I’m getting tired of writing about free will, as what I’m really interested in is determinism of the physics sort, and, as far as we know, determinism is true except in the realm of quantum mechanics—where it may still be true, but probably not. So let me lump quantum mechanics and other physical laws together as “determinism,” recognizing that predictability may be nil on the quantum level. If you wish, call determinism “naturalism” instead. So we can say that “naturalism”, physical law, is true.
Further, as we know, admitting some uncertainty on the particle level does not mean that, even if our behavior is governed by the laws of physics, we could have chosen to do something other than what we did. For physical uncertainties have to do with particle movement, not with the amorphous “will”—the supposed ability of our mind to force our bodies to do different things—that’s essential to most people’s idea of free will.
Anthony Cashmore defines free will “as a belief that there is a component to biological behavior that is something more than the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature”. A simpler but roughly equivalent definition is this one: “If you could replay the tape of life, and go back to a moment of decision at which everything—every molecule—was in exactly the same position, you have free will if you could have decided differently—and that decision was up to you.”
If you pressed most people, you’d find that they agree with these definitions, though the second one is clearer to the layperson. These forms of “libertarian” free will are accepted by many, including of course, those religionists who believe that we are able to freely decide whether or not to accept Jesus or Mohamed as the correct prophet, and if you make the wrong choice, you’ll fry. Only a loony Christian would argue that God would still make you fry if a quantum movement in your neurons made you reject Jesus. No, your “decisions” have to be under your control.
At any rate, physics—naturalism—rules out this type of free will.
I’m pretty sure science writer Philip Ball would agree that the laws of physics are true. But he also argues, in a recent op-ed piece in PhysicsWorld (click on screenshot), that free will has nothing to do with physics. I was going to discuss his piece in one post, but it would be too long, and I hear that goldeneye ducks are disporting themselves in a pond over near Lake Michigan, and I must go see them. I’ll continue this analysis in a final post tomorrow.
Now Ball doesn’t really define “free will”, he says that it is “not a putative physical phenomenon on which microphysics can pronounce—it is a psychological and neurological phenomenon.”
There are two issues in that sentence. First, is free will a physical phenomenon or not? Yes, of course it is, in the sense that all human behaviors are physical phenomena that come from our evolved sensory system and neuronal wiring interacting with our environments, and all of this must ultimately be consistent with the laws of physics.
As far as “pronounce” goes, well, no, we can’t predict with complete accuracy what someone will do, for we lack that depth of knowledge. But we’re getting closer to the “pronouncement” part, as we can often predict with better than even accuracy, via physical interventions or brain monitoring, what someone will do or “choose”. And we can also affect one’s sense of volition by interventions (Ouija boards are a familiar example.)
But to say that psychological and neurological phenomena are different from physical phenomena is nonsense. The phenomena are viewed and analyzed in different ways and on different levels, of course. As Ball argues, we don’t use the laws of physics to help understand or predict human behavior—yet. But that doesn’t mean that determinism doesn’t operate, and that somehow one could have behaved, through one’s own “will”, otherwise than one did. If you could, then our will would truly be “free” of physical constraints.
Ball seems to think that although we can’t use physics to predict our behavior, determinism and “naturalism” are therefore irrelevant to our lives. But they aren’t, for, as many of us agree, including Sam Harris, Anthony Cashmore (read his paper), and many others, accepting determinism can have profound effects on how one sees and wants to structure society. I know many here will argue against that, but surveys of the public show that a). they don’t accept determinism, with most accepting libertarian free will, and b). they realize that accepting determinism affects one’s view of morality and responsibility. (Sadly, they usually think that in a deterministic world there can be neither morality nor responsibility; and they’re wrong.) But I’ll talk about that tomorrow.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Click on the screenshot below. I’ll just reproduce a few of Ball’s assertions (indented) and comment on them (my words flush left).
To start, I have to agree with Brian Greene, whose take on free will, which I see as correct, is denigrated by Ball:
In his new book Until the End of Time, the US theoretical physicist Brian Greene says that our choices only seem free because “we do not witness nature’s laws acting in their most fundamental guise; our senses do not reveal the operation of nature’s laws in the world of particles”. In his view, we might feel that we could have done otherwise in a particular situation, but, short of some unknown psychic force that can intervene in particle motions, physics says otherwise.
