The Locus of Human Free Will

In order to validate free will it is helpful to also identify the specific locus–the specific area–over which man has freedom. As a pre-requisite observation: man’s freedom is limited, like everything else, he cannot choose to do whatever he wants under whatever circumstances he finds himself in out of some miracle—which is the libertarian free will or “indeterminist” viewpoint. Philosophy can properly identify what you have direct control over, what you have indirect control over, and what you have no control over.

To concretise this idea, something you have no control over is whether the sun will still shine tomorrow (assuming you don’t have a sun-controlling device). Something you have indirect control over, to borrow an example from Onkar Ghate,¹ is whether you will learn Spanish—if you want to be able to speak Spanish you can’t just decide to start being able to speak it, but you can start implementing certain courses of action that will lead you towards this goal. Finally, something you have direct control over would be whether you keep reading this article.

This final level of control, the direct control, can be broken down into two fundamental choices:

1. the primary choice to focus or drift, and;
2. the secondary choice to think or evade.

Everything you have direct control over is caused by which primary choice you make, and then which potential² secondary choice you make. So, perhaps a man is making a painting—he would have direct control over every brush stroke he makes, but, the brush strokes he is making would be caused by his prior choices. Namely, if he is a rational man who has engaged in habitual thought through his entire life, then the philosophy he is concretising will be a rational one, thus he will be making a rational painting. This painting would not consist of random or arbitrary brush strokes, his subject will not be random, and his depiction will not be random—he will be depicting what is truly metaphysically essential and will be doing so through the means of a proper epistemology. On the other hand, if the man is a chronic evader then his paintings will embody nothing, or at least nothing important, and they may well be barely comprehensible to the eye (think of just about any painting held up in a gallery today).

What is meant by this “tertiary” choice being caused by the primary and secondary choices, is that it is not the fulcrum, or the irreducible primary, of human choice. The theory of free-will does not consist just of you having a choice over how you will paint that painting—that choice can be broken down into more fundamental units. So, the primary locus of choice is not over which flavour of ice cream you will pick, it is rather the choice of how you will make that decision.

To relate to the above example: more fundamentally than the choice over how to paint the painting is the choice of how you will decide how make that choice. Will you decide to do so through attaching your consciousness to reality and making decisions on that basis, or by detaching your consciousness from reality and retreating into your mind? In short, the commonplace examples of whether you have free-will by looking at whether you can choose which flavour of ice cream to get are looking in the wrong place for the root-level choice—such a direct choice comes from somewhere, namely from your prior cognition, the choice of how to make that choice.

A man’s power of choice in a thought process is to maintain the tie between his mind and reality, or not to do so. This means: to concentrate on a question, on everything he knows to be relevant to it, and to keep this content clear and operative by a continuous, conscientious directing of his full attention—or to let some or all of the data lapse into fog, to let past knowledge fade, new evidence blur, methodological standards relax, and then drift to groundless conclusions at the mercy of random material fed by his subconscious.

If a man chooses the reality orientation, then the higher-level choices he makes will be shaped by causal factors relevant to a process of cognition. If he does not choose the reality orientation, then the flow of his mental contents will be shaped by a different kind of cause. In either case, there will be a reason that explains the steps of his mental course. But this does not imply determinism, because the essence of his freedom remains inviolable. That essence lies in the issue: what kind of reason moves a man? Has he chosen the reality orientation or its opposite? sustained full focus or self-made blindness?³