On Free Will, Solipsism, and the Boa Constrictor Eating the Elephant

Coming Untethered

Like any bored, now-early-20s, middle-class thinker who is worth his weight in gold, I've done the only sensible thing: fought my way through an existential crisis, one part self-regard, one part social media. Just the other day I saw someone my age claim he'd confirmed we are living in a simulation, and that we must escape it. That set me off, honestly. What if he was right?

Sartre didn't help either. I can't pinpoint the exact essay that tipped me over, but reading Sartre can do that to you in a way only Sartre can, and for a long stretch afterward I detested him for it. To read Sartre is to have the guardrails removed from life. There's a punk band from Toronto I love, PUP, whose song "Kids" captures that feeling better than I can: the narrator describes coming loose from everything, adrift in a kind of empty stillness that doesn't quite register as pain, even though it should. I'd be lying if I said it felt like nothing. It felt like a deep sea of anxiety. But the point stands: I had come untethered.

For a while it was horrible, an endless loop of why are we here, why does any of this matter, what is reality, how do I prove it. Then came the follow-on questions of solipsism and free will. I've come to believe we live in a deeply solipsistic society, and that is a fight worth having on its own terms: why we must all confront and overcome solipsism to become fully human. But that isn't the purpose of this essay. This essay is about free will, because I think free will and our shared reality stand or fall together, against what I'd call the two great philosophical threats of our time. The first is solipsism: the belief that the world exists only around you, the operating logic of the rich, the self-absorbed, and anyone privileged enough to think that way, a kind of unspoken conviction that one has been chosen to get what one wants, paired with a total inability to accept criticism or pushback. The second is the problem of free will, or really its opposite, determinism: the belief that our brains are simply wired the way they're wired, and there is nothing to be done about it.

The Death of a Common Reality

When I first went through this crisis, I went to see a friend of mine, an adamant Christian, who read my problem as a straightforward reaction to a godless existence. That diagnosis, absurdly enough, is close to the opening image of "Kids" by PUP itself, which describes trying to find your footing inside a reality that no longer has God in it. So the problem had clearly been diagnosed before. It had. When Nietzsche wrote "God is dead," we tend to read it as a celebration, but Nietzsche meant it as mourning, a statement of fear, because the death of God was the death of a common reality. We can see that fear play out in the twenty-first century. There is no common reality anymore, and I know that's a loaded claim, but the flood of new-age religions, conspiracy theories like simulation belief, and the outright denial of other people's humanity all point the same direction. I'm not religious, and I think the idea of God is a dangerous one, but I'll admit it can serve as a unifying figure for humanity, a shared anchor point.

When God Died, Did Free Will Die With Him?

So what does any of this have to do with free will? When religion was the dominant frame, free will was a given, part of the doctrine itself. When God died, in a sense free will died with him, because neuroscience has since shown us that we are largely driven by chemical reactions in the brain, that scans show activity lighting up before a decision is consciously made, suggesting we're reacting to our brains rather than the other way around. This is determinism, and it's a popular position today. You see it constantly from pseudo-intellectuals on Instagram, the line that humanity is just a sack of bones and clumps of cells on a floating rock in space, and that we're stuck being exactly what we are. I hate this line of thinking, and beyond that, I think it's objectively wrong.

The Embodied Consciousness

One way to push back on determinism is through Merleau-Ponty's idea of embodied consciousness. I consider myself something of a Pontian, and I think his work is essential for grounding our connection to reality and for rejecting the deterministic picture. Jack Reynolds, in Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity, makes a related point about Merleau-Ponty's aim: not to reject analytical thought, but to discipline it (21). That's what Merleau-Ponty's philosophy does so well, in my view: it grounds metaphysics in the actual lived world. In a way, he answers Nietzsche's death of common reality by suggesting that what once held us together wasn't God, but our embodied consciousness.

For Merleau-Ponty, the mind-body dualism Descartes set up, and which in turn left us struggling with solipsism and free will, is a problem that never needed to exist. Here's the simple version: Descartes is willing to doubt his senses entirely, to imagine an evil demon deceiving him at every turn, and yet he still turns around and uses those same senses, touch to write, sight to check what he's written, to confirm his own reasoning. His senses never actually failed him. Where Cartesian philosophy splits reason from body, Merleau-Ponty insists the two are inseparable. Helen Keller, in The Story of My Life, gives what I think is the clearest possible illustration of embodied experience, in the passage she calls the day language entered her life:

"As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away." (34)

That passage confirms Merleau-Ponty's philosophy for me. Descartes tries to set the senses aside, but it's only through the senses that the problem of solipsism can arise at all. Which is, I think, the strongest rebuttal solipsism can receive: our senses and our embodied consciousness are what survive regardless of whether solipsism holds, not the other way around.

The Boa Constrictor and the Hat

To make the case that determinism is objectively wrong, I want to start with a meme I love. It shows philosophy as a spectrum from beginner to advanced: Thus Spoke Zarathustra on the beginner end, The Little Prince on the advanced end. It's a joke, but I think there's a real truth buried in it. We often treat philosophy as a game for showing off intelligence, when what it should really be doing is what The Little Prince does so well: articulating a kind of love for what life is. When I picture the philosophers of our moment arguing over the hard problem of consciousness, over whether other people are philosophical zombies, over whether we're all living in a simulation, so much of it starts to look like mental masturbation and escapism, I think of the opening of The Little Prince: his drawing of a boa constrictor that has swallowed an elephant. To the Little Prince, the shape is obvious. Every adult who looks at it sees only a hat, and can't be talked out of it, because they're certain that's all there is to see.

I think we do the same thing with free will. We decide there's no such thing, because we're simply chemical reactions in the brain, and stop there, as if that were the whole picture: a drawing of a hat and nothing more. But that's a narrow way to look at life. Brain chemistry can explain why we feel happy, sad, or afraid in a given moment. It can't explain our response to that feeling. It can't explain the deeper arc of a life, and it certainly can't explain why we so often have the capacity to override a chemical reaction by sheer will. How often do we misjudge someone on first meeting them, for better or worse, and then find the emotional room to correct ourselves? If we were only hats, we wouldn't grow or change. The fact that every human life involves growth and change suggests we're a good deal more than a hat: we're a boa constrictor that has eaten an elephant.

The Oversoul

I'll close with a thinker I return to often, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Nietzsche himself named as one of the great minds of his era. Emerson saw the same trouble coming that Nietzsche did, and answered it with what he called the Oversoul, an idea borrowed heavily from the Hindu concept of Brahman: the belief that each of us is connected to something larger than ourselves. Spinoza, another monist, arrived at something similar with his deus sive natura. Emerson's version is more childlike, comparing consciousness to electricity and the mind to an outlet in your house. Is it true? I like to think so. I feel it when Emerson writes that the divine good exists in all of us; I feel it in my own sense that we're each capable of making a real difference, of making the world better. Simulation theories still unsettle me sometimes. What if we really are being deceived by something larger than ourselves, some grand escape still waiting to happen, Matrix-style? Those thoughts are common enough today. But I think, in the end, we're all looking at the same drawing, the only one that exists: our shared reality. And given the choice, I'd rather see a boa constrictor eating an elephant than a hat.