Greene, like many others who take this view, is upbeat about it: free will is a perfectly valid fiction when we’re telling the “higher-level story” of human behaviour. You can’t change anything that will happen, but you should merrily go on thinking and doing “as if” you can with all the attendant moral implications. Maybe this picture works for you; maybe it doesn’t. But in this view, you have no say about that either.
But is free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.
Metaphysical? It’s metaphysical to say that underlying our behavior are unalterable laws of physics? (Screw “cause and effect” for the moment, as they nebulous, philosophical, and irrelevant to determinism.) If you are a determinist, then there’s no way you can accept libertarian free will. My goal is not to engage in semantic arguments about what free will can be in a deterministic workd, but to ask a scientific question: is there anything we know about science that tells us that we can “will” ourselves to behave differently from how we did? The answer is no. We know of nothing about physics that would lead to that conclusion.
Ball then proceeds to construct what I see as a strawman:
If the claim that we never truly make choices is correct, then psychology, sociology and all studies of human behaviour are verging on pseudoscience. Efforts to understand our conduct would be null and void because the real reasons lie in the Big Bang. Neuropsychology would be nothing more than the enumeration of correlations: this action tends to happen at the same time as this pattern of brain activity, but there is no causal relation. Game theory is meaningless as no player is choosing their action because of particular rules, preferences or circumstances of the game. These “sciences” would be no better than studies of the paranormal: wild-goose chases after illusory phenomena. History becomes merely a matter of inventing irrelevant stories about why certain events happened.
Perhaps that is the bitter truth. Why should we sacrifice physics just to save the face of other disciplines? But let’s consider the alternatives. Understanding decisions and behaviour through psychology allows us to form hypotheses and test them empirically. Some of these look as though they’re right: we can reliably predict what might make people change their behaviour, say. If, however, physics demolishes free will, this is just a peculiar coincidence. Forget all the “as if” gloss: reducing all behaviour to deterministic physics unfolding from the Big Bang offers us no genuine behavioural science at all, as it denies choice and puts nothing in its place that can help us understand and anticipate what we see in the world.
. . . It is not because of the sheer overwhelming complexity of the calculations that we don’t attempt to use quantum chromodynamics to analyse the works of Dickens. It is because this would apply a theory beyond its applicable domain, so the attempt would fail. Greene presents the matter as a hierarchy of “nested stories”, each level supplying the underlying explanation of the next. But that’s the wrong image. To regard every form of human enquiry, from evolutionary theory to literary criticism, as a kind of renormalized physics is as hubristic as it is absurd.
This is a strawman because none of us deny that there can be behavioral science, and that one can study many aspects of human biology, including history, using the empirical tools of science: observation, testing, falsification, and a search for regularities. It’s also a strawman because the issue is one of physics underlying human behavior, whether or not we can use it to predict that behavior.
Although the “laws” of human behavior, whether collective or instantiated in an individual, may not be obeyed as strictly as the laws of physics, all of us determinists admit that it is fruitful to look for such regularities on the macro level—at the same time we admit that they must comport with and ultimately derive from the laws of physics.
But behavioral science isn’t necessarily “pseudoscience”. Regularities can be tested, confirmed, or refuted—as Ball admits. For example, I would predict that if a madman approaches a playground with a gun, a parent would first rush to save their own child rather than somebody else’s. That’s derived from kin selection theory. Or you can predict that if someone accumulates more desirable things in a lab experiment, like donuts, the value of an additional donut—its marginal utility—will diminish. That’s economics, but comes from selfish human behavior. And we can predict that if we show someone that their wife is having sex with another man, that person will get angry and jealous. That is NOT a “peculiar coincidence”, but also derives from evolution, as does much of human behavior that we see in our striving for repute, power, wealth, and status.
And history is surely not a “matter of inventing stories” about why certain events happened. True, we often don’t know for sure, as we can’t easily determine historical causation, but I’m sure historians wouldn’t see themselves as “making up stories”. If, for example, you think famous person A did X because he knew that Y was true, and you find out that that person A didn’t really know that Y was true but thought that Z was true instead, you’ve falsified a historical argument. Historical records exist to check assertions of fact. That’s why we know that the “Bethlehem census” of the Bible is wrong, and why the claim that the Holocaust was just prisoners dying of disease and not deliberate extermination is equally wrong.
