Chapter
Nine
Agency and free will
Luckily, says Claxton, this is untrue because I never was
split into controller and controlled, even if the struggle
and self-recrimination were real enough. ‘So the dreaded
mayhem does not happen. I do not take up wholesale
rape and pillage and knocking down old ladies just for fun’
(p. 69). Instead guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-doubt,
fear of failure, and much anxiety fall away, and contrary to
expectation I become a better neighbour.
Harris has a similar reaction.
Speaking from personal experience, I think that losing
the sense of free will has only improved my ethics – by
increasing my feelings of compassion and forgiveness,
and diminishing my sense of entitlement to the fruits
of my own good luck.
(2012, p. 45)If they are right, there is no need to protect anyone from
anything, and we can welcome the evidence whether it
suggests that free will is a genuine force or an illusion.
If you suspect that free will is an illusion, what can you do
about it? You can ignore the feeling and hope it will go
away. You can act ‘as if ’ you had free will. Or you can stop
believing in it. If you choose the third option, you can be
sure that everything about your conscious experience will
change.
FIGURE 9.10 • Remember that an illusion is not
something that does not exist
but something that is not what it
seems. In this visual illusion the
upper monster seems far bigger
and more frightening than the
lower monster. In fact they are
identical. Is consciousness what it
seems to be? Is free will?Dennett, D. C. (1991). Time and experience
[excerpt]. In D. C. Dennett, Consciousness explained
(pp. 153–162). London: Little, Brown.Dennett’s criticism of Libet’s notion of backwards refer-
ral as a Stalinesque method for establishing the time of
consciousness (see Chapter 6).READING