To Get Happier, Choose to Read This Column

In 2005, the journal Nature published a short science-fiction story by the writer Ted Chiang about a small toy called the “Predictor.” Roughly the size of a car’s key fob, the Predictor has a button and a green light. The green light illuminates one second before the operator presses the button. No one can outwit it, because it works by reading the operator’s predetermined behaviors before they’re apparent to the operator themselves.

At first, people goof around with the device as a simple amusement. But in time, its effects on many users clearly become serious, because they realize from playing with it that free will is an illusion. As a result, a third of the population develops a pathology known as “akinetic mutism,” a kind of walking coma in which all motivation is absent from life. Some are hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves. Without free will, it seems, people do not feel they are truly alive.

That account is fiction, but we are living in a time when science and philosophy present fresh challenges to the existence of free will. Just as Chiang’s story suggests, this has profound implications for happiness. Understanding the arguments at play, and deciding how to respond, can make a big difference in your life.

The question of free will arises from what philosophers call the “mind-body problem,” which asks whether the mind and the brain are the same thing or separate entities. The philosopher René Descartes famously wrestled with this conundrum in his 1641 Meditations on First Philosophy, arguing that the mind occupies no physical space and is thus distinct from the body.

This “dualist” view has had many modern adherents, both religious and secular. For example, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers believes that the mind is not physical or material; he posits that one could exist physically without consciousness, like a zombie, so consciousness must exist outside the material realm.

If this is true, where does the mind reside, if not in the brain? Some might say that the mind is in the soul—or is the soul itself—which, if not physical, might exist beyond physical death. Others point to a kind of panpsychism, or a degree of consciousness that inhabits all natural bodies. But whatever the mind is and wherever it resides, we seem to possess an essence that enables us to make decisions in our daily lives, an expression of independent choice, of free will. A useful metaphor for this view is that the brain is the computer and the mind is the operator.

In contrast to all of this, a school of “physicalists” believes that subjective experiences and consciousness emanate entirely from the brain, and that the separateness of brain and mind is an illusion. To revert to the metaphor, no external operator exists.

True, we do not know how our consciousness and brain are connected; no brain component that processes the sense of conscious self has been identified. But this isn’t proof that the mind doesn’t exist. After all, we believe that the universe is a purely physical phenomenon as well, even if we still do not fully understand it. To say that the mind is separate from the brain simply because the connections are unknown, the logic goes, doesn’t make sense.

This logic also explains why so many physicalists reject the concept of free will. As the Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky puts it, “What we call ‘free will’ is simply the biology that we haven’t understood well enough yet.” Furthermore, these thinkers cite evidence that many of what we consider to be voluntary actions are initiated before we are even aware of them. After all, our brains contain about 86 billion neurons, with an estimated 100 trillion links among them. The activity and connections are—pun intended—mind-bogglingly complex, far beyond the conscious control of your lumbering will. By the time you decide to eat that cookie, your brain has already initiated the action to do so.

A hybrid argument for free will does exist, one that acknowledges both the complexity of the brain and the fact that we might not make every individual decision freely. It suggests that decisions influencing the patterns of everyday life might run automatically. So you may not, in any meaningful sense, choosea certain route to work every day, but you did freely choose to take a job in Tucson instead of Tacoma, limiting your overall range of commuting possibilities. More seriously, you might make moral commitments based on careful consideration, but that in turn constrains your subsequent behavioral choices, which you make automatically.

We aren’t going to sort out the puzzle of free will here. I have my hunches about all of the theories, and you have yours, but they are just that. The question at hand is how best, allowing for this uncertainty, to act to improve your happiness. The answer, doubts notwithstanding, is to embrace the idea of your own free will over your actions and life. This is a pragmatic strategy, similar to Blaise Pascal’s famous wager about belief in God: You should believe, because if you are wrong, you lose little, but if you are right (and live accordingly), you have a huge amount to gain.

Social scientists have demonstrated that a belief in free will is associated with life satisfaction, as studies have shown among adolescents and adults. This finding does not seem culturally dependent, appearing in collectivist cultures as well as in individualist ones. Furthermore, this belief can affect anyone, because people whose belief in free will was found to be weaker in research studies tended to score higher than others in aggression and social conformity, and have lower self-control.

Regardless of their underlying beliefs, when people are simply exposed to statements about free will, that influences their attitudes toward life. In an experiment written up in the journal Philosophical Psychology in 2016, scholars asked participants to read either statements affirming free will, such as “I have feelings of regret when I make bad decisions because I know that ultimately I am responsible for my actions,” or statements denying free will, such as “All behavior is determined by brain activity, which in turn is determined by a combination of environmental and genetic factors.” The researchers found that after reading the pro-free-will statements, people set more meaning-filled goals for themselves. After reading the anti-free-will statements, the participants in a parallel study perceived less meaning in their lives.

If you are a firm believer in free will, well … lucky you. You can try affirming this belief as you start each day by telling yourself, “This is a day of choices—to love or to hate, to give or to take, to move forward or backward in my life. I will make the better choice whenever I can.” When you feel upset or angry, remember that your feelings may happen to you, but that you can manage your reactions to those feelings.

Even if you are not so sure that free will is real, you can still benefit from acting as if it is, as the research shows. You don’t have to walk around all day hoping that your environmental and genetic proclivities conspire to give you a pleasant day. On the contrary, conjuring thoughts of free will can inspire you to take control of your life in a positive way. If you are a hybrid thinker, that might mean focusing on your major goals in life, which you believe really are under your control.

The strategy i’m proposing turns out to be similar to the one that Ted Chiang settled on in his story. The narrator, using the same technology that the Predictor exemplifies, is communicating with readers from one year in the future. Looking at the destruction that occurs when people conclude they have no free will, he tells them, “My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will.” In sum: “The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief.”

If the mind-body problem were truly settled, I doubt that we could follow this prescription. But the problem isn’t settled, so your decisions might very well be real and matter very much. In which case, my best advice is to admit that you don’t know, throw up your hands in resignation, laugh at the riddle, and make positive decisions about the day ahead.