The Missouri Review has published my 7500-word narrative nonfiction essay on free will denial in their Summer 2026 issue, July 2026. The essay is about the gap between what we know versus what we believe and can actually live by—focusing on free will deniers like Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford biologist, and author of Behave and Determined.

From my essay:

Sapolsky is convinced we do not have free will; so, from his perspective, he knows it. But he’s admitted he catches himself reverting to the default setting of free will belief every time he nonchalantly accepts responsibility. “Someone says, ‘You’re dressed nice today,’ and I say, ‘Thanks,’ as if I had anything to do with it,” Sapolsky joked during a guest appearance on NPR’s Radiolab.

My essay is behind the paywall at The Missouri Review website. But they made a beautiful PDF available on the Project MUSE website, with physical copies reaching subscribers in August. (I’ve also got the PDF at davidjfrost.com)

The free will essay is part of a larger project about what we know but do not believe. I’m building a conversation around those ideas here in the Armchair Vertigo newsletter and website.

Please share widely!

Thank you for already being a subscriber. Please consider sending this or later newsletters to anyone you know who might be interested. It would help me out a lot.

Share

And it’s all free. (Free and paid get same content. Paid is just a way to say thanks for those with the monetary means.)

Subscribers can look forward to more behind-the-scenes posts on what it was like to write the forthcoming piece. Plus companion essays on other truths we know but do not believe. One long-form essay each week. No mere “content.”

Ask a friend to subscribe if they want literary nonfiction about what it’s like to live with ideas—philosophical and scientific—that clash with ordinary life… that disturb our pre-theoretical ways of being, and derange those practices, ideas and concepts germane to day-to-day living.

Subscribe now

Read me for:

• The examined life as literary subject: I experiment in the genre of “autotheory,” à la Maggie Nelson. It’s theory applied to one’s own life. Ideas made felt, not just understood.

• Literary nonfiction about mortality, meaning, happiness, grief, and self-deception: What resources can philosophy provide to an atheist grieving the loss of a loved one?

• Live philosophical debates made personal: especially the dispute between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett over free will, which Adam Gopnik called “the only debate worth having.”

Subscribe to my Armchair Vertigo newsletter

One substantial essay each week (sent to your email inbox), plus shorter amuse-bouche on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (posted to the website, not sent to your email). Additional features will follow, if the subscriber list grows, like a curated list of interesting reads midweek.

Subscribe now

Brief bio

In addition to “Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem,” in The Missouri Review, I’ve also published essays in The Smart Set, SLAB literary magazine, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere. I wrote the first chapter in Girls and Philosophy, an Open Court anthology about Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking HBO show Girls.

For more than ten years, I’ve taught philosophy classes, exclusively online, for Alamance Community College in North Carolina.

I live on the Oregon coast with my dogs, Fritz and Lou Salomé, 3000 miles from Brooklyn.

More credentials of which I’m proud, even though their achievement must be chalked up to luck, given there’s no free will:

• B.A. in English from Columbia University

• M.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Irvine

• Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Subscribe now

Armchair Vertigo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they’re playing a strange game,” the narrator says, “one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it’s easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that can’t. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed.” If you don’t press the button, the light doesn’t flash. “No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press,” by one second exactly.

The way the device works, according to the fictional science in the story, is that when you press the button you activate “a negative time delay circuit” that “sends a signal back in time one second,” turning on the indicator light one second in the past. The narrator of the story is from the future, when negative time delays of greater than one second have been achieved. He is sending us this message from one year into our future via a one-year negative time delay communication device.

It’s a clever idea for a story.

The Predictors become a societal menace because they “demonstrate that there’s no such thing as free will.” How do they do that? (And would it really be a menace to society?) Remember the delay is always one second exactly. If you see the light and quickly try to press the button faster than a second, you would feel frozen, unable to do so. (Because the only reason the light illuminates is because you have “already” pressed the button one second into the future.) And then when you inevitably press it in exactly one second, you would feel caused to do it, like a puppet on a string. But feeling frozen or like a puppet is not the strongest deflation of free will.

According to the time travel science aspect of the story, the light’s being lit up has already happened and so things cannot be otherwise. And in a sense that goes for your coming button press too. The light has lit up now only because in the future one second forward you must have or will must have pressed the button sending the signal back one second in time to illuminate the light. The one-second negative time delay conceit shows what believers in causal determinism have been saying in the free will debate, namely that if an action is determined, that is no different from it being pre-determined.

“There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic,” the narrator says. “Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that’s what a Predictor provides.”

The effect on the population is devastating. “A third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma… The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.” The affliction spreads “like a cognitive plague,” says the narrator. “People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable Lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we’ve all encountered: the idea that free will doesn’t exist. It just wasn’t harmful until you believed it.”

The narrator wishes to warn us that we must continue to believe, or at least pretend to believe, in free will. “It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t… Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”1

And yet the narrator admits that he knows who among our population will descend into akinetic mutism and who won’t. “And my sending this warning won’t alter those proportions,” he says. “So why did I do it? Because I had no choice.”

Subscribe now

The Missouri Review will be publishing my 7500-word narrative nonfiction essay on free will denial in their Summer 2026 issue. My essay is about the gap between what we know versus what we believe and can actually live by—focusing on free will deniers like Robert Sapolsky, Stanford biologist, and author of Behave and Determined.

From my essay:

Sapolsky is convinced we do not have free will; so, from his perspective, he knows it. But he’s admitted he catches himself reverting to the default setting of free will belief every time he nonchalantly accepts responsibility. “Someone says, ‘You’re dressed nice today,’ and I say, ‘Thanks,’ as if I had anything to do with it,” Sapolsky joked during a guest appearance on NPR’s Radiolab.

The essay is expected to appear on the Project MUSE website on June 19, with physical copies reaching subscribers later in mid-July. The free will essay is part of a larger project about what we know but do not believe.

I’m using the weeks before publication (and after) to build a larger conversation around those ideas here in the Armchair Vertigo newsletter and website.

Thank you for already being a subscriber. Please consider sending this or later newsletters to anyone you know who might be interested. It would help me out a lot.

Share

And it’s all free. (Free and paid get same content. Paid is just a way to say thanks for those with the monetary means.)

Subscribers can look forward to more behind-the-scenes posts on what it was like to write the forthcoming piece. Plus companion essays on other truths we know but do not believe. One long-form essay each week. No mere “content.”

Ask a friend to subscribe if they want literary nonfiction about what it’s like to live with ideas—philosophical and scientific—that clash with ordinary life… that disturb our pre-theoretical ways of being, and derange those practices, ideas and concepts germane to day-to-day living.

Subscribe now

Read me for:

• The examined life as literary subject: I experiment in the genre of “autotheory,” à la Maggie Nelson. It’s theory applied to one’s own life. Ideas made felt, not just understood.

• Literary nonfiction about mortality, meaning, happiness, grief, and self-deception: What resources can philosophy provide to an atheist grieving the loss of a loved one?

• Live philosophical debates made personal: especially the dispute between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett over free will, which Adam Gopnik called “the only debate worth having.”

Subscribe to my Armchair Vertigo newsletter

One substantial essay each week (sent to your email inbox), plus shorter amuse-bouche on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (posted to the website, not sent to your email). Additional features will follow, if the subscriber list grows, like a curated list of interesting reads midweek.

Subscribe now

Brief bio

With an essay forthcoming in The Missouri Review, I’ve also published essays in The Smart Set, SLAB literary magazine, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere. I wrote the first chapter in Girls and Philosophy, an Open Court anthology about Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking HBO show Girls.

For more than ten years, I’ve taught philosophy classes, exclusively online, for Alamance Community College in North Carolina.

I live on the Oregon coast with my dogs, Fritz and Lou Salomé, 3000 miles from Brooklyn.

More credentials of which I’m proud, even though their achievement must be chalked up to luck, given there’s no free will:

• B.A. in English from Columbia University

• M.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Irvine

• Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Still here? Read this next:

1. If you want more of the philosophical side of things—

   Here’s an accessible history of the changing concept of happiness from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers through to today. Plus, I show how hedonism and relativism insinuated themselves into happiness’s definition.

2. If you want a more literary narrative—

   Here’s the true story of my best friend’s death at fourteen-years old, which made me ask “Why?” so urgently that it turned me into a philosopher. Originally published in SLAB literary magazine, Issue 16. Archived here on Armchair Vertigo.

Still want more from me?

• Find additional selected writings here on Substack.

• Find links to the original venues of selected essays: linktr.ee/davidfrost.

• My homepage: davidjfrost.com.

• Subscribe to my newsletter now.

Armchair Vertigo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Addendum: About The Missouri Review

For readers outside literary publishing, The Missouri Review is one of the country’s most respected literary journals. Here are a few ways it shows up in rankings of literary magazines.

The Missouri Review will be publishing my 7500-word narrative nonfiction essay on free will denial in their Summer 2026 issue. My essay is about the gap between what we know versus what we believe and can actually live by—focusing on free will deniers like Robert Sapolsky, Stanford biologist, and author of Behave and Determined.

From my essay:

Sapolsky is convinced we do not have free will; so, from his perspective, he knows it. But he’s admitted he catches himself reverting to the default setting of free will belief every time he nonchalantly accepts responsibility. “Someone says, ‘You’re dressed nice today,’ and I say, ‘Thanks,’ as if I had anything to do with it,” Sapolsky joked during a guest appearance on NPR’s Radiolab.

The essay is expected to appear on the Project MUSE website on June 19, with physical copies reaching subscribers later in mid-July. The free will essay is part of a larger project about what we know but do not believe.

I’m using the weeks before publication (and after) to build a larger conversation around those ideas here in the Armchair Vertigo newsletter and website.

Thank you for already being a subscriber. Please consider sending this or later newsletters to anyone you know who might be interested. It would help me out a lot.

Share

And it’s all free. (Free and paid get same content. Paid is just a way to say thanks for those with the monetary means.)

Subscribers can look forward to more behind-the-scenes posts on what it was like to write the forthcoming piece. Plus companion essays on other truths we know but do not believe. One long-form essay each week. No mere “content.”

Ask a friend to subscribe if they want literary nonfiction about what it’s like to live with ideas—philosophical and scientific—that clash with ordinary life… that disturb our pre-theoretical ways of being, and derange those practices, ideas and concepts germane to day-to-day living.

Subscribe now

Read me for:

• The examined life as literary subject: I experiment in the genre of “autotheory,” à la Maggie Nelson. It’s theory applied to one’s own life. Ideas made felt, not just understood.

• Literary nonfiction about mortality, meaning, happiness, grief, and self-deception: What resources can philosophy provide to an atheist grieving the loss of a loved one?

• Live philosophical debates made personal: especially the dispute between Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett over free will, which Adam Gopnik called “the only debate worth having.”

Subscribe to my Armchair Vertigo newsletter

One substantial essay each week (sent to your email inbox), plus shorter amuse-bouche on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays (posted to the website, not sent to your email). Additional features will follow, if the subscriber list grows, like a curated list of interesting reads midweek.

Subscribe now

Brief bio

With an essay forthcoming in The Missouri Review, I’ve also published essays in The Smart Set, SLAB literary magazine, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere. I wrote the first chapter in Girls and Philosophy, an Open Court anthology about Lena Dunham’s groundbreaking HBO show Girls.

For more than ten years, I’ve taught philosophy classes, exclusively online, for Alamance Community College in North Carolina.

I live on the Oregon coast with my dogs, Fritz and Lou Salomé, 3000 miles from Brooklyn.

