Free will. It’s something we don’t usually spend our waking moments pondering, but it’s implications affect everything about us and all that we do. On its face, the questions asked when considering whether “free will” exists seem obvious, to the point of being insulting: “Do you have the ability to make your own decisions, or is some bigger force at work, guiding us all along a predetermined path? When you’re at a figurative (or literal) fork in the road, is it really ‘you’ that chooses which road to take, or are all the consequences of our choices currently hidden behind a metaphorical ‘black curtain’, which constantly pulls back to reveal the latest results of outcomes that were already set in stone?”
Since we are all intimately familiar with the decision-making processes in our own minds, I suspect most people naturally favour the theory that “Yes, we most certainly do have free will, we aren’t all automatons constantly playing out the scenes of some cosmic script which we have no control over.” Furthermore, trashing this theory means accepting that we have no power over our lives. Power is something we all crave, and admitting our complete lack of it would not only be upsetting, it would shove the average person off the cliff of existential confidence. Indeed, I bet abandoning this theory would test the limits of many people’s sanity.
On the other hand, we often accept very limited concessions on this idea. Let’s say you’re groggy one morning because you wake up to find that you’ve run out of instant coffee. This crisis eats into your time, so you rush to work caffeine-free and ignoring your dazed mind, determined to be as productive as normal. You soon notice that no matter how hard you try, your mind can’t focus as per usual. At this rate, your workload will probably only be piled higher by the end of the day. Defeated, you take an early break and trudge out to Starbucks to perk your brain up. Right after, your mind sharpens into focus, and you know you’re ready.
It may seem like a small detail, but that moment there when you couldn’t get your mind to cooperate on your own leads to all these deep questions.
We are biological beings, being only a few percentage points away from the DNA of our ape cousins. Our bodies demand constant maintenance and don’t cooperate as easily when we ignore them. As science has matured, we’ve discovered more and more of how these biological impulses and chemical interactions in our bodies affect the way our minds work. What if every thought and feeling we’ve ever had is just a big combination of all that? What if they always steer us around, leaving us as helpless bystanders to the whims of whatever it is inside us that directs our lives? Every time you try to call up a memory, you rely on this complex soup of ingredients in your head to faithfully pull it up for you. If you think about it, you accept the powerlessness you’re stuck with over this habit you have with your mind. If it recalls something incorrectly, you can see how you’d likely react and make decisions based on this new, flawed memory in your mind.
These questions have BIG implications, from the way we treat criminals (“It wasn’t my fault I did the crime, your honour, my biological makeup predestined me to do it!”) to the point of living at all (“If we’re observers merely watching what our bodies do, what’s the value of my existence?”).
For me, the movie Arrival charged head-on into these questions in a way that I’d never seen from Hollywood before, being a truly unforgettable film that gave my curious mind weeks of thoughts and questions to feast on. I’ve realized that while we may never know the ultimate question of whether or not we have free will, we most certainly can see that we have the illusion of it (“Every morning when we wake up, it sure looks like we can decide what we wanna do with ourselves for the day”). Since we have no time machines that can jump to the future and see what decisions we end up making, everything seems like it’s up in the air, waiting for our minds to settle on a course of action. The black curtain remains firmly shut to sneak peeks, only smoothly rolling back with the pace of time. To ward off existential crises, that’s gotta be good enough for me.
Jack Hopkins 