A famous Zen story goes like this:

A monk asks the master, Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?”

Joshu answers, “Mu!”

This story has become known as the Mu koan — a koan being one of those semi-meaningless statements that, by beating your answer-seeking mind against the unanswerable statement, may, eventually, after a lot of brain beating, result in a moment where rationality snaps and you have a dramatic (and temporary) shift in perception (doesn’t that sound much less interesting than, “You experience Satori!”?).

The way you wrestle with this koan is by trying to understand Joshu’s answer. And if you go to a Zen retreat where people are putting their mind into a cage match against the Mu koan, you’ll often hear people muttering, “Mu! Mu! Mu… mu… muuuuu,” as if repeating “2+2, 2+2, 2+2″ will spontaneously make them think, “FOUR!”

First of all, why they’re saying Mu is a mystery. Why did the entire story get translated into English, but not the last word?

“Mu,” is a Japanese word for “no” or “nothing” or any form of negation. But you never hear good Zen boys and girls mumbling, “No. No. Nothing. No… nooooo….”

Instead, they sit on the floor or walk around the zendo sounding like their practicing for the upcoming 4-H cow impression competition.

Which makes me wonder if there’s another Zen story that hasn’t yet been translated:

A monk asks Joshu, “Does a cow have Buddha nature?”

Joshu answers, “WOOF!”

But the Buddha nature of livestock and companion animals is not my concern here… I really want to know this:

Do my cats have free will?

My cats clearly learn things. Things like, “don’t eat that plant,” “that weird sound means food is coming,” “if I face this door and meow long enough I get treats,” and, “no matter how much those tall animals yell, I have no personal issue that would prevent me from walking on this counter, scratching that chair, and wiping my butt on the carpet.”

My cats also seem to make decisions. Decisions like: “I will run to that empty corner of the room as if my life depended on it… NOW!” and, “NEVER MIND, I’ll make a 90-degree turn at 100 miles an hour and dash up the stairs instead.” Or, “I think I’ll nap here, and then get up and sleep there, and then rouse myself in time for some serious shut-eye over there.” And, even seeming artistic decisions like, “Yes, it is much more aesthetically pleasing if this mouse were floating in my water dish!”

But do my cats have free will? It seems like a silly question. We don’t think they sit around deliberating, “Do I find a nice sunny spot to lie down, or do I plant myself in the middle of the guests and lick my butt ?” We don’t expect them to be thinking, “I feel a certain sensation that I’ll call ‘lacking’ and if I could only spend a weekend in a hotel room with other cats and discover my ‘purpose’ for living, I should be able to eliminate this sensation.”

Cats seem to do fine, free will or not.

Now, if we’re going to suggest that cats have do have free will, let’s move further back on the evolutionary chain… fish? worms? algae? amoeba?

They all seem to survive just fine without what most of us would call free will. It doesn’t seem to be a prerequisite for survival.

So, let’s head in the other direction. What about us?

For over 40 years, cognitive scientists have noticed that you hook people up to various scanning and measuring devices and see something happen in the brain when they have made a decision. What has been puzzling to them is that this event takes place at least half a second prior to the person actually deciding. A recent study showed a neurological event SEVEN SECONDS prior to the person deciding, “NOW!”

These scientists suggest that decisions, and perhaps most of the rest of our life, is happening in some non-conscious way, and that our conscious thought is simply narrating an event that has already passed.

“I decided to buy that new Brittany Spears album,” is a thought you have merely to explain the fact that, for no rational reason, you’re standing in line with the CD in your hand, and some goth kid behind the counter giving you the evil eye.

Some scientists say, “Well, the initial decision is out of our control… but then we can decide whether to act on it or not!”

Oh? Really?

But what about that decision? Why isn’t that one as non-conscious and non-controllable than the first?

The notion that we aren’t the conscious and volitional actors that we seem to be makes most people more than a bit nervous… and many — including scientists — avoid thinking about it all together and then justify that lack of consideration with, “Well, that couldn’t be true… it sure seems like we have free will… the notion that we don’t argues with our every day experience!” Even though they know that what we “experience” and what is accurate are often as disconnected as “Paris Hilton” and “Nobel Prize for Physics.”

