Where Does
a Choice Begin?

Before reading the next sentence, try to predict your next thought.

That's the request at the beginning of a video about free will. You might start wondering how to do it, then realise that the wondering was already a thought. Or you might decide to think of an apple and successfully think of one. But where did the decision to do that come from? Keep looking for an earlier decision and you have another thought to account for.

I like this exercise because it makes something familiar feel strange. We say “I thought of something” as though we watched ourselves manufacture it. Often, the first we know of a thought is that it's there.

This is central to Sam Harris's argument against free will. The intentions we feel ownership over emerge from a mind whose starting conditions we never chose. You can trace a decision back to a desire, the desire to an experience, and keep going. At what point do you arrive at someone who made themselves? Harris's argument ↗.

There is a lot I find convincing about that. Then I think about working through a maths problem. I can't say in advance which step will occur to me. I can try it, discover that it leads nowhere and cross it out. I might spend an hour on the problem, leave it alone, and come back with a different approach. Surprise is part of the work. It would be a stretch to conclude from that surprise that doing the work made no difference.

So I get stuck between two intuitions. I can't find the point where I independently author a thought. I also can't make sense of treating all the thinking that follows as irrelevant.

What would count as choosing?

Imagine typing a message while angry. You have a sentence ready that would hurt the other person. You know it would hurt them; that's part of its appeal. Then you read it again and delete it.

Did you choose? In ordinary conversation, I'd say yes. You understood something about what you were about to do and changed your mind. The skeptical reply is that the hesitation had causes too. Your upbringing, your attachment to this person, a memory of the last argument. You didn't step outside your history for a second and take charge of it.

Both descriptions can fit what happened. They disagree about what freedom requires. Many compatibilists locate it in our ability to understand reasons and act on them, without coercion. That capacity could exist even if the world were deterministic. The stronger demand is to be the ultimate source of the decision, or to be able to do otherwise with the entire past and the laws held fixed. Compatibilism ↗.

The video is fairly dismissive of the first view. I wouldn't dismiss it so easily. Signing a document because someone threatens you and signing because you've read it and agree to it are different situations. We need a way to talk about that difference. We also need to take seriously the skeptic's question: how much credit can I claim for being the sort of person who can reason well in the first place?

One thing that confused me about the video's argument is how close it brings causation and predictability together. A deterministic world needn't be predictable to the people inside it. And unpredictability wouldn't give us authorship anyway. If a random event tips my decision one way, it's hard to see how that makes the decision more mine. The free-will debate ↗.

The button-press problem

You've probably heard some version of “your brain decides before you do.” The famous experiment behind that claim is worth looking at more closely.

In 1983, Benjamin Libet and colleagues asked participants to make a simple movement and report when they first felt the intention to move. The researchers recorded a buildup in averaged electrical brain activity before that reported moment. This is the readiness potential. Notice the task: make a movement, then report the timing of an intention. There's already some distance between that and deciding whether to send the message. Libet's study ↗.

There is disagreement about the signal itself. In 2012, Aaron Schurger and colleagues offered a model in which fluctuating neural activity builds towards a threshold for movement. Averaging trials backwards from the movement can produce a gradual rise. On that account, the start of the rise needn't mark a completed decision sitting in the brain, waiting for consciousness to catch up. Schurger's model ↗.

A 2019 study by Uri Maoz and colleagues compared arbitrary choices with deliberate decisions about donations to nonprofits. The familiar readiness potential appeared for the arbitrary choices. For deliberate choices, it was absent or substantially diminished. That's a reason to be careful about generalising from the original task. It doesn't establish that the deliberate decisions were free of prior causes. The donation study ↗.

The phrase “your brain decided before you did” also assumes we've agreed on which part of the process counts as you. Is it only the moment you can report an intention? What about the earlier work of considering the problem? I don't see how we answer those questions simply by finding that something happened in the brain.

Sitting with it

Meditation makes this less abstract. Try sitting in silence and waiting. You may remember something you meant to do, or find yourself halfway through an imaginary conversation before noticing you've started one. Even the thought “I'm getting distracted” turns up without much warning. Looking for a separate watcher behind all this can leave you with the same question again: who is doing the watching, and how did they decide to intervene?

When “Song for Zula” brought me back to Class 12, I wasn't trying to remember that period. I was listening to music. It brought back the feeling that I was being held back, that if I were freer I could do so much more. Looking at it years later, I also wondered how much of that explanation was fair and how much was a way of coping with what I hadn't managed to do.

That is more interesting to me than the idea of a thought appearing from nowhere. The memory had a history. So did my first explanation of it. Now there was a later interpretation to consider, and I couldn't assume that was the final, correct one either.

Buddhist dependent origination gives me a way to approach this without having to find a first author. In the early discourses, it concerns the conditions through which suffering arises and ceases, including the relationships among contact, feeling and craving. Reducing it to “everything is determined” loses much of what the teaching is concerned with. Dependent origination, SN 12.2 ↗.

In the middle of an argument, for example, you could look at what's keeping your anger going. Perhaps you're rehearsing the other person's words, adding a motive they haven't stated, then reacting to that motive. Catching this doesn't guarantee you'll stop. You might be quite attached to your explanation. But it gives you something specific to examine beyond the feeling that you are right.

Why practise, then?

If the thought to examine your anger also has causes, haven't we moved the problem back one step? We have. I don't think advice about pausing can rescue the idea of an uncaused self.

I do think practice matters. Karate is a useful example for me because much of the point is to make a response available before you have time to talk yourself through it. Calling a trained response automatic doesn't make the earlier effort disappear. You practised so that, under pressure, you would have something better available than a flinch.

The conclusion that nothing is worth trying seems to leave trying out of the picture. An explanation can affect a decision. So can putting the phone away, asking someone else what they think, or remembering something you regret. These things belong in any account of what caused the outcome. Harris makes room for effort and deliberation in his own account, too. Harris on choice and effort ↗.

That's enough reason for me to keep practising, even with the philosophical question unresolved. It also makes me cautious about judging someone else's failure to change. Time, support and the chance to try again are distributed very unevenly. “Change your habits” can be reasonable advice and still leave most of a person's difficulty untouched.

For the smaller decisions, I'd start with fairly ordinary things. Write the angry reply somewhere you can't accidentally send it. Leave the book within reach and the phone somewhere else. Ask what evidence would change your mind before you've spent an hour defending your position. None of these requires a theory of consciousness. Whether they help in a particular case is something you can observe.

Other people

I find it easier to explain my own behaviour than someone else's. I can usually produce a history for my impatience. With another person, it's tempting to stop at “that's what they're like.”

Taking the causes of behaviour seriously makes that stopping point less satisfying. It doesn't tell me to trust someone who repeatedly causes harm. It does make me question the extra pleasure of deciding they deserve to suffer for it. Protection, repair and what happens next still need attention. Humiliation often gets added as though it were part of the solution.

There is a temptation to turn this into another flattering description of oneself: I understand causation, therefore I am compassionate. The harder test is what happens when someone does something you can't stand. Can you remain curious about how they got there while being clear about what needs to stop?

I don't know whether I can choose the next thought that arrives. I'd like to get better at noticing when I've accepted one too quickly, especially a thought about another person.