If we care to understand human potential, envision our ideal lives and our ideal world and focus on what makes us feel our lives are meaningful and worthwhile, would it be helpful to understand how we might begin to observe our own behavior – to awaken as it were from the torpid illusion of our egos, and focus first on how we might discover our purpose in life?

Finding purpose in life is not a passé topic. On the contrary, it seems timeless and everywhere apparent. If life be precious, at least to each person, if not to the masses in a more universal sense, then it seems logical to associate such worth to some purpose – to some artifact of corporeal existence that completes the sentence, “My life is worthwhile because….”

No doubt, each person will fill in that sentence to their own liking, which is to admit that free will is somehow connected to living a purposeful life. Whether sinner or saint, atheist or parishioner: who would not agree that we prefer to choose our own fate, our own faith or lack thereof, or even our own fiction. Such choice is commonly understood as the exercise of free will. It can’t be substantiated except by common sense; but I will assert that free will is a necessary variable in the overall equation of what it means to live a meaningful life.

But, what is free will? I am someone who has taken a rather unpopular position in asserting that free will has little to do with what we experience and more to do with how we experience events in our lives. How we experience events, and that choice only, repeated over and over, from one conscious moment to the next, determines what we will experience (which is necessarily, what actually happens – but, that’s another essay altogether). At a superficial level, mine is a reductionist approach limiting free will to a choice between attitudes only. It’s bad enough that the nature of all attitudes is that they are necessarily conceptual constructs only. Worse still, the attitudes that I present are fundamentally opposed, but in such a way that it will take a significant explanation to convey.

For those whose curiosity may be aroused by such an introduction, what follows is a rather bottom-up analysis of free will that I believe will support at least a renewed effort by those interested in such things, to reexamine their own value systems, the choices they make, and why they make them. Ultimately, it is hoped that the example of my reasoning will help the reader discover something that adds value to the purpose they may find in their own lives.

A Construct for Free Will

Our exercise of free will is limited by our lack of understanding of what free will actually implies.

Let’s try to improve our understanding of free will so that it may better serve us.

Consider first that a computer program that relies upon any heuristic other than randomness is predictable, and therefore, not free to assert its own will, but forever relies upon the will of the program’s designer.

It is certain that many things influence our own behaviors, and to assert that we behave without regard to those influences is to assume that objects, which cause turbulence within a river, do not over time affect its course, its boundaries and the speed at which it flows.

Must we be free of such influences and behave in a purely random fashion in order to assert our free will?

Nonsense! If we can’t predict our behavior, how can we assert any control over it? Is an act of free will an unconscious intention resulting in action that we subsequently call action taken by our own choice, but only because we see it so by the light of reason found in hindsight? Is free will no more than a shadow of chance?

Perhaps learning how to observe our own behavior and the intentions that give rise to that behavior will alter our course, awaken us fully to the awareness of our intent. That is the premise is it not? If not upon intentionality, upon what basis might we erect the construct of free will?

The Observer Effect

But that poses a new challenge – the observer effect is such that our observation of our behavior itself alters our behavior as surely as observing a photon alters its position. So how can we predict what is changing as we predict it?

Maybe that should be our only aspiration. To be a single photon; a particle of light bouncing about in what appears to dance randomly throughout eternity, aware only that our choice is to believe that we are where we are and that the only thing that might put us “off course” as it were, is our self-awareness, our fascination with what, not why, we are here.

That resonates well with much of fashionably Eastern and Western philosophy.
A priori, intent precedes action, regardless of the origin of that intent. If we can’t know our intention until after we act, then free will is illusion.

That is hardly the construct for free will we seek. But how to observe, interact with, influence our intent, must serve fully as evidence of free will or free will can not exist.

Intentionality

Some would argue that intentionality refers to the act of pondering, “What am I going to do next?” It is a uniquely human characteristic to plan: to peer into the probable state of the universe a moment from now, and grasping what alternative actions provoke the most desirable new states, to behave in ways according to our chosen outcome. Might intentionality be the operative aspect of free will?