More credentials of which I’m proud, even though their achievement must be chalked up to luck, given there’s no free will:

• B.A. in English from Columbia University

• M.A. in Philosophy from the University of California at Irvine

• Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Still here? Read this next:

1. If you want more of the philosophical side of things—

   Here’s an accessible history of the changing concept of happiness from the ancient Greeks to the Founding Fathers through to today. Plus, I show how hedonism and relativism insinuated themselves into happiness’s definition.

2. If you want a more literary narrative—

   Here’s the true story of my best friend’s death at fourteen-years old, which made me ask “Why?” so urgently that it turned me into a philosopher. Originally published in SLAB literary magazine, Issue 16. Archived here on Armchair Vertigo.

Still want more from me?

• Find additional selected writings here on Substack.

• Find links to the original venues of selected essays: linktr.ee/davidfrost.

• My homepage: davidjfrost.com.

• Subscribe to my newsletter now.

Armchair Vertigo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Addendum: About The Missouri Review

For readers outside literary publishing, The Missouri Review is one of the country’s most respected literary journals. Here are a few ways it shows up in rankings of literary magazines.

Socrates never mentions free will and it does not appear in the works of Plato or Aristotle, or so says classicist and philosopher Michael Frede. In his book, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, Frede writes, “[I]f we look at Greek literature from Homer onwards, down to long after Aristotle, we do not find any trace of a reference to, let alone a mention of, free will.”

Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind popularized the hard-to-believe idea that the pre-Homerian Greeks heard what we would call the inner voice of conscience as if it were a god’s voice in their head. In Homer’s Iliad many significant moments, for example, actions that turn the tide of a battle—but also insignificant moments of quotidian agency between husband and wife—are described as caused not by the Homeric heroes themselves but by the gods acting through them. It was as if the gods played puppeteer standing over the scene like over a game board, pulling the strings connected to Hector and Achilles.

For the moment, we may put Jaynes aside as overly speculative, if still evocative. According to Frede, the reason Plato and Aristotle do not have a concept of free will is because, “[n]either Plato nor Aristotle has a notion of a will.” That’s right. They did not make use of the concept of will, much less free will.

Frede: “[N]either Plato nor Aristotle has a notion of a will.”

Plato and Aristotle’s famous “tripartite view of the soul” is grounded in the idea that there are distinct forms of motivation which often come into conflict with each other and therefore “must have their origin in different capacities, abilities, or parts of the soul,” Frede writes.

According to these ancient Greek thinkers, the collected parts of a human soul can be thought of metaphorically along the figure of the horse-drawn chariot. The charioteer is Reason, gripping the reigns of two horses, Desire and Passion. As a metaphor, this strikes us as not so bad today. It looks a lot like our preferred folk metaphor of a homunculus at a control panel patched into the central nervous system. But the ancient view is more complicated than the metaphor suggests, and stranger too. Frede says the ancient thinkers had “a highly specific form of wanting or desiring, in fact, a form of wanting which we no longer recognize or for which we tend to have no place in our conceptual scheme.”

In other words, we don’t think of ourselves, of our agency, in the same way as the ancient Greeks did. And we may never be able to. But the way they thought can be made understandable from the outside, if not usable, so to speak, from the inside.

Frede says it’s safe to assume that Plato and Aristotle thought human beings at least sometimes acted voluntarily, or because they desired to so act, that they “willed” certain actions, et cetera. The ancient Greek “folk” (non-philosophical layperson) had a commonsense psychology in which they attributed intentions and so on to each other. But the philosophical theory which Plato and those other philosophers posited to explain this commonsense folk psychology is what the modern mind does not, perhaps cannot, share in.1

Aristotle does not share our notion of a will as essentially spontaneous, an uncaused causer.2

Consider the Latin velle, the German wollen, and “to will” in English. They all mean something like wanting or willing. The ancient Greek word boulesthai is closely related and yet, Frede says, should not be translated as “willing” because it signified a very specific form of wanting conceptually distinct from our sense of “willing.” Nevertheless, we lack any better term to translate it into.

According to Frede, boulesthai is “a form of desire which is specific to Reason.” “It is the form in which Reason desires something. If reason recognizes, or believes itself to recognize, something as a good, it ‘wills’ (boulesthai) or desires it. If Reason believes itself to see a course of action which would allow us to attain this presumed good, it thinks that it is a good thing, other things being equal, to take this course of action.” And, if it thinks that it is good to do something, then Reason does it. Or Reason makes us do it.

The ancient view assumed that “reason by itself suffices to motivate us to do something. This is an assumption which is made by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics.” But it is an assumption that is incommensurate with how we think about motivation and agency today. We are all followers of David Hume today insofar as we think that between reason and desire only desire is motivating on its own.

We are all followers of David Hume today insofar as we think that between reason and desire only desire is motivating on its own.

In our understanding today, my reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable. Hume wrote that “it is not irrational to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger.”

Hume wrote that “it is not irrational to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger.”

Let’s unpack that double negative. Hume is saying it’s possible that I’d rather avoid a little pain than prevent the destruction of half the world. It’s conceivable I would not switch one for the other; that is, I might let half the world be destroyed rather than endure a little pain in my finger. Preferring is a key notion here. What we prefer is a matter of taste in our schema today. For the ancient Greeks, what was preferable was a dictated by reason.3

My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable.

My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable.

That is our modern intellectual inheritance. Those preferences would sound like nonsense to the ancient Greek philosophers. The difference is Hume has limited “rational” to mean only instrumental reason. Being rational can help you instrumentally to achieve your goals, your values, your desires. But establishing what is valuable is not a part of rationality when the latter is conceptually limited to be only instrumental reason.

What, then, is value in our post-Humean paradigm? For us, value is just a matter of desire or preference, with all the subjectivity and relativism that this implies. If value were arrived at via reason instead of desire, value would be objective—it would be something you could be wrong about instead of being something which depends as it does today on subjective desire wherein if you think it’s good then it’s good.4

Two things separate us most remarkably from the ancients. One is that they lived in a time 1500 years before the moral relativism we embrace today was even conceivable. The other is their lack of an important role for will in their understanding of human action. We, by contrast, have made an apotheosis of will; we’ve turned it into the end all be all.

Socrates’ view is especially foreign to us because he specifically denied the conceptual possibility of “weakness of will,” or akrasia, that is, situations in which we act against our (better) judgment. In cases of weakness of will, like bad habits or procrastination, our reason tells us a task is important or urgent but when we do something else instead, we demonstrate, according to Socrates, that we actually believed the other thing—the thing we actually did—to be more important, more valuable.

A student going to a party rather than studying the night before a test demonstrates he values the party more than studying. Socrates would categorize procrastination as a failure of rationality, an evaluation5 of what would be good to do, an evaluation which was objectively false. His reason or reasoning was wrong (indeed, his rational evaluation of the pros and cons of the various options open to him was wrong) because it motivated him to do the less objectively reasonable thing.6

Contrariwise, after Hume, we say the student’s reason was correct (he reasoned that he should not go out but instead study the night before the test); he just didn’t want to do the reasonable thing. Acting against your better judgment was impossible according to Socrates, because Reason does what it views as best done. In those case where it might appear you acted against your better judgment, you were in fact judging what you did to be better—best all things considered—but, Socrates would say, you were simply wrong about that.

The paradigm we live in today describes the case differently. It says: our reason did indeed evaluate the undone course of action (about which we procrastinated) as the most valuable, and therefore the thing we ought to do, but we did not want to do it, and so we did not do it.7

Let’s now compare the figure or trope each epoch or paradigm prefers to describe human agency. The two-horsed chariot for the ancients and the homunculus at the control panel for we moderns.

The first task is to understand the chariot metaphor in the way the ancients did rather than how we are inclined to. Frede says, “modern readers apparently can hardly help thinking of cases of acute mental conflict,” when thinking of the charioteer metaphor. That is, we project our homuncular conception of the mind onto Aristotle and the two-horse chariot setup. “We sit there anguished, tormented, torn apart by two conflicting desires which pull us in opposite directions, while we try to make up our mind which direction to take,” (italics added).

But that’s not what Plato meant with the charioteer metaphor when he introduced it in The Republic. Standing in for Reason, the charioteer, according to the ancient understanding, himself has a desire; he desires the good. (His task is to train his horses to also go in that direction. Horses do not act on the basis of reflection or wisdom; they act out of habit or instinctively; but they can be trained to act in line with what Reason judges proper.) The ancients understood that to cash out the italicized “make up our mind” a few sentences above, we would have to invoke another metaphorical charioteer inside the first charioteer. The ancient paradigm avoided this infelicity by giving Reason a desire of its own, capable of motivating us on its own. The charioteer has a telos or drive of its own, which is sufficient on its own to succeed in motivating action.

According to the ancient Greeks, when we do what we believe is best, it’s because we saw it was best, and not because we saw it was best and also had this other thing, a will, which decided to do it. The addition of a mental event, an extraneous willing, is what gets the homuncular regress going. Aristotle’s view makes sense at just the point ours starts to go awry. Indeed, Aristotle was the first to oppose the notion of a homunculus as leading to an infinite regress, although he opposed it in biology as a bad theory of the life force a sperm brings to an egg.

Conceiving of the mind in the homuncular manner is to conceive of self-consciousness as an autonomous monitoring and control system and conscious will as an uncaused causer. The ancient conception of the mind was different. The ancient’s conceived of the mind as a collection of desires or motivating drives (that is, the rational charioteer and nonrational horses are all drives, drives of different kinds), each in competition with the other drives to get the creature to do what each drive innately wants the creature to do. No uncaused causer anywhere. No “spontaneous will” as uncaused causer. And so no problem of free will in the way we moderns understand it, which is as a conflict between belief in an uncaused causer and the truth of causal determinism. QED.

Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences.

— René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 1640 A.D., trans. John Veitch

One day during the era of COVID-19 and Trump 1.0, my then-girlfriend, Kelly, and I hiked the Neahkahnie Mountain trail on the Oregon coast. We needed a break from the incessant news cycle, and from the misinformation and conspiracy theories on social media. A growing segment of Americans seemed capable of believing unbelievable things. That segment included Kelly’s father.

She and I had recently watched Kate Snow of NBC file a report on the Q-Anon conspiracy theory: “Chloe Neely is a mom of two who spends Sundays on the soccer sidelines. She subscribes to some of Q’s more outlandish unproven theories,” said Snow. Talking with Neely, Snow asked, “Do you believe that there is a satanic […] group of people [including Democrats and celebrities] who are trafficking children and drinking their blood?”

“I would like not to believe that,” Neely said, attempting a laugh.

“But you think it might be… or is?”

“Yeah, I think it definitely could be possible, yes.”

“God help us,” opined Brian Williams.

“Piss poor epistemology!” said Kelly.

“Oh,” I said, “I’m gonna use that.”

As a philosophy professor, I occasionally teach critical thinking classes and I had been looking for a catchall term for a list I’m keeping of epistemic errors people regularly make on TV.

But just then we arrived at the sea cliff overlooking Treasure Cove, and north beyond it, Smuggler’s Cove. My mind cleared. Flowers and meadow grasses covered the ground all the way to the edge of the cliff. It was a vertiginous drop, five-hundred feet straight down. I thought to myself: Didn’t the edge used to be farther out? I realized a part of the cliff face must have recently broken off and fallen into the ocean. Suddenly I got dizzy. My heart raced and I started sweating. I felt like I was going to pitch over the edge. I dropped to my hands and knees.

