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Sorry couldn't resist the stupid pun. I probably lack free will in the pun department.

Seriously though, I want to try and address the issue of free will. 

It seems like this is a really interesting and confusing story. 

It’s an old story too. One version of the story goes like this. God made us. God knows everything, therefore we can’t possible do anything that contradicts God’s will.  Therefore we should call ourselves Calvinist and wear strange hats. Of course as someone who believes in free-will, I believe the hat part is a choice, but I am getting ahead of myself.

John Calvin wearing his favorite hat

The other version of the story is that God created humans with free-will.  In this version of the story there is a garden, an apple, a snake and Good and Evil. Leaving aside the garden, snake and apple our job in this story is to choose Good and avoid Evil.

Dilemmas of Free Will: Which T-Shirt should I wear?

But what observations can we use to explore these stories? As it turns out, not so many.

So what’s a better story about free-will?

We have started to get some interesting brain-related stories about free-will.  One of these stories is that much of what happens in our brain happens with out us being consciously aware of it or before we become consciously aware of it.

Even more interesting is that our conscious brain likes to make up stories to justify things that its already decided. In split brain patients this is called confabulation 

In non-split brain people this is called rationalization, or sometimes denial  (assuming you are dating a Freudian).

But I digress.

The point is that these stories are testable and can lead to other more interesting stories. I also happen to believe that there is another interesting story about free will, which is a bit more challenging to explore but also relevant.

This is the story told by Viktor Frankel, a psychologist who survived Nazi concentration camps.

Frankel observed inmates at the concentration camp. He was curious why some survived while other died.  His explanation was that the people who survived were the ones who found a way to make meaning of their suffering. Free-will for Frankel was not a question of God or closed systems. It was not even really a question of behavior. Free-will was a choice about how we make sense about what is going on in our lives and how that affects our subjective quality of life as well as how it helps us adapt to the difficulties of life.

This is a very similar story to the one told by the Buddha several thousand years before. According to the Buddha life has a subjective quality of feeling either good (pleasurable, comfortable, warm, fuzzy, happy) or bad (painful, sad, annoying, depressing etc). Our natural tendency is to gravitate towards the good and avoid the bad.

According the Buddha’s story, this is a very powerfully ingrained pattern of behavior that is hard to avoid. It is also according to his story a pattern that causes us more suffering and unhappiness.

To the Buddha, free will is about paying very close attention to the thoughts and feelings that are involved in our patterns of behavior.  In paying very close attention we can begin to understand many of our conditioned involuntary responses to certain things. Once we understand them, we have some freedom to act differently. This for the Buddha is free will.

I find both of the Buddha’s story and Frankel’s story useful in my own life.  Both help to explain large parts of my subjective experience around how and why I make certain choices. Is that free-will?  I am not sure. But its useful.