Free will
Jerry has a post on free will (the latest of a series) and it has set off an interesting discussion; see especially the comments by Tom Clark and Russell Blackford, and several by Eric MacDonald.
This subject doesn’t fret me the way it does some people, and I suspect that’s because I’m lazy about it. I’m lazy about a lot of things. It doesn’t fret me because I always end up thinking “but it feels as if I choose and in a way that feeling amounts to the same thing as really choosing.” That’s probably lazy because of the “in a way” or the “amounts to” or both. It’s woolly. And yet –
And yet if we all do live that way, feeling all the time as if we choose various things, then for the purposes of living that way, it does amount to the same thing. Or at least it seems to. It’s like the self, and other such illusions. We can agree that they’re illusions, and yet in everyday life, we go on living and thinking as if they’re not, and we can’t really do anything else.
It’s like vision, too – we don’t really see what we see; what we see is a confabulation – we fill in all kinds of missing bits with our brains to make a seamless whole that our eyes don’t in fact see. I’m aware of that, but I certainly can’t refrain from doing it.
It’s perhaps a little like reading novels or hearing stories, which rely on the convention that the narrator – whoever that is – knows what every character, or some characters, or one character is thinking. Some novelists point out or play with that convention in the novel, but lots don’t; the convention is just there, and we’re entirely accustomed to it so that it seems natural, but in fact it’s radically different from life, in which no one knows what anyone else is thinking.
The fact is human life is full of illusions of this kind; narrative combinations that knit things together that are actually fragmented and all over the place. Most of them are really difficult to set aside for more than a few minutes; some of them are impossible.
And yet…quite often I will suddenly notice how unconsciously I have just done something quite complicated, while thinking about something else, and then I will have a little jolt of awareness of the illusion of free will.
I’ve read a bit of the literature on free will, and it’s one of those areas where my initial convictions have not been molested by any ingenius philosophical arguments. People are just plain invested in different sorts of claims when they cash out the phrase, “free will”.
I take it to mean something like “conscious control”. It is being able to deliberately choose otherwise, in the sense that you could have chosen some other course of action that you’ve already entertained, and you can treat that counterfactual choice as if it could have been effectively realized under the alternative psychological circumstances. Free will is just a rational choice that is the product of deliberation.
I think that most people think that this formulation entails that free will is an illusion. But they only get only because they’re obsessed with this idea that free will actually meant something deeper than this, or that “could have done otherwise” takes on some robust metaphysical significance. I’ve always thought this was a silly and bizarre outlook. What else were people expecting?
Identical twin studies indicate that a lot of the ‘free’ choices we make, like whether we prefer a station wagon to a sedan, prefer Brussels sprouts to spinach, prefer tennis to playing the stock market, etc, etc, are more determined by heredity than we would first assume. Just as I had no choice about being born with 5 digits on each limb, I had none on the matter of my genetic makeup. So the really spooky choice is coming up someday soon in a clinic near you: whether or not to book in for a gene therapy session that will alter the way you will make those ‘free’ choices and start liking Brussels sprouts where previously you detested them. Or whatever.
The moral responsibility for choices issue is closely related. Adolph Hitler’s defense if he had ever been brought to trial might have been along the lines of ‘I had a rotten childhood, and I inherited a lousy set of genes’, and he might have maintained that all the way to the gallows, where the hangman might have wished him ‘better luck next time around Adolph’. The notion of justice, without which society cannot function, is the other side of this free will coin, and justice demands that there be no defense case that can get an Adolph Hitler off the hook.
Oh yes, identical twins are a good way to sharpen the picture; I should have thought of that. (See? Lazy.) I hate the idea of having an identical twin – because there’s just one me, and it’s ME. I refuse to share.
I agree with Ben. We don’t have the freedom to make uncaused choices. Determinism appears to go all the way in, operating within us as well as on us. That gives the concept of free will epistemic meaning only. Since we don’t know everything about how we decide things all we can do is choose. I choose to run away from the lion rather than be eaten by it. How does the remote possibility that I “could have done otherwise” help me?
