Between Neuro-Skepticism and Ultimate Liberation

When I enrolled in Columbia College in the fall of 1967—as a naive and immature 17-year-old—I did two things that shaped my outlook for years to come: I signed up for an introductory experimental psychology course to meet the college’s science requirement, and I dropped acid.

At the time, Columbia’s psych department was a stronghold of behaviorism, the theory developed by John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner that rejects introspective methods and seeks to understand psychology strictly in terms of observable behaviors and events. My introductory psychology professor was intelligent, provocative, and skillful. Behaviorism seemed logical and pragmatic. Within weeks, I was a convert, trying to see how all human activity was the conditioned product of rewards and punishments. I became an evangelical idiot, doing my pathetic best to spread the good word.

LSD also led to a conversion of sorts. My high school preppiness transformed into hippiness, complete with antiwar, antiestablishment fervor. That eventually led to spirituality, yoga, and finally, Buddhism, all with an evangelical flavor.

In recent years, I’ve become concerned about the way behaviorism, scientific materialism, and other reductionist approaches to the mind present major obstacles to realizing the profound truths of the Buddhists teachings. Insights into this conflict crystallized for me recently when I watched Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky talk about his recent book, Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.

Sapolsky is emblematic of a cohort of free will deniers whose manifestos are grounded in advances in neuroscience, and he delivers his remarks with the force of a true believer. Some Buddhists have hopped onto this bandwagon. Others are horrified by this version of determinism. That’s why I’ve been pondering whether Buddhism really has any dogs in the free will race.

Age-Old Questions

People have debated free will for millennia, but what they have meant by that has shifted dramatically over the ages, in step with prevailing intellectual preoccupations. The central question remains: To what extent do we control our actions?

Ancient Greek philosophers were deeply concerned about the relationship of reason to emotion. For them, free will meant the ability to rationally decide a course of action and carry it out, undeterred by contrary impulses and emotions. 

Medieval thinkers were concerned with the relationship of human will to God’s will. They (like many modern Christian schoolchildren) grappled with questions of why an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful god would allow humans to disobey his will and commit evil. On the one hand, this seemed to mean that people must have the freedom to obey or not obey God’s will. On the other, this seemed to suggest that there were limits to God’s power.

In the modern age, two competing conceptions of free will are on the table. One view is aligned with our commonsense notion of free will: You have free will when no outer force or inner disorder compels your actions (for example, you aren’t hypnotized, no one’s holding a gun to your head, and you don’t have a tumor impinging on your brain that makes you act irrationally).

A very different conception of free will revolves around ideas that first circulated in the 18th century. Causal determinism was first scientifically articulated by the great French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace. He contended that if you knew the location of every particle in the universe and the laws that governed their interactions, you could perfectly predict all future states of the universe. This would mean that the future—including all human action—is wholly “determined” by the past.

Most contemporary arguments about free will are between thinkers who believe free will is compatible with determinism and those who think determinism negates free will. Compatibilists tend to emphasize the commonsense conception of free will. Incompatibilists tend to emphasize the determinist conception.

What Are Real Causes? 

Rapid advances in neuroscience over the past few decades, including the development of tools for imaging the brain and techniques for studying individual neurons, have given neuroscientists tremendous confidence in their ability to understand the material basis of experience. They have also generated a new wave of skepticism about anything that cannot be objectified, quantified, and independently verified.

Sapolsky is a prominent spokesman for what I think of as “neuro-skepticism,” a philosophical stance that argues against the existence of free will based on the deterministic nature of brain function. He sets out his no-free-will agenda in Determined like this:

When you behave in a particular way, which is to say when your brain has generated a particular behavior, it is because of the determinism that came just before, which was caused by the determinism just before that, and before that, all the way down. The approach of this book is to show how that determinism works, to explore how the biology over which you have no control, interacting with environment over which you had no control, made you you…. Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will.

My first encounter with neuro-skepticism came decades earlier when I read this quote from Nobel Prize–winner Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul: 

“You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Sam Harris, the neuroscientist, philosopher, and meditator, presented a less didactic version of this view in his best-selling book Free Will: 

“There is no question that (most, if not all) mental events are the product of physical events. The brain is a physical system, entirely beholden to the laws of nature—and there is every reason to believe that changes in its functional state and material structure entirely dictate our thoughts and actions.”

Like Harris, neuro-skeptics generally do not distinguish between minds and brains. In a recent discussion I found myself part of, another prominent neuroscientist explained that the prevailing view in the field is “Mind just is what the brain does.” The late philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett articulated such materialistic beliefs in his 1991 best seller Consciousness Explained: 

The idea of mind as distinct in this way from the brain, composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff, is dualism, and it is deservedly in disrepute today…. The prevailing wisdom, variously expressed and argued for, is materialism: there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter—the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology—and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain.

