How much agency do we really have?

Coming to terms with the fact that we aren't in control

If I were to sum up one of humankind’s biggest, centuries-old quests in a single word, it would be control. The purposeful reorientation of the world to suit us, a constant dissatisfaction with the inexplicable, the random, the unforeseen — a deep and desperate desire to carve out circumstances that make sense to our creative and addled minds. For a very long time now, the human project has been one of control, understanding, harnessing, and manipulation.

One might associate these ideas with a western culture obsessed with progress, scientific discovery, innovation, militaristic expansion, individuality, and technology — but the notion of human control is certainly not unique to the western (or westernized) world. I’m using the term loosely to encompass the human enterprise of confronting an indifferent universe with creativity and ingenuity to no longer be at its complete mercy.

Tools, myths and other world-explaining stories, farming, medical remedies, the notion of our prized and ever-receding self-control — these practices and beliefs are found in nearly every culture the world over. They help define our species, make it what it is.

In all of these cases, the key element is human agency — the fact that we, as a species, have the power to alter the course of events in the universe. That we aren’t pawns, that we are agents, that we’ve been endowed with an inalienable capacity for that most human of attributes: free will.

These concepts have become fundamental to our identity as humans. Unlike other animals which largely appear to be bound to their instincts and at the mercy of a dangerous, dog-eat-dog world, we can rearrange the world to our liking, or at least devise tools and stories to tolerate it better.

We design cars and airplanes and heaters and dishwashers and writing and weather prediction and farming techniques and weapons and birth control and indoor plumbing and the internet and artificial intelligence. We believe in elaborate and diverse stories about the origin of the universe and the methods with which we can secure this creator’s favor. We take the world, and we bend it to our unique will.

. . . or do we? Although our capacity for free, unencumbered decision-making is one of the cognitive mainstays we take for granted¹, it shouldn’t evade our scrutiny. Many have started to question how free our will truly is.

---

Losing our grip on free will

Earlier this month, I read Dr. Robert Sapolsky’s latest book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. It was a whirlwind of an argument from a preeminent Stanford neuroscientist that can largely be summed up as:

You don’t have a single neuron in your brain that isn’t directly and heavily influenced by a whole host of factors over which you had absolutely no control.

The book was beautifully written — packed with data, experimental results, clear refutations, and expert opinion. But it’s left me gnawing on the hard edges of such a reality. A world with no free will — a determined world. Just the thought of it is incomprehensible, alien, wrong. The concept of free will is so deeply engrained in the human psyche. For many, including myself, the question becomes: From where do we source our meaning if not from our agency? What do we have left to offer this world?

A world without free will converts us all to objects, the playthings of a maelstrom of forces that uniquely determines the sequence of events that makes up our existence, such as our precise genetic inheritance, its corresponding regulation based on a capricious and often ill-suited environment, the way we were parented, the progression of our adolescence, the hormonal cocktail that eternally ebbs and flows within us, the culture to which we happen to belong, the evolutionary history that has shaped our species. Our intentions and the behaviors that result from them appear to be products of circumstance — rather than our own productions.

That thought is very scary to us, so we retreat into our familiar narratives of agency, will, and control. We argue, like we always do, that the science can’t capture the ineffable nature of being a conscious, living, breathing, agency-driven human. It’s too cold, too sterile to explain our personal and private experience of “affirming or denying.”² We unequivocally feel that we are making choices in our lives, that we are the agents driving everything forward.

And yet, we’ve also started to come around to the idea that feelings and intuitions do not spell truth and reality. The human mind is a crockpot of instincts and assumptions and biases that feel very accurate and justified — but under closer examination, we realize that they simply aren’t. In the modern era, the intense and familiar feeling of agency is not enough to warrant its existence.

Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True offers the illuminating insight that our feelings evolved with us because they helped us make more strategic decisions, helped keep us alive — not because they were in and of themselves true or realistic constructions of our place in the world. As I wrote in response to an intriguing article about the existence of free will:

Knowing that our feelings are often powerful and intuitive and also wrong, I don’t like to rely on the sense of conscious willing to justify the reality of conscious willing.