If we reject dualism – and you’d be hard pressed to provide a naturalist argument for embracing it – we have to accept that free will, in the deepest sense, is absent. This is an interesting realization. It reminds us that we are not fully independent agents (and though she feels as if she’s in a play, she is anyway), and so maybe we shouldn’t be so full of ourselves.
Other than that, I find little utility in it. The agonizing over moral culpability seems useless. Empathy is a feature of our determined being, and so we’re going to act on it. If you get caught up on the other side, well, then, at one level I understand that it isn’t really you, but I’m still going to ask you to play your part.
I haven’t read the comments on Jerry Coyne’s site, only his post, but I suspect that this illusion that we “choose freely” is something we cling to (consciously/unconsciously/evolutionarily?) because it provides us with the kind of dignity that we humans seem to need to get on with the business of being human. I recall philosopher Susan Neiman saying something like this in Moral Clarity, though the book is more of a treatise on Enlightenment values (often misunderstood, she partly argues).
And I agree (@Ophelia) that feeling as if we have choice and really having it may be a distinction without a difference (?)
My first thought was that this is much like the philosophers who say that nothing really exists. What else can we do but act like it does? Or like those who claim that we cannot ‘know’ anything. How do you know that?
My next thought is that we are much like ancient Greeks discussing what elements the world is made of. We’re just making things up and choosing the ones that look pretty. We don’t have the understanding and tools to tell if we’re right or wrong. If philosophers have better tools and understanding than I do, they might be more in the position of Leonardo da Vinci, who could understood flight well enough to draw a flying machine, but could not build it due to lack of materials and power sources.
I’m comfortable enough knowing that I don’t know. I am happy acting as if I have free will and moral responsibility, even if I can’t prove it or justify it. Someone (more than one) needs to strive to improve the art, but at some point it seems silly to make claims for understanding that we do not have. At some point the claims of philosophers about free will (for or against) seem to have just as much basis as claims about existence of gods. Or those Greeks again.
Another thought-stream: Jerry acknowledges that quantum indeterminancy exists and says it doesn’t affect the deterministic state at the non-quantum level. I don’t dispute that. If we consider that determinance fails to cross the border to quanta, then why could there not be another barrier it cannot cross in another direction? One possible border might be ‘consciousness’ and another might be ‘life’. It could be something we haven’t discovered or thought of yet. Just guessing (making stuff up), but also suggesting places to aim our research if we wish to do more than just argue about it.
We recognized the differences between solid, liquid and gas states centuries before we could explain it better than “hot and cold”. We could change things from one to the other long before we knew what was really happening when it did. Along the way to our current understanding, we discovered another state that we hadn’t dreamed existed- plasma. I think our path to understanding free-will will look much like this. Better technology and better tests will lead to better understanding and that understanding will include important, even essential, things that are un-dreamed of today.
I can sleep just fine until then.
So one could say that you believe in free will because you don’t have any choice.
You do realize that philosophers have been struggling with freedom and necessity for about 2,300 years?
When it comes to my choices of jams that I like equally….and both selling for $1.49, I do make a choice. Strawberry or Raspberry?
It has something to do with the way my mouth feels. That must be determined by when I last brushed my teeth. Does it want sweet (strawberry) or slightly sour (raspberry)? Would flossing have made a difference, and what would have motivated me to floss to begin with to set this whole deterministic chain in motion?
Oh, but my granny used to to always have raspberry jam when I visited her.
But my other granny had strawberry jam.
When scientists can unpack all that, and predict it, then I’m on board.
.
The efficacy of moral education is dependent on the fact that our decision processes *can* be manipulated by others – but isn’t that kind of just the opposite of free will?
Freedom to do what I want or decide to do is freedom of action, but freedom of will is more than that. It is the freedom to want do to whatever I want to want to do.Do I want to be good? Do I want to? No, I don’t really want to.But I really want to want to really want to want to.(With apologies to Dick Feynman for stealing from ‘I wonder’)
The twin studies, which form one of the main arguments for heritability of behavior, are not as robust as their adherents imply – especially when we take into account that, even when adopted, identical twins are likely to grow up in very similar environments. An obvious counter-example is that second-generation immigrants invariably display the body morphology and disease susceptibilities of their adopted culture, although they have inherited the genes of their natal one.
