Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem - Part 5 of 5

An essay on what we know but do not believe. First published in The Missouri Review, Summer 2026. Short enough parts to read in one sitting.

This is the fifth part in a five-part series.

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… attention to our experience with sufficient care, we’d see that thoughts, intentions, and desires simply arise without consciousness calling them up. Harris says you can come to this insight through mindfulness meditation. Try it. Try meditating. You’ll see what he’s talking about. A guided meditation will ask you to focus on your breath and, when you catch your mind wandering, to refocus your mental attention back on the breath. It’s not necessarily the goal to have a clear mind, but rather to strengthen your ability to pay attention. In your early attempts, doing this is extremely difficult, and you immediately discover the wildness of your mind. Random thoughts pop up seemingly from nowhere; they take over your experience, leading you down tangents, pulling you away from paying attention to your breath. You’ll be thinking about something else for a good long while before you realize that you are no longer focusing on your breath.

Harris says this is you identifying with the thought provided to your consciousness by nonconscious parts of your brain. You do not even notice that the thought came from nowhere, nor do you notice that you’ve identified with it automatically. You are lost in thought. If you are a novice meditator, and you’re honest with yourself, the longest you can attend to your breath before your train of thought goes off in its own direction is probably two to three seconds. And the time spent not focusing on the breath without realizing it, i.e., the time spent identifying with your thoughts, can be much longer than two seconds before you realize it. For Harris, since being lost in thought is the same as identifying with your thoughts, enlightenment, or at least mindfulness, might be thought of as reflective distance from (non-identification with) every thought, including seemingly willed intentions and decisions.

Harris’s upshot for free will is exactly the same as that of Haynes’s experiments: namely, that the contents of consciousness are provided by nonconscious processes in the brain. Feelings, ideas, desires, evaluations, decisions—they all come to consciousness, as it were, out of nowhere. Thoughts appear on their own, “unbidden,” as Nietzsche put it. Thoughts come out of the darkness, entering the spotlighted stage of the mind’s Cartesian theater on their own. As long as they do not conflict with our character or otherwise rock the boat, we immediately identify with them and, if asked, we will have, post-hoc, filed them under “freely willed.” Harris and Sapolsky both think (and Haynes’s research seems to show) that when we make decisions, even momentous ones, the contents of consciousness are provided by nonconscious processes that we have no access to. Harris avows that he no longer feels like he could have done otherwise—a denial of libertarian experience, i.e., phenomenology.

To end, I return to my original question: what does denying your own free will feel like? Let’s find out: there’s no free will. There, I said it. And you read it, which means you thought it. Now try to believe it. The interesting thing is, even when assumed for the sake of argument, disbelief cannot be maintained for very long. One’s tacit assumption of free will—one’s tacit assumption of an event that Harris thinks we never actually experience—is nevertheless still so natural that disbelief evaporates quickly and usually unnoticed. Even when the denial of free will is based on the strongest evidence and most compelling arguments, it fades away (Harris’s point notwithstanding). Indeed, without deliberately and effortfully keeping denial at the forefront of one’s mind, one’s mind reverts to its natural, implicit credence. For deniers, the falsity of free will is something they know but do not (always) believe.

In those brief moments when we do actively deny our own free will, we get an intellectual dizziness; we start to freak out about the end of moral responsibility, and our actions start to seem not our own. But the discombobulation of the ultimate perspective is transient. Since it comes from thinking too much, I’ve taken to calling it “armchair vertigo.” Once you get out of the armchair of philosophical reflection and you engage again with life, it goes away. We only get armchair vertigo when, taking the ultimate perspective, we actively force ourselves to believe what we know (again, pace Harris). In day-to-day, normal life—that is, while not suffering from self-induced armchair vertigo—lost-in-thought deniers know they don’t have free will, but they don’t believe they don’t.

Knowing without believing is, furthermore, the prescription offered by that other group of deniers who wish to suppress the knowledge that free will is false. They say, “Yeah, we know it’s false, but it’s better not to believe that.” Maintaining that a non-veridical illusion is true amounts to not believing what you know. Of course, you cannot benightedly labor under an illusion you know is an illusion. The self-same person, or a transparent, open society, cannot both know that X is an illusion and be taken in by the illusion. To not believe what you know requires rifts, internal divisions, impermeable walls between parts, self-deception or forgetting.

We live in an age where much of what we know is not believed. Since the Scientific Revolution that started five hundred years ago, we have lived with this gap between the scientific image of the universe and the image tacitly animating how we experience and act in the world. Recall the last affecting sunset you saw. That fiery orb of nuclear fusion, the sun, moving down through bands of luridly colored clouds, getting closer and closer to the horizon. It is easy to forget that the sun is not really moving in the way it seems to be. It’s the Earth that is moving— rotating—so that, from our perspective situated on the sphere, the horizon eventually blocks our view of the sun. We are rotated away from the sight of it. We know this—if we take the time to think about it. Yet for our language to reflect our belief in it, we’d have to say, “What a beautiful Earth-turning tonight!”

What will be our fate once a critical mass of us finally knows the falsity of contra-causal free will? Should we try harder to believe what we know? Or should we perhaps be grateful for temporary ignorance of the icy knowledge gleaned from the ultimate perspective? If you know something but do not believe it, you are in the position Oedipus was in immediately after he learned that he had killed his father and married his mother. For a split second, or maybe longer, he knew it, but it had not sunk in. He did not yet grok the new paradigm he now disastrously occupied. When his time of sleepwalking through life was at its end, when, finally, Oedipus truly believed what he knew, when he was pierced by the knowledge that he was a motherfucking patricide... he took a knife and pierced both his eyeballs.