We can’t really act freely unless we can think freely, it seems. But none of us can really choose what we will think next. Thoughts occur to us. I’m not the guy who puts the records in my own jukebox; at best, I merely punch some buttons. But can I even say this much?
It seems to me that most (all?) of our freedom of thought (to the extent we have any) boils down to a sort of veto power that we seem to be able to exercise over those thoughts of which we become conscious. But, again, we don’t choose the specific thoughts that well up from “below” to ripen into consciousness. Instead, we deal with thoughts that happen. To invoke the baseball metaphor, we decide whether or not to swing at a thought, but they are pitched from elsewhere. By whom, then? It’s me, of course, but not a conscious me. And it’s not a me that is bound by skin and skull. It’s a me that constitutes an extended self, [1] given that so many of our thoughts are triggered when our attention is diverted by the “outside” world.
Many people would resist these ideas ferociously. After all, if no one is free, no one is responsible, resulting in a moral and intellectual free fall. Or is this correct? After all, what’s wrong with this starting point: What is, is? Human animals are undeniably tuned so that they truly feel moral pressures, sometimes moral certitude. Those feelings won’t evaporate just because we raise good questions. The proof is that many of us have been raising good questions for millenia.
But let’s go back to whether we really make choices, at least in the way choices in the way that choices are traditionally conceived.
I admit that you chose to think about X, but did you choose to choose that thought? I admit that you sometimes exercise a conscious veto (“I’m not going to do that thing”) but did you consciously decide to exercise that veto? Did you decide to decide? This chain—this non-eternal regress of thoughts—can’t yet be followed down to that place where neurons generate tiny sparks of sentience. Of this place where thought joins meat, where the frisson of electrochemical activity meets proto-thoughts, we know almost nothing. And there’s no good reason to stop to declare total understanding at that juncture because, as difficult as it would be to achieve, that achievement would be scratching the surface. That juncture is only a resting place, because those pulsing cells are each built on a scaffolding of chemistry, and then physics. Further “down,” those infinitesimally small particles smear into effervescent mystery.
Whenever we claim that we know what we mean when we assert “I chose,” this is an assertion based upon great faith. And it’s understandable many would resist this characterization. Person want to be themselves. They want to be more than chemical-electrical activity “down there,” no matter how intricately those tiny parts aggregate into people. We crave that old-fashioned conception of ourselves, no matter how elegantly scientists characterize that symphonic buzzing of microscopic life as a complex adaptive system that can get hungry or fall in love.
The tiny-seeming vetoes we exercise, somehow firmly anchored in soft protoplasm, aggregate into extraordinary eruptions of macroscopic intention and planning, purpose and power. Consider, for example, the many “tiny” vetoes one exercises while web surfing or while dedicating one’s self to a higher principle such as generousity. That those tiny vetoes can sometimes aggregate into any form of coherence is miraculous. Really, how could “I” possibly be trillions of exponentially simpler parts? I can’t think of any fictional story that is more amazing than this one. Truly, it is miraculous.
That’s about all a devout agnostic can say . . .
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