Quantum indeterminacy is a red herring — and an annoying one, because it’s the equivalent of New Age woo. The wave functions have collapsed and decohered at a far smaller scale than molecules, let alone cells.
At the same time, we do have a kaleidoscope of choices at several scales if only stochastically (Will a neuron fire? Will a synaptic pathway get strengthened? Will the “ball” of an action fall in this or that decision valley?), although there are several levels of hardwiring as well: our repertoire of responses is constrained by our brain (including what we can sense directly), our species, our culture. So as far as I’m concerned, these discussions are parlor games.
We each have a measurable amount of freedom. Nearly none if we’re up against the wall, destitute, enslaved, hunted or in love, parents or children, but a great many of us have considerable latitude in how we conduct our affairs, and continually have to expend effort making choices.
It’s not terribly useful, when you’re losing sleep over a dilemma, to consider that your eventual choice, being determinate, has already been made, because at that point you don’t yet know what it is. Perhaps, while you’re agonizing, the darkling legions of your cognitive apparatus are still contending in dubious battle, or perhaps they’re slacking and distracted while you impatiently await a conclusion.
We’re complicated. We run multiple simulations of different variations of ourselves in different scenarios, we conduct dialogues with imagined inquisitors, all the while handling assorted immediate exigencies with the same cognitive capabilities which were wrestling with the previously pending problems. Underneath that, we’re continuously reprogramming ourselves in order to improve our performance, as judged by the same unstable consensus that chooses our behavior to begin with.
The predictability of far simpler computer programs has so far proven to be an intractable problem. It seems intuitively obvious that it shouldn’t be the case, but so far it is, and as to what goes on in our heads I’d rather not venture a guess. Freedom is something we have to deal with.
It doesn’t fret me because, regardless of the answer, nothing in my life changes vis the truth of this question.
Athena, these discussions may be parlor games, but parlor games are often worthwhile. They beat watching TV most of the time.
I for one would like to know (if that is ever to be possible) to what extent I am like a train running on a set of rails, and to what extent I am roaming free as the proverbial breeze.
Ian, the relevant answers are 1) it depends on the scale and 2) on the conscious level, the larger-scale determinants (species, culture) matter far more than gluons and neurons. Which is the reason why most such dissection are parlor games (or, better yet, college bullshit sessions).
And, Ian, P. S.: I don’t know about you, but for me at least the choice is not between watching TV and engaging in parlor games.
Quite right.
There are two ways of looking at “free will”.
The first way is to realize that it is horribly ill-defined, and any attempts to pin down a definition result in something which is inherently self-contradictory, so there is no need to worry about whether humans in particular “have it” — it’s not even a coherent concept.
The second way is to realize that we all “know what we mean” when we use the phrase, and it designates a particular sensation of first-person choice, which, while a strict philosophical impossibility, is a rather important illusion for the functioning of society. If this smacks of a comforting delusion, it shouldn’t — the “free will model” of first-person choice is a pretty good model for interpreting and predicting human behavior most of the time, and in that sense it is no more a “comforting delusion” than Newtonian physics. (It’s not quite the same, since Newtonian physics is precisely defined, but I think my point is clear nonetheless: It’s a framework we KNOW is false when you get right down to it, but it yields a simple and accurate understanding of everything we encounter in our daily lives, so it’s utility cannot be denied)
Of course! That’s part of why I call my view of it lazy – I’m not struggling enough.
Athena, it is more than a parlour game because belief in “free will” allows for a less nuanced concept of “moral responsibility” which in turn is often used to justify unproductive punitive behaviour.
See now I continue to find the connection between “free will” and “moral responsibility” to be tenuous at best. If you go to a restaurant and find that your meal is rather disappointing, do you just shrug it off since the meal didn’t ultimately get to choose what it tasted like?
Well I might not “shrug it off” but I don’t think any sane person would try to punish the meal. They might try to get a message back to whomever was responsible though.
