People worry a lot about free will now, not so much anymore because of the theological puzzles it poses as because it’s supposedly incompatible with modern science. There are basically two ways to gloss that incompatibility. One reading is that our experience of having free will is somehow “fake” because science teaches us that everything is either strictly determined or random. This approach takes the experience of free will as naively representative and declares it mistaken on that basis. To characterize any phenomenon of consciousness as naive representation, however, is seriously misguided – the same kind of error as taking thoughts to be identical with scans of brain activity correlating to those thoughts. When it comes to consciousness, the picture is not the thing; and neither is the thing the picture.
A more promising way to construe the incompatibility between free will and the modern scientific consensus would be to concede that the notion of free will as usually understood entails some kind of special (uncaused) causation that experimental evidence tells overwhelmingly against. Assuming we want to maintain a univocal notion of “cause” that has proven at least technologically useful, what we then have to do is reconstruct “free will” in a non-causal way, for instance as a special way of experiencing uncertainly about the future with reference to ourselves as agents. On this reconstruction, free will isn’t so much a way of changing the future as it is of acknowledging our moral responsibility vis-a-vis actions for which we’re not in a deep sense causally responsible.
Dreams provide us a way of understanding what this would be like. When we remember our dreams, we often recall ourselves as choosing while at the same time feeling (in retrospect) as though the whole plot of our dream had been predetermined. From this perspective, we can see free will as a feature of experience that doesn’t have any causal efficacy. That’s why, despite this experience of choice, people try to experience “lucid dreaming” – a kind of dream state in which we would “really” have free will, rather than just the experience of it.
The idea is then that our waking minds will have causal efficacy in the world of our dreams. Of course, if free will is non-causal anyhow, then it can’t have any more causal efficacy when we’re asleep than when we’re awake. However, it bears noticing that a distinction between “real” (i.e. causal) free will and merely experiential free will can’t even really be conceptualized outside of some kind of scenario like this one, where we observe and participate in a fictional world (i.e. the dream space) from an “actual” position in a “real” world outside it.
All that by way of introducing a passage from the Oneirocriticon that struck me when I read it a few days ago and has stayed with me since. It comes from the end of book two, where Artemidorus finally gets around to what we’ve all been waiting for, flying dreams:
πάντων δὲ ἄριστον τὸ ἑκοντα πέτεσθαι καὶ ἑκόντα παύεσθαι· πολλὴν γὰρ ῥᾳστώνην καὶ εὐχέρειαν ἐν τοῖς πραττομένοις προαγορεύει. διωκόμενον δὲ ὑπὸ θηρίου ἢ ὑπὸ ἀνθρώπου ἢ ὑπὸ δαίμονος ἵπτασθαι οὐκ ἀγαθον· φόβους γὰρ μεγάλους καὶ κινδύνους ἐπάγει.
“The best of all is to take off willingly and stop [flying] willingly; this predicts much ease and facility for those who do it. But it is not good to fly while being pursued by a beast or a person or a daimon; this brings great fears and hazards.”
How are we supposed to understand this “willingly” which makes so much difference for our interpretation of the dream? Categorically excluded, I think, is a causal interpretation where “willingly” means “you desire to do it, and this causes you to do it.” That’s because the whole Oneirocriticon treats dream actions as something for which you’re not causally responsible. Indeed, this must have been a general premise for ancient dream interpretation: how else to create an atmosphere in which people are comfortable recounting dreams they’ve had about, e.g., getting a blow job from their own fathers? The dream is something that befalls you, not something that you do.
Hekonta, then, has some kind of experiential meaning. But what kind? The text opens up a couple of alternatives, which I have a hard time choosing between. One way to construe it is as the same kind of special ignorance about future events I was talking about before – the only difference between it and our general uncertainty about the future being that free will has reference to our own, agential actions. Another way to construe it would be to read it in close connection with the second sentence I quoted above, which we’d then interpret as presenting alternative scenarios in which you’re not voluntarily taking off or landing. If the typology given here is exhaustive – that is, if either you fly voluntarily or you fly under compulsion from another agent – then the experience of free will would just be the experience of non-compulsion, in principle susceptible of verification by outside observers too.