The illusion of free will

A friend who has started a meditation practice using the Waking Up App reports that one of his gains has been “dissolution of the illusion of free will.”

This is a big deal because free will is mostly an illusion. Not always. But mostly. And dissolving the illusion is goodness.

Who gives a fuck?

I do, for one.

So should you (I’m speaking to you, Future Self, among others).

Why it matters

Our conditioning constrains what we call our lives. We think we are free agents, but we’re usually just robots doing what we’ve been conditioned to do.

If you imagine that free will exists when it doesn’t you are preserving and promoting an illusion.

By preserving the illusion, you keep yourself and others trapped.

The only way to become free is to see through the illusion of free will and step outside of it.

The only way to help others to become free is to help them step out.

Initial conditions of conditioning

Once upon a time, we were infants.

Our biology conditioned our behavior. It conditioned us to seek pleasure. To avoid discomfort and pain. It conditioned us to mimic others. To repeat what was successful. To vary what we did and choose the best variant.

All mindless. All conditioned.

Our inborn conditioning was designed to help us survive and to expand the scope, complexity, variety, and sophistication of our conditioning.

Our inborn conditioning let our environment—our parents, the people around us, and our culture—further condition us. When we did what the environment wanted, the environment rewarded us. When we did what the environment did not want, the environment did not reward us—or it punished us.

And thus, the environment conditioned us.

Why?

Because their environment had conditioned the people in our environment to condition babies, children, and even other adults.

Why?

To pass on the knowledge that’s helped them survive.

When people condition the people around them, they preserve the knowledge they’ve acquired through their own conditioning and the knowledge they’ve acquired throughout their lives.

Cross-generational and cross-cultural conditioning is a survival strategy.

Conditioned responses

When people do things that others don’t like, they often react with blame, or resentment, or anger or worse. They react more strongly when they know that the offender was aware of the effect they might create—and did it anyway.

Fuck them, anyway!

Why do people do things like that? Because their conditioning leads them to do them.

Why do we react that way? Because our conditioning leads us to react.

Reacting is reasonable, but it’s not reasoned. It’s conditioned.

It’s part of the illusion of free will. We believe that people have a choice in what they do and when they seem to make a bad choice, we choose to respond as though they actually made a choice.

But it’s an illusion.

It’s conditioning, all the way down.

And seeing through the illusion can help us.

Stepping outside of conditioning

Long ago, Gautama Buddha was able to break away from his conditioning. He conditioned others to break from their conditioning. And so on through the ages.

I was conditioned to read books and sometimes follow the suggestions I read in books. After I read the Sam Harris book, “Waking Up”, my conditioning led to me follow his suggestions.

And so my conditioning caused me to step outside my conditioning.

It was not the first time I had stepped out of my conditioning. I had done so several times during my time with Scientology. But it was the first time I had a reliable and repeatable way to step out on my own.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll realize that almost all your moment-to-moment behavior and even your reflective decision making is automatic. Conditioned. Mindless. Robotic.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll want to spend more time apart from your conditioning.

I believe it’s possible for anyone to step outside their conditioning, but I also think that it’s not easy to remain there.

The illusion that we are not conditioned is convincing. A logical argument that almost all of our behavior is conditioned is not enough to penetrate the illusion. It takes effort even to step outside momentarily. And it takes a lot more to step out long enough to change our conditioning.

I believe we can be free of our conditioning only to the degree that we’re aware of our conditioning.

We can free ourselves from reacting to another’s conditioning to the degree that we are aware of our own conditioning—and theirs.

But ironically, we’ve got to condition ourselves to do that.

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