Free Will and the Extended Mind

Illustrations of emergent agency

I departed from the Christianity in which I was raised primarily because I was unable to logically reconcile human free will (agency) with God’s omniscience. For a while, I struggled to take life seriously because of the specter of determinism, the position that all human actions are pre-determined by the chains of cause and effect that precede them. I thought that my experience of deciding was a defensive psychological illusion, an affectively reassuring but philosophically unjustifiable story I told myself about my decisions. Since human brains/bodies are material objects subject to the physical laws of the universe, the argument goes, people can’t decide any more than rocks tumbling down a hill can intervene their descent. If one can identify the relevant inputs (causes), he can identify the necessary outputs (effects).

We can accurately predict the trajectory of a tumbling rock by accounting for variables like weight, slope, and air resistance and plugging them into an equation. Why would it be any different for human beings? Doesn’t the idea people have agency, that they can make decisions that aren’t pre-determined by the material exigencies immediately preceding those decisions, necessarily contradict the physical laws of the universe? Doesn’t belief in free will require an ignorance of humans’ situatedness within material reality?

I propose that many deterministic arguments against human agency make a critical mistake by conceptualizing people atomistically. They reductively conflate mind with brain. But the human mind is not a brain; it is a product of the interactions between brains and environments. What makes a person who they are is not their brain, but their brain’s engagement with the external world. Humans are not like tumbling rocks because they have the capacity to manipulate the potential-future environmental inputs their brain will potentially translate into outputs. To communicate what I mean by this, I’ve formulated the five illustrations below. See the section after the illustrations for an elaboration of their purpose.

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Illustration #1

You need to go to the grocery store after work this week, but you keep forgetting to go. Work has been a lot lately and you’re so tired and brain dead afterwards that all you can think about is getting home. But you seriously need groceries. Today, you decide to schedule an alarm on your phone with the message “Get groceries!” for after you get off work tomorrow.

When tomorrow comes, you once again forget about your need to get groceries because of the busyness of work. When 5pm rolls around, you head to your car anticipating a drive straight home. Your course is set, you’re homeward bound. But then, alarm! Your attention shifts to your phone, and you alter your trajectory from home to the grocery store.

Who reminded you to get groceries?

Illustration #2

You’re struggling to overcome an addiction to cigarettes. You’ve made half-assed attempts to stop, but now you’re serious about quitting. You ask your partner for help. You propose that every time you smoke from now on, you must give them a quality, effortful massage. Each successive cigarette you smoke adds five minutes to the massage time. They agree and accept the responsibility of keeping a log that tracks the duration of the massages.

One day, you pull out your pack of Camel Crush and a lighter. Before you can light up, your partner emerges and informs you that, if you smoke, you must give them a 45-minute massage. You hadn’t realized it would be that long. 45 minutes is forever! You decide that the nicotine high is not worth the cost and put the cigarette back in its box.

Who stopped you from smoking?

Illustration #3

You need to write a paper, but you’re having trouble concentrating. You feel fatigued and stupid, but you have procrastinated and the deadline for submission is in a few hours. The paper seems absolutely impossible. The words just aren’t coming. Defeat is eminent.

You decide to make a pot of coffee. After drinking a cup or two, you feel re-energized. The words begin to form, and you power through the paper.

Who helped you write the paper?

Illustration #4

Your roommate is upset with you because you keep forgetting to turn the lights off when you leave the apartment. The electricity bill has been way too high and it’s mostly your fault. You decide to intentionally cultivate the habit of turning the lights off.

To do this, you put post-it notes on the door reminding you to turn the lights off before you leave. Eventually, you don’t need to see the notes to remember to flip the switches. The routine has become unconscious and automatic.

A month after deciding to intentionally cultivate the habit, you prepare to leave your apartment. Without even realizing you’re doing so, you turn all the lights off.

Who made you turn the lights off?

Illustration #5

You want to remember to put your family first, so you get a tattoo symbolizing that message. But not long after you get it, you forget about it. The tattoo becomes just a normal part of your appearance; you don’t really notice it anymore.

Years after you get the tattoo, you get into a serious fight with your partner about how you’re spending too much time at work and not enough time at home. To decompress, you go to the gym. You reflect on what your partner said as you work out. When you’re flexing in the mirror, you suddenly notice your tattoo and the memory of your intent when you got it spontaneously floods back. This memory triggers a cascade of other memories of better times, of when you had more balance in your life.

When you return home from the gym, you tell your partner that you will shift your priorities and apologize for losing sight of what was most important. You mean it. From that point forward, you leave work on time instead of staying late.

Who shifted your priorities?

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These illustrations do not show that humans are somehow exempt from the laws of the physical universe. People, like everything else in the world, are subject to cause and effect. All of our momentary decisions are outputs of inputs. Instead, what these examples show is that we can manipulate our potential-future inputs by presently modifying the internal and external environments in which our potential-future selves will potentially be embedded.

Who we are, the state of our minds, is not equivalent to our brains, but to the outcomes produced by our brains’ interactions with our past, present, and potential-future environments. What makes a person truly a person is their capacity to modify their potential-future. The more you intentionally modify your potential-future environments in pursuit of your goals, the more of a person you are. People who do not practice this habit are effectively no different than robots running pre-scripted algorithms or animals that operate solely on reflexive instinct. Human agency cannot be found in the present moment, but in the interaction between past, present, and potential-future.

This conceptualization of human agency has not rescued my Christianity because, if there is an omniscient God who created everything, all of human existence is nothing but the fulfillment of the potential-future environments that God intentionally envisioned at the beginning of time. If such a God exists, literally all of our outputs would be outputs of that God’s inputs. Accepting the existence of such a God means accepting that humans are merely robots running algorithms that God scripted before anything was. I refuse to believe in such tyranny.

However, this perspective on agency has saved me from the nihilistic despair of a bloodless determinism. The fatalistic God of deterministic philosophies is the historical chain of causes and effects. The result of accepting this sort of philosophy is the same as accepting the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent God. Human beings are once again reduced to automatons produced by the “will” of the historical sequence of impersonal events. Our capacity to modify our potential-future external environments through tools, technologies, and other people indicates that, even though we are subject to cause-and-effect, we can be our future selves’ causes by manipulating the environments that help make our future selves who they are.

We can order the chaotic future in our own image through environmental modification. This capacity affords us all the opportunity to become Godlike.

…but will you take it?

PS: Did you know the asterism (asterisk triangle) I used as a section divider is called a dinkus? A dinkus!

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