Think about it. When a thought pops into your head, did you put it there? Did you will yourself to think it? Or did your subconscious generate it unbeknownst to your conscious mind because it — not you — is in charge of these things?
I think we can agree on the answer.
Where do thoughts come from, then, if we don’t decide to think them? And if we aren’t in charge of how and what our minds elect to spend their time doing, then what does that say about free will?
Is free will simply a battle between subconscious processes over which we have no control whatsoever and our conscious attempts to influence them?
Is free will really just a human conceit?
Famously published as Thinking Fast And Slow, Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky developed a behavioral science thesis about two systems of thinking: one fast & automatic (system 1), and one slow & deliberate (system 2). It’s a great piece of research. There are in fact two very different ways we react to things, and while we can’t control system 1 (we are hard-wired for certain types of information processing, subconsciously), we are the masters of system 2 (which has consciously birthed every aspect of civilization). But where Kahneman and Tversky’s oeuvre stops short is in examining what happens upstream of either system, to the origins of thought itself.
First, let’s look at the concept of free will. Dictionaries define will as “control deliberately exerted to do something, or to restrain one’s own impulses.” Will is thus defined as an internal struggle between what we want to do and what we naturally do, absent adequate influence.
Free will is similarly described as “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate.” By acting with free will, we are presumably doing more than simply implementing a pre-determined set of outcomes.
Thus, free will is essentially the ability to control our actions in spite of other deep influences, namely our own unconscious impulses, or a kind of supernatural fate. Fair enough. But where every definition of free will I’ve seen falls short is that all of these focus on our acts, and not on what drives them. When most of us think about free will, we focus on whether we can exercise choice over turning left or right, or ordering salad, rather than more laboriously thinking about thought itself; about our ability to choose not just our actions, but our very thoughts — that which makes us, us.
And we can’t do that. We can no more choose our thoughts than we can choose the Earth’s path around the sun. Other forces are at play here. All we can do is to listen to—or ignore—the thoughts that our subconscious minds choose for us. That is, we can choose to accept them, and if we are self-aware enough, we may be able to influence how much power to cede to them.
As Viktor Frankl did on his deathbed in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, we can elect to choose our reactions to things over which we otherwise exert no control, like those imprisoned in Nazi death camps.
I wrote a piece nearly a year ago called Light, Dark and Everything in Between, and in it listed three things that fundamentally influence our inner state:
- the meaning we make out of our interactions, via narratives
- how well we know ourselves and our needs, authentically
- the degree to which we accept ourselves warts and all, with compassion
Underpinning these things is the fact that the 70,000 or so thoughts we have every single day are no more in our control than is deciding the weather. All we can do is pay attention or ignore them, process them, and react.
Pretty weird, right?
Know Thyself
If we cannot will ourselves to be something we are not—naturally—the good news is that we can certainly put in the work to consciously influence our subconscious impulses by assigning them value.
Psycho-Cybernetics was the first book I read that described the nature of individual world views as no more than narrative-driven interpretations of real experiences that result, above all, from where our subconscious emotional states lead us. Said differently, everything we believe is just a story we convinced ourselves was real, based on an impulsive and subconscious set of reactions to real things over which we had near-zero control.
Said even more simply, little if anything we feel is rationally true.
The best we can hope for in life, then, is to understand our own impulses a little bit better; and if we do so enough, we may be able to nudge our true selves toward outcomes our conscious minds might hope to bring into being.
That is, we might become happy.
Spurred by a dawning realization that perhaps his thoughts were something less than a reflection of objective reality, philosophy giant Rene Descartes sat down one night in 1640 and wrote, “I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.”
The very next year, Descartes wrote and published his seminal Meditations on First Philosophy, a treatise on his existential struggle to be convinced that anything could be said to reliably exist outside of his perception.
His most famous utterance, “I think, therefore I am,” was actually a desperate attempt to hold onto something stable: namely, that he could at least have confidence in the idea that his existence was real.
If Descartes was crippled by the realization that his feelings weren’t fact, we can turn to another historical giant for a healthier appraisal of the human mind, and its prospects to lead us to eudaemonia.
Preceding Descartes’ crisis of consciousness by a whopping 1,500 years, Stoic philosopher and Pax Romana-era Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius scribbled a number of deeply personal reflections in a journal meant for no eyes but his own. In spite of this, they were found after he died and collected in a 12-volume folio published as Meditations. Below are just three separate musings therein.
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Like Frankl in the Holocaust 1,800 years later, emperor Aurelius realized that true power lay in his conscious interpretation of the subconscious thoughts over whose generation he exerted no influence.
It lay in the health of the relationship between these aspects of self.
Buddhist philosophy and its wide practice of meditation is, more than anything else, a valiant attempt to make peace with our “monkey minds”. It is to avoid emotional attachment to the things they generate 70,000 times a day. It is to watch thoughts pass like clouds without becoming embroiled in them, or struggle against the generation of thought itself.
As though we even could.
We can’t.
Final Thoughts
So who are we? What are we?
Are we simply physical processors of psychic energy?
That last sentence may be the closest thing I’ve found to an empirical truth. My “proof”, as such, is that we cannot generate our thoughts or choose to think them. They are generated as a result of generally subconscious interpretations of true experiences, in a subjective and non-transferrable life.
We receive energy in many forms, conscious and subconscious. We develop insights out of what our psyches reveal to us, as long as we’re ready for the lessons. We act freely in support of what the self believes is good for it based on these things. And sometimes we find gateways to glimpsing the self itself—in a form of metacognition—such as mental meditation, yoga and other embodied practices, flow state activities, psychedelic medicines, or other forms of quieting the thinking self long enough to see what lies beneath it:
The true self.
Some would say that the concept of ‘self’ is in itself an illusion; that there is something beyond that, as well. To some, this is anamnesis: “the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence”—aka innate knowledge. To others, it is non-duality: “the interconnectedness of everything dependent upon a non-dual Transcendent Reality”.
However we interpret the larger context of ‘being’, there are important conceptual prerequisites worth knowing if we are to reach a form of psychological, here-and-now-centered wellbeing.
They include the fact that our thoughts are not ours to choose. That we are recipients of them. That something more intangible than our thinking brains — this ethereal ‘self’ construct, or soul, or psyche — is in charge, and makes us, us. That we are generally in thrall to it—aka its ‘slave’. That with the right tools—or gateways—we can glimpse these things and thereby understand that there is more to us than we are consciously aware, and that the pursuit of understanding the subconscious self is the path to a greater integration of these two aspects of our being, from which powerful acts can spring. And finally, that this pursuit itself—this introspective dive—is in itself a noble and mind-expanding pursuit, if the ultimate goal is to be happy.
That journey begins with the understanding that we are not our thoughts.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
 White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism |
 Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box |
 The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer |
 |
—
Photo credit: Ole Magnus Røgeberg on Unsplash
