Free Will (The Conundrum of Choice)
Does Free Will truly exist? Or is there an invisible hand pulling all the strings?
Introduction
In our daily lives, there are seemingly countless extraordinary yet mundane tasks performed by our two-clenched-fist-sized brains. And one of those unvarying operations is the act of making choices.
It happens all the time, whether we are conscious of it, or our brain is secretly subconscious about it, but it’s estimated that an adult human makes about 35,000 decisions (choices) every single day! Moreover, we consider these choices unbounded, free of any confinement or restraints, hence the introduction of the concept of Free Will.
Free will seems like a simple thing to understand in itself, quite self-explanatory even. Just a culmination of two separate words; “Free” and “Will”, meaning our wills are completely free to make whatever decision they please. We are the masters of our own fate, rulers of our own destiny, kings of our own choices! This is what makes us fundamentally unique as a species, the power of choice, the power to decide what path we should move towards. All is our free will and nothing is determined in our lives. Our choices are completely our own to make, the world is our oyster!
This is what free will truly means, right?
Well, I am here to argue that the entire concept of free will as we humanly understand it, might be gravely flawed. It may very well be the most misunderstood thing in our whole human psychology. Because what we merely assume this free will to be, could just be nothing more than an elaborate illusion with a bigger invisible hand in control.
So, is free will only a cruel illusion or an actual act of choice? Or is the true answer something absolutely different than anything we had ever hoped for?
In an attempt to find this out, let us look deeper into each school of thought.
Free Will as an illusion
Let’s take the help of a scenario to understand.
Ding!
The familiar sound alarms your head into alertness. Instantly you look straight towards one side, finding the black-reflective locked screen of your phone blinking, calling you to open it. And unlocking it quickly, you recognize a text from your friend.
“Yesterday was fun!”
You smile and reply, “Absolutely!”, remembering the blast that you recently had at your friend’s home. “Send that one picture which we clicked.”
“Sending.”
Immediately, an image starts self-loading upon this chat. You gauge at the peripherals as it all materializes into a faintly recognizable structure, containing your friend and you combined in broad smiles together. A new fact makes its way into your head.
“Isn’t this t-shirt of yours like a decade old!?” you type back. “I remember you used to wear it every day in college! Don’t you ever buy new clothes?”
“Ha ha! You are right, tho…” the reply pops. “I think it’s finally time for me to buy a new one.”
“Yes I should buy,” instantly you correct the typo. “You* should buy.”
“I am always a mess in deciding on which one. No matter, I’ll send you some links. Do help me in finding the best amongst them.”
“Sure!”
Then rather quickly, your friend soars offline while you start to get busy with the usual tasks. Some links arrive a while after, you open them to check, finding one quite appropriate to your friend’s weird fashion sense, and you ultimately suggest them to buy.
A few hours later when you only wanted a quick peek on your device, wanting to know the time, a notification pops up. “Best picks for you!” followed by certain images of vivid t-shirts.
You plainly ignore.
Considerable moments after, you are in the middle of another work when suddenly, advertisements of familiar t-shirts start bombarding in from every corner of the screen. You take a quick look at one suggestion.
“Not bad,” you consider. “But I only bought one last week!” you realize, ending up ignoring the enticing recommendation yet again.
Next morning the moment you wake up, the first thing to grow in visibility on your phone is more “Best picks for you!”. Disregarding it all and continuing with your daily work, you are found once again browsing through the internet when ads begin to explode left and right. But this time, your eyes fall prey to a new-unseen design.
“This looks great!” and just like that, you click on the enticing and popping photo, heading onto a different place just to know more about this harmless t-shirt. “It’s under discount as well…” you see the cut-mark on the original price followed by a reduced one. “But I don’t want to spend anymore, I can buy it later,” you decide when a warning in red flashes on one side.
Only 1 left in stock!
Your eyes instantly expand. “Oh, no! I might lose it forever if I don’t buy it now.” So naturally, you take the final decision. “I will buy it!”
Successfully placing the order then, you feel quite satisfied with the price and exclusivity that you paid for. “What a great deal!”