To say that any behavioral regularities we see are mere “peculiar coincidences” is a claim that evolution itself has nothing to do with physics. For it’s evolution that’s at the base of so much of behaviorial science. And evolution results from the differential replication of different genes, which become different via mutations, which are of course physical phenomena.
It’s “not even wrong” to say that determinists who reject the idea that our “will” can interact with our bodies are at the same time claiming that history, game theory, economics, and other forms of “social science” are all pseudosciences. If you know what a pseudoscience really is: a belief system that rejects testing and falsification by the methods of “real science” and is buttressed by confirmation bias, then you wouldn’t make the statements that Ball does. He’s arguing against a view that nobody holds.
And now I must go see my goldeneye ducks. More tomorrow. Read Ball’s article.
h/t: David
Determinism is true in QM if you accept that there exists a single wave function for the entire universe. The mistake is to think that one can decouple the observer from the observation and the system. One cannot if one accepts QM as the ultimate description. Anything an observer does is part of the wave function and, so, cannot be “external.” Integrate the time dependent Schroedinger equation (TDSE) — if one could — from the initial conditions of the universe and everything is determined, including the outcome of “observations.” The “observer” is, by definition, external to the system, but what is external to the universe? The dilemma is whether the TDSE is an accurate description or not. The fact that QM cannot provide an explanation of gravity implies that it is incomplete and so the jury is out (and may never be in).
But that is – so far untestable – philosophical elaborations adding or modifying axioms to the working “shut-up-and-calculate” Copenhagen machine in order to get “interpretations”.
It doesn’t seem very useful to handle the question of magic “free will” in any case. At best it would be philosophy waring other philosophy, but the physics is that there is no magic (we are biochemical machines).
Modern quantum physics describes (explains) gravity fine, it looks like a tensorial quantum particle field on all energy levels that applies on the cosmological scale. (From inflation to standard particles, black hole innards excepted – but there are low energy scale solutions such as GEODEs.)
Since there are more than 3 links, I will split the comment into 2 parts. First on the general quantum field and cosmology physics, where renormalization and an energy scale < 10^-5 times lower than Planck energy density is at play. Then the low energy quantum gravity theory we all know and love.
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization ]
—
[ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/10/22/what-came-first-inflation-or-the-big-bang/?sh=5d37fe5d4153 ]
As you know, I discourage comments longer than about 600 words, and splitting them up is not a great way to get around that restriction!
? I stated clearly why I split this question – as I usually do not – it was because many links swallow it. “Since there are more than 3 links, I will split the comment into 2 parts.”
Now, if there is a 600 word limit, I did not consciously know about it at the time of posting. I can post facto verify that it is in Da Roolz, which I have read through at one time: “If your comment is longer than, say, 600 words, it is too long.” And if that is implemented in the editor it could explain why my 2 part comment was swallowed into the approval queue, and I had to cut it into 4 parts thinking the number of links was the problem.
It would have been easy for me, if I was conscious about the rule – an irony considering the topic of how our consciousness appear – to cut out large parts of it since it was intended for clarification rather than widening the analysis. My apologies!
FWIW I like reading over Larsson’s occasional long-form comments.
I would argue it can raise the bar for comments, and can make connect unexpected connections when composed well, as TL’s are – even though much can be above my head.
But that Hartle–Hawking state is – so far untestable – among philosophical elaborations adding or modifying axioms to the working “shut-up-and-calculate” Copenhagen machine in order to get “interpretations”. We know that the wavefunction encapsulates all the knowledge of the system – no hidden variables – and we know the Copenhagen machine produces both non-relativistic quantum mechanics and modern relativistic quantum field theory. It is as if quantum physics itself says “this is all there is”.
It doesn’t seem very useful to handle the question of magic “free will” in any case. At best it would be philosophy waring other philosophy, but the physics is that there is no magic (we are biochemical machines).
Modern quantum physics describes (explains) gravity fine, it looks like a tensorial quantum particle field on all energy levels that applies on the cosmological scale. (From inflation to standard particles, black hole innards excepted – but there are low energy scale solutions such as GEODEs.)
Since there are several links I have to split the rest of the comment accordingly.
