If I don’t have free will, am I really choosing to kill myself?

anonymous asked:

(Suicide tw??) If I don’t have free will, am I really choosing to kill myself?

Free will is a tricky concept. When people (such as science popularizers and neuroscientists) claim that we don’t have free will, what they are saying is that none of our choices are made entirely free from causal constraints. We are not, in other words, the sole, exclusive, and ultimate creators of our decisions. The idea that we can make a choice completely free from any causal influence seems like a pretty silly one to me anyway, though it is often how we intuitively think about free will. It seems obvious if we give it any sort of serious thought that everything that we’ve ever thought or done (or will think or do) was influenced by previous circumstances. How could it possibly be otherwise?? What would a free choice in a vacuum even look like? How could a choice be completely and totally untethered to causal, external, and historical influence? That seems like an incoherent position. If those are the conditions required for free will, then we have set out with unrealistic and inflated standards. 

Nevertheless, the fact that we are not the prime mover of our choices does have implications for our lives. It means that freedom and choice are not what we’ve thought them to be. It means that we are never in complete control. It means that we should alter (or perhaps work to eliminate) our conceptions of blame and punishment, while fostering and enlarging our patience, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness. It means that our capacity to make a choice and to influence our surroundings falls on a continuum. Sometimes we have more choice andmore influence than at other times. A lack of free will (in the sense of free from causal constraints) does not render human animals as causally inert or powerless as a rock or a gust of wind. Our frontal lobes are doing work. We filter things through our metacognitions, we desire and plan and predict and work to make the world look a certain way. Again, we are not wholly responsible for what we desire or how effective we are at accomplishing our goals. But most of us are not powerless (which makes us lucky indeed). 

It’s true that what will happen, will happen. We may have a goal in mind, something as innocuous and seemingly within reach as walking across the street. But as we set out to do so we may have an embolism pop in our brains and our goals are frustrated. We did not choose for this to happen, and this (and relevantly analogous stuff) happens to innumerable people everyday. But we are nonetheless in a position to work and try to accomplish our goals, to make our lives and our world better. We are ultimately ignorant of what the future will hold, and thus it would be epistemic arrogance to assume knowledge of the future. We must act with humility rather than arrogance. We can abandon our need for total control without abandoning the fact that we have any influence or capacity to change the world for the better. It would require twisting ourselves into some logical pretzels to claim that a lack of complete control would justify apathy or lead to absolute impotence. Understanding our constraints is our best hope for working within the world and most effectively changing it. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.’

So, while it does not follow from an absence of free will that we are incapable of making choices, or that we have no influence on the world around us, or that there is no point in trying and working toward our goals, it’s also clear that certain circumstances strip us of choice more than others. And this often includes mental illness. The notion that depression and anxiety and a whole host of other maladies are just simple ‘choices’—as in, ‘we’d feel better if we just chose a different attitude or outlook’—has been extremely harmful. It is arrogant, gaslighting, and false to say that mental illness can just be willed away. We can, however, still work to make mental illness more manageable. We can try. Research shows that resources and support systems can be invaluable for combating the worst symptoms of mental illness. Things like counseling, medication, and a supportive community can be extremely helpful for working toward healing (The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline offers free and confidential support 24/7. As scary and hard as it may be, I encourage people to reach out: 1-800-273-8255). 

Leaning on a completely individualistic, will-power oriented approach to mental illness is our absolute worst and most ineffective strategy. It’s true that no one can guarantee that any of the above resources will help make the world brighter and more tolerable. But it makes it a whole helluva lot more likely. As someone who has struggled with depression for most of my life, I can say, personally, the fight has very much been worth it. I’ve had scary moments where it didn’t exactly feel worth it, but now I am profoundly grateful that my younger self stayed in the fight. I had no idea how great life could be.