Imagination and free will

Today, I would like to present my interpretation of the central philosophical concept of free will. I argue for a view that stresses the role of imagination in all decision making, even so much that the concept of will as uncoupled from imagination will be deemed nonsense. I am not interested in denying free will in the sense that freedom would be an absolute quality, either present or absent in a living thing. Instead, I will define freedom as a property or state of all organisms, with some of them, such as most humans, enjoying greater freedom than others. References to traditional theories of freedom have decidedly been left out, for this post is not primarily meant as a critique of any of them. It is my analysis of the concept of free will, and as such it might contradict with, or bear resemblance to, ideas previously developed by others.

Let me first lay out the crucial role of imagination. Regardless of the existence or degree of our freedom, imagination is a necessary factor in decision making. One cannot choose a course of action beforehand if one is unable to imagine the action itself and, perhaps, some of its consequences as well. Human beings often see their actions as goal-directed: they aim at certain results. The ability to imagine ends and means was central already in Aristotle’s account on practical reason, and clearly visible in his practical syllogisms. There, for example, the act of eating could result from a person’s actual sensation of hunger and her belief that eating cures hunger. Such a belief entails envisioning a potential state of not being hungry: imagination, case in point. But Aristotle did not, as far as I know, pay much attention to the question whether humans make free choices.

Now, let’s assume that we indeed choose our actions freely. Imagination generates or comprises mental images that, in each given situation, represent different optional courses of action. Some of them are more realistic than others. When confronted by a dangerous terrestrial animal, for instance, one could envision both running away and flying away, but obviously the latter wouldn’t be a realistic escape plan. (It is nevertheless a remarkable capacity that we can imaginatively combine things that have not occurred together in our previous experience, and thus envision a human flying like a bird). In any case, the course of action one opts for is chosen from the set of mental images offered by imagination. The choice-making instance, I suppose, is what the concept of will refers to. Then, the chosen mental images are more or less successfully turned into action.

The crucial question here is: if actions are chosen by will, and will is provided with options by imagination, what is the instance that imagination is dependent upon? What determines exactly which kinds of mental images are generated?

Suppose that your imagination was free from all constraints. That means it could generate an unlimited mass of mental images, for example to represent an unlimited selection of different actions in a given situation. But to speak of an ”unlimited selection” is folly: in a temporally restricted situation, such as any situation you may encounter in your earthly life, no choice could be made from an unlimited range of options. No matter how free the will is, it simply has not got the time to go through an endless array of mental images. It is implied that, for you to be able to make choices at all, the range of options generated by imagination has to be restricted by something. But what would that something be?

Might it be called human intellect or rationality? Let me explore this possibility: I, as a subject, control the formation of images in my mind rationally. Such a view seems to imply that I should be able to anticipate what to think of next. But as hard as I try, I cannot run ahead of my thoughts. At the very moment I ”decide” what to think of next, the thought – a mental image or representation – is already there. It is not ”next”, it is now. I cannot anticipatively decide what to think. My thoughts come and go, and I guess the same is true of yours as well. What we call deciding what to do is thought A anticipating action α, and that is pretty conceivable. But I see no way my thought Α could anticipate my thought B, without B already being experienced in the present. Thoughts are always present, never anticipated, just like a certain action is never done first ”anticipatively” and then ”really”.

Even if I refuse to rely upon my own experience on this, the subjective, rational control of imagination would be hard to explain. For what else could the formation of mental images consist of than making choices between options? Intellect is very much about associating things with each other, and in order to construct mental images, one would have to choose which things to associate with which. By positing ”intellect” as the controlling instance of human imagination, I would merely make a replica of the choice-making instance of will and place it before the ultimate mental images. Obviously, this replica of the will generates the need to posit further replicas ad infinitum. It starts to seem like mental images were being pushed into our consciousness by something or someone outside our conscious mind.

If that is the case, the products of our conscious imagination probably represent a selection extracted from a greater, unconscious set of images. There has to be an instance doing this selective work and sending certain images up to the ”surface” so that they can be consciously reflected upon. This mysterious instance appears to be nothing but a separate meta-will, operating in the subconscious sphere. What else could account for the limited set of imagined possibilities emerging in the human mind before a free choice? Here, the theory starts going wild.

It is not the only problem with the subconscious meta-will that you could not be held responsible for the material provided to your conscious imagination, but it is a significant one. Look at it from an ethical point of view: it might actually hinder you from making good decisions in your life. Should you opt for an ethically unsound mode of conduct in a given situation, you would not necessarily be responsible for it. The ethically sound options just might not have been provided to your conscious mind by the meta-will. Who should we blame for that? People are usually not held responsible for actions committed in an unconscious state of mind.

In fact, this is only the beginning to a whole chain of problems. For the meta-will to be able to make choices, there has to be a subconscious meta-imagination as well. It is quite obvious: if the conscious will chooses from certain imagined actions, the meta-will also has to have some material at its disposal. And when we accept this, there is every reason to posit further meta-levels of choice-making instances (will) and instances providing options to them (imagination). Any set of options has to result from preceding choices, and the choices themselves have to be a selection out of a preceding set of options. This is a ridiculous thought, utter nonsense that does not offer the slightest help in understanding how human minds work.

What else, if not an endless chain of metacognitive apparatus, could account for a limited set of imagined options? An alternative is to think of human imagination as a contingent process. That is, the possible courses of action envisioned in an individual mind emerge without a single steering instance such as will or meta-will. There are many factors that are likely to influence an individual’s imagination: previous experiences, cultural background, natural surroundings and genetic makeup, for instance. This view resembles the point made by theologian Joel Green in Conversations On Human Nature (Fuentes & Visala 2015, p. 289):

”Decisions determine other decisions; relationships shape what is possible for us to even think. Our relatedness actually constrains our free will, not in the sense that it keeps you from making decisions, but in the sense that it shapes the way you even think what decisions are possible.”

In fact, when understood as above, imagination and freedom should not be thought as belonging to humans only. Our imagination obviously tends to be much more complex and our freedom, consequently, wider than that of other organisms. More images, more associations and therefore more options occur to humans than to others. But it is likely that some human mental images, associations and options are really special in the sense that they emerge through unique neurological mechanisms that no other animals exhibit. For example, human language could be a result of such mechanisms. Further speculations must wait for a more appropriate occasion.

To conclude with, I repeat my argument in a step-by-step format:

1 For a human subject, making a choice entails envisioning options in the form of mental representations.

2 In a temporally restricted situation, any choice must be made from a limited set of options.

3 The subject cannot plan any mental representations before actually experiencing them, because to plan X is to experience a mental representation of X.

4 This means that the subject cannot produce a limited set of options out of nowhere while still controlling the outcome.

5 Therefore, in a temporally restricted situation, the subject can only produce a limited set of options by deriving it from a preceding limited set of options.

6 If such limited sets are produced by the human subject herself, her every choice is dependent upon an endless regressive series of her own deliberative acts, deriving limited sets from previous limited sets.

7 An endless series is, given the context of a temporally restricted situation, impossible.

8 If such a series is not postulated, there has to be, at some level, a given set of options underlying the final choice made by the subject.

9 These options, being given, are outside the control of the subject.

10 The subject is not free to decide what occurs to her as possible.

11 In that case, the final choice can be free only inasmuch as the subject chooses freely from the given options.

I have here tentatively defined individual freedom as the range of possible mental representations and actions open to an individual organism. I do not believe it is an absolute property or quality of human mind or human will. In my view, the explanatory power of free will is zero unless one takes into account imagination, which obviously is not controlled by a single subject, but instead is a contingent stream, drawing influence from numerous tributaries.