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization ]
[2/4]
—
[ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/10/22/what-came-first-inflation-or-the-big-bang/?sh=5d37fe5d4153 ]
[3/4]
[4/4]
[ http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Quantum_gravity_as_a_low_energy_effective_field_theory ]
I’ll add that this may lead up to Wilszek’s Core Theory of composing the quantum fields with Feynman path integrals to a low energy (perturbative) “theory of everything”. It plays nicely with cosmology since gravity is partitioned into a relativistic Lorentz metric of cosmologically flat space as well as local additive gravitational effects of the rest of Distler’s Lagrangian described in [3/4].
There isn’t any conceptual problem, at least as long as black holes refuse to give up their secrets as we have solutions for them that avoid non-perturbative physics (and even exotic additions such as GEODEs). Of course it can be a house of cards, but it looks like the current best bet in that game – no additive physics.
No wait, don’t screw cause and effect for a moment. Most people, scientists included, deeply believe that physical laws always correspond to cause-and-effect. And this is at the core of why most people believe that determinism blocks free will. The Sarkissian et. al. study of people’s beliefs, which you often cite, specifically asks subjects about a scenario described by cause and effect.
There’s a grammatical ambiguity about the scope of “unavoidable”. Cashmore presumably means that there’s an unavoidable connection between the (presumably complete, down to sub-atomic levels) genetic and environmental facts, and your behavior. But that doesn’t make the behavior unavoidable, full stop. It would only do so if the sub-atomic details of your past were independent of what you do now. But they’re not. Your intuition will tell you they are, but that’s a cognitive illusion, brought on by overgeneralizing cause-and-effect to realms where they don’t apply.
The “rewind” definition of free will is flawed for a less subtle reason – it only makes sense on a dualist view of what counts as “me”. If what I am is a physical system, why would I want what I do in a potential rewind to be independent of that physical system – i.e. independent of me? That would basically amount to wishing for demonic possession. Demonic possession does not fit my idea of free will.
Yes, it’s always struck me as a bit odd the way some people, when thinking directly about free will/agency/responsibility, would want to make any part of themselves non physical or indeterministic.
Determinism would say your behavior is determined by the confluence of your internal state and the input from the external world. Thus you adapt to new information in some fashion. In fact, only under determinism would this be feasible. The alternative is that new information either does not change you, or that it changes you randomly. Which of the three alternatives makes more sense?
When tired of discussing ‘free will,’ perhaps a discussion of “will” would become interesting.
Under the stipulation of no dualism or magic, what is the phenomena of choosing, volition, and in general jump-starting the focus of attention and reason in homo sapiens?
In such discussion, since dualism is out, I would be of mind to exclude the trope “could not do otherwise” and instead discuss the essence of observed volition in human thought and behavior.
Any takers?
I agree with your idea. If you could get the “no free will” crowd to define volition precisely, the whole issue might evaporate.
I don’t think most of the “no free will” crowd believe in volition so they certainly don’t have to define it. Dennett attempts to define it but it comes off as a weird way to just whistle past the graveyard.
My view is that our belief in free will is caused by the fact that we experience our choices and thoughts. The phenomena that needs to be explained then is the raw ability to experience things.
@ppnl
Again, the distraction of invoking “free.” It seems impossible to discuss the initiation of human thought and action (will) without being sucked into the vortex of “free.”
ppnl, you say we “experience our choices and thoughts.” Yes, we notice (and can introspect on) our choices and thoughts. We choose to notice them, a proactive decision and action.
We also initiate them, by volitional focusing of cognition. This is will. The implications, fascination with, and valuation of will/volition is vastly important. I say the advocates of both dualism and determinism are both whistling past the graveyard.
I agree that it feels like we initiate them. But how can you know that that is not an illusion? With no known physical way to ground this “initiation” as a physical process we have to give strong weight to this possibility. We don’t even know what to look for.
But then we have no known way to ground “experience” as a physical process either. And the fact that we experience the world seems hard to deny. You can’t for example call it an illusion. But some try.
I agree that both sides are refusing to examine the inherent problems that they face.
I wrote about this on my blog six months ago, I can’t help there is semantic arm wrestling going on here. Often it is argued that atoms and physical objects don’t have wills etc. Can’t disagree with that. After scouring on line thesauri for half an hour there was a decent list of words that might substitute for will, giving different nuances in different situations. But none seemed to fit the inanimate.
Well at work, I was thinking about how copper and sulphide ions have an affinity for each other, and realized that “affinity” was potentially a synonym for “will” which my search had not thrown up.
So I ask, are our affinities free?