Or people get even more nervous and suggest that if people truly accepted that the are not the ones running the show, then all hell would break loose. Or nobody would do anything. Or some other equally horrible future would ensue, where humans would merely alternate between watching Brady Bunch reruns, killing each other, and trying to lick themselves.

But I’m not sure anything would change if we all suddenly accepted that, contrary to our seeming experience, we are DNA robots who have a glitch in the programming that makes us think we’re not robots. I’m not convinced that having an intellectual understanding of something that’s so contrary to our experience would make a bit of difference. After all, we know that we could die from any of a thousand causes in almost any moment, but that doesn’t stop us from partying like it’s 1999.

Years ago I heard someone say, “Humans think they are immortal. The proof? They always act surprised when one of them dies in a manner that has taken out millions of others.” Every day’s newspaper, TV and radio tells of some “surprising” death… just like the “shocking” one from the day before and the day before and the day before and…

Though, maybe, if we truly accepted that the thought of having free will is also just some idea that popped into our awareness after our non-conscious being “decided” to cut our hair with a lawn mower instead of a weed whacker… then, maybe, we wouldn’t be as committed to justifying and acting to support our beliefs. Maybe, for example, we would see our desire demonize some group of humans who speak, look, talk or smell differently than we do as no more “conscious” or rational than our “choice” to put on our pants left leg first.

That might be interesting.

I don’t know.

I’m just thinking… or am I?

Every now and then the “check oil” light on your car’s dashboard turns red… so you add a quart of 10w-40 and go on your merry way… or your grumpy way… or whatever way you were going.

Some time later, the light lights, you toss in another quart (unless you’re driving in Europe, where you would add a liter, which, thanks to Schoolhouse Rock, I know is a little more than a quart).

Then, one day, you go to the shop for them to, oh, whatever mechanics do at the shop — calibrate the servo-trans-turbo-anti-locking-carburator thingy or something (it doesn’t matter WHY you’re at the shop; that’s not the important part of the story) — and the mechanic says, “Hey, I just noticed that this oil light of yours is broken. It’ll just go off at any old time for no reason.”

What would that knowledge to do you?
Your car was broken, but you had no external indication of the problem. Would it even occur to you that the oil light was faulty? Of course not.

This, by the way is a more tame version of the thought-experiment … the more National Enquirer version is: What if you just found out that your “mother” is really your grandmother and your “sister” is actually your bio-mom? (And let’s add that as you scan your history, there is NO INDICATION at all that this was the case.)

Does this change your thoughts about who you are?

Regardless of your answer, consider this:

What if your most fundamental decision-making mechanism was broken and you didn’t know it?

Not that you were unable to make decisions, nor that every decision you made led to some unpleasant circumstance. But what if, say, it had a short-circuit so that any time you were deliberating or trying to decide between some options the “YES” signal went off totally randomly, having nothing to do with any sort of rational thinking process, and you just went with that YES, because you had no reason to think it wasn’t the result of a faulty YES-meter?

And what if, I’ll say this again to highlight it, you had no objective indication that this was happening? Sometimes the YES worked out well; other times not so well.
Would you be able to tell that your YES-meter was broken?

Nope.

And this problem is bigger than your car issue, because if you wanted to examine your decision-making mechanism, guess what? The only tool you have is the broken decision-making mechanism. So, if you start looking at the “data,” and played with theories about whether it was working or not, you could get a big random YES that “confirms” a theory that’s completely not true.

That is, you can’t use your damaged analysis tool to determine if you have a damaged analysis tool.

What difference, if any, would you expect to experience in your life if it turned out that, all along, ever since you were born, your decision-making analysis tool were broken and you just found out?

You can probably guess why I’m suggesting this line of thinking.

It could be true (though, again, if it is, it would be almost impossible to determine!)

Wrap your brain around that for a bit and let me know what you find… or take a gander at On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not  by Robert Burton, and let’s chat