It is only sometime after when you are occupied in another work, new images pop up all around. This time they are trousers.
You evidently look at one picture as an inevitable thought enters in your head.
“Not bad…”
Now, let us quickly break down what exactly happened in the above scenario.
It was our friend who actually wanted a new t-shirt, but it was us who ended up buying one as well. We did not want to, moreover, we insisted upon not buying, yet we still did. And by the end of it, we seemed perfectly fine with that decision because we took it through our own free will, didn’t we? It was our free choice!
Let me ask you this, was this actually a conscious decision made by us, or a subconscious decision made entirely by someone else who may have intricate knowledge of our fundamental behavior?
I am afraid to inform you that the answer is definitely the latter in this case. We made one text too many and the data scrappers, like absolute vultures they are, clawed onto and salvaged the remains of our typed words, all combined with cutting edge AI recommendation tools and age-old marketing tactics determined and hijacked our entire decision-making process, exactly predicting what our behavioral pattern would be in a given situation and exploiting it to the maximum. It led us to eventually spend our hard-earned money which we never intended upon spending while believing that we actually did a good thing by doing so. If this isn’t the peak exploitation of our minds, then I do not know what is.
Our free will was as good as non-existent in this case. Moreover, it was used to trick us into believing that we made a certain decision out of freedom, when all of it was merely an illusion of choice.
But could something like free will only be an elaborate illusion?
Let us look at the other side of this coin.
Free Will as a choice
Another simple scenario would demonstrate this well.
Imagine there are 3 identical doors in front of you. Behind one lies the destination you seek, while beyond the other two is something truly horrendous that you don’t really need. Having no clue about which one’s which, what will you choose? Which door?
It could be anyone out of the three.
Some of us may decide upon a particular door while others would go for a different one. But in this scenario, there is no possible way to determine, or even predict, which particular door we will eventually end up choosing. Our behavior in this case cannot be foreseen. This is where we demonstrate having absolute and true free will.
We are free to decide upon any door out of the three, knowing that our chances would always remain 1/3, and no one other than us can possibly know our decision until we actually decide upon it.
Now, let us expand further on this scenario and change some things up.
The three doors of before are no longer completely identical, they are numbered “1”, “2” and “3” from left to right respectively. Would this fairly simple change affect our choices at all?
Maybe our birthday arrives in the 3rd month, so we choose door “3”, or one is our lucky number so we go with “1”. Might be that we consider going right as good fortune, so we choose the right-most door, or maybe the middle is our chance to be correct.
But what happened now? What happened to our unbiased choices of before? Are they still completely random and unpredictable? Or is our free will getting heavily influenced by factors embedded deep within our minds that we are not truly aware of?
To understand the effect of this further, let’s kick things up a notch!
Instead of merely 3 doors, now lay a 100, absolutely identical in every shape, size and color. Behind one lies all of the treasures of the world that we desperately need, while beyond 99 others lay nothing but darkness and defeat. You demonstrate pure free will and decide upon one random door out of a hundred.
But this time, after your initial choice has been made, I go ahead and open 98 of the other 99 doors, showing how they all contain only darkness inside.
Now, there only remain 2 doors out of the 100, one which stands with your initial choice and the other which purposefully remains unopened.
At this point, I give you one extremely crucial decision to make. You can either stay with your original decision or switch to the one which hasn’t yet been opened. Stay or switch, what would you do? Think hard because the future of your own life may depend on it.
What does your gut feeling tell you? Would you stay with the initial choice or switch? What is your brain telling you to do?
Do go through the above scenario again if needed and pause to think upon your final answer.
It is a certain fact that in this particular moment, your mind might be screaming to switch to the other unopened door, just like it would be doing for each of us in the given scenario.
Statistically, almost all of the participants in this example will definitely end up switching their original decision. But why? Why is our gut feeling compelling us so much to switch?
As it turns out, our cheeky little brains are extremely intelligent, being particularly so at finding probabilities even when we consciously do not seem to understand it very well. How so?
