Free will and politics

Worth a read, especially considering how different fields are converging in on politics recently:

I’m going to have a very hard time condensing what I mean here into a paragraph at the end of a blog post, but roughly: we assign responsibility for desired public outcomes to decision-making units that communicate well internally and have internally shared interests in that outcome. So in general, it makes a lot of sense to make individuals responsible for themselves: modules inside one person’s brain may be distinct but they’re usually in very close communication and generally share a common interest. However, some brain modules don’t communicate well and may conflict with each other. One module in your brain wants to be fit; a different one wants to drink that soda. Taking as a given for the moment that we have a public interest in people being fit, it may make sense to have social institutions work collectively with the modules in everyone’s brains that want to be fit, rather than depending on each individual to resolve the contest between their get-fit module and their drink-soda module. The shift in thinking here isn’t necessarily so different from the Freudian development of the idea of the subconscious mind. But like psychoanalysis, neuroscience’s challenge to the idea that individuals are coherent subjects who make their decisions consciously and can be held responsible for them tends to shift the way one thinks about society and politics. In many cases, it’s not only unfair to hold individuals accountable for the actions of the modules in their heads, it’s also completely counterproductive, while solutions pursued at either a neuropsychological-pharmacological level or at a social level would be the effective ones.  

There is a concept in psychology called instinct blindness. It means we are so attuned to our instincts (including our conscious mind) that it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine how it’s like otherwise. I often imagine what it’s like to be an animal but I can never fully leave my domain of consciousness and enter—let alone imagine being in—another creature’s mind. There is just no way for my mind to leave my body.

This is all pretty obvious but it holds an important implication. If our thinking comes so effortlessly and naturally to us and if we can never see our thinking process from an external perspective, how can we ever be sure if we indeed possess a free will? Not in the free will as in whether or not you want to touch your nose or not, but free will in the sense that every decision we make is made by, well, the part of our conscious mind that we think is making our decisions (the part that told you to touch your nose).

In other words, isn’t it possible that our “rational” mind is telling and lying to us that we are making rational decisions when in fact, most of our decisions are driven by impressions, feelings and inclinations? What if you touched your nose (or whatever action you deem would support free will) because your actual decision-making mind wanted to falsify any impressions of our not possessing free will? After all, touching nose is a small price to pay to keep an illusion of free will.

I’m not saying we are programmed computers that blindly compile and execute existing code; what I’m saying is that our inability to study the true workings of the mind downplays a lot of different factors that go into our decision-making process. It is both ignorant and arrogant to think of us as rational actors who always know and do what’s best for ourselves.