The world whirled around me—around me whirled the world.

I forced myself to crawl to the edge next to Kelly, who might as well have been standing in Amy Cuddy’s Wonder Woman pose. She does not share my fear of heights.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Yeah—head just got a bit wooly.”

I decided I would stand up. But I was going to take it slow. First, I crawled away from the edge, then I got up on one knee and untied and re-tied my bootlaces in preparation for, and to delay, finally standing up. I could sense Kelly was watching me.

“Hey,” she said after I finished, “You are tying your shoes with a granny knot.”

“Really?”

I undid them and tied them again, at first for myself but then sheepishly so she could see.

“Yep. That’s a granny knot,” she said.

Evidently, I’ve been tying my shoes wrong my whole life. No wonder I’ve always needed to double knot them! If I could be wrong about this, I could be wrong about anything. Jesus, what else had I been wrong about my entire life? Watching the foundational supports of my own epistemological surety tremble was frankly as vertiginous a feeling as looking down over the edge of the sea cliff. I got dizzy all over again.

The world whirled around me—around me whirled the world.

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The American tree sparrow and the chipping sparrow look remarkably similar. Both have a cinnamon or rust colored cap and both have two white bars of the same width on their wings. Finally, both have a grey breast. Only the American tree sparrow has a breast spot of white. To tell the birds apart, the white spot is dispositive since the chipping sparrow lacks one.

Imagine: I was out birding with a friend in Montana, the territorial home of these two kinds of birds. My friend claimed to know he saw an American tree sparrow without determining if it had the white breast spot or not. What would we say in a case like that? I think my friend’s lack of epistemological scruple would weird us out. You can’t say you know it’s an American tree sparrow unless you’ve eliminated the possibility that it might be a chipping sparrow. That’s part of what the word “know” means.

Descartes’ definition of knowledge built on this point. Forgive me a brief dalliance with some slightly more philosophical verbiage, including a sparse use of variables, so I can explain Descartes’ epistemology, his definition of knowledge. In order to say you know that X is true, it makes good sense that you must have eliminated the possibility that X is false. If you are saying it’s one specific kind of bird, then you are saying by implication that is not another kind of bird.

If it were the wrong kind of bird, that would “defeat” your initial claim. Descartes generalizes this sensible requirement of eliminating defeating possibilities. According to Descartes, in order to know X, you must eliminate any defeating possibilities, which we can label collectively “P.” In other words, to really know X, your evidence for X must eliminate P, where P is all the possibilities in which X is false.

You gotta make sure it’s not a chipping sparrow if you’re saying it’s an American tree sparrow. But you also have to make sure it’s not a taxidermied American tree sparrow, nor an audio-animatronic American tree sparrow escaped from Disneyland, nor just a dream of an American tree sparrow, nor an American tree sparrow consisting of 1s and 0s in the Matrix. Because if it’s any of those, it’s not what you claimed to know it was.

Requiring knowledge to be beyond all possible doubt has a lot of our commonsense intuitions in its favor. When my birding friend uses the word “know” in a way that deviates from Descartes’ definition of knowledge, we feel my friend is wrong or crazy. That is good support for Descartes’ theory. It’s intuitive, at least that far. It captures a lot of what we mean by “know.”

However, Cartesian epistemology has a fatal flaw.

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When the film The Matrix came out, a few philosophers got paid Hollywood money to pen essays about the philosophical bona fides of the film.

“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?” Laurence Fishburn’s Morpheus says to Keanu Reeves’ Neo. “What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?”

The idea that we might right now all just be dreaming is a Cartesian idea. Descartes realized that if he had ever had a dream that seemed real, then how could he tell that right now—which seemed real—was not a dream? Answer: He couldn’t.

If it seems to me that I am sitting by the fireplace in my dressing gown holding a piece of paper, Descartes wrote, and yet I am actually only dreaming that I am sitting by the fireplace in my dressing gown holding a piece of paper, then it follows that I am not actually sitting by the fire and the rest because instead I am lying prone in bed, asleep.

The fact that we might be dreaming was a defeating possibility that could not be eliminated. The skeptical argument in Descartes is (1) To know X you must know you’re not dreaming; and (2) You can’t know you aren’t dreaming. Together, (1) and (2) imply we never know anything, never actually have genuine knowledge.

Except that you exist. The one thing we can know is the conclusion of the famous cogito ergo sum: “I think therefore I am.”

In point of fact, it was really “I doubt I am, and yet there I am doubting.” Or even: “I think I might be dreaming, yet there I am thinking.” So, the one thing that can be known beyond any possible doubt is that I am a thinking thing, a consciousness, a seat of experience—not a body, mind you, just a mind.

Descartes went on from there to build up a reconstruction of scientific knowledge from the foundation of the cogito, but hardly anyone accepts it. Instead, his legacy has been to be associated with an epistemological skepticism bordering on solipsism. Knowledge needs to be impossible to doubt, he said. However—except for the cogito—it never is.

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In the 2500-year history of philosophy there has been a lasting preoccupation with possibility and necessity. Philosophers use these logical concepts as well as analyze them. St. Anselm argued that necessarily God exists. Descartes argued that it is logically possible for the mind to exist separately from the body. Berkeley held that it is impossible to be and to be unperceived. Descartes argued that knowledge consisted of propositions impossible to doubt.

The support for these philosophical positions were offered in the form of deductive arguments, which stands in contrast to modus operandi of science which works mostly by induction. Based on empirical experiment, science takes many particulars and arrives at a generalization, which, if good, will be said to be highly confirmed by the evidence.

An inductive argument works like this:

Premise 1) The first time I saw that dog it bit me.

Premise 2) The second time I saw that dog it bit me.

Premise 3) The third time I saw that dog it bit me.

Conclusion: Next time I see that dog there is a high probability it will bite me.

When Damian Lillard steps up to the free throw line, we know that the probability he will make the shot is 90%. How? Because, roughly speaking, we’ve seen him in the past take 1000 shots and he made 900 of them.

The laws of nature—such as Newton’s Second Law, f=ma, force equals mass times acceleration—are not said to be “proven,” only very highly confirmed, or 99.9999% certain.

On the other hand, the following is a classic example of a deductively valid argument form, which can give 100% certainty:

Premise 1) If P then Q.

Premise 2) P.

Conclusion: Therefore Q.

If we imagine premises 1 and 2 were true, then it will be impossible to deny the conclusion, the conclusion will be necessarily true. Try it. Imagine that “If P then Q” is true. Now imagine that “P” is true. You can see the implication is the truth of “Q”. Indeed, it is impossible (contradictory) to imagine denying the truth of “Q” while also imagining that “If P then Q” and “P” were true.

Let’s look at an example argument in that form: A philosopher might argue that “If an entity is conscious, then it deserves moral consideration” and “C-3PO is conscious.” If those two premises can be shown to be true, then the proposition “C-3PO deserves moral consideration” is as equally logically guaranteed as “all triangles have three sides.”

Do you balk at that, Reader? Are you offended by the assertion that something might be true necessarily?

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The great Scottish philosopher David Hume made perhaps the most devastating critique of philosophers’ concept of necessity. Hume began his case by pointing out that for all we can rationally know, even those states of affairs excluded by the laws of nature are not necessarily false. Consider Hume’s famous example. Hume said it was not logically impossible that you could jump out the window and not fall to the ground. That’s a lot of double negatives. Let’s clean it up. What Hume was saying is that it’s a possibility that you jump out the window and float up and away, contrary to the laws of nature.

It’s a possibility, a logical possibility because, again, induction does not get you 100% certainty. “But,” as Hume would say, “So what?” What matters is that your floating away is very improbable in terms of natural probability. That you won’t fall is empirically very unlikely, and that’s what matters to knowing what will happen when you jump out the window.

Because, for Hume, the laws of nature are generalizations with the weight behind them only of inferences of an inductive kind, and inductive inferences are always less than 100% certain.

The only real necessity anywhere in the universe is in the necessarily true truths of mathematics and of logic, or in propositions true by definition, like “All bachelors are unmarried males,” and “all triangles have three sides.” Necessity can be found in the internal inferences within our conceptual scheme, but not in nature. Not since Hume.

Under a Humean meaning for the word “know,” do we know that you’d fall if you jumped out the window? Yes, actually. We know you will fall with as much certainty as can be had inductively. But we do not know it as a matter of logical necessity.

So, please don’t jump out the window, Reader—the author and publisher hereby disavow any such perceived instruction and cannot be held legally liable—because we know you will fall as well as we know anything. We just don’t know it the way Descartes thought was required to count as knowledge. But his definition of what should count as knowledge, while intuitive in some respects, in the end does not work and must be rejected. It doesn’t work to say that knowledge is only achieved by propositions that are impossible to doubt, i.e., necessary. It works for math, but not for the physical world. Impossibility is binary, without shades of gray, without degrees. But we need degrees of knowing.

Descartes has no way to say I know X with a higher probability than I know Y. But, in real life, knowledge must be able to countenance probabilities and degrees of confirmation.

The Cartesian alternative to knowledge by degrees is to seek and never find necessary truths—to seek and never find, in our empirical investigations of the physical world, truths impossible to conceive otherwise, to seek and never find truths impossible to doubt.

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With what we’ve got on the table now, I can explain what’s Cartesian about conspiracy thinking. The same explanation has the added value of explaining what’s wrong with some well-worn epistemological bromides: “We cannot predict the future,” “I can’t know another person’s mind,” “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and “You cannot prove a negative.” Those are all errors.

I’ll show how these are mistakes in thinking, and then I’ll correct them by using Hume’s definition of knowledge and eschewing Descartes’.

• Incorrect cliché: We cannot predict the future

• Humean truth: We predict the future all the time

We cannot be 100% certain about what will happen in the future, but we do in fact make predictions all the time that turn out to be true. And we can in fact get all the way up to 99.99999% probability in certain cases. Just let your prediction rely on a regularity you’ve observed in nature many times before. We predict the future a million times a day every time a piece of technology such as a watch or computer works as expected, since technology is based on our understanding and manipulation of the regularities known as the laws of nature.

• Incorrect cliché: I cannot know another person’s mind

• Humean truth: We can very well know another person’s mind

The impenetrability of another’s mind is given the lie a thousand times a day. Every gossip session, in which we explain a friend’s behavior by attributing a mental state to our friend, proves the point. We can in many contexts know another person’s mind as well as we know almost anything. Provided you know what “know” means.

• Incorrect cliché: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

• Humean truth: Yes, it is, if you’ve looked systematically and thoroughly for evidence

The absence of evidence for the Pastafarian’s god, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is evidence of its absence. It’s not proof. It’s evidence.

The concept of proof is misplaced here. Proof belongs to contexts of logical argumentation and deductive inferences. Evidence and the degree of confirmation by evidence are the relevant concepts when we are talking about empirical reality.

• Incorrect cliché: You cannot prove a negative

• Humean truth: Proof is misplaced as an epistemic concept except in logical deduction

“You cannot prove a negative.” Fine. That’s true. But it’s worse than useless because, again, proof is the wrong standard. Instead, induction is king here. And what you are able to do with inductive inferences from more and more evidence is make a quote-unquote negative less and less probable until it is as improbable as anything we know does not and will not happen.

Much of American conspiracy theory thinking comes from some Americans’ inability to think probabilistically and statistically. They fail to think of knowledge as Hume recommends and persist in thinking like Descartes, whose epistemology focused too much on what’s logically possible and not enough on what is empirically probable.

