I am getting tired of YouTubers "debunking" free will. And I know. The solution is simple: stop watching YouTube.
But it's winter in Canada, and sometimes you find gold like this Kyle Hill channel. His videos on nuclear energy are reasonable, rational, scientific analyses.
Then he steers far out of his lane and publishes a free-will video.
Don't worry, he says. You don't need philosophy to understand why we're not freely making choices. But if you don't need philosophy to understand free will, then you don't need science to understand the shape of the planet.
Maybe the Earth is flat.
Science explains why we're not free. Why our conscious choices are mere illusions. Scientists can trace every choice and thought back to the Big Bang.
In theory, at least. We don't currently have the tools to do this, but it should be possible, which explains why we don't have free will.
After all, the Earth isn't consciously deciding to spin on its axis, and a river isn't choosing its path to the ocean. A predator doesn't choose to hunt its prey.
Like the weather slowly shaping a mountain range, our thoughts and actions seem dictated by the universe's intricate web of cause and effect. Every decision we make, from picking a career to craving a midnight snack, is simply the outcome of countless prior influences.
We have no free will.
We are mere biochemical meat puppets directed by forces of nature.
This is not science. It's not even Science™ (at least not yet).
Kyle's video is just bad philosophy. Sabine Hossenfelder's videos are on the subject, too.
Let's not forget Sam Harris's horrendous book. I'm beyond amazed that anyone considers him an expert in anything.
Free will is not a mere illusion, as these science enthusiasts (and some actual scientists) seem to suggest. They have taken a reductionist argument too far, failing to account for the complexity and richness of human experience.
It's time to pull out Henri Bergson.
Bergson's Duration
Henri Bergson's concept of duration emphasizes time's indivisible, flowing nature. This is life as human beings experience it. In simpler terms, duration is the continuous, unbroken flow of time instead of a series of distinct moments.
Think of life as a movie. The entire film is duration.
Breaking the movie down to its scenes represents the scientific or mechanistic view. Time is treated as a quantitative unit. It can be measured. Divided into distinct, segmented parts.
In the movie "duration," our conscious choices aren't the sum of preceding frames but emerge organically from the story. Wherever you are in the movie, that moment is influenced by the whole experience up to that point.
Breaking the film down into scenes implies determinism. Every frame determines the next. However, duration is an unfolding process involving accumulating qualitative experiences.
The movie analogy can only go so far.
The point is that free will arises in the subjective, felt experience of time, not in its physical measurement.
Free will is not a product of deterministic cause-and-effect chains. It is an expression of the continuous, indivisible flow of lived experience. The past does not predetermine our decisions; our choices emerge organically from synthesizing past and present.
Life is not a predetermined sequence of movie frames or data points.
YouTubers like Kyle or Sabine struggle to account for free will because they've fractured time into discrete units. They've created a paradigm in which the universe operates according to the mechanic principles of cause and effect.
What is Cause & Effect?
Cause and effect — causality — is a mechanical explanation of the universe's workings. One event deterministically leads to another. A rock falls down a hill according to a set of universal rules of cause and effect.
According to Bergson, this is essentially an illusion—or, at best, an abstraction we've imposed on reality. After all, we didn't evolve to see reality as it is; we evolved for practical purposes.
It's just as valid to see the universe—particularly life and consciousness—as a dynamic creative process rather than a rigid chain of cause and effect.
Causality is a tool. It's a useful conceptual tool that allows us to navigate the world efficiently. Especially when dealing with inanimate objects and physical systems.
However, many scientists fail to realize that reality is not a series of isolated events linked by necessity. Reality is a continuous flow of change and becoming, always in the transformation process.
Causal laws are part of a broader, more complex reality. Bergson (nor I) are denying scientific reality. The universe has a level of regularity that we can reasonably interpret as cause and effect.
But imposing these mechanical metaphysics as fundamental reality is another matter. That's not a question for science. That realm belongs to philosophy.
Instead of cause and effect, Bergson suggests élan vital (vital impetus in the English translations). Life and evolution unfold creatively, not merely as the result of mechanical causation but through an ongoing process of development and differentiation.
This means that you can't reduce reality to a series of discrete causes and effects.
Reality is always in the process of becoming. Our segmented perception arises because we're wired to break down and categorize experiences for practical survival.
The experience of free will emerges from the indivisible flow of duration. In our attempts to analyze and control our environment, we impose causality as a retrospective explanation.