Despite our protestations of agency, I think most people, at this point, can bear the thought that we are on auto-pilot for much of our lives. That Sigmund Freud’s unconscious is alive and well within us, governing much of our behavior, our processing, our desires. That we’ve been, for lack of a better word, programmed since birth to want certain things, to see the world in certain ways. It’s not that these desires and perceptions can’t change — they do all the time. It’s that they don’t change because of some magical element of white-knuckled will. They change in response to very physical, brain-based factors, to a universal causal chain to which we all unmagically belong.

For much of human history, we’ve shied away from these unremarkable observations, preferred to think of the world revolving around us, around humanity. We were hesitant to accept that the earth isn’t the center of the universe, that humans are fundamentally animals with fascinating evolved capacities, that there may not be a colloquial, enduring self within all that brain matter. Complete, untethered agency now appears to be another illusion in a long chain that’s steadily crumbling under the weight of scientific exploration and the rejection of magical, anthropocentric thinking.

As much as we crave control over ourselves and the world, we simply don’t — and will never — have it (or at least as much as believe we ought to.)

---

Where do we go from here?

Well, now we’ve landed on untrodden ground. Although a portion of philosophers accept that we likely don’t have the freest of wills, the average person finds this notion laughable, out-of-touch, even blasphemous.

Our languages, justice systems, workforces, education systems, and just about every other institution we have assumes and thus depends on the commonplace existence of free will. None of what we do makes sense without the underpinning belief that we chose to do it.

In his book, Sapolsky argues for reimagined institutions that unchain us from moral responsibility — in much the same way that author Rutger Bregman advocates for reimagined institutions that center our fundamental goodness rather than our lapses into misbehavior in his own book.

I bring up this comparison because these two books have led me down an interesting philosophical path. And that’s precisely the point. Here is where philosophy should inject itself and tell us how to move forward. Now that we can see how, just like everything else on this planet, we are made up of our constituent, determined parts, we need a modern, expanded, philosophical worldview to tell us what on earth to do next. How do we make sense of a world that no longer adheres to the narratives we’ve always believed?

We’ve long believed that people are in control of themselves and that all the badness in the world is the result of free will run amok. But both authors recontextualize that notion, forcing us to consider the possibility that the human experience is not one of control, agency, and responsibility, but one of learning, circumstance, and influence.

Perhaps, as both authors speculate via their very different paths, the human mind is fundamentally bent toward goodness, cooperation, and kindness but gets warped by unfortunate genetic combinations and an inhospitable environment. Must we continue to label this process “free will”? Should we continue to grind everyone down in the same joyless meritocracy, knowing that it’s based on an illusion of control?

At the same time, we must acknowledge and honor the irrepressible feeling that we are in charge, that our decisions are ours, that control remains with us. If not, we’ve lost touch with one of the fundamental cornerstones of the human experience. Just because our feelings can’t always be trusted doesn’t mean that we can easily ignore or circumvent them. We must learn to work with the stories our brains cleverly tell, rather than pretend they don’t exist. We cannot ignore the social reality that each of us is humming around with the feeling of agency — and that we like that feeling and desperately don’t want to lose it.

Having been left with a brain that cleverly plants illusions left and right to help it navigate an inordinately complex world, we are the beneficiaries of those illusions, as we involuntarily stumble into our one, specific life and brain at birth. As renowned poet Mary Oliver says:

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

The reimagination of our capacities as humans doesn’t have to be a loss. We can, in fact, “get started immediately” with new knowledge and a forever unraveling understanding of ourselves. Unfortunately, some are very disheartened by these discussions of the precarity of free will. They do feel that we’ve lost something, that the human mind runs on a bit of magic and its removal dooms us to lives as robotic zombies.

But I see a great deal of wonder and opportunity in a world that refocuses our assumptions about behavior — one in which people are not casually faulted or praised for tendencies that elude their control. Rather, there’s the possibility of a world dedicated to more practical values, such as childhood development, lifelong education, rehabilitation, and empathy.

I think that’s a world worth willing into existence in whatever way we can.

---

Thank you for reading. If you found this article valuable, I hope you’ll press the little heart at the top or bottom of it to help others discover my work. (Please know you can press the heart even if you’re reading in email — no account needed — and it means the world.)

1. Along with the stability of our perceptual experience, our sense of an enduring self, the legitimacy of our emotions, et cetera, et cetera…

2. The terminology used by determinist, Baruch Spinoza