Chapter 7. How
the Unsolicited Participation of the
Unconscious Makes Free Will
Impossible
In this chapter, we’re going to
explore how our unconscious, which
we all have, is constantly involved
in every decision we make. We can’t
avoid this influence; its
participation is unsolicited. We
don’t ask our unconscious to work.
In fact, the reason we term the
unconscious the unconscious is that
we’re literally not conscious of it.
We’ve determined we have an
unconscious through various indirect
means, some of which I’ll go into
later in the program. But this
unconscious never sleeps. It is
always active, retains all of our
memories – what we’ve learned – and
it takes part in every decision we
make.
In science and reason, there is the
principle of causality. Nothing is
uncaused. If something happens,
there is always a reason, or a
cause, (or causes) for it to happen.
There is also a principle in science
and philosophy of sufficient and
necessary cause. For example, if
I want to lift the table in front of
me, I might grab it with my right
hand, and lift it. The cause of the
table rising would, therefore, be my
right hand and arm lifting it. But,
what if while I’m reaching for it
with my right arm, I am also
reaching for it with my left arm,
and lift it with both arms and
hands? In that case, I can no longer
say that my right hand was the
sufficient and necessary cause of
the table rising. The left hand was
also involved in the lifting. So, it
is actually a combination of these
two causes that results in the table
rising.
Let’s now apply this principle and
reasoning to the unconscious. Our
right arm and hand will represent
our conscious mind. It says, “I’m
going to decide to lift this table.”
But our left arm and hand is our
unconscious. Again, we are not even
perceptually aware of it in
real-time, but it is always active.
It takes part in our every decision.
Consider also that even if our
unconscious were not taking part in
every single decision we make, we
could never know with any degree of
certainty whether or not it was
participating in any given decision.
Actually, the truer and more precise
reality is that although our
conscious mind believes it is making
the decision to lift the table, it
is actually our unconscious mind
that is making that decision, and
allowing our conscious mind to be
aware of the decision. If the
conscious mind and the unconscious
mind are involved in the decision to
lift the table, we cannot say that
the decision was consciously and
freely made. We cannot say that the
decision was free of the
participation, in this case, of the
unconscious. If our unconscious
never sleeps, and our conscious mind
simply ceases to be conscious during
sleep, our dreams must all originate
at the level of the unconscious. Our
unconscious occasionally allows our
conscious mind in on the content of
what it has dreamed.
How do we know we have an
unconscious? How do we know that
this unconscious is actually making
the decisions that we ascribe to our
conscious mind? One way is through
hypnosis, and what is known as
post-hypnotic suggestion. Medical
hypnosis has been around for over
200 years. You can hypnotize people,
and when they’re in that hypnotic
state, you can give them the
post-hypnotic suggestion that when
they wake up, they will do
something. For example, you might
tell a hypnotized person that when
the phone rings, he will get up from
his chair, get on his hands and
knees, and crawl a few paces. This
is not just theory; this is fact.
Psychologists have done the
experiment. The subject, indeed,
hears the phone ring, and crawls on
his hands and knees in fulfillment
of the post-hypnotic suggestion. How
does this relate to the question of
whether or not we have a free will,
and whether the unconscious mind
really is an unsolicited
participator in thoughts we wrongly
ascribe to a freely willing,
conscious mind? Well, the
psychologists then ask the subject
“What are you doing?” He may respond
with something to the effect that he
is just admiring the pattern on the
carpet, that, he may add, he finds
interesting. Or he might say “I
don’t know; I just felt the need to
stretch a bit.” The idea is that the
subject will make up a reason that
he thinks is the actual reason he
chose to get up and crawl across the
floor. That is a perfect example of
how the unconscious exists, and
actually makes decisions for the
person.
Priming is a hot and intriguing area
of research. John Bargh, a Yale
University professor, has done
important work with this. Priming is
similar to hypnosis, but the subject
is completely awake. In one
experiment, there are two groups –
the target group and a control
group. The target group is asked to
take some words and make sentences
with them. They are given the words
“bingo,” “gray,” “cane,” and other
words that connote being old, or the
concept “elderly.” The control group
is given arbitrary words that do not
have any strong or implicit
connotation. The subjects from both
groups complete the task, and they
think that the experiment is over.
But, it is not, because during the
last part of the experiment they are
observed walking from the
experimental area to the elevators
to leave the building.
