Unfree Will

How to control yourself when you can’t control yourself

Who Decides?

We all feel that we are the masters of our actions. It seems to each of us, at least most of the time, that we consciously do the things that we do.

Oftentimes this is an illusion. Scientists have conducted studies in which subjects’ actions were controlled by the researchers, and yet those subjects insisted that they had chosen their actions.

Sometimes we’re even aware of being out of control. We get up in the morning still half-asleep and stumble through our morning routine and later have no memory of doing some of the little actions of this routine. We walk into a room and suddenly it strikes us, ‘Why did I come in here?’ — and find no answer.

And sometimes we can frankly see even while performing an act, that we are not choosing to do it, we don’t even want to do it, we want to do something else; and we watch, in seeming helplessness, ourselves do that very thing. Many addicts experience this, and dieters too.

We know we ought not to have a slice of cake, and yet we take the knife and set it over the cake. We tell ourselves we will take only a small piece, and watch as our hand guides the knife to slice at a much fatter angle than we had imagined. We tell ourselves we will only eat some of it, and find ourselves scraping the last crumbs off the plate.

So if ‘we’ are not deciding these actions, who is?

Brains: Upper & Lower, Right & Left, Super- & Sub

There are plenty of theories about the ‘other self’ that sometimes seems to control our actions. There are philosophical notions from thousands of years ago of ‘little men’ who inhabit us and sometimes dictate our actions. More recently psychological theorists have written of the ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ or ‘subconscious’ or ‘preconscious’ minds we all have. Neuroscientist have studied the two hemispheres of the brain, assigning different general interests and tasks of each.

Here I’ll give one model that I read about some years ago in a book on the Right Brain. (I forget the title, but it was something like, The Right Brain and the Subconscious Mind.)

Our Unconscious Self

In this model, which the author claimed to have developed from many studies of the mind conducted in the end of the 20th century, the right hemisphere and the ‘subconscious mind’ are roughly the same. The right side of the brain matures much earlier than the left side, which does not begin to assert itself until we are about 7 years old, and does not fully mature until we are in our mid-20s.

The right brain is more closely connected with our physical bodies and our emotions. It has no clear sense of ‘there’ or ‘future’ or ‘past.’ It knows only ‘here’ and ‘now.’ It does not work with words or what we consider logic, but rather with images (pictures and other sensory impressions such as sounds and tastes) and patterns. To the right brain, what comes next is a necessary consequence of what came before, a ‘logical fallacy’ known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

The right brain is also more primitive in the sense that it more closely resembles in its thinking how other animals consider the world. The right brain also is more visually oriented (a consequence of working with images and patterns) in the way it understands the world. And it remembers its lessons much better than the left or ‘logical’ brain does.

Because the right brain works with sensory impressions, and the left brain works with words, the two do not communicate well. In general we consider ‘ourself’ to be the left brain, the conscious, thinking, reasoning brain, and so the messages of the right brain seem to come from ‘deep inside’ or from ‘another place.’ The messages of the right brain often need to be unscrambled before we can comprehend them with our left brain. Often the right brain signals our left brain through sensations in the body or in dreams.

Finally, because the right brain comes into its own when we are very young, years before the left brain begins to assert itself, the right brain learns lessons in our first seven years of life, that affect our character, our tastes, our fears, our desires, and our sense of ourselves. But because ‘we’ the left-brain understands the right brain so poorly and incompletely, speaking a different language as it were, we find it quite hard to correct or amend those lessons, and they usually continue to shape our character until the day we die.

And it is the right brain that is in command when we seem to act outside ourselves, lacking control.

Freedom

Regardless of notions of the right or unconscious brain, however, there are many philosophers and scientists who have reached the conclusion that we never are in control of our actions — at least not in the sense we commonly hold. The philosophers hold this position because they are materialists. The scientists hold this position because of studies and experiments they have performed.

‘A man can do whatever he wants, but he can’t want whatever he wants’ is one way to put it.

We are conditioned by our environment, which acts upon our (rather malleable) nature. Through our environment, therefore, our actions can be controlled.

If we can control our environment, we can control our actions.

In this way, even though we may be unable directly to choose what we do, we can, by indirect means, affect what we do.

It is a paradox: even though we may believe we cannot control our actions, we must act as if we can. (Perhaps we are conditioned to believe in this sense of self-control and free will.)

Master Your Environment

So the way to control what we do is to alter our surroundings. A simple, hoary example gives us the model:

When you want to remind yourself of something, tie a string around your finger.

Here the action we want to do is to remember something. Remembering is one of those acts that feel outside our conscious control, and men have developed several means of indirectly helping themselves remember. The string around the finger is an external adjustment to your environment that helps you to remember.

Set Yourself Free and Speak to Your Other Self

Another way to increase your mastery over your actions lies in meditation and foresight, or setting deliberate plans and commandments for yourself. These two general approaches both involve entering into a state of mind divorced from the immediate, sensory world the right brain knows; from this state the left brain sends signals that the right brain accepts. (At least that is as close as I have come in understand just what might be going on.)

In meditation, you have awareness of your self (those who are advanced in meditation claim to gain awareness of their Self as well, that universal Self of which we all partake) but lose awareness of your body. You leave behind, in other words, your right brain — it no longer affects you. In this ‘idealized’ state you can feel your cravings and fears subside, drift away, ebb to low points. Your ideal self, which we can only connect to the left brain in neurological terms, now takes full control and command. Some sort of adjustment takes place, hard to describe. But when we emerge from the meditative state, we are able, for a time at least, to hold the right brain at bay, or tamed.

In states of foresight we set ourselves apart from our right brain selves in time. Before we go to dinner, before the cake is not yet before our eyes, before we have the dinner table, plates, and other details of the eating place surrounding us, before we smell the cake, we tell ourselves:

No cake tonight.

If we can do this in such a way as to impress it upon our right brains, and if our right brains do not clamor too much for its desire, we will find ourselves acting in the way we (the ‘we’ of our left brains) choose.

More to Come

This essay is a good deal longer than I’d like, so I’ll save more specific techniques for another time. This should be enough to start on.

(First posted Wednesday, January 16, 2008)