Illustration by Nicole Ruffell @nicoleruffellart

Free will is a long-standing philosophical impasse for one reason: people seem to think they have it. Children age 3 to 5 who see a ball rolling into a box claim it couldn’t have done otherwise. But if someone puts their hand in the box, children assert the person could have acted differently. The former view represents the notion of determinism; the latter the ordinary notion of free will. [1] In fact, the idea of free will undergirds virtually everything of distinctly human importance, including morality, law, politics, religion, intimate relationships, and the like.

The default belief in personal agency rests on two assumptions: firstly, at any given moment, you could have acted otherwise; secondly, you are the conscious source of many of your thoughts and actions. In fact, as a matter of experience, most people identify themselves as the very seat of awareness located behind their eyes – the thinker of thoughts, the reader of these words.  Crucially, this perception of personal will is tantamount to another basic assumption most people have: that they are a separate self.

Nonetheless, most academics begin the free will debate on the presumption that our subjective perception that we have it is undeniable, and so proceed to trade in speculative arguments about whether or not it objectively exists.  From this arises the struggle to reconcile our apparent sense of “libertarian” freedom with the scientifically deterministic model of the universe, whereby everything appears subject to an intricate chain of prior causes. On this account, free will amounts to somehow escaping the shackles of cause-and-effect at the moment you ponder the dessert menu. Those firmly in the ‘determinist’ camp, therefore, often declare free will to be an illusion.

At the level of quantum mechanics, however, sub-atomic particles display entirely random, indeterminate behaviour. Though if the neurons in our brains operate on pure chance, by definition, this contradicts “freedom of will,” meaning neither universal picture permits it.  Not without critics, neuro-imaging experiments seem to exacerbate the issue, demonstrating a cognitive delay in the exact moment a so-called conscious decision is made. [2] 

To a mind that sees itself as individually separate, an honest inquiry into free will inevitably invites a looming sense of nihilism.  Subsequently, endeavours to salvage some semblance of free will are by those who claim it is compatible with determinism. This usually involves refining the general definition of free will to fit a deterministic landscape. [3] It’s important to note, however, that both perspectives depend explicitly on the antecedent idea of a separate “will” for the argument to arise.

But the start-line must be pushed back. Such abstract discourse often fails to touch the apparently felt sense of inner stewardship deemed central to the texture of experience. Now, because the dilemma turns on the prior acceptance that our experience elicits this autonomous quality, surely we must first inquire into the nature of experience itself? In doing so, we must temporarily disregard any theoretical definitions of cause-and-effect and the nature of persons. After all, no-one ever argued for the efficacy of free will as an abstract idea.

Thoughts without a Thinker

When considering how thoughts arise, we notice the central aspects of our supposedly deliberate behaviour are nowhere to be found. “You’ll see that your thoughts simply appear in consciousness, much like my words,” the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris says. “In fact, you no more decide the next thing you think, than you decide the next thing I say.” He adds, “If you can’t decide what your next thought is before it arises, and if you can’t prevent it, where is your freedom of will?” In fact, even permitting a ‘will’ that selects thoughts before they appear would require thinking them before they are thought. There’s an infinite regress here; a persistently elusive first or last step in the decision-making process when trying to distinguish an author. In the event that you appear to override an initial choice, this also implies that you choose to choose what you choose, and so on. “You didn’t pick your parents, genes, or environment into which you were born,” Harris says. “And yet the totality of these facts determines who you are in each moment.” [4]

Bizarrely, choice is commonly associated with freedom. However, to choose is to be inevitably compliant with a dualistic logical framework, implying conformity and imitation – the antithesis of freedom. In this instance, there’s no choice but to choose. Of course, the conventional abstractions of daily life, such as a humdrum choice between coffee or tea, requires a decision. But observing the very mechanics of choice uncovers the erroneous notion of a chooser. Rupert Spira, a teacher of non-dual awareness, continues with the above example: “You pause; then say: “coffee.” Following this sequence, the thought ‘I heard, I decided’ arises. But the ‘I’ is always retrospective – it is never present in the act itself. Thought looks back and imagines there is a chooser between each thought; but it’s not actually there.” He continues, “We have to make a clear distinction between something quite subtle: there is a thought that says ‘I’d prefer coffee over tea.’ That thought contains the choice between two drinks, but there is nobody there choosing that thought. The choice is the thought, of which there is no chooser.” [5]