When does intent actually occur? Is it a temporal occurrence at all? Does intent exist in time and space? Must intent be, like action, subject to all of the other natural law of our comprehensible universe? Or is intent an emergent property of some higher level physical, concrete, albeit, organically originating process?

If that is the case, how can we possibly predict an intention? That is a quandary isn’t it? It is regression ad infinitum into intending intent.

But if we can’t control, which is to say, anticipate and control our intentionality, our will is powerless over our intention and thus, something besides our will is ultimately governing our intentionality, ergo we may roll the dice, but we can’t pick the number we want.

Manifest Intention

But let’s go back to our analogy of the observer effect. We could stipulate that intentionality exists if and only if we are observing it. With that stipulation, we are then free to redefine “free will” as the observation of intention as manifest by consciousness. Or in other words, the mere act of observing intention creates free will.

By corollary, we could argue further that our most likely behavior is that which follows from whatever intention, among several possible, that we perceive to be most necessary to our preservation of self, however that may be defined.

That certainly solves our dilemma, providing a step into a construct of “free will” that allows us to observe whatever implications it might hold.

Invoking Free Will

Firstly, we note that our invocation of free will by observing a single intention or various and competing intentions introduces something new into the state of the universe every moment we observe our intentions. Without wanting to risk unnecessary complexity, let it suffice that we are positing only that consciousness has some bearing on reality as we know it, and that without consciousness, we could not observe our intentions, or anything else for that matter.

Secondly, we note only two possible sources for the substance of our conscious projections of future states that that arise from the observation of our intentions that form the substrate of behavior.

The Substance of Free Will

The first source is whatever cognitive functions allow sensory data to be recalled to form mental images, albeit fragments of the potential “world” states where such states would from our point of view, however flawed, be influenced more or less by our actions. We will call this simply “recognition”, which is to say we are recreating an earlier cognitive experience.

By way of clear example, we might imagine the difference between an infant under attack by a hungry tiger as opposed to a savvy tiger hunter under similar threat. The former might be startled by the noise, instinctively cry and cower, but would not have the “experience” with tigers to summon mental images of likely outcomes resulting from possible behaviors. The latter might evaluate, albeit quickly, whether running or throwing a spear might be most advantageous. Both infant and hunter may well perceive the threat, but only one might invoke free will to deal with it. For the hunter, two choices are manifest from two intentions. One intention is to escape the threat and the other is to vanquish it.

The second source is inferential analysis where rather than reforming sensory data on file the mind converts that data into symbolic representations of alternative states in a way that makes comparative analysis possible. From our previous example, we could program all of the behavior into a simulation, including the empirical data we might have previously obtained from measurement of actual occurrences of similar situations. Our program might then evaluate the probable “world” states resulting from various actions and choose whichever action produces the most positive outcome, where for simplification, we will agree that, in our example, sustaining human life is the most positive outcome. In many situations, the exercise of free will is very much like one described by inferential analysis.

Temporal Locality of Free Will

We would be remiss to not point out a very important factor that affects the quality of our free will, whether it arise from Recognition or from Inference. This follows naturally from the previous example of the infant and the tiger, but differs in that it is not whether or not one has the experience or symbolic representation with which to activate intention, but rather, whether one is capable of focusing their attention on their intentions sufficiently to manifest free will.

A simple analogy would be someone trying to fill a glass with water from a pitcher. If sufficiently distracted, a good deal of water may miss the glass altogether, and depending upon the size of the glass and the amount of water in the pitcher, the glass may never be filled if too much recognition or inference is wasted. This is actually more significant than it might it appear at first glance, because it characterizes free will as having temporal locality, meaning that if one is distracted long enough one may miss an opportunity to act. Since this attribute substantially agrees with common sense, we are well satisfied that it may be derived it from our construct, thus adding, at least superficially, to the authenticity of our model.

That Which is Random at One Scale May Appear Quite Orderly on a Different Scale

In our own lives, to rely on pure randomness is not to say that we live, as pragmatist Charles Pierce might assert, in a Universe of Chance. Indeed, in all of nature, randomness is a function of scale: what appears, and serves functionally as random occurrence at one scale may prove quite orderly at a different scale. The theory of chaos is replete with such examples.