Inanimate objects move, interact, and follow predictable patterns because they lack complexity. But even then, there exists a degree of spontaneity and novelty, even in inert matter.
No one here is denying causality. Bergson reframes it as part of a limited perspective we use to function in the world.
We perceive events as connected by a strict causal link, where one event "causes" another. But reality is an indivisible flow, and causes are like snapshots of this ongoing process.
Consider the Tree
Change is holistic and creative. Evolution happens organically without being reducible to prior conditions.
Consider the tree.
A tree doesn't grow simply because of water, sunlight, and soil—it thrives because it is part of a dynamic, evolving process.
Causality, when viewed mechanistically, struggles to explain this creativity. It assumes that past conditions predetermine the tree's growth. It leaves no room for novelty—the twist of a branch, the squirrel drey, damage from a storm.
Life is not a static equation. It unfolds in ways that defy prediction, continuously weaving past influences into something new.
Bergson urges us to see causality not as a rigid sequence of events but as a fertile field of potential. The future is not contained in the past but emerges organically through the flow of duration.
The life of a tree is more than counting its rings. Reality cannot be fully understood by breaking it into artificial parts.
To truly grasp the nature of growth—of life itself—we must rely on intuition. Only by experiencing time's continuous, indivisible flow can we understand that free will, like a tree's branches reaching for the sun, is an act of creation, not mere reaction.
Intuition allows us to perceive the flow of reality as a whole. Every moment contains the entirety of its past, and every moment grows organically into the future.
Free will exists because each moment is not mechanically determined. What we call "cause and effect" is a helpful shorthand for everyday functioning and science.
Imagine walking through a forest. Your movement could be explained as a series of muscle contractions (causes) leading to steps (effects).
But Bergson would argue that your walk is a continuous experience where environment and internal states blend into an indivisible flow.
Cause and effect are intellectual shortcuts that do not capture the richness of duration and the creativity inherent in the universe. The "problem of free will" is a problem of taking a reductionist worldview too far.
How to Experience Duration
As soon as you put the experience into words, you've lost it.
Art is an expression of duration, but how does one experience it? Meditation practices like Zazen can be seen as a way of experiencing duration.
Although Bergson—to my knowledge—never addressed Far East practices, we can find some parallels.
Bergson emphasized that proper knowledge of duration comes through intuition. Similarly, Zazen is about sitting in the lotus position and quieting the mind to cultivate direct awareness of being.
The goal of Zazen is to experience the continuous, indivisible flow of time—to feel time's actual flow rather than measure it—to return to a purer, more direct experience of reality.
Bergson's duration is essentially the Dao in Taoism. Spatializing time creates false divisions. Bergson wrote about creative evolution; Taoists believe in wu wei, or spontaneous natural action.
There are differences. Bergson saw the self as evolving within duration. He saw consciousness as genuine and personal.
Most Buddhist thought, on the other hand, suggests that the self is an illusion arising from transient conditions. Bergson teaches about life pushing forward. Buddhist and Taoist thought often advocate for non-attachment.
Here, I'd like to interject my philosophy of the self—or rather, borrow from Thomas Szasz.
The self is essentially a linguistic phenomenon. Bergson is right to see it as evolving within duration, if only because language is part of creative evolution.
But the self or "mind," is a linguistic construct we create by talking to ourselves and others.
But that's another post for another day.
Beyond the Tree
Bergson's duration isn't limited to meditation or philosophical reflection. Whenever you're in a flow state—playing an instrument, writing, painting, exercising, fucking—that's duration.
And consider that.
Consider when we "lose track of time."
You get so caught up in an activity that you're unaware of time.
Time is subjective. A twin sibling can age slower depending on how fast they move through space-time. If aliens had a powerful telescope and were at the proper distance, they'd look at our planet and see dinosaurs walking the flat Earth.
OK, the planet isn't flat. Science is useful—no one denies that—but it crosses into religious territory when people start using it to answer life's big questions.
Why are we here? What is this all about? And what is free will?
A mechanistic universe will never give you the correct answer. It's like applying Newtonian physics to the findings of the James Webb Space Telescope.
You'll never make sense of the data.
But once you shift your perception from Newton to Einstein or from mechanics to creative evolution, you begin to see how Kyle Hill, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Sam Harris don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
We shouldn't look to science for answers it can't provide.