- seCtIon tHRee: BoDY AnD WoRLD
There are many arguments here, and little agreement, except perhaps for a wide-
spread rejection of free will as a magical or supernatural force. If free will exists, it
is certainly not magic. The question is, what other possibilities are there? If we add
chance or randomness, as modern physics does, we get back to the Greek philos-
opher Democritus, who is reputed to have said that ‘everything in the universe is
the fruit of chance and necessity’. And it is not chance or randomness that believers
in free will want, but some way in which their own efforts really make a difference.
[S]cience itself will teach man [. . .] that he does not have and, in
fact, has never really had any caprice or will of his own, and that
he himself is something like a piano key or the stop of an organ,
and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so
that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of
itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover
these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his
actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human
actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws,
mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered
in a calendar; or, better still, there would be published certain
edifying works, comparable to today’s encyclopaedic lexicons, in
which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that
there will be no more deeds or adventures in the world.
(Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground [Записки из
подполья], 1864, our translation)
This is where the connections with self and consciousness come in, for we feel as
though ‘I’ am the one who acts; ‘I’ am the one who has free will; ‘I’ am the one who
consciously decided to spring out of bed early this morning. When the chosen
action then happens, it seems as though my conscious thought was responsible.
Indeed, it seems that without the conscious thought I would not have done what
I did, and that I consciously caused the action by deciding to do it. The question
is: does consciousness really play a role in decision-making and choice? Is this
sense of conscious agency justified or illusory? We began to tackle this question
in Chapter 8 when trying to distinguish conscious from unconscious action, and
considered theories that do, and do not, give a causal role to consciousness. Here
we will explore how consciousness relates more generally to our sense of per-
sonal agency and free will.
As ever, William James got to the heart of the matter when he said:
the whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our
voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really being
decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling
off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago. This appearance,
which makes life and history tingle with such a tragic zest, may not be an
illusion.
(James, 1890, i, p. 453)