Or, as Bob Marley and Eric Clapton might sing:
“I shot the che-ef, But I did not shoot the table service”
@Alan Cooper: Are you going to trot out the Twinkie defense? Once again, for the third time in this thread: determinism at lower scales has virtually nothing to do with final outcomes, which depend heavily on context. Given the enormous number of possibilities, the outcomes are not deterministic even if they fall within a spectrum of possibilities.
@Athena, At the physics level I think you are confusing indeterminacy with chaos. Classical chaotic systems are completely deterministic – it’s just that there may be no open range of initial conditions that is sufficient to determine the outcome, so from the point of view of any normal observer they appear indeterminate. But in any case, surely you are not suggesting that indeterminacy implies free will, since I doubt that you would punish a coin for giving heads when you wanted tails.
On the other hand, regardless of whether physics is or is not deterministic, if our behaviour is ultimately determined by the physics then whatever kind of “free will” we have is not quite what some people would like to have (and to be able to ascribe to others).
And this is where it stops being a “parlour game”.
Some people do use a belief in “free will” to justify punishment that has no net utility (other than pleasing “god” perhaps), and others (viz your mention of the “Twinkie defense”) do the opposite. I prefer to take what I believe philosophers would call a “utlilitarian” approach, and respond to offense by only doing harm to an offender when that seems likely to produce at least as much offsetting benefit to myself and others.
“It doesn’t fret me because I always end up thinking “but it feels as if I choose and in a way that feeling amounts to the same thing as really choosing.””
Sorry, but you’re not even on the right track there. Of course you make choices. The question is whether those choices are “free.”
And this brings me to the first rule of discussing such controversial topics as free will, consciousness and intelligence: don’t even bother unless the terms are defined first. Since you don’t offer up your definitions, I won’t comment further.
If the ‘self’ is an illusion – who’s having that illusion?
I like ‘Bad Jim’s comment (#12) but would add that, since we can’t free ourselves from the need to be continually making choices (even if we have no choice about the choices we will actually make), perhaps his final sentence should be extended to read “Freedom is something we are not free to not deal with – even though we probably don’t have it”. So let’s just continue to act as if we and our peers are free, while keeping enough sympathy for the bind we are all in to prevent us from applying blame where it serves no purpose.
Some of the posters on Jerry’s site – and possibly Jerry himself – seem to be confusing ‘free will’ with unpredictability, which seems implicit in the phrase ‘could have gone otherwise’.
But being unpredictable doesn’t mean being ‘free’: I’m bipolar – my behaviour can be highly eratic, especially when I’m off my meds – yet I’d argue that I’m more at the mercy biochemistry (i.e. ‘determination’) than most people *without* the condition. If you doubt your experience of ‘free will’ I suggest you consume great quantities of alcohol or other drugs and experience what a loss of control – or ‘will’ – is really like.
And being predictable isn’t the same as having no free will. If I choose a path of non-violence for instance, that limits the the other choices I might make, which means my actions will be predictable. I won’t, for instance, reach for a gun when presented with a difficult problem. But I chose the path of my own free will. If I do suddenly decide that I can respond ‘otherwise’ and start blowing people away then I haven’t got free will because I have just demonstrated that I was unable to choose the path of non-violence. That ‘choice’ would have been an illusion.
Ophelia, (@#18) philosophers may have been debating this matter for 2,300 years, but not so the theologians. I have a good friend who is a local farmer and a lay preacher. In a sermon he delivered one Sunday morning to the small congregation in his little bush church, he disposed of the whole issue of free will vs determinism inside 20 minutes. (Free will won.)
It’s not that you aren’t struggling enough. If you had been there you might have been witness to that historic resolution of the matter. In the words of the old hymn, ‘all my struggles will soon be over.’ (As I remember, that’s how it goes. ;-)
My question at #25 was serious, by the way: who or what is experiencing the ‘illusion’ of selfhood? A self which is itself illusory?
Most of the answers which spring to mind involve either Lacan or Eastern mysticism and are therefore bollocks.
