For a while, we changed the name of our meetup in order to attract more free will believers.
This is the 12th in a series on how the free will belief that our world’s top thinkers, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein each refuted is used by conservatives to attack LGBTs, the over-weight, the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts, and the rest of us. Let’s pull this hateful myth out from under the Republican Party. For more details, see the series’ first post: How to dismantle the GOP by debunking the belief in free will.
As with Darwin’s evolution, it will take some time for us to accept this. For now, I’ll focus less on political implications, and more on why free will simply doesn’t exist. I’ve produced and hosted over 200 local cable TV episodes on this. Presenting them here will allow our free will believers to understand why they're wrong, at the same time they have fun, gleefully focusing on, and mocking my amateurish presentations. So, snark away free willers, but if you find yourselves seeing why we don’t have a free will, don’t blame me ( :
Transcript:
Understanding that our wills and our reality are causal represents a new stage of civilization. It’s hard to think of a comparable shift in our world. We went from thinking that our world was flat to understanding that our planet Earth is an orb. We went from seeing ourselves as the center of the solar system to understanding that we are three planets out from that center. But while these understandings might help with our astronomical model of reality, and help us travel to the moon and back, they don’t really affect our personal day-to-day lives and our lives as a civilization. As we understand that free will is an illusion, and that causality, or cause and effect, is what determines everything, we begin to understand that it’s a paradigm shift in our consciousness that is happening in our overcoming this illusion of free will. What will it mean to our world? Naturally, we can only predict, because, not having a free will, we can’t compel ourselves, or the universe, to unfold in any certain way. Truth is generally a better guide to what we do, and how we do what we do, than illusion. I predict that by our world overcoming this illusion of free will, we’re going to create a much more pleasant, intelligent, and compassionate world. When we attribute free will to others and to ourselves, we will tend to blame others and ourselves for our misgiving – for what we do wrong. When we have a causal will perspective, we understand that we’re doing these things not because we choose, but because the causal past has compelled us to do them. Correctly perceiving our wills as causal can lead to greater compassion and non-judgment.
Let’s now take a look at how this correct understanding of human will effects our global civilization. Geo-political conflict between nations is, in large part, based on our illusion of free will. We say to ourselves “people from other countries have a free will, and they are doing something we consider threatening, so we are going to war with them.” Our other option is for us to say to ourselves “alright, those other countries may be doing what we consider threatening, and not in our best interest, but wait a minute. The actions of those people from that country – the leaders, the government, and the citizens – are completely compelled. They don’t have a free will.” From this perspective, punishing an entire country for what no one in that country could have done any other way doesn’t make sense. I have every hope and expectation that our new causal reality era will bring out the best in us.
This book is about the illusion of free will, and the reality of causal will, but we should remember that causality is not limited to human will. Causality controls everything. Consider the state of the universe at this very moment in time. The state of the universe at the immediately prior moment in time was what gave rise to it, and caused it to be. The state of the universe at each subsequent moment is completely determined by its state at the preceding moment. That is the most objective, all-encompassing, universal description of causality possible. It relates to the entire universe, state by state and moment by moment. What we find is that we don’t have free wills. We have causal wills because reality isn’t free; reality is causal. Reality can’t decide to be one way or another. It goes by certain laws and the causal progression of events. It’s important to realize that causality extends beyond the human will to all of reality. Our world is very much like a movie. I don’t know what you are doing right now besides reading this, but whatever it is, and whatever you did in the past, and what you will do in the future, is completely determined. It is not up to you, and that is amazing.
What does this mean? It means that the world is so much more “wonderful” than we have believed it to be. If we’ve been so completely deluded about the nature of why we do what we do, and about causality as it relates to human will, and we come to understand that our wills are causal – that all is governed by cause and effect – this new understanding changes everything. It makes reality far more wonderful than it is under the free will perspective. The free will perspective just confuses everyone, because it doesn’t make sense. Our whole lives are based on a premise that is wrong. Of course, we’re not to blame for this. We didn’t choose to be deluded in this way. We didn’t choose to believe we have a free will. That perspective was equally compelled. The universe has compelled us to believe that a delusion is reality, and it seems that the universe is now compelling us to understand that free will is not the reality; causal will is. I came to this understanding several decades ago, and it’s a fascinating realization. To contemplate that everything is a movie, and that we’re just actors, may have an element of unpleasantness, but that unpleasantness just comes from our ego. We have a part of ourselves that says “I want to take credit for what I do. I want it to be up to me.” So, we give that up. We instead see that there is no individual I; there is a one. There is one universe, and one reality that proceeds from moment to moment in a causal manner. That is what compels us to do everything we do. It’s amazing that we have for at least two millennia fallen prey to this illusion of free will.
One benefit that will likely result from our overcoming this illusion is that the world will become more intelligent, and routinely exercise greater intelligence. Seeing human will as free is not intelligent. There is absolutely no credible evidence that we have a free will, and there is conclusive, irrefutable evidence that our wills are causal. Our world needs to change. Just considering global warming and the 2008 global economic meltdown, we need to make great changes. As we understand that our wills are causal rather than free, these changes will come about much more quickly and intelligently. Overcoming the illusion of free will appears to be a great gift to humanity, and to the other forms of life with whom we share this Earth.
