known as “the new science” was Rene Descartes, a mathematician in his own right but also the source of a lot of philosophical confusion that would haunt science for hundreds of years. Descartes is famous for declaring, “I think, therefore I am” and for inventing what is now known as Cartesian dualism—the idea that human beings are composed of two substances, mind and body. He may have suspected that one day science would totally transform the world, but he lived too early to witness that power himself. Descartes had to defend thinking itself, in an age unwilling to place much confidence in science.

  Although there is no longer any doubt about the power of science to comprehend the world, science still has many enemies who fear that science is robbing them of things they value highly—like free will, consciousness, the self, and even religion. Some of these opponents of science are fighting to keep the mind safe from what they see as reductionist science. And it isn’t going to be an easy fight for science to win—if winning means convincing the public. After all, people don’t enjoy having their illusions shattered.

  Descartes affirmed that the mind and reasoning are real, but he also knew how fallible human reasoning could be. He said, “I think, therefore I am,” and not “I think, therefore I am right.” But Descartes was not immune from self-deception himself. His own religious intuitions led him astray when he turned from science to philosophy. He did not have access to the knowledge from the brain sciences that we take for granted today. If he were alive today, he would be impressed by the discoveries about the brain by neuroscientists, discoveries that undermine many of the traditional beliefs about the mind. If Descartes were alive today he might say, “I am, therefore I think,” or even, “I have a brain, therefore I think.” And he would certainly say that philosophers must base their ideas on the scientific investigation of the brain, not on bare speculation or on what they would like to be the case. Nature does not care what we think. It reveals itself the way it is. Fortunately our brains are complex enough to gain some insight into the workings of nature.