What, after all, does the conspiracy theorist say? They say that their cherished, conspiratorial conclusion cannot be definitively disproven by their opponents.

“You can’t prove that what Q-anon says is false,” they say breathlessly.

“You can’t know for sure that Hillary Clinton didn’t run a child sex ring out of a pizzeria!”

Notice the structural similarity between those conspiracy-type thoughts and the Cartesian assertion: “You can’t prove for certain that we are not living in the matrix.” “You can’t prove that Democrats and celebrities are not drinking children’s blood.”

Unless everything is hopeless, I think it will help to avoid conspiracy thinking by recognizing that it partakes of a discredited and in any case unworkable epistemology by which only something impossible to doubt gets to be called knowledge.

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Yet, you know what, I have still not bothered to learn how to tie my shoes properly.

Well, I did Google it and I found some instructions. But the habit of how my fingers throw the laces around is so deep in muscle memory I didn’t bother more than twice to try to change it. And I think I’m okay with that.

The new, occasionally dizzying question becomes: What else are we wrong about that we nevertheless won’t care to change our views on? And, when it’s important enough that refusing to change would count as a character flaw and moral failing, how will we know?

Nonsense. I think we’ll know. We’ll know at least to a moral certainty. We’ll know with probability sufficient to allow no reasonable doubt. And then we just have to be reasonable. Is that too much to hope for?

“Those who cannot understand how to put their thoughts on ice should not enter into the heat of debate.” —Nietzsche

Socrates never mentions free will and it does not appear in the works of Plato or Aristotle, or so says classicist and philosopher Michael Frede. In his book, A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, Frede writes, “[I]f we look at Greek literature from Homer onwards, down to long after Aristotle, we do not find any trace of a reference to, let alone a mention of, free will.”

Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind popularized the hard-to-believe idea that the pre-Homerian Greeks heard what we would call the inner voice of conscience. But, Jaynes said, they thought it was a god’s voice in their head. In Homer’s Iliad many significant moments, for example, actions that turn the tide of a battle—but also insignificant moments of quotidian agency—are described as caused not by the Homeric heroes but by the gods acting through them. It was as if the gods played puppeteer standing over the scene like over a gameboard and pulling the strings connected to Hector and Achilles.

For the moment, we may put Jaynes aside as overly speculative, if still evocative. According to Frede, the reason Plato and Aristotle do not have a concept of free will is because, “[n]either Plato nor Aristotle has a notion of a will.” That’s right. They did not make use of the concept of will, much less free will.

Frede: “[N]either Plato nor Aristotle has a notion of a will.”

Plato and Aristotle’s famous “tripartite view of the soul” is grounded in the idea that there are distinct forms of motivation which often come into conflict with each other and therefore “must have their origin in different capacities, abilities, or parts of the soul,” as Frede writes.

According to these ancient Greek thinkers, the collected parts of a human soul can be thought of metaphorically as a charioteer, which is Reason, gripping the reigns of two horses, Desire and Passion. As a metaphor, this strikes us as not so bad today. It looks a lot like our preferred folk metaphor of a homunculus at a control panel patched into the central nervous system. But the ancient view is more complicated than the metaphor suggests, and stranger too. Frede says the ancient thinkers had “a highly specific form of wanting or desiring, in fact, a form of wanting which we no longer recognize or for which we tend to have no place in our conceptual scheme.”

In other words, we don’t think of ourselves, of our agency, in the same way as the ancient Greeks did. And we may never be able to. But the way they thought can be made understandable from the outside, if not usable, so to speak, from the inside.

Frede says it’s safe to assume that Plato and Aristotle thought human beings at least sometimes acted voluntarily, or because they desired to so act, et cetera. The ancient Greek “folk” (non-philosophical layperson) had a commonsense psychology in which they attributed intentions and so on to each other. But the philosophical theory which Plato and those other philosophers posited to explain this commonsense folk psychology is what the modern mind does not, perhaps cannot, share in.

Aristotle does not share our notion of a will as essentially spontaneous, an uncaused causer.1

Consider the Latin velle, the German wollen, and “to will” in English. They all mean something like wanting or willing. The ancient Greek word boulesthai is closely related and yet, Frede says, should not be translated as “willing” because it signified a very specific form of wanting conceptually distinct from our sense of “willing.” Nevertheless, we lack any better term to translate it into.

According to Frede, boulesthai is “a form of desire which is specific to Reason.” “It is the form in which Reason desires something. If reason recognizes, or believes itself to recognize, something as a good, it ‘wills’ (boulesthai) or desires it. If Reason believes itself to see a course of action which would allow us to attain this presumed good, it thinks that it is a good thing, other things being equal, to take this course of action.” And, if it thinks that it is good to do something, then it does it. Or Reason makes us do it.

The ancient view assumed that “reason by itself suffices to motivate us to do something. This is an assumption which is made by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and their later followers.” But it is an assumption that is incommensurate with how we think about motivation and agency today. We are all followers of David Hume today insofar as we think that between reason and desire only desire is motivating on its own. My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable. Hume wrote that “it is not irrational to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger.”

Hume wrote that “it is not irrational to prefer the destruction of half the world to the pricking of my little finger.”

In other words, it’s possible that I’d rather avoid a little pain than prevent the destruction of half the world. It’s conceivable I would not switch one for the other; that is, I might let half the world be destroyed rather than endure a little pain in my finger.

My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable.

My reason can recognize something as good to do and yet I will not do it unless I also want to do it, or unless I desire to be reasonable.

That is our modern intellectual inheritance. Those preferences would sound like nonsense to the ancient Greek philosophers. The difference is Hume has limited “rational” to mean only instrumental reason. Being rational can help you instrumentally to achieve your goals, your values, your desires. But establishing what is valuable is not a part of rationality when the latter is conceptually limited to be only instrumental reason.

What, then, is value in our post-Humean paradigm? For us, value is just a matter of desire or preference, with all the subjectivity and relativism that this implies. If value were arrived at via reason instead of desire, value would be objective—it would be something you could be wrong about instead of being something which depends as it does today on subjective desire wherein if you think it’s good then it’s good.

Two things separate us most remarkably from the ancients. One is that they lived in a time 1500 years before the moral relativism we embrace today was even conceivable. The other is their lack of an important role for will in their understanding of human action. We, by contrast, have made an apotheosis of will; we’ve turned it into the end all be all.

Socrates’ view is especially foreign to us because he specifically denied the conceptual possibility of “weakness of will,” or akrasia, that is, situations in which we act against our better judgment. In cases of weakness of will, like bad habits or procrastination, our reason tells us a task is important or urgent but when we do something else instead, we demonstrate, according to Socrates, that we actually believed the other thing—the thing we actually did—to be more important, more valuable. A student going to a party rather than studying the night before a test demonstrates he values the party more than studying. Socrates would categorize procrastination as a failure of rationality, a subjective evaluation of what would be good to do, an evaluation which was objectively false. His reason or reasoning was wrong (indeed, his rational evaluation of the pros and cons of the various options open to him was wrong) because it motivated him to do the less reasonable thing. Contrariwise, after Hume, we say the student’s reason was correct (he reasoned that he should not go out but instead study the night before the test); he just didn’t want to do the reasonable thing. Acting against your better judgment was impossible according to Socrates, because Reason does what it views as best done. In those case where it might appear you acted against your better judgment, you were in fact judging what you did to be better—best all things considered—but, Socrates would say, you were simply wrong about that.

The paradigm we live in today describes the case differently. It says: our reason did indeed evaluate the undone course of action (about which we procrastinated) as the most valuable, and therefore the thing we ought to do, but we did not want to do it, and so we did not do it.2

Frede says, “modern readers apparently can hardly help thinking of cases of acute mental conflict,” when thinking of the charioteer metaphor. We project our homuncular conception of the mind onto Aristotle’s works. “We sit there anguished, tormented, torn apart by two conflicting desires which pull us in opposite directions, while we try to make up our mind which direction to take,” (italics added). But that’s not what Plato meant with the charioteer metaphor when he introduced it in The Republic. Standing in for Reason, the charioteer, according to the ancient understanding, himself has a desire; he desires the good. (His task is to train his horses to also go in that direction. Horses do not act on the basis of reflection or wisdom; they act out of habit or instinctively; but they can be trained to act in line with what Reason judges proper.) The ancients understood that to cash out the italicized “make up our mind” a few sentences above, we would have to invoke another metaphorical charioteer inside the first charioteer. The ancient paradigm avoided this infelicity by giving Reason a desire of its own, capable of motivating us on its own. The charioteer has a telos or drive of its own, which is sufficient on its own to succeed in motivating action.

According to the ancient Greeks, when we do what we believe is best, it’s because we saw it was best, and not because we saw it was best and also had this other thing, a will, which decided to do it. The addition of a mental event, an extraneous willing, is what gets the regress going. Aristotle’s view makes sense at just the point ours starts to go awry. Indeed, Aristotle was the first to oppose the notion of a homunculus as leading to an infinite regress, although he opposed it in biology as a bad theory of the life force a sperm brings to an egg.

Conceiving of the mind in the homuncular manner is to conceive of self-consciousness as an autonomous monitoring and control system and conscious will as an uncaused causer. The ancient conception of the mind was different. The ancient’s conceived of the mind as a collection of desires or motivating drives (that is, the rational charioteer and nonrational horses are all drives, drives of different kinds), each in competition with the other drives to get the creature to do what each drive innately wants the creature to do. No uncaused causer anywhere.

Whence our intuitive notion of causal determinism?

I’d assumed that determinism began to take its contemporary shape with the new mechanistic explanations of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But recently I have begun to wonder if determinism were not older and deeper in our psyches—a feature of explanation per se, not mechanistic explanation specifically.

Rather than coming about because of early science’s impressive discoveries of the clockwork-like laws of cause and effect, maybe the first threat to humanity’s sense of autonomy and dignity came from deterministic stories—that is to say, from Fate.

Narrative paths and story arcs, imposed on us by gods or divine forces, were taken to undermine something important to us: happiness or meaningfulness, if not also autonomy. Fate, oracles, curses, and the like preoccupied the ancient Athenians especially—as evidenced by their invention of the genre of tragic theater. At Oedipus’s birth, a divine oracle prescribed the inescapable story of his life, its end and its lasting meaning, as clear and unchangeable as if chiseled in the firmament.

During the Scientific Revolution, Medieval explanations (which had been Aristotelian, teleological, purpose-based, and qualitative) began to lose esteem and were replaced by quantitative and clockwork-like explanations, as in the mathematical equations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.

But the success of scientific explanations from the 1600s up until the advent of quantum mechanics (around 1900) only cemented a deterministic understanding of the world that was already conceivable without the walloping, world-historical success of Newton.

Indeed, the kind of determinism that could threaten humanity’s sense of agency would have been conceivable by a caveman observing the regular trajectory of his spear. He would have found that if he threw it with a certain effort, it reliably flew a certain distance; if he added some amount of effort more, then it would go some amount of distance farther.

There were regularities to be discovered everywhere. Our prehistoric ancestors saw the repeating paths across the sky of their projectiles, the sun, the moon, and the stars. They endured the relentless repetition of the seasons. Any regular pattern—physical or narratological—could take root in the early human imagination and begin to seem like a prison of the endless repetition of the same.