And feel free to click on “rom” … 😉
a) I am asking for a discussion of volition that does not include the concept “free”;
b) Referring to human thought and action.
My summary of why I think free will rules over determinism, with an example of real life. It applies at least for some.
The human brain evolved over eons to command body energy to be saved, to keep our bodies at rest, whenever possible. So that we would be ready and fully charged for the next energy-intensive hunting-gathering session.
Now.
Keep the brain wiring as it evolved, and radically change our environment, from food scarcity to overabundance of food (for those lucky enough to have plenty of money for food, but this is not the point here).
Suddenly, we don’t have to frantically move around anymore, to search for food. Gone is our primary reason for being physically active. For good.
Now. Again.
No need for physical activity, and a brain wired to save energy is a deterministic recipe for disaster. Within our current environment, we are programmed to kill ourselves, with the ready help of sedentarism, obesity, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer, cancer.
Roughly half of the adult population of the USA is obese, having fallen prey to this deterministic trap.
Is it possible to escape this deterministic fate, related to body health?
Yes it is.
With iron-strong free will.
I do reasonably fast 4K runs (<23 min, 68 yo), five times per week.
But it is undeniable: some section of my brain orders me, instructs me NOT to run, to save energy. Doing its job, as designed, perfectly.
But other sections advise me that these commands are deterministically correct, but do not lead to an acceptable outcome.
So there I go to the park, fighting my deterministic operating instructions, and resorting to my free will powers to keep running, to stay alive and healthy.
Am I oversimplifying the free will versus determinism controversy, with this example?
I clearly 'feel' the two alternatives, fighting inside me. And I know which one to choose.
Sorry, but that you “feel” the two alternatives says nothing about whether you could have, at the moment one decision was made, made the other decision. We AlL recognize and “feel” the alternatives, but so what? The brain is making the decision for you, not some numinous “will” you have that interacts with your brain.
I don’t think you understand what libertarian free will really is.
“I’m getting tired of writing about free will,”
I hear that — it appears to me everyone commenting here has scoured every corner of a room they can with our primitive tools.
I just saw Sabine Hossenfelder’s latest – a birds-eye view of the latest conference on consciousness – I think that is where any understanding lies – and importantly, the proper placement of the notion of “free will” where it belongs : https://youtu.be/efVBUDnD_no
Free will as Anthony Cashmore defines it doesn’t exist. This is the ‘magical essence’ version of free will which is completely unscientific, unless someone can show experimentally that this essence really exists. And, if we did discover a new force in our universe, we would probably forget about free will as we’d be busy rewriting physics and the rest of the sciences.
Well, tell it to the majority of people who believe in libertarian free will. Those are the people I’m trying to reach. I think promulgating determinism will have more salubrious effects than trying to convince people, as the compatibilists do, that even though determinism be true (and then that’s the end of discussing determinism for them), what’s really important is that we define free will as something we already have.
Speaking personally, I had not thought about free will, I just thought I had it. But thirteen years ago, the moment I thought about it for one second, I knew I was sunk. I, maybe for three weeks, tried to fight a rear guard action in what I knew to be a loosing cause, before I became a free will skeptic. It for me was inevitable.
I still don’t think that many people actually believe in libertarian free will. They simply don’t understand the questions as those that pose them wish. Ask the man on the street who had coffee with breakfast if they could have chosen tea if they had wished, they’ll say “yes”. If you ask them if everything in their brain was exactly the same at the level of fundamental physics in the two “trials”, and they understand what is meant by “fundamental physics”, then they say “no”.
There are some compatibilists – on WEIT, at least me and Vaal – who think the science of deterministic physics is worth discussing. For me, it’s the central issue. It’s only by looking at actual physics that the free will “problem” is revealed to be just as imaginary as its traditional libertarian “solution”.
Those are the typical mistakes made by supporters of libertarian free will. In fact:
1) determinism is not the same thing as predictability (that’s why Laplace was talking about a demon, duh)
2) the fact that reality can be described at levels different than physics does not imply that, when operating at those higher levels, we can imagine that the laws of physics have disappeared
I think of determinism and causation as the same thing. No mind. What about downward causation? Sean Carroll seems ambivalent about whether it exists, but it seems clearly to exist in any computing device. For example, in a deterministic digital computer, a high level algorithm determines how electrons flow through the device, etc. Of course, the high level program itself results from some complex upward causation process that would be hard to detail. But so what? Upward causation can create complex structures, like ourselves, which can direct downward causation. I think it a mistake to think of causation (or determinism) as some linear process. We are strange loops. Deterministic, but with complex loops that include downward causation which can encompass what we think of as free will, which is actually a coarse-graining interpretation. NOT, contra-causal free will I hasten to add.