Interestingly, the target groups
that had been primed with words
connoting elderly walk more slowly
to the elevators than do the control
groups. Naturally, that tells you
that the target group is consciously
walking to the elevator, but their
unconscious mind is participating in
how they perform that action. This
is a perfect example of the
collaboration that takes place
between conscious and unconscious
activity, completely hidden from the
subjects of the experiment. The
subjects are not aware that the
priming is the reason they are
walking more slowly.
There’s another priming experiment
that demonstrates this quite
interestingly. It’s the same kind of
word task as in the “elderly”
experiment. The target group is
given words like “rude,” “abrupt,”
“impolite,” and “hasty.” The second
target group is given words like
“polite,” “respectful,” and
“patient.” As, with the other
experiment, the subjects in both
groups think that they have
completed the experiment by doing
the word task. They are told that
when they are done with the task,
they should go to a nearby
colleague, and hand them their
completed task. They do that, but
the colleague is a part of, – a
cohort in – this experiment. The
colleague has been instructed to be
engaged in dialogue with a third
cohort for ten minutes. What happens
is that the subjects in the
experiment generally want to wait
until this conversation is over so
as not to interrupt. What the
experimenters find is that the
subjects in the group that had been
primed with words like rude and
abrupt tended to interrupt the
cohorts’ conversation sooner than
did the subjects who had been primed
with words like polite and patient.
The second part of this experiment
demonstrates that these kinds of
decisions that we attribute to our
free will – that we think we’re
making completely on our own – are
actually made at the level of the
unconscious. The subjects are then
asked why they waited as long, or as
short, as they did before
interrupting. Again, very curiously,
the subjects invent reasons. “Well,
I’ve always been taught to wait
until somebody is done with the
conversation,” or “I don’t know; I
just felt like it.” They will invent
reasons, but none of the subjects in
either group are aware that what
determined, in part, the time it
took them to interrupt was the
priming.
There are many experiments that
demonstrate how the unconscious is
actually making the decisions that
we generally attribute to our
conscious mind. There is another
kind of experiment that demonstrates
this decision-making at the
unconscious level far more clearly
and strongly. Beginning in the
1980s, Benjamin Libet and others
researchers hooked subjects up to
imaging machines like
electroencephalograms (EEGs) and
functional Magnetic Resonance
Imagers, (fMRIs) that measure brain
activity and EMGs, (electromyograms)
that measure muscle activity. It
turns out that before the conscious
mind is aware of its decision, in
these experiments a simple motor
movement like flexing a finger, the
unconscious has already made the
decision. More recent experiments,
by Chun Siong
Soon and his
colleagues have, in fact, detected
decision-related activity in the
unconscious as far back as ten
seconds before subjects were aware
of their decision to perform the
act. So, we have an unconscious
that’s either taking part in
whatever decisions we make, as in
the table-lifting example, or making
the decision entirely, as with the
imaging case.
Before Freud and the mesmerists did
their experiments with hypnosis,
there wasn’t a way to empirically
demonstrate that we humans have an
unconscious. Now, the results are
irrefutable that we do. When you
think about the unconscious, think
about all that is happening in your
body – your heart beating, your
organs functioning, your lungs
breathing in and out. All of this is
part of the autonomic nervous
system, which basically doesn’t rely
on our conscious direction. In other
words, we don’t have to think about
it; it basically works on its own.
Actually, that is another way of
understanding the pervasive role
that the unconscious has in not just
our decisions, but also on our basic
biological makeup and functioning.
Because we have an unconscious that
is always awake and active, we can
never claim to any degree nearing
even 50 percent certainty that we
make decisions that the unconscious
takes no part in at all. Such claims
are also mistaken because, again, we
are not even aware of our
unconscious mind in real-time.
Another way to understand how this
unconscious participation works is
through mood and feelings. If it’s
overcast or raining, we will feel
differently than on a bright, sunny,
and warm day, and that difference
will lead to different decisions.
There are many other ways to
understand how and why free will is
impossible, but even if we leave
aside causality as the fundamental
process of the universe that nothing
escapes, and even if we don’t
consider the hedonic, moral and
other imperatives, and even if we
don’t consider the effects of our
upbringing and past experience, and
we simply consider that we all have
an unconscious that is constantly at
work, then we can understand why
free will is impossible. It is mind
boggling that our civilization has
been under this delusion of free
will for millennia. If we’re so
fated, and the causal past and our
unconscious determine that we’re
going to wake up from, and
transcend, this illusion of free
will, that means that we will have
evolved a distinctly new
consciousness, and an entirely new
way of perceiving our reality and
ourselves. That is a huge step in
evolution.
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