“Gronk, we sit around this campfire, as we have always done, and you say you are stronger than our clan leader, Thogson, which is what so many untested youngsters have always said. Upstarts like you are destined to try and fail. You are like Snarp from legend, who challenged the dragon and was killed. Thogson is like Thog of legend, who challenged the dragon and defeated it. But you cannot help yourself. It has always been thus.”

With the jawbone of your skeleton hinted at in your newly strange mouth and with your bugged out eyes revealing the sockets in your skull, the normally expressive human face stops expressing humanity. You now look to yourself like a meat android on a robot skeleton; the tenderness of the mouth is gone, replaced by a grimace more reflective of the cyborg endoskeletons of the Terminator movie franchise. The face and eyes no longer convey a soul endowed with free will. If you do it right, the eyes will have no more hint of a soul in them than does—to borrow from Burroughs—a crab’s eye on the end of its stalk.

“a deterministic view of human conduct… is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system.”

“A universal and persistent foundation stone in our system of law, and particularly in our approach to punishment, sentencing, and incarceration, is the belief in freedom of the human will and a consequent ability and duty of the normal individual to choose between good and evil.” US v Grayson 1978.

Steward Machine Co vs Davis 1937:

“[T]he whole presupposition of the criminal law is that most people, most of the time, have free will within broad limits,” and that “the law has been guided by a robust common sense which assumes freedom of the will as a working hypothesis in the solution of its problems.”

Ronald Reagan said:

“We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

I had another section, longer than this one, about how progressive should adopt Sapolsky’s line and deny free will. Should? Well, the more interesting point, I thought, was that progressive already deny free will, as can be seen if one views various progressive goals, projects, shibboleths, and bromides through a certain lens.

Is the person in the street a libertarian or a compatibilist? The relatively new movement called experimental philosophy has for a couple of decades taken the armchair thought experiments of philosophers to the person in the street. Practitioners then utilize the statistical research methods of social psychology to get data on how people respond—whereas philosophers had made claims for their thought experiments from a sample of one. It turns out that what people say about free will depends on framing and ordering effects; that is, surveys and experiments can elicit compatibilist as well as libertarian intuitions. If a vignette about Newton’s success at discovering the laws of nature precedes the survey question, a larger percentage of respondents agree that free will and science are incompatible. If an action was described as immoral and with sufficiently concrete detail, people reintroduce free will in order to hold the evil doer morally responsible.

Robert Sapolsky describes the untutored, folk view as a mix: it’s broadly libertarian with compatibilist aspects. “We have something resembling a spirit, a soul, an essence that embodies our free will, from which emanates behavioral intent; and… this spirit coexists with biology that can sometimes constrain it… A well-intentioned spirit, while willing, can be thwarted by flesh that is sufficiently weak.”

In other words, we have our biology, including aspects of brain function that “can be influenced by someone’s prenatal environment, genes, and hormones, whether their parents were authoritative or their culture egalitarian, whether they witnessed violence in childhood, etc.,”—basically Sapolsky’s entire book, Behave. “And then, separate from that, in a concrete bunker tucked away in the brain, sits a little man (or woman, or nongendered individual), a homunculus at a control panel.” The homunculus, if you think about it, cannot be made of brain stuff (“squishy biological brain yuck”) or else there’d need to be a tinier homunculus inside the first homunculus. In order to avoid an infinite regress, the homunculus must be an immaterial substance that is capable of spontaneous action outside any causal story preceding it.

Sapolsky says the folk view allows that there are some things “outside the homunculus’ purview—seizures blow the homunculus’ fuses, requiring it to reboot the system… Same with alcohol, Alzheimer’s disease, a severed spinal cord, hypoglycemic shock.” However, aside from a few situations in which biology overpowers it, the homunculus maintains its ability to act unpredictably and contrary to everything that had come before.

This view is not supported by science, Sapolsky argues. And, as Sam Harris points out, it’s philosophically confused for invoking a causa sui, i.e., a self-causing, uncaused causer, namely the soul-like homunculus. (Nietzsche said it best: “The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived, a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity’s excessive pride has got itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense.”) The folk view is further problematic philosophically-speaking because of the question of interaction. A dualist view like this needs to explain how the soul, which is immaterial, can “pull” on the “levers” which are physical or biological. It was Elizabeth, Princess of Bohemia, who presciently pointed this out in extensive correspondence with the father of modern dualism, Rene Descartes, who had absurdly invoked the pineal gland as the place where the impossible interaction occurs.1

The rotation happens at 1000 miles per hour, roughly. After all, the circumference of the Earth is about 24,000 miles around. And the Earth completes a rotation once per 24-hour day. And—if I may belabor a point—since twenty-four goes into 24,000 1000 times, we know the Earth is rotating west to east at 1000 mph.

That the sun does not set and that we are spinning at 1000 miles per hour are examples of truths we know but do not believe. At least in my way of framing things. I understand this framing is unconventional, even paradoxical. But I have found it fruitful.

By logic alone it should not be possible to know something yet not believe it. Those exposed to some philosophy among my readers will have been making this objection in their minds for the last few moments. Philosophers often conceive of “knowledge” as “true, justified belief.” In other words, a person knows something when (1) they believe it to be true in virtue of proper justification and (2) the belief is also true. (About which much ink has been spilled but let us not be delayed.)

Thus, while not all beliefs are knowledge, all knowledge is a (special kind of) belief.

Knowing without believing sounds strange. More commonly, it goes the other way around—someone holds a belief without having knowledge, without being in possession of proper justification for their belief. We are inundated by news of people who maintain a set of beliefs without knowing what the fuck they are talking about, without their beliefs corresponding to anything in the real world. And then those benighted people perpetrate an insurrection against their government.

Knowledge without belief? What could that even mean?

We live in an age where much of what we know cannot be believed or at any rate is not believed. Since the Scientific Revolution that started 500 years ago, we have lived with this gap between the scientific image of the universe and the image tacitly animating how we experience the world, i.e., the commonsense or “manifest image” of the world, to use a term from philosophy of science. According to the manifest image of the world, the sun moves across the sky throughout the day, setting in the west. According to the scientific image of the world, it is not true that the sun is moving in that way; instead, the Earth is moving.

What physicists know about the nature of matter asserts that matter is mostly empty space. Those of us who know this rarely believe it.

Those of us who know free will is not real (i.e., libertarian free will is either incoherent or undermined by the truth of causal determinism) can only briefly make ourselves believe it. (For more on this, please read my essay forthcoming in the Missouri Review, titled “Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem,” due out in mid-June.)

Denying free will of oneself—or, generally speaking, trying to believe what you know but don’t normally believe—can cause a kind of vertigo. But it’s temporary. Since it’s a dizziness that you get because you’ve been thinking too much, I’ve taken to calling it “armchair vertigo.” And I also call it that because it goes away once you get out of the armchair of philosophical reflection, and you engage again with life. Simon Blackburn coined the phrase “inductive vertigo” for the feeling one gets when one appreciates David Hume’s so-called skeptical point about the mere probability of the laws of nature, not their absolute certainty. (I won’t pause to explain; just wanted to give credit where credit is… you can finish that sentence yourself.)

In day-to-day, normal life—that is, while not suffering from armchair vertigo—the state free will deniers are in consists paradoxically of knowing without believing. It’s the believing what we know that makes us dizzy.

There are cases where believing what we know causes anxiety. I’m thinking of the widespread phenomenon of “death denial,” and also of the truth of the climate change crisis. In both cases, we know it, but we can barely bring ourselves to believe it—at least judging by our actions or lack thereof. We would live differently if we really appreciated the fact of our inevitable death. That’s why a brush with death so often brings about significant life changes.

I’ll conclude this brief introduction by merely gesturing in the direction of other topics which I’ve been able to relate to this phenomenon of knowing without believing. Self-deception, as a topic in psychology but also philosophy, is related. When you act against your better judgment—as in procrastination and other instance of so-called weakness of will—you are not believing what you know. Your better judgment is that you ought to do X, that it would be best to do X, but you end up doing not-X. This action against your better judgment is an indication you actually believed something else was best to do because that was what you ended up doing.

More: the problem of publicity for utilitarianism; the climate crisis; Hume's problem of induction; many possible worlds theories; free will denial; optical illusions like the Mueller-Lyer illusion. I explore them all in the same manner as the free will essay.

Stay tuned.

I write about what we know but do not believe.

—David J. Frost

We know we will die, but mostly live as if we will not. We may know free will is an illusion, but still blame, praise, regret, apologize, and resent. We know happiness cannot be pursued directly, but pursue it anyway. I write about that gap: the distance between what we know intellectually and what we can actually believe, feel, and live by.

About Armchair Vertigo

Armchair Vertigo is a newsletter of literary nonfiction, philosophy, psychology, memoir, and cultural criticism. Its central subject is the examined life under pressure: death, grief, self-deception, procrastination, moral responsibility, free will, happiness, and meaning.

About me

I’m David J. Frost. My essay on the psychological effects of denying free will is forthcoming in the Summer 2026 issue of The Missouri Review. I’ve also published essays in The Smart Set, SLAB Literary Magazine, Philosophy Now, and elsewhere. I have a B.A. in English from Columbia, an M.A. in Philosophy from UC Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UNC-Chapel Hill. I teach philosophy online for Alamance Community College and live on the Oregon coast.

For more of my work, visit: davidjfrost.com or linktr.ee/davidfrost

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Chérif, Mustapha. Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Originally published as L’Islam et l’occident, 2006. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. With a foreword by Giovanna Borrodori. In the Religion and Postmodernism Series. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xxii + 114 pp. Hardback, $19.99 

On the very day he learned he had contracted pancreatic cancer (the cancer which in 15 months would kill him), Jacques Derrida participated in a deeply personal discussion with Mustapha Chérif on the topic of ‘Islam and the West.’ Chérif, a professor of philosophy and Islamic studies at the University of Algiers, had organized a conference in Paris on the theme of the dialogue between civilizations.1 

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Derrida’s participation was highly anticipated: The extremely influential practitioner of deconstruction was born in Algeria, a life experience which had not left Derrida’s philosophical thought untouched. The text of this book is Chérif’s own essayistic account of their discussion, with Derrida’s remarks embedded as quotations. Chérif delivered a eulogy for Derrida after his death, which is included as an appendix.2

The central themes of Chérif’s book include (1) Derrida’s own mixed French and Algerian identity; (2) the false dichotomy that sets Islam and the West in opposition; (3) the responsible way to approach ‘the other’—essential to Derrida’s philosophy; (4) the insistence that Muslims can affirm pluralistic democracy without losing their identities; (5) criticism of the ‘dehumanizing’ aspects of modernity, and (6) hope for a universal ‘democracy to come.’

These last two themes are the most fully developed. However, neither the foreword by Giovanna Borrodori, nor Chérif’s text surrounding the dialogue, are substantial enough to build an undergraduate course on alone. For pedagogical purposes, Chérif’s book would have to be supplemented with the relevant Derridean texts.3 One would also need philosophy of religion texts4 and political philosophy texts (recommendations made in the references section below) that would give more context to the claims made in the book. 

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Derrida was, as he says, ‘born a Jew in Algeria,’ (p. 29) in 1930. He was born in El Biar (Algiers) ‘into that part of the community which in 1870 had obtained [French] nationality through the Cremieux Decree, and then lost it in 1940.’ He says, ‘When I was ten years old, during the Vichy regime, I lost my French citizenship, and for a few years, [was] unable to attend the French school…. That was one of the earth-shattering experiences of my existence, one of the earth-shattering Algerian experiences of my existence,’5 (p. 29).