From the first-personal stance, then, when actually paying attention we find no thinker in the mind apart from thoughts themselves. Besides conceptual analysis, there’s no experiential evidence of the will, either. In fact, this demonstrates something profound: the notion of a chooser (or separate self) is itself an after-thought, which Spira likens to Jean Klein’s analogy of a clown appearing on stage to take a curtain call. [5] Dan Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, echoes this analysis: “We see two tips of the iceberg, the thought and the action, and we draw a connection.” [6]

So, our identifying ourselves as a conscious agent is equivalent to our identifying ourselves with a thought. Of course, if we are asked whether we feel we have free will, by consulting memory, we naturally appeal to the after-thought and therefore claim the truth of the feeling. Yet, as demonstrated, when the structure of the thought process is perceived, we no longer identify as that thought. In such perception, the observer is the observed - there’s no-one standing at the edge of experience, you’re part of the stream.

No Strings Attached

At this point, enslavement to deterministic puppetry, or even fatalism, looks like the only conclusion.  But this is only a consequence of the dualistic outlook, that is, to assume one is independent of the world. “It’s only that there is no freedom for a separate self,” Spira adds. “For awareness, there is infinite freedom. Awareness is not just watching a mechanical system set in place since the beginning of time. From the point of view of awareness, which is the only real point of view, there are infinite possibilities available at every moment, so there is complete freedom.” [5] Ultimately, psychological freedom comes not in being free to choose; rather it is to be free from choice altogether. Awareness itself is choiceless, and true freedom is therefore contradicted by the idea of will.

In fact, the “illusion” of free will is itself symptomatic of confusion. When attending to our cognitive processes, there is no illusion. The superficial idea we have of ourselves as a discerning will comes, in fact, from a lack of attention. When this is seen, what is there left to possess freedom of will, or to be determined? The very concept of determinism breaks down when there is no self or will distinct from a causal power for it to act upon, just as there is no distinct thinker acting upon thoughts. Nothing abides for free will to be an illusion of, since this implies concealment of some veiled truth.

Some philosophers, leaving the issue open-ended, defer the conceptual answer to science in the hope of future empirical clarification. But such clarity is neither waiting to be discovered scientifically, nor is it something spiritually extravagant. It is, as demonstrated, immediately on the surface of consciousness, hidden in plain sight. The very act of this perception is clarification; it is undivided, and therefore non-conceptual.

In seeing this, the entire scope of the philosophical issue has been fundamentally misdirected. An absence of self or will can initially seem depressing, because it diminishes an ego-centric view of life. Contrarily, moral cornerstones like compassion and love are the essence of perceiving oneself as non-separate, which has broad implications for well-being – the bedrock of ethics. Without a frontier between oneself and the world, the importance of decisions becomes, if anything, more important. Here the mind is empty and is not divided by any image or concept of oneself, and so is unconditionally free to act in a world of abstractions, choices and decisions.

Recommended Sources:

[1] Tierney, J. 2011. ‘Do you have Free Will? Yes, it’s the Only Choice.’ NY Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/0...

[2] 2009. 'Neuroscience and Free Will - Libet's  Experiment.' UCL. Available at:

[3] Bragg, M. et al. 2011. In Our Time: Philosophy. BBC Radio 4. Available at: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/...

[4] Harris, S. 2020. ‘Thoughts without a Thinker’. Waking Up. Available at: https://dynamic.wakingup.com/c...

[5] Spira, R. 2014. ‘Do We Choose our Thoughts?’ Available at:

[6] Overbye, D. 2007. ‘Free Will: Now you Have It, Now you Don’t’. NY Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/0...