At the beginning of this 100-door scenario (which is an extension of the famous Monty Hall Problem), we clearly had a 1/100 chance of success, leaving a whopping 99/100 chance of failure. Our brains instantly realize this fact while choosing initially. But the moment 98 out of the other 99 doors were opened and shown to be of darkness, the 99/100 chance is now attached to just a single door which lays unopened, while our original choice is still attached with merely 1/100. When given the choice to switch, what would we choose? 0.01 probability or 0.99?
It will be 0.99 every time. And while we never consciously calculated our chances to the exact value, our minds subconsciously did, leaving us with a strong gut feeling wanting to switch. Isn’t that incredible!
We had the power of free will throughout, but our own minds still persuaded us to a single deterministic decision. Does this mean our brains secretly control our decisions without us even knowing about it? Do our minds solely trick us into believing that we actually possess free will?
The Answer
Within our vastly peculiar and complex real world, we have always tried to find simple answers to things, yes or no, do or don’t! But seldom the answer actually lies in between the yes and no’s, riddled amidst the gray area that exists. And this is specifically the case with our free will.
Do we possess free will? Absolutely!
Do we actually practice it on a daily basis? Not really…
Because true free will only comes from freedom of choice, but each and every conscious decision that we ever take in our entire lives is always (and always will be) confined by our own surroundings.
There is a sphere of influence that encapsulates us, playing a crucial hand in every decision that we make, whether it be external influence like the people we are surrounded by, our friends and family, what circumstances envelop us, or it be internal influence including our past experiences, people we have been with and our entire brought-up from the beginning.
While calculated influences like subconscious triggers or instincts and gut feelings help us in taking the absolute right decision in any given moment, quite often we can get horribly exploited by one of the countless wrong and manipulative influences out there which take severe control over our decision making (free will) without us being aware of it. How terrifying is that?
Throughout history, the power of influence has exploited the human race to its utter limit, and it has only been growing over time. As artificial intelligence gets more intelligent, making accurate recommendations and getting the precise clicks that it needs, it is also getting better at manipulating our free will for its own good.
All of this takes me back to the words of George Orwell, arguably one of the greatest writers of our generation, and the author of my favorite book 1984, in which he skillfully showed that if strategically and repeatedly we are told that;
“Freedom is Slavery”
We will eventually start believing that freedom is, in fact, equivalent to slavery. Then nobody would want this freedom, would they? We would be happy with Slavery, a thing which we have chosen through our own Freedom of choice; our free will.
What can we do now?
After knowing and experiencing all this, our future does seem bleak. But what can we do now?
There is only one key thing which is required of us in this dire situation, something that we should always rely on before making any conscious decision in our lives, Think!
Whatever we may conclude to do, no matter the influence, we have to have a habit of actually stopping and thinking hard about what truly led us to take this decision.
Moreover, we need to understand that the people we are close to and surround ourselves with, the mere things we encapsulate our lives with, may have a bigger hand in our crucial life decisions than we ever care to realize. Choose them carefully, for they might decide exactly where your life is headed.
Look around you and ask, “Am I making this choice on my own, or is someone else making it for me?” Think!
Was it our conscious act of free will, or were we heavily steered into this direction by unknown malicious forces who only want to manipulate and feed upon our choices?
Because the very last thing we ever want to end up being is mere mindless machines, pawns of simple advertisements and recommendations, infiltrating our heads and turning what is one of the greatest gifts in life; free will, into our own illusion-filled prison. We just cannot simply acknowledge the existence of free will, we have to start practicing it more.
As only then we can transcend from merely existing, to actually living.
Just start thinking!
Free Will is not something that we should take lightly, rather we need to remember its true significance and start to take true control of our lives in the process, for my aim has always been to make this world; our world a better place to live in, one piece of writing at a time.
I hope this elaborate post instills grave thought among my readers and makes one realize the true meaning and importance of Free Will in our individual lives.
I wish for you all to stay safe and have a great life ahead. Please leave your claps and thoughts in the comments below. I would really appreciate it!
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Source:
The original Monty Hall Problem — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lb-6rxZxx0