Borrodori writes, ‘after leaving Algeria for the first time in 1949 at the age of nineteen, Derrida returned as a soldier in the French army and a teacher in 1957-59, during Algeria’s war of independence,’ (p. xiii). He gave a lecture there in 1971; by then he was already extremely influential in the critical theory movement in American literature departments. ‘Interestingly, over the course of the next two decades Derrida would travel all over Africa and the Middle East, expressing political support for the oppressed in South Africa and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, for example. But he would never again land in his country of birth,’ (p. xiii). 

The contortions and idiosyncrasies of deconstruction that were most evident in Derrida’s early work are not on display in Chérif’s book. ‘In the 1990’s, Derrida’s works went in two simultaneous directions that tend to intersect and overlap with one another: politics and religion,’ (Lawlor 2006). Derrida’s deconstructive practice in this political-religious context is not especially difficult or obscure:

‘What I call deconstruction, [is] namely, to do these two things at the same time: to ask questions, for example, about the theological genealogy of the concepts of the political that organize Western thought, and European thought in particular, on the one hand, and, on the other, to maintain, in determined and determinable contexts, the survival of those concepts that one is in the process of questioning and deconstructing,’ (pp. 52-53). 

One concept deconstructed in this sense is that of ‘dialogue’ between individuals and groups. Since the conversation recorded here is between two intellectuals with sympathetic but divergent ideas, and since the book’s theme is the dialogue between civilizations, Derrida’s ideas about respectfully and fully addressing ‘the other’ are often repeated and, indeed, instantiated.

Chérif says that the book,

‘was not meant to be a classic philosophical exercise but above all a testimony to the fact that addressing the other is possible, that speech, respectful speech, thoughtful speech, frank speech, is the favored path to face up to our responsibilities,’ (p. 28).

Derrida and Chérif assert this approach as the proper methodology for a dialogue between civilizations, between the West and Islam, modulo the inaccuracies of that binary division. Since Chérif argues Islam is bound up with the history of the West, he prefers to make a distinction between peoples of the northern shores of the Mediterranean and those of the southern. 

This respectful dialogue with the other is also the preferred methodology of their academic discourse.

‘One doesn’t introduce Jacques Derrida. One welcomes him from the bottom of one’s heart, respectfully, warmly, kindly, thanking him deeply for having accepted our invitation,’ (p. 27).

This is not just boilerplate. The effusion of sentiments recorded here may surprise readers coming from the ‘analytic’ tradition’s more antagonistic discursive arrangement.6 However, those unfamiliar with Derrida’s intellectual circle should know that the emotion is sincere, and that the sincerity has theoretical foundations worked out over the entirety of his career in engagement with ‘the other.’ Yet, the more successful the book is as a ‘testimony,’ in Chérif’s word, the more it appears as a sentimental souvenir, almost a curio, for those who knew and read Derrida. 

Nevertheless the book contains substantial theorizing about politics and religion. A central pursuit in the book is to deny ‘the clash of civilizations’ narrative promulgated by the likes of Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis. ‘There is no inevitable confrontation nor intrinsic clash of civilization in their history… on the contrary Islam has participated in the emergence of the modern Western world; through its cultural and spiritual values, it is close to Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman ethics, norms, principles, regardless of the very real differences, divergences and uniqueness of each,’ (p. 21). 

Chérif and Derrida both insist that Muslims can endorse a pluralistic secular democracy while at the same time holding on to their Muslim identities.

‘For the field that I know relatively well, Islamology, I will say with modesty that, without a shadow of a doubt, the principle of secularity is, despite appearances, intrinsic to Islam, and this has been true since its origins,’ (p. 13).

The separation of religion and politics is, Chérif says, ‘a vital truism… contrary to what is believed, Islam does not confuse these two realms,’ (p. 5). That would seem to be an empirical claim; he does not back it up.

A relevant philosophical claim that they both do seem to argue is, in Rawlsian terms, that it would be possible for Islam to meet what is required of any comprehensive view in order for its adherents to agree to a just structure of society, which in a slogan ‘puts the right before the good’—an agreement which is made in an ‘overlapping consensus’ with other religious citizens of other faiths and with non-religious citizens (Rawls 2005).

According to Rawls, any ‘reasonable’ comprehensive view will be able to affirm the merely political conception of justice, which amounts to not much more than agreeing to fair terms of cooperation. Islam has the denominational resources, Chérif says, to affirm justice, fairness, and emancipation in its own Islamic terms. It is possible to embrace a religious life, which involves a relationship, as Chérif describes it, to the ‘Mystery of life,’ (p. 57) while protecting one’s neighbors’ freedoms to live otherwise, indeed to live in willful ignorance of the Mystery.

At least that is how I read Chérif. He is incomplete enough in his argumentation that it is possible he does not embrace the Rawlsian notion of ‘political liberalism’ as fully as Derrida indeed seems to here.

For his part, discussing the totality of Mystery at the center of Muslims’ concern, Derrida says to Chérif: ‘I believe that it is possible to live or to attempt to live this totality, even live it religiously, or to make religion the principle of this unification…. The principle of a global unity for his or her behavior, ethics, rule of life, without having to turn it into a system of political rules to be universalized and imposed on others,’ (p. 66).

However, at the same time, Derrida and Chérif are both intensely critical of the West. For one, both Derrida and Chérif obliquely make reference to the fact that the United States has its own problems, one might say, with achieving an overlapping consensus between its religious and secular citizens. Derrida distinguishes between different secularisms within Europe—there are differences in how ‘secularism’ is pursued in France, Germany, England, and Italy, especially as regards their respective unique immigrant populations. But Derrida takes what those European countries have in common and contrasts it with what is endemic in Arab-Muslim dictatorships and in the USA—places where there is a merging of politics and the theocratic (p. 65). He says, ‘their political discourse is a religious discourse in its most dogmatic form,’ (p. 66). 

Of course, Chérif would be remiss not to offer a critique of radical Islam or ‘Islamism,’ as well as criticizing the complacency of liberal, reformist-minded Muslims. ‘For [these latter] Muslims it is urgent and imperative to undertake a deep and constructive self-criticism; a work of ijtihad, interpretation, and of tajdid, renewal, which should recall that the Koran and the words (hadiths) of the Prophet prescribe an opening up, democracy, and the universal,’ (p. 23).

Chérif’s criticism of violent Islamism is almost always made on the heels of a criticism of the West’s violent and dehumanizing treatment of ‘the other,’ such that the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Bernard Henri-Levi might accuse him of making an unjustified moral equivalency. For example, Chérif says that ‘modern reason’ asserts ‘a cosmos without cause or a goal,’ falling short of its emancipatory promise:

Today, we, like the insurgents, are above all shocked, profoundly disappointed to see that… the revolutions, the promises of progress, have been transformed into threats, into dehumanization, and that at the same time our version of what is human is ignored. If we hazard to criticize, however peacefully, however naturally, the deviations, the lies, the duplicity, the confusion, the law of the strongest, the perversions of some practices of freedom, all doors close, and we are accused of every evil. However, we criticize our own contradictions as well, those of our own people who react irrationally, darkly, and absurdly to the politics of double standards, to hypocritical political discourse, to the refusal of dialogue and negotiation. The shameless exploitation of these blind reactions, to discredit the other and continue to refuse dialogue and justice is devastating. We demand the universalism of democracy, dialogue, and negotiations in the common interest, because we are all in the same boat,’ (pp. 41-42).

According to Chérif, precisely where modernity fails, Islam can help. The West’s notion of ‘modern reason’ rips meaningfulness from our lives.

‘For us, it appears that the West, the motor of modernity, does not propose a strong politics, nor a project for a society in which the question of justice, on the one hand, and that of meaning, on the other, are central,’ (p. 65).

Chérif’s alternative however is not anti-modern, he insists.

‘Globally, we don’t have the choice, modernity is inevitable, but we have the duty to criticize and to attempt to correct, to rectify, and to adapt that which appears to us to be contrary to our interests and values,’ (p. 47).

Chérif’s critique is reminiscent of Michael Sandel’s communitarian critique of Rawls insofar as Chérif also disapproves of the liberal, voluntarist conception of the person who values autonomy above all else and is unencumbered by notions of the good that they do not freely chose.7

His Islam resists, Chérif says, ‘that which appears to be a de-signification of the world, a challenging of the very foundations of humanity,’ (p. 4).

‘The commercialization of the world reduces [our] capacity to be responsible and to freely decide [our] future. Indeed, the ability to think, to think in other terms, is challenged by the shrinking of a horizon diminished by an absence of meaning, breaking of ties, and dictatorship of the market,’ (p. 5).

Still echoing arguments against liberalism, Chérif says that we must go beyond, ‘the corrupted forms of classical humanism… for that humanism is caught in the web of a waning Eurocentrism and of “the civilization of the death of God”,’ (p. 12). 

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Here is the place where Chérif believes Islam can contribute to solutions of the West’s problems. ‘Islam can contribute to the search for a balanced world, that is to say, a less dehumanized, more just, and more reasonable world,’ (p. 79) Chérif says. ‘Islam’s emancipatory force, beyond the deviations of some of its own followers today, makes it a natural participant in the search for new horizons,’ (p. 37). 

Derrida’s idiosyncratic conception of ‘democracy to come’8 is, on the other hand, more in line with Rawls’s political liberalism, or at least usefully compared to it. Derrida even expresses, perhaps, an appreciation of the value of autonomy and unencumbered free choice. It is worth remarking that one aspect Derrida particularly admires and inserts into his notion of ‘democracy to come’ is an essentially critical spirit.

‘Democracy is always to come, it is a promise, and it is in the name of that promise that one can always criticize, question that which is proposed as de facto democracy,’ (pp. 42-43).

Derrida, thereby, does not mean democracy as it is instantiated in today’s regimes.

‘What distinguishes the idea of democracy from all other ideas of political regimes—monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, and so on—is that democracy is the only political system, a model without a model, that accepts its own historicity, that is, its own future, which accepts its self-criticism, which accepts its perfectibility,’ (p. 42).

The right to pursue one’s own conception of the good is, in Rawls as it is in Derrida, a valorization of autonomous choice at the end of a process of unfettered critical thinking. It is not clear to me if Chérif would not prefer to put, so to speak, the good before the right.

Yet, Derrida and Chérif may not be all too far apart. Derrida is ‘a nonreligious thinker,’ Chérif realizes, but one who, ‘as a philosopher and from outside a system of belief, attempted to deal with problematics of religion. For me, he was a thinker who did not despise religion…. There is a noble moral dimension in Derrida’s thinking: he is concerned with the future of human dignity,’9 (pp. 6-7). Regarding the relative merits of faith as compared to reason, Derrida says: 

We must try to grasp the ineffable, to understand why and how reason, on the one hand, and faith, on the other, experience such difficulties in describing metamorphoses, in facing them, in accepting them. It is true that faith, as an intuition, sensation, conviction, lives and grasps the signs, risks, movements of the world in an easy, simple and natural way; from that, when it gives itself the Open for a horizon, it enables the human being to maintain a stand, a dignity, an ethics, even if nothing guarantees happiness, (pp. 8-9). 

But as the above passage continues, Derrida seems more essentially liberal, more willing to praise reason: ‘But reason too,’ he says,

‘when it refrains from excesses and [refrains] from claiming to govern meaning completely, when the unconditional is its principle and the infinite its task, can and must promote worthy, moral, and humane behavior,’ (pp. 8-9).