Many people who have held the belief in free will are going to be challenged. It’s a challenge on the scale of creationism vs. evolution. Many of us still believe that there was and Adam and Eve, and that Eve was created from the rib of Adam. Scientifically, we don’t believe that any more, but many people who once believed that now understand the overwhelming evidence against such a creation story, and in favor of evolution. Overcoming the illusion of free will actually represents a much more profound challenge because it lies at the heart of who we are. We have the choice of seeing ourselves as gods who are able to think whatever we want at any time, or from the more humbling perspective that we are subjects. We’re like pawns on a chessboard. We’re doing the will of God, or the causal past. That’s huge. We’re going from the guiding philosophy that we have free will to the guiding philosophy that everything is causal; everything is a movie, and we’re just playing out our roles. It’s absolutely amazing.
As we go through our exploration, we’ll get into all of this in greater detail. We’re going to bring physics, neuroscience, and psychology, into this. There are various ways to understand why free will is impossible, and why both our reality and our human will must be causal, and we’ll go through them. For now, let’s contemplate what this means to us as a civilization and as a humanity. I can’t think of a question like this that has confronted humanity in the past. There was the Scopes Monkey trial decades ago about creationism vs. evolution, and that caught the attention of the international media. But, years later, that issue is rarely talked about. This question of human will is capturing our attention as one of the fundamental questions and issues of our time. I’m not going to say it is a valid question, because the evidence against free will is so solid and compelling that it would not be truthful to present the matter as unresolved, at least objectively. In other words, if our world was debating between whether two plus two equals four, or two plus two equals five, that’s not much of a debate. But to many people, the truth about our human wills will be a revelation. It is incumbent upon those of us who understand the causal nature of our will to help others understand this better. We should mitigate the fears people may have, and address people’s misgivings about giving up their presumed god-like power to believe and think, and feel, what they want, regardless of anything.
Let’s talk about criminal justice. This is extremely important. Anyone who has ever been imprisoned, or who is in jail or prison now, is in an important sense being punished wrongly. If somebody forced you to do something, and I mean absolutely forced you to the extent that you had no choice in the matter, is it morally right and just for you to be punished for this act that you absolutely had no choice but to do? Our jails and prisons are filled with people who are suffering that fate. This is, of course, not our fault, because we don’t have the free will to have overcome the illusion of free will, and treated them more compassionately and intelligently in the past. But, it’s something we should recognize. Some of us will immediately ask, “Are you suggesting we give up laws and rules and order?” No, I’m not suggesting that. I’m asking, “How would you like to be in jail or prison being punished for something you were absolutely compelled to do?” What’s the answer? Naturally, part of it is that we, as a people, have to be protected from each other and ourselves. If somebody is going around doing what is hurtful to themselves or others, certainly we need to take steps to prevent that kind of behavior. The greatest good for the greatest number is a philosophy we cherish, and that forms the basis of our democracies. By understanding that we don’t have a free will, we can catch those of us who would eventually turn to crime in their later years when they are very young, and condition them to not go that route.
We now have many people in jail and prison for what they had no choice but to do. Transcending the illusion of free will is about how we are going to treat them. It seems quite wrong to punish them in retribution. There is the issue of punishment as a deterrent. Punishment will, in many cases, prevent others from committing crimes, but my guess is that as we understand that our wills are causal and not free, we will perhaps separate those of us who need to be separated from society for whatever reason, for their own sake as well as for the sake of the rest of us, but we’ll do it without that sense of retribution. We’ll do it without judgment or blame. Two hundred years ago in the United States, our criminal justice system was more about penitence. That’s why our prisons were called penitentiaries and reformatories. Criminal justice back then was more about showing a person the error of their ways, but not through punishment as much as through relatively benign correction. We’ve gone from that kind of system to one that punishes according to the notion of “just deserts.” They did something evil, which makes them evil, so we’re just in making them suffer.
God willing, once we are able to reform our criminal justice system, those of us who would otherwise resort to crimes that hurt our society and ourselves would probably be far less likely to do so. Criminals often commit their crimes as a direct result of ascribing free will to another person. They say “this person freely hurt me, so I’m going to hurt them back.” Our criminal justice system is an area of civilization and society that this truth of our causal will relates to very directly from a moral perspective, and also from the perspective of alleviating unnecessary suffering. Our awakening to the reality that our world and our human will is causal is revolutionary. We will create what in many ways will amount to a brand new world. I don’t know how long this might take, and to be completely honest, I don’t know if it will happen. If we don’t have free wills, we can’t know for sure whether the causal past will lead us to understand that it, and not us, is really responsible for everything. But, from all of the evidence – our education, our development as a species, our becoming more intelligent and evolved – it seems this is clearly the way we are going. We’re moving into an era where we will all very likely understand all of this. Some talk about the dumbing down of America – how somehow we’ve become stupid. The nature of human will is the kind of issue and question that can reawaken our intellect, and thereby help us all.