I don’t think that Sean Carroll is ambivalent about this. For example, at https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/09/08/consciousness-and-downward-causation/ he clearly states: “There is no reason to think that anything like downward causation really happens in the world, at least not down to the level of particles and forces“
Yes, I think you are right. Carroll appears to identify downward causality with strong emergence, which is not reducible. I am not sure I agree with this identification, although I am reluctant to contradict Carroll. He does say he might wrong about it which is why I thought he might be ambivalent.
As you note in answer to Ugo, Carroll does identify downward causality with strong emergence. That is not standard, though. Roger Sperry, who popularized the phrase “downward control”, had weak emergence in mind.
Source
If the higher-level phenomena “do not disrupt or intervene in the casual relations”, how can they be said to be “exerting downward control”? That could only be true as a matter of speaking, not as an efficacious effect. Is Sperry denying physical causal closure?
I’m a bit confused about what you think “real control” is, Does a steering wheel not really control the direction of the car? If it does, is a particular atom in its left front tire somehow an exception?
“Does a steering wheel not really control the direction of the car? ”
Question begging.
The steering wheel just sits there.
A steering wheel is meaningless driving on ice.
I think you’re using the word “control” to mean something much stronger than what people usually understand it to mean. Control doesn’t need to be absolute to be interesting.
The word “control” is fine when used at the level of description that includes steering wheels. But “downward control” implies crossing the boundary of that level of description and reaching down to a completely different level of description, carrying causal effect down to that level. As Sean Carroll describes in the quote I mentioned before, such causal implication across levels is an improper use of the concept of cause. Another way of putting it is that the level of physics is, as far as we know, causally closed
I agree that physics is causally closed, but not that higher-level descriptions are not physical in the sense relevant to closure. But this is tricky and getting off topic, so I’ll say no more.
I don’t think that refusing to engage with the cause and effect argument because it’s ‘philosophic’ is fair here. Philip doesn’t deny that free will is constrained by physical laws. Instead, the level of organization at which free will works is so remote from fundamental particles and forces, that no meaningful causal link between these levels of organization can be established. After reading Organisms, Agency & Evolution, by DM Walsh, I tend to agree with this position.
As I tried to say, I don’t think it’s very profound to say that “no meaningful causal link between these levels of organization can be established. If Ball agrees that free will IS CONSTRAINED BY PHYSICAL LAWS, he’s admitted that there is a meaningful causal link between physics and free will That is, he’s a determinist, and I think that in itself is admitting my major premise. The rest, HOW they’re connected, is less important to me, but we’re learning more and more about that as we lean what sorts of interventions affect people’s sense of agency.
Same here. I believe this is also the position of Sean Carroll, Daniel Dennett, and many others. The kind of free will most people are familiar with, the one underlying social sciences and criminal justice, is at a different level of description, a different domain of discourse, than the one involving determinism and the laws of physics.
Yes but it seems a pretty useless domain. It does not answer the deep questions I want answered. I feel like I have free will. Fine. Why do I feel anything let alone free will?
You keep saying the same thing over and over again, and I ask you not to try to dominate this thread (read the posting rules on the sidebar).
He can‘t help it. 🙂
That is a deep question but our inability to answer it to your satisfaction doesn’t make it a useless domain. Besides, isn’t it the domain that contains all of our thinking on human behavior? Arguably not the impact on the world of physics but still consequential.
IMHO, the question as to why we feel anything is not so mysterious. We don’t yet know all the details of how the brain processes feelings but we’re working on it. I believe the explanatory burden is on those that seem to think it is magic involving yet-to-be-discovered fundamental forces and qualities of matter.
