Programmed to Be Free

In today's New York Times Science Times Dennis Overbye takes up the question those of us who bother to make new year's resolutions face: do I have the willpower to fulfill any of the goals I set for myself this year? The real question, Overbye suggests, is determining whether or not we have free will at all. Overbye reviews the current state of scientific research and concludes, "A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control."

Jean-Paul Sartre would probably do a lot of fist pounding in response to the bad faith of using the physical sciences to rationalize one's ethical choices. Yet Overbye paints a more nuanced picture of the state of our free wills. Science has shown that the means by which we make decisions are neither entirely random or determined. They're somehow magical, or at least we experience them that way. The explanation for the magic of human choice Overbye comes up with sounds vaguely Freudian. He cites Daniel C. Dennett who says we consciously control which urges we quash, and which ones we let fly, much like Freud said the ego acts as a gatekeeper. Our unconscious is structured like a computer program, albeit one of mind-boggling complexity. Your laptop has a set of predetermined instructions, but, as any close reader of Microsoft user interfaces can attest, the operating system has only an imperfect understanding of what it's doing at any given moment. The interaction between data, input, and software code constitutes the laptop's unconscious. The computer can't tell you how long it will take to boot up until it runs through all the computations. Similarly, we can't fully understand ourselves, so even though we may be fated by our genes (or whatever) to make a certain choice, the meaning of that choice can't be known until we act through it. And, if I understand the physicalist position correctly, we're free to construct the person who recognizes these choices as his or her own.

So we may be preprogrammed to make certain choices, but the math is so complicated no one will be able to sort it out.  One such elaborate math problem we experience is narrative. Narratives are both deterministic and contingent, especially genre narratives. In Time and Narrative Paul Ricœur argues that stories structure our experience of time. We know how the story begins, and we have a good idea of how it will end, but we still have to experience the story to know what it means. All the apparently random details of life get woven into coherence; its determination experienced as contingency. We know Othello is going to drive a knife into his heart at the end, but we still await each development in the plot as if it's happening for the first time.