In their attempt to remain faithful to scientific materialism, both views fail to recognize that knowing, which is what mind does, is a mental phenomenon not dependent on some “special kind of stuff.” 

Mind has a cognitive primacy that materialism doesn’t see. The “physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology” is known only through cognition, whether it is observed directly or inferred by the mind from observations of scientific instruments and computations. The objective world described by science is a construct of the mind. All scientific theories and models are mental models. They are not part of the furniture of the world. 

The belief that only science reveals reality is theological, not scientific. Scientists and philosophers steeped in neuroscience are deeply invested in scientific methods and conceptual models. Because of this, many assume that all knowledge must be scientific knowledge and that anything that is not susceptible to scientific inquiry has no reality. These materialistic beliefs remind me of the old saw, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Science studies objective reality: things that are measurable, quantifiable, and independently observable. Neurons and brains, quarks and galaxies, and skyscrapers and iPhones are objective realities. Subjective reality is the realm of phenomenal experience. Colors and sensations, feelings and awareness are subjective realities. (Subjective, in this sense, doesn’t mean opinions or ideas about reality but rather direct phenomenal experience.) Subjective reality is the realm of first-person inquiry.

Materialism is blind to the realm of subjectivity. Sapolsky provides a perfect example of this myopia in Determined:

Once you work with the notion that every aspect of behavior has deterministic, prior causes, you observe a behavior and can answer why it occurred: as just noted, because of the action of neurons in this or that part of your brain in the preceding second. And in the seconds to minutes before, those neurons were activated by a thought, a memory, an emotion, or sensory stimuli. And in the hours to days before that behavior occurred, the hormones in your circulation shaped those thoughts, memories, and emotions and altered how sensitive your brain was to particular environmental stimuli.

In Sapolsky’s version of reality, objective phenomena—neurons and hormones—are fundamental causal factors. However, subjective phenomena—thoughts, memories, emotions, and sensory stimuli that occur prior to the neuronal activity and activate the neurons—are not considered causal factors. Even when he describes the functional role that thoughts, memories, emotions, and sensory stimuli play in causing behavior, all the work seems to be done by neurons and hormones, and nothing is attributed to subjective phenomena. This is an astounding oversight. But it is not a trivial one.

Sapolsky’s ideology is that “biology over which you have no control, interacting with environment over which you had no control,” determines everything you do. While Sapolsky and other neuro-skeptics sometimes say that determinism is not the same as fatalism, the clear implication of this ideology is that you are screwed. Whatever you think, understand, or decide does not affect anything. Your entire future is determined by material things that you cannot directly experience or influence. You have no direct access to your biology. You do not experience your brain. You might have seen illustrations of brains with various areas labeled according to their functional significance. You might have watched operations being performed on other people’s brains. If you’re a surgeon, you might even have performed such operations yourself. However, you cannot directly experience or control the activity of your brain.

Materialism is a philosophical position that suggests an utter lack of human agency. It has infiltrated and subtly undermined modern culture. I can’t help but wonder how much of the anxiety, depression, addiction, and despair of modern life are caused by this materialist ideology. When people believe that only physical things have causal power, it’s not surprising that they resort to alcohol, drugs, consumerism, and even suicide to change the course of their lives.

The Buddha Understood Cause and Effect

During my time at Columbia, my life moved along divergent tracks. I plunged into experimental psychology in the classroom and the lab and immersed myself in the counterculture at home and with friends. As the second track progressed from drugs, politics, and protest to yoga and spirituality, I discovered Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Chögyam Trungpa’s Meditation in Action. The authors of these Buddhist classics clearly knew something about the mind that I longed to understand and that behavioral psychology didn’t even attempt to address. Suzuki Roshi and Trungpa Rinpoche seemed to possess a mastery that I could only dream of—and dream I did. I imagined what it would be like to be a Zen master. 

In the summer of 1971, after four years of college, but still many course credits short of a degree, I dropped out of Columbia and hitchhiked to San Francisco to train at the San Francisco Zen Center under Suzuki Roshi. In San Francisco, I learned to sit zazen and attended talks by Trungpa Rinpoche. That winter, after Suzuki Roshi’s death, I became a student of Trungpa Rinpoche.

Trungpa Rinpoche equally emphasized the practice of meditation and the study of the profound views of the Buddhist teachings. Perhaps the most famous encapsulation of the Buddha’s teachings goes like this:

“Of those phenomena which arise from a cause, the Tathagata taught their cause, and also their cessation.” 

This statement articulates the deterministic nature of the Buddha’s teachings. It stands in stark contrast to caricatures of Buddhism as a magical and mystical religion—think Tintin in Tibet.