In all, this book will likely be a pleasant surprise to ‘analytic’ philosophers unfamiliar with Derrida, and a necessary book for those, as Borrodori writes, ‘of the progressive antiorientalist lineage.’        

References [Purchasing these books will help me fund Armchair Vertigo.]      

• Asad, Talal (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

• Bhargava, Rajeev (1998) (ed). Secularism and its Critics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

• Chérif, Mustapha (2006) Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Derrida, Jacques (2004). Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

• Derrida, Jacques (2001). Acts of Religion. New York: Routledge.

• Derrida, Jacques (1993). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International. New York, Routledge.

• Habermas, Jürgen (2006). An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age. New York: Polity.

• Habermas, Jürgen (2006). ‘Religion in the Public Sphere,’ European Journal of Philosophy 14:1 pp. 1–25.

• Lawlor, Leonard (2006). ‘Jacques Derrida’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, editor Edward N. Zalta. (Accessed online Spring 2010.)

• Rawls, John (2005). Political Liberalism, 2nd Edition. New York: Columbia University Press.

• Rorty, Richard (1991). ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,’ in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. New York: Cambridge University Press.

• Rorty, Richard & Gianno Vattimo (2005). The Future of Religion. (ed. Santiago Zabala). New York: Columbia University Press.

• Sandel, Michael (1998a). Democracy and its Discontents. Cambridge: Belknap. 

• Sandel, Michael (1998b). Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Sandel, Michael (1984b). ‘The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,’ Political Theory, Vol. 1, No. 1. (Feb. 1984), pp. 81-96.

• Taylor, Charles (1998). ‘Modes of Secularism,’ in Bargava (1998).

• Warner, Michael & Jonathan VanAntwerpen & Craig Calhoun (2010) (eds). Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Boston: Harvard University Press. 

My book review was originally published in the academic journal, Philosophia and was informed by my attendance, during the Summer of 2004, at Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory, paid for by a grant from the University of California, Irvine.

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Adam Gopnik, writing in an aside in the New Yorker, says that the argument between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris “is worth having”—and “in some sense it’s the only argument worth having.”

That stunned me. It’s pretty darn categorical. Gopnik is usually a quite subtler thinker and gifted writer. Indeed, he is one of my favorite stylists.

According to Gopnik, Dennett’s and Harris’s opposing positions on the free will debate represent two differing options secular materialists have in place of faith. They both “reject superstition and the supernatural, but end in radically different places,” with one side “accepting that the materialist view of the world without inherent meaning can produce only fatalism,” and the other side saying, “it can give us the great if ambiguous gift of freedom.” A marvelous insight as usual with Gopnik, but just slightly cockeyed. It is rather that Dennett attempts to saddle Harris with said fatalism, but both men see their differing materialism in positive terms. There is no representative of the ugly position defended by “Lui” in Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, which was part of the ostensible occasion for Gopnik’s article.

Writing and revising the free will article took me years. Yes, years. Looking at my computer files, I can see that it was way back in December of 2022 that I was researching the role free will played in denying line-of-duty death benefits to surviving family members of police officers who commit suicide. I first corresponded by email with Robert Sapolsky in June 2023. The drama with my first submission, revise and resubmit, their offer and my withdrawing the piece, happened in March 2024. The piece was finally accepted February 2026. April and May were spent cutting for length or resisting such cuts in back-and-forths with the assistant editor. The essay will finally come out in June or July. What was it like writing the piece? Did denying free will have the effects on me that the studies reported on would suggest?

Years ago, I had the good fortune to housesit for a friend while he and his wife were traveling over an extended Christmas break. They were med students at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. So, their place was not grand. As on-campus, institutional housing, it was not much more than a glorified dorm room. Nevertheless, I luxuriated in the quintessential feeling of the house sitter: that uncanny sense of newfound freedom. In this unfamiliar space, all my old habits were wiped away. I had a clean slate. I could reset, reboot, start fresh. Anything was possible.

Each shivering weekday morning, I would take the three-dollar interborough bus to my publishing job in midtown. After work, I’d ride the subway to the Bronx Zoo station and happily trudge home through the snow in the relative warmth of the afternoon. In their apartment, the thrilling sense of possibility persisted. I took in all the unfamiliar stimuli: the anatomy textbooks on the coffee table; the mini Eiffel Tower on the bookshelf (we had first met in Paris); the aluminum-edged kitchen table adorned with a plastic yellow and white daisy in a cobalt blue vase; and three comfy reading chairs, any of which I was free to choose to sit in, to read any book I wanted until I wanted to do something else.

I was as free as the Spring wind until one day I came across a box of See’s Candies, a pack of cigarettes, and two mesmerizing bottles of bargain booze. I had to eat them all, smoke them all, drink them all.

I tried to resist but couldn’t stop myself. Deterministic procedures booted up in my brain. I could feel my free will evaporating, as a multitude of open possibilities collapsed into one closed necessity.

As soon as I’d finished indulging my physical addictions, my old habits of mind returned too. The house sitter’s quintessential experience of open-endedness was spoiled. My longstanding mental and behavioral patterns resurfaced, predictable as ever. I was me again.

Sound familiar? We’ve all experienced such joyous feelings of freedom. And we’ve all had moments when we felt our free will was compromised, in one way or another, to one degree or another.

If you’re not sure what I mean, try not eating for three days. Really set your conscious willpower to fasting. Then you will know the inner struggle against physiological drives: vectors of psychic force, pushing you, imposing on you, enjoining you to eat. Perhaps you can distract yourself by drinking water, but the metabolic need for calories is too basic. Thoughts about food bubble up, until food is the only thing you think about. Lure and temptation transform to need and command and, ultimately, to unfreedom.

There certainly are occasions we seem to lack free will, such as irrational outbursts, split-second instinctual reactions, persistent bad habits like nail biting, procrastination, and any case of acting against our better judgment. Think of Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “I can see, and I approve, the better course, and yet I choose the worse.” Think of Paul in his Letter to the Romans: “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” To act unfreely in this way often feels terrible, like self-hatred or holding oneself in contempt.

Thinking about the philosophical problem of free will, or what comes after denial, may therefore seem a fruitless endeavor to some, a mere spinning of our cognitive wheels, which never gets us anywhere. However, for the two deniers I profiled in my Missouri Review essay, Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris, the so-called problem of free will is in the rearview mirror. They are convinced. They know we don’t have free will, even if they don’t always believe we don’t. The changes to society they envision will simply have to accommodate the truth that it’s a hard truth to believe, but a truth all the same.

The cognitive space where Sapolsky and Harris have arrived is new territory, an intellectual position with novel paradoxes, but—most importantly—a position that brings with it a number of urgent moral imperatives.

The essay opens describing Kelly as my fiancée. Relationship trouble is hinted at throughout the story, from beginning to end. My sleep-peeing—sleepwalking and peeing in the closet unconsciously—made Kelly display a “pent-up prickliness,” as I wrote. (Pent-up because she believed she could not hold me responsible since I did it all unfreely.) Additionally, during the info-dump about psychology studies which show that people become more aggressive when primed with thoughts about free-will denial, we have, sure enough, a few too many aggressions ourselves.

In a longer version of the piece, we break up before the end of the essay. Early in the writing process, an editor I consulted over Zoom asked me “What is this essay about?” A simple question but not so simple to make sure there is a good answer. After thinking about it for a while, I decided the essay should be about: How do Kelly and I explain our breakup without referencing free will? That is nice and specific. That is a specification of a more abstract or generalized expression of the point of the essay: how would society and the individual change if they were to deny free will? How does denial change one’s self-conception? How do you explain the behavior of yourself and others without referencing free will?

I had to think back to why Kelly and I broke up, which was not a pleasant experience. Neither thinking about it nor the actual process of our break up was pleasant, but I meant thinking about it was unpleasant. I had to explain it in the essay, but I did not like even to try to explain it to myself in my own mind, my own inner monologue. But thinking about it in the context of free-will denial was different; it felt different and ended up in a different place. I recalled that Kelly had said she would try to help the relationship by going off birth control, which she speculated might be suppressing her libido.

Think of my “Behind the Scenes” series as like the special features of a DVD, like the director’s audio commentary. What was I doing or what do I think I was doing in the essay? There are certain themes I was hoping to evoke and certain tactics that might be interesting for me to point out to the reader now after having already read the essay.

There are a few recurrent events or images throughout the essay. One of them is involuntary furrowing of brows.

I also self-consciously tried to introduce words that might evoke free will versus determinism, such as “control.” The first time I drop a five-word alliteration on the reader, it is introduced as a way to “get distance from disgusting deeds.” But when I do alliteration again without any such reason, I say, “Sorry I couldn’t control myself.”

Excerpt from cut section:

Then, one day, like an event without a cause, Kelly broke up with me. We’d started to fight more while we’d been reading Sapolsky together. About unimportant things. We were just more impatient with each other, quicker to anger, just more easily irritated.

I had thought I was pretty rational. But she was more rational than me. Yet I could tell she was not getting what she wanted because she became quicker-to-anger and impatient. Even when I stifled the irritable reactions of mine I knew she didn’t like, she began to dislike the stifling. Kelly said she had learned from her first formative relationship—with Blane, not his real name—that emotions and bad moods and being irritable is fine; it’s all fine, as long as you do not act on them. You can be in a bad mood, but it does not need to manifest. You can be irritable, but do not get irritated. So, rather than snap back at something she’d said that irritated me—usually some way she failed to spare my feelings—I would not say anything. And then I would see her face darken. I thought keeping it on the inside would satisfy her. But then she started noticing my silences, my hesitations, as I quashed my own irritation… and this irritated her. There’d be a flash of tension between us, and I’d go silent, and she’d suck her teeth.

But this is not a story about our breakup. It’s about how I explain to myself the failure of our relationship without making any reference to either of us acting of our own free will. I call our dogs “robots,” affectionately. But what happens when I think of the two of us as robots too?

What explains our breakup? Were our Myers-Briggs’ incompatible? Kelly “says” it was my irritability and that, over time, it felt to her like trying to be romantic with a roommate. For debunking explanations, I turned to the scientific literature on lust, limerence, and romantic relationships. The dry, academic language was oddly reassuring: “Women’s sexual attraction to their partners wanes as relationship duration increases.” Studies, additionally, show that living and working together—spending 24 hours a day together, as we did during COVID—makes both partners have increases in prolactin, and decreases in testosterone and dopamine. Prolactin makes for more domesticity—the roommate remark—and drops in testosterone and dopamine causes libido to decrease. Prolactin “reduces a woman’s neural response to the expectation of erotic stimuli.” Hormones, in general, cause “alteration in women’s pair-bonding behavior,” which, even less romantically, is sometimes labeled “affiliative behavior.” Less reassuringly, the ruination of my romantic partnership, home life, and general wellbeing was referred to in one paper as the “relationship side-effects” of hormonal changes. They meant hormonal changes that happen because of changes to circumstances like too much time together causing prolactin to go up. But they also meant hormonal changes that happen when a woman goes on or off birth control.

While we were trying to make it work, Kelly went off the pill to see if it was suppressing her sex drive. Where’d she hear it might do that? Hormonal contraception, such as the pill, makes the body think it’s pregnant—the “pregnancy-mimicking mechanism of keeping progesterone levels elevated and steady signals the brain to stop releasing FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) and LH (luteinizing hormone), which prevents ovulation.”