Determinism has nothing to do with complexity. Complex systems are just as deterministic as simple ones, which is why you can’t solve free will by appealing to the emergent complexity of minds. I’ve come to the conclusion that free will is an epistemic condition. For us the future is open, and remains open even though we know we are determined to see it that way.
Shatterface wrote:
Who’s talking when you talk to yourself, and who’s listening? It isn’t that hard to see how a self is a kind of coalition. I look at it like this: I am not my thoughts, but they represent me as a unitary self (part of the time). That’s a kind of illusion, for sure. It makes sense to me to accept this unity even though I don’t always experience it.
When it gets to this kind of brain hurting level, I’m in the lazy camp (more accurately the shut down camp) and try not to think about it. The slot machine in a casino has to be programmed, every outcome is predetermined upon manufacturing, it only gives the appearance of being random because of our limited time playing and funding to go through the whole cycle of combinations. I’m ok with that in the same way I’m ok with being in metaphorical “flatland” and possibly missing out on a true picture of “reality”, it hurts to think about what might be there, but I’m never going to be able to really picture it in the same way a snake could detect the existence of the Mona Lisa, but never actually “see” it (I know the theorised existence of additional dimensions is a different debate).
I am interested in whether the “free will” behind the guy who stole my bicycle is truly as free as my “free will” choice to go all Charles Bronson if I get my hands on them…
Pinning colours to the mast though (did I mix a metaphor there?); I’m in Jerry’s camp. The argument against the automaton seems to be more an issue of just not wanting to believe that everything we think, feel, emote, etc is little more than some basic (if not well understood) science, I just think it’s more a case of the slot machine the scale and complexity gives the impression of freedom rather than it actually being truly free.
But “free” is implicit in the word “choice” so I don’t see why my shorthand version is not even on the right track.
Yes.
More precisely, when we are talking on this low level about consciousness, talking about a “what” that is “experiencing” is sort of putting the cart before the horse.
Ophelia: “But ‘free’ is implicit in the word “choice” so I don’t see why my shorthand version is not even on the right track.”
If you build contra-causal freedom into the very meaning of choice, then of course we don’t make choices, but what’s the justification for that? You might say that’s what most people mean by choice, but whether they do or not is an empirical question being researched by experimental philosophers. Whatever the case, we need a word for the process that deterministic biological systems like ourselves go through when faced with alternatives, and a natural candidate is “choose” or “deliberate” or “ponder” or “cogitate” or whatever. That process adds value since the system doesn’t know in advance what the best alternative is, but figures it out (fallibly, of course) *because* of the process. Choosing is just as real and causally effective as anything else in nature, so we needn’t put choice in scarequotes. And we’re just as real in our agentic powers as what made us who and what we are. All told, determinism (or better: lack of contra-causal free will, since determinism might be false) doesn’t mean we have to behave “as if” we’re choosing or acting or making a difference, we really *are*, as much if not more than anything else we know of. Here’s Gary Dresher from his amazing book Good and Real:
“Thus choice…is a mechanical process compatible with determinism: choice is a process of examining assertions about what would be the case if this or that action were taken, and then selecting an action according to a preference about what would be the case. The objection The agent didn’t really make a choice, because the outcome was already predetermined is as much a non sequitur as the objection The motor didn’t really exert force, because the outcome was already predetermined…Both choice making and motor spinning are particular kinds of mechanical processes. In neither case does the predetermination of the outcome imply that the process didn’t really take place.” (p. 192, original italics) [reviewed at http://www.naturalism.org/reviews.htm#Drescher]
So there’s no illusion about choosing or being a real, honest to goodness agent, even though you’re likely fully caused, http://www.naturalism.org/demoralization.htm.
Thanks Tom. That makes sense to me…but I always suspect I’m too easily satisfied on this subject!
I always liked the way Justin B Rye put it: “Consciousness is knowing what you thought last; free-will is not knowing what you’ll think next.”
[…] in the camp that believes that free will is an illusion, albeit an exceedingly strong one. I think Ophelia pretty much sums it up for me: This subject doesn’t fret me the way it does some people, and I suspect that’s because I’m […]