The Buddha’s determinism is not limited to Laplace’s “particles and the laws governing their interactions,” but critically, it includes the phenomena of subjective experience. In the Buddha’s determinism, what you think, understand, and decide does have causal power.

Understanding causes and effects is at the heart of the Buddhist enterprise. The four noble truths, the quintessence of the Buddhist teachings, first explain the causes of suffering, dissatisfaction, and unease, and then the causes of liberation, fulfillment, and ease. For a Buddhist, the question isn’t whether we have free will or not; it is how we cultivate the causes of freedom instead of the causes of imprisonment. This is the sole purpose of the Buddhist teachings.

As humans, we are continually compelled by objective causes and subjective causes. We are compelled by large causes, like a death in the family, and by small causes, like thoughts about lunch. We are immersed in a relentless causal flow. We seldom experience more than a moment’s peace and ease. We are driven from one situation to the next by the fear and pain of sickness, old age, and death, by not getting what we want, getting what we don’t want, and not being able to hold on to what we have. We are driven by time—the force that constantly drives us to the next moment. Doomscrolling illustrates this compulsiveness that continually propels us onward. This is the first of the four truths: suffering is pervasive. We are doomscrolling through our lives.

Like someone drowning in a rushing river, we are so caught up in the causal flow that we can’t step back to see what’s propelling us. The second truth is that craving and attachment provide this impetus. Craving and attachment are subjective phenomena. It seems like we crave and attach to objective phenomena, but this is a misperception. For instance, that person that you like is not the person appearing in your mind. What’s appearing in your mind is your subjective version of that person. Likewise, that person you dislike is not the person appearing in your mind; it’s also your subjective version of that person. In each case, the actual person has more dimensions than you can imagine. 

We are compelled more by the dreams of things than the things themselves.

It is always the subjective version of things we are struggling to get and struggling to avoid. We are compelled more by the dreams of things than the things themselves. We crave and cling to mental fabrications. Even the “I” that is seemingly propelled along by this compulsive flow is an endless series of mental constructs. Ignorance of the nature of the phenomena appearing in our minds is at the root of our suffering.

The third truth is that freedom from suffering is possible. This is what the Buddha experienced; in his words: “Profound, peaceful, stainless, lucid, and unconditioned—such is the nectar-like truth I have realized.” Objectively, of course, we need food, shelter, and security. However, suffering and dissatisfaction, hope and fear, stress and delusion are not essential. They can be overcome. This is an audacious claim, but people have been verifying the Buddha’s research for twenty-six hundred years, and generation after generation has confirmed his results.

The fourth truth presents the path to cultivating the causes of freedom. Different traditions offer variations on the path to liberation, but all of these paths encompass three elements: ethical conduct, meditation, and insight. These are known as the three trainings. Ethical conduct reveals and reverses deep habits of self-centeredness. Meditation slows the chaotic flow of the river of consciousness and introduces gaps in the flow that allow glimpses of nonconceptual wisdom to shine through. Insight provides a general understanding of the causes of suffering and liberation and gradually leads to experience, realization, and genuine freedom.

Ignorance is at the root of the craving and attachment that cause suffering. Knowledge and insight are the remedies for this ignorance. The three trainings bring about knowledge and insight by guiding us away from seeking happiness and avoiding sorrow in objective reality and pointing us toward the inner reality where the causes of joy and sorrow truly abide and where absolute freedom can be realized.

No doubt, all of the mental activity involved in training in ethical conduct, meditation, and insight is accompanied by corresponding activity in the brain of the person undergoing the training. However, the neuro-skeptics’ logical fallacy assumes that correlation is causation—that it is always the brain that’s the cause of mental activity and never the other way around.

Truly Free

The free will debate is about what control we have over our actions. Since Buddhists recognize that the self is a series of mental constructs devoid of objective existence, we understand that there is no one who is ultimately free or not free. Yet we also believe in the possibility of freedom—the Buddha’s third truth. What we mean by this is that we can become free from compulsion. 

You experience freedom when you recognize that objects of hope and objects of fear are subjective phenomena that are not part of objective reality. Seeing this, you are free to make objective choices based on your understanding of how objective reality functions: The compulsions of craving and attachment do not drive you. This insight is cultivated through the three trainings. At first, these insights are experienced as sudden, short glimpses that are quickly covered over by discursiveness. Gradually, as confidence in this way of seeing develops, freedom begins to dawn.

In many ways, I am still like that naive 17-year-old who entered Columbia in 1967. I still have a bit of that same evangelical streak, particularly when it comes to combating materialism (as you’ve just seen). I still dream that I can help beings on a vast scale. I still wish I could be a Zen master, if only to wear those beautiful black robes and utter poetic words of wisdom, like those found in the stories of the masters of old. Maybe I haven’t traveled all that far, yet I do feel a little more free.