After reading the science, my hypothesis—uncomfortably close to what I imagine a jilted tech bro or even an incel would come up with—was that, while pregnant, the woman had no need for a male partner with the traits that evolutionarily-speaking signal genetic wellbeing and a good choice for reproduction. Those traits being roughly whatever a cavewoman would consider the ideal of masculinity: symmetrical face, broad shoulders, high status, physical strength, well-tailored loin cloth. Instead, a cavewoman who’s pregnant becomes attracted—because of natural changes in her hormones—to a potential partner with more feminine traits, like gentleness, caregiving, and lack of violent capability. Because: the baby’s on its way, time to team up and raise it.

When I looked in the scientific literature to support this hypothesis, what did I find? There are studies showing that women who meet their partners on hormonal birth control, and then stop taking the pill, report finding their partners less attractive upon cessation, unless their partners display typically masculine traits. It’s about incongruency at the time of pair-bonding versus the time of the experimenters’ survey—with respect to hormones. Women who had chosen their partners off of the pill, then started it, tended to report higher levels of sexual attraction to that partner following subsequent discontinuation of the hormonal contraception. Read that again. Think it through. Find what’s natural and the causation. It makes sense, even if it triggers some of our progressive sensibilities.

While researching and writing the free will denial essay, I started to drink more heavily. I decided I needed to quit for a while. It became an illustration of another psychological effect of denying free will: it makes it harder to muster your conscious willpower to change behavior. But I had a few tricks. I did not want to promise myself that I’d not drink and then break that promise, so I did not resolve to stop drinking. Instead, I waited for a day when I didn’t feel like it and tried to ride that wave. I often felt like it. But a day came when I was kind of sick of it, bored actually. For some reason, that day it did not hold out the promise of relief or release. So I didn’t drink that night. After that it was just a matter of not breaking the chain. In this way, I did manage to stop drinking.

But it was not via willpower. One day after three months being dry, I decided I could let drinking back into my life. Not the old binge drinking. But just a glass of wine with dinner. I decided this at work before heading home. But, on the way home, I didn’t stop by the store to get wine, booze or beer. And when I got home I forgot to open the liquor bottle someone had gifted me. I just did my regular, new-normal night routine: walk the dogs on the beach, feed them, make dinner, watch the WNBA on DVR while eating. Once done eating and the TV programs were switched off, then I’d do some grading until it was time for bed. I never got around to getting my drank on. Previously, my habitual drinking made it hard to will my not drinking. Now, my habitual not drinking made it hard to will my drinking. It was kind of embarrassing. I was a creature of habit, through and through.

Looking back, it feels way too easy and self-serving for me to chalk up the relationship’s failure to Kelly’s imbalanced hormone cocktail. In weaker moments, I’ve taken the excuse for a test drive. It feels good. It’s an explanation, and sense-making is inherently satisfying. Plus bewilderment is unpleasant. It has the additional merit of allowing me to avoid looking too closely at myself, at my role, at my failings. For all those reasons and more, it’s really off limits.

Nevertheless, during my research, I looked at my genetic test results to see if I have the MAO-3 variant, called “the warrior gene,” the gene for aggression. Turns out, I have it. By aggression, they more specifically mean that having that allele makes it more likely you will react with rage to perceived slights. My irritability was often occasioned by my perception that Kelly was thoughtlessly failing to spare my feelings. “These kitchen knives are all dull as shit,” she’d say. I bought those; it’s my kitchen, it’s my fault. I should do something about it—is what she seemed to be saying, which made me defensive, even though, now in relative tranquility, I’m sure all she was saying was that the knives were dull. But she coulda said it nicer, knowing it’d make me feel bad. Ugh. Yes, I can hear myself.

Maybe my irritability could be chalked up to my MAO-3 allele. When you discover some new fact about your genetic make-up, what are you supposed to do with this information? It seemed my options were: to positively endorse it, i.e., adopt it, take pride. I am capable of aggression, yay! I guess I am not as much of a doormat, people pleaser as I thought I was. Another option: my occasional angry moments with Kelly and the rage I keep to myself are coming at least in part from this genetic inheritance. Rather than endorse it, this second option is to reject it, or rather, aim to struggle against it. It’s not much different than knowing that my dad had anger issues and trying to think about how much of that side of him might be in me.

But I didn’t know about the birth-control-loss-of-attraction thing, nor about my warrior gene, until after Kelly broke up with me. So we couldn’t try to counteract them or factor them into what was going on. But after the fact the explanations that appeal to these non-standard reasons—reasons not based on the relationship nor on either or both of our personality traits—felt good.

If Kelly broke up with me because I was too irritable, then postulating that my MAO-3 gene was involved could be a “bunking” explanation. It supports the same explanation (hers) just at a different level of analysis. Debunking explanations, on the other hand, come in and displace extant explanations. So rather than breaking up with me of her own free will, the hormonal birth control explanation would be the real explanation. Of course, that only works if we think, had it not been for the pill—being on it when we met, and going off it when the relationship hit the skids—she would have felt differently about me. But what would explain her attraction, or lack thereof, in those cases? Some other debunking cause, like elevated prolactin increased by living and working together during COVID? When we met, and if I imagine (counterfactually) she were off the pill, I have to ask: would she still have chosen me? On what basis? Her own free will? Was it pre-determined not to work out? Was I pre-determined always to be alone?

Good sections cut for length from the free will essay

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I write about what we know but do not believe.

—David J. Frost

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A traveler who had seen many countries, peoples and several of the earth's continents was asked what attribute he had found in men everywhere. He said: "They have a propensity for laziness." To others, it seems that he should have said: "They are all fearful. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions."

Thus begins Nietzsche’s excellent early essay, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” A clever made-up anecdote in which to couch Nietzsche’s first point for us. Humans are lazy. Or are they fearful? 

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that there will be no second chance for his oneness to coalesce from the strangely variegated assortment that he is: he knows it but hides it like a bad conscience—why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conformity and cloaks himself with it.

I like that. You are unique is translated into you are a oneness, naturally enough. But that oneness cannot be achieved if you don’t bring together all the great varied little bits of you pushing and pulling in different directions and by no means toward unity. We know deep down that all we have is this one life and this one chance to optimize our “assortment” of contingencies in our personality and experience; but we hide this from ourselves like a bad conscience. Why? Because of our fear of disapproval of our neighbor?

But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself?

By the way, it would be a mistake or an immodesty, Nietzsche says, to place yourself among those to whom this conformity does not apply.

The reason we do not embrace our uniqueness is because of our laziness and fear with respect to the opinions of others… which we have made the opinions of ourselves—how? Via laziness. The reason you have no joy in yourself is:

…idleness, inertia, in short that propensity for laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are fearful, and fear most of all the burdensome nuisance of absolute honesty and nakedness. 

Absolute honesty is key. It is difficult, it is burden to be feared, it is not for the lazy to live with absolute honesty and nakedness about oneself… absolute honesty with oneself and with others and about others. We ended up valuing things other than ourselves out of laziness; and we do not attempt to find ourselves for fear of our neighbors, who demand conformity.

Does that not strike you as true? I seems true to me, at least in a certain broad-brush, metaphorical way—you know, if you allow some license to see where Nietzsche is going. Were you really to find your true self, then your neighbors would notice and demand conformity. And this is so almost by definition, since Nietzsche started with the assumption that we are each unique, while most—if not almost all—conform and squish themselves into the Procrustean bed of socially-accepted types.

By contrast, artists and great thinkers, Nietzsche says…

… hate this lax procession in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions…

Artists and great thinkers, through their work… 

… reveal everyone's secret bad conscience…

Which can be uncomfortable. Artists and great thinkers also show…  

… the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, to himself unique in each movement of his muscles, even more, that by being strictly consistent in uniqueness, he is beautiful, and worth regarding, as a work of nature, and never boring.

Artists and great thinkers are not necessarily misanthropes. When an artist or great thinker…

… despises human beings, he despises their laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like manufactured goods, unimportant, and unworthy to be associated with or instructed.

In order to break free from conformity, which is a violation of your true self, all you need to do is…

… stop being comfortable.

Follow your conscience…

… which cries out: "Be yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, and desiring is not really yourself."

That’s a hell of a couple of sentences, I think. 

Nietzsche goes on to say that the still-young tremble with the awesomeness of their situation, of their task to become themselves. A young person… 

… suspects that its measure of happiness is determined from all eternity: a happiness it can never achieve so long as it lies in the chains of fear and convention. And how bleak and senseless life can be without this liberation!

A person who has forsaken their individuality is an affront.

There is no more unpleasant and barren a creature in this world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks askance left and right, squinting behind him and all about. In the end, one cannot grasp such a man, since he is completely exterior, without core, a tattered, painted sack of clothes, a ragtag ghost that cannot provoke even fear and certainly not sympathy.

That is the lazy and fearful individual’s outrageous wretchedness. What happens when an entire society consists of such lost individuals?        

If it is true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it follows that an era which sees its welfare in public opinion, that is to say private laziness, is a time that really will be killed…

The equivalence of public opinion and private laziness is a wonderful and surprising insight even though it is a direct implication of what Nietzsche had already said—which gained our acceptance and eager approval—namely that conformity derives from laziness (and fear). A lazy individual kills time and a lazy society kills its epoch.

I mean that it will be erased from the history of the true liberation of life. How adverse later generations will be to deal with the inheritance of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men governed by public opinion; why perhaps our age may be to some distant posterity the darkest and least known—because least human—period of history.

An era ruled by conformity will be an era with nothing to offer the future. It occurs to me that Nietzsche here is reflecting his era’s worries about nascent mass communication—where “public opinion” takes on a life of its own with a populace that does not read master works anymore only newspapers. The passage also expresses Nietzsche’s “romantic individualism,” which may be time-bound itself. (But of almost all philosophers it might be Nietzsche about which one cannot say he merely reflected his epoch since his work is the standardly cited rupture at which modernism ends and postmodernism begins. His work changed the future more than it reflected the present or past. When your thought or mere existence changes the calendar, that is a rare thing indeed. Think B.C. and A.D. “Before Christ” and “anno Domini” or “in the year of our lord.” We are, all of us, now in a time period “after-Nietzsche.”)

Back to our likely-to-be-erased epoch:

I go along the new streets of our cities and think how, of all these horrific houses which the generation of public opinion has built, not one will be standing in a century, and how the opinions of these house-builders will no doubt by then likewise have collapsed.

But were we not a cluster of conformists? But were you a person out of step with the conformists?

How hopeful are all who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time; since they are so, it would be useless to serve to kill their time—their desire is rather to arouse their time to life in order to live on themselves in this life.

Our existential situation demands we arouse ourselves to the adventure of being ourselves.

We possess only a short-lived today to show why and to what end we evolved. We have only ourselves to answer for our existence; consequently, we want to be the real helmsman of this existence and not permit our existence to be a thoughtless accident…

One must grab one’s own existence…

One must take it somewhat boldly and dangerously: especially, in any case, since one will always lose it. Why cling to this clod of earth, this way of life, why pay attention to what your neighbor says? It is so provincial to oblige oneself to opinions which, just a couple of hundred miles away, are no longer binding. Orient and Occident are chalklines drawn before us to fool our timidity. I want to make an attempt to reach freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and it will be prevented by the fact that, coincidentally, two nations hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught which, nevertheless, did not exist a few thousand years ago. All that is not you, it says to itself. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose.

Do not pawn yourself to get across the river of life.

There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along it.

Do not ask, go along it.

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There is—in the world—only one way, on which nobody can go, except you…. Where does it lead? … Do not ask…. go along it.