Freedom from "Free Will"

The philosophy makeover that made my life better

Border collies believe in free will.

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I want to tell you about one of the most liberating philosophical shifts in my life: coming to see “free will” as an illusion.

Before that shift, I tended to get tangled up in complex debates about free will (with both books and people, in both religious and non-religious settings).

Then I read Sam Harris’s small but powerful book Free Will—and finally, the tangles began to clear.

And, even better, so did thickets of anxiety and shame inside me.

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Stories and Science

We feel like we have free will. We feel ourselves making choices, acting on them, and seeing their consequences.

We also feel a sense of identity—a self—an ego—a consciousness—a “me.”

But there’s no physically findable thing that is the “self” or the “free will.”

Our brains, adapted for survival, construct stories of self and of personal agency to help us navigate the world. But believing that those stories are literally true requires believing in what some have called a “ghost in the machine”—a separate non-physical entity (like a “spirit” or “soul”) inside our physical bodies. And of course, we have no evidence for such a thing, despite the claims of religion and pseudoscience.

What actual science shows is that when it comes to our feeling of making decisions, there’s way more going on in the vast arcs of reality and time (see: physics) and way more going on in the intricacies of our brains and bodies (see: neuroscience) than what we subjectively, consciously experience as a decision.

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Little Mind and Big Mind

My egocentric little-mind thinks that I am personally on the hook for getting things right, keeping things together, figuring out the answers, achieving my goals, and so on. Enter anxiety, stress, frustration, shame, blame, ambition, discouragement—and so on.

But in the big-mind view, what’s going to happen will happen anyway, without my consciously willing it to happen and then making it happen. So I can relax as I walk along my path, following where my conditions and inclinations lead.

(Little mind and big mind are concepts from Zen philosophy, which has also lent quite a lot to my current perspective.)

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Less Suffering, Please

Some people seem to think that believing in free will is necessary to prevent laziness and immorality. (This is akin to the viewpoint that we need religion to keep us moral.) That looks to me like more of “little mind” thinking.

The “big mind” model of free will and self as illusions implies that we operate just as we would anyway—we still passionately pursue our goals (or not) and uphold our values (or not)—but we can do so without suffering from the stress that comes from thinking we’re in control.

And, bonus: this “big mind” model leads to less suffering not only inside us, but also in the world around us—because we view others’ behavior with compassion instead of blame.

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Outsmarting My Brain

I’m not saying it’s all enlightened equanimity for me now. I’m still a human meat-creature with messy feelings and an egocentric bias.

But, being human, I have the benefits of a large cerebral cortex—so I can sometimes outsmart my animal brain and take a larger view of things. Then I get to experience benefits like equanimity!

So, I Write about This a Lot

I work hard to regularly practice this “big-mind” view, as you’ll see if you take a look through my old poems here (imported from my old blog), especially the “Alphabet Meditation Verses.”

In fact, part of why I’m writing this post is because these concepts tend to end up in a lot of my poems and songs, and I want to provide some context for that.

“I’m Just a Droplet of Awareness”

For example, my song “Droplet” is specifically about this liberation from free-will-based thinking. (My family and friends say it’s my best song, and it’s certainly my favorite.) I lean on it pretty heavily to help myself practice “big mind” thinking.

So I want to share the lyrics again here:

It appears to my little mind
that I make things happen all the time.
Every choice that I make carries brutal weight
to save or to sink—but I’m starting to think

that life is far bigger than what I know,
with complex connections in constant flow.
It’s like a great river going where it will go,
and the drop that is me can only follow.

So there’s no truth to shame or blame;
they are only tools in ego’s game.
It may fail to console, but I’m not in control;
and the saner I’ll be the sooner I see… (chorus)

So set down these burdens and yield to the flow:
as the river goes on, just breathe and know
that I’m not what happens; I’m not even a “me.”
I’m just a droplet of awareness in the river of reality.

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Connections

Does this model make sense to you, and do you share my views? If not, would you like to share more about your own viewpoint, or some other point of connection (or disconnection) with what I’ve written here? I welcome any discussion.

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