Do novelists have free will? Part 2

When we look at how our minds really work, there’s a strong case to be made that free will isn’t as important as free won’t. We all have a strong intuition that we’re ultimately responsible for how we act and behave, but what we think of as our deliberate actions seem to arise from a stratum of the brain that isn’t normally accessible to conscious thought, and we often unconsciously set ourselves in motion long before we’re aware of making that choice. Benjamin Libet, whose famous experiment was the one that cast grave doubts on the idea of volitional control in the first place, proposed an elegant solution to this apparent problem: the role of consciousness is to veto certain proposals from the unconscious mind while approving others, sifting through and evaluating the possible actions with which it’s presented. This veto power, if it exists, necessarily takes place in a very short window of time, something on the order of a tenth of a second. But if you were to slow down the process and translate the results into a concrete, tangible form, you’d have something oddly similar to what an author experiences while writing a novel—except that the character you’re creating is yourself.

Writing fiction is certainly one of the most peculiar pursuits in which a human being can engage, but really, it’s not so different from any other kind of focused human activity. In theory, you have complete freedom to write whatever you want on the blank page, but in practice, it isn’t so straightforward. You can’t write a sentence without being constrained by the conventions of language, by your own abilities, and by your mood when you sit down at your desk. Ideas, both big and small, generally don’t arise from an effort of the will: they appear, mysteriously, from some shadowy part of the brain. Yet a good writer can influence even the factors over which he seems to have little control, less through what he does in the moment than by what he’s done at every moment before. You can improve your craft over time, increasing the range of possible sentences you’re able to write; you can develop habits that will allow you to write in any emotional state; you can even learn to generate ideas on demand. Or you can do none of this. Whichever way you go, though, you’ll find that your small, unconscious artistic choices are really determined by the seeds you’ve planted in the past—which is a lot like how it works in real life.

Of course, that doesn’t bring us any closer to cracking the problem of free will. As Sam Harris might point out, and has, even if we can influence ourselves with our past behavior, that still doesn’t explain what influenced the influences. But there’s another stage in the writing process that does look a lot—at least to me—like the product of conscious choice, and that’s revision. “For artists, writing has always meant, in effect, the art of endless revising,” John Gardner says, and to the extent that a writer’s personality is expressed in his work, it’s in how he chooses to revise. First drafts are the id of the writing life: they’re rough, unconsidered, and as horrifying in their own way as the unwanted thoughts we encounter in dreams or in our less guarded moments. I suspect that the rough drafts of all writers at the same level of experience look more or less the same, which is to say, awful. In revision, though, you find yourself evaluating the choices you made the first time around, deleting the ones that don’t work and refining the ones that do, and the result, however far it may fall short of your intentions, comes as close to a fully considered action as a human being is capable of achieving.

My argument, then, is that free will in art is something that unfolds over time. Each choice we make may be accidental, serendipitous, or random when it first occurs, but it’s in the act of selecting, polishing, and editing, executed over the course of many months, that we start to find true freedom. And that’s the way it works in life, too. I may be the product of influences I can’t control or decisions I made without conscious deliberation when I was much younger, but it’s in my ongoing attempt to revise myself as a person—using the input of those hidden processes while also subjecting them to what feels like a higher level of consideration—that responsibility enters the picture. Free will seems to disappear the more closely we look at it, just as I’d have trouble explaining why I chose one word over another as I typed this sentence, but it emerges once we stand back to look at the system and its evolution as a whole. This kind of revision, with influences on the smallest scale affecting the larger which affects the smaller in turn, is something we all exercise from one minute to the next, and if it isn’t freedom, it’s close enough to make the distinction seem irrelevant. Because if writing is the art of endless revising, that’s true of life as well.

Do novelists have free will? Part 1

Recently, as part of a writing project I’m hoping to finish within the next couple of months, I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of free will. Free will, like consciousness, is a phenomenon that seems perfectly obvious in our everyday life but increasingly elusive the more we try to pin it down. As David Eagleman points out in his book Incognito, science has long since established that much of what we think of as our own intentions and behavior arise from parts of the brain that aren’t immediately accessible to conscious thought. In the famous Libet experiment, for instance, subjects were told to flick a finger at the time of their choosing, while recording what they perceived as the exact moment at which they decided to move. What Benjamin Libet discovered was that readiness potentials associated with muscle movement could be detected in the brain about half a second before the subjects were conscious of having made the decision. Later tests have found similar brain activity as much as seven seconds in advance—which implies that consciousness, at least under some circumstances, is really just a way of retrospectively rationalizing actions we’ve undertaken before we’re even aware of it.

To some extent, we all know how this feels. This morning, for instance, while mulling over today’s blog post, I brushed my teeth, showered, shaved—and then brushed my teeth again. Why? I don’t know. My eye happened to fall on the toothbrush by the sink, and without any conscious input whatsoever, my “brushing my teeth” subroutine was absentmindedly activated for the second time in twenty minutes. Later, I made coffee and my morning omelet, and it’s safe to say that I was operating mostly on autopilot: I was watching my daughter and thinking about what I was going to write at the same time, so I was more than happy to outsource my breakfast to a different part of my brain. This kind of automation is a necessary part of survival, as well as basic happiness: I’d go crazy if I had to consciously think over each step of such routine activities, much less to remind myself to breathe twelve times each minute. It’s far less comfortable to acknowledge that higher levels of our actions and behavior may be equally out of our control, but the more we try to grasp what we mean by free will, the more it seems to slip through our fingers.

Opponents of free will certainly have a strong case on their side. Every human thought or action arises from the firing of the brain’s neurons, which in turn are governed by the laws of physics, and attempts to explain consciousness by reference to quantum mechanics are really just a way of replacing one mystery with another. Go down far enough and we’re nothing but physical processes, and any event in the brain, big or small, can be traced back to another. Even if we’re willing to entertain the existence of a soul, this doesn’t solve the underlying problem of the unconscious roots of our influences and intentions, as Sam Harris notes in his little book Free Will: “If you don’t know what your soul is going to do next, you are not in control.” Harris writes elsewhere that most attempts to salvage the idea of free will begin with the premise that they want to prove, and that such efforts have more in common with theology than science or philosophy. And although Harris’s case is in some ways irrefutable, one is still tempted to respond to it in the same way that Samuel Johnson, in Boswell’s Life, replied to the doctrine of idealism:

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—”I refute it thus.”

It might seem equally quaint to point to one’s subjective perception of free will and say: “I refute it thus.” But that’s really all most of the arguments in favor of free will can do—and make no mistake, it’s a powerful piece of evidence. What Daniel Dennett has called “our important intuition that we are the authors of our moral decisions” is something we can’t easily dismiss. And although it’s far outside this scope of this blog to make a case one way or the other, I think it’s worthwhile to consider it through one particular lens: that of creative activity. At first glance, the act of writing a novel—or composing a symphony or executing a fresco—seems like a strong demonstration of willed, conscious activity: each book is a series of choices, executed over a long period of time and with a lot of reflection, constrained only by the artist’s ability. As much as any action in which human beings engage, the novel is an exercise in sustained consciousness that can take years to complete, and the result, however flawed it may be, can only be something that the author meant to do. Or can it? Tomorrow, I’ll be looking at the process of writing as an act of free will, and try to consider how much, or how little, it really explains.