Here is how Sean Carroll addresses the concept of causation between different levels of description:
‘Part of the issue is, as often happens, an inconsistent use of a natural-language word, in this case “cause.” The kinds of dynamical, explain-this-occurrence causes that we’re talking about here are a different beast than inter-level implications (that one might be tempted to sloppily refer to as “causes”). Features of a lower level, like conservation of energy, can certainly imply or entail features of higher-level descriptions; and indeed the converse is also possible. But saying that such implications are “causes” is to mean something completely different than when we say “swinging my elbow caused the glass of wine to fall to the floor.”‘
It’s also worth noting what he says about causality at the smallest level: “Neither is really a cause preceding an effect. There’s just a pattern that particles follow.” I asked him about it in his Mindscape AMA, and his reply was “Causality just disappears here [at the fully-detailed level].”
Calvinist here (I come in peace!). Dr. Coyne, your criticisms of libertarian free will are obviously correct, and I admire your patience in meticulously picking apart the gobbledygook “arguments” put forth by otherwise smart people who should know better.
To me, it’s not even about the laws of physics (although your argument from physics is correct). In a choice between A and B, I will always choose according to my preferences (unless restricted by an outside force), and I have no control over what my preferences are. Therefore, I have no control over whether I choose A or B. It’s really that simple.
Anyway, obviously I have disagreements with you concerning the *implications* of a lack of libertarian freedom (I’m a compatibilist), but I appreciate your clarity on this issue.
Some 60 years ago, walking to and from my high school, I concluded that free will vs determinism would be decided in a similar way that light was decided to be both a wave and a particle. I’m still waiting for that conclusion. I’ll have to admit, at this time I’m on the side of free will being an illusion just as time is an illusion (I’m a fan of the physicist Carlo Rovelli who argues that it’s all about entropy, reality is just rocks rolling down the side of a mountain).
Ronsch,
“Illusion” necessarily entails an untruth. If your belief you could another comment here is only an “illusion”, that is a way to say: it’s not true that you could choose to post another comment.
So let me ask you:
Is it “true” to say you could choose to submit another post (e.g. in reply to mine)? Or is that an “illusion?”
And if it is “true,” how would you demonstrate that truth?
(By posting a reply to me, I presume?)
Just trying to get at the bottom of what you really think is “illusory” about your powers in the world…and if you identify a power that is truly impossible…how much that actually matters or even figures in to your day to day choice making. I suggest your normal method of thinking “what is it possible for me to do?” when making choices is virtually always based on what you are ACTUALLY capable of in the world.
The general philosophical discussion of the issue is called “The Causal Exclusion Problem“. An exhaustive discussion can be found, for example, at https://iep.utm.edu/causal-e/
Nicolas Gisin is a physicist who has written a series of papers on shortcomings in our ideas of determinism eg
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0748-5
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.06824
“I believe that the notion of a deterministic and timeless world does not arise from the huge empirical success of physics, but from considering Platonistic mathematics as the only language for physics.”
Personally, I am some kind of compatibilist, because “free will” seems best to describe complex goal oriented thought and action (at its best – so we might act and think under the influence of unconscious bias, but if this factor is pointed out, we can choose to attempt to free ourselves from it). As per Lequier (who influenced William James)
“The determinist is evidently not pushed into activity a tergo, as he would maintain, but rather initiates an argument to a purpose, and, in the very act, frees himself of the fetters he purports to prove are there. His activity is manifestly not purely mechanistic, but essentially axiological, i.e., it affirms a value; it strives toward a goal.”
This brings in the purported difference between teleonomy and teleology – I’ll say there is none.
Lequier also gives an argument that chimes with stuff like those “free will” theorems in quantum physics, which attempt to prove that the person running the experiment has to have some kind of free will, else horrible superdeterministic explanations for some types of results.
Things are as they are because they were as they were. (unoriginal)
Our host said ” …determinism is true except in the realm of quantum mechanics…” but the problem is that there are not two different unconnected realms. The apparently deterministic laws of classical physics are composed of the underlying quantum rules like a chair is composed of atoms. If quantum mechanics is not deterministic then ultimately the universe simply isn’t deterministic.
There are many phenomena that we can observe with our eyes that would not be possible in a classical universe. Violations of Bell’s inequality, superconductivity, photosynthesis, Quantum cryptology… the list is endless. A quantum computer would be a very special example because the answers it produces would be a weighted probability that comes directly from the quantum world.
Some theories of physics suggest that the classical laws of physics are themselves the result of a quantum event. When the universe was hot all the forces were unified. As the universe cooled the different forces crystalized out and the masses of particles were determined. But there seems to be many different ways this could have happened. For example an electron could have had twice the mass leading to very different chemistry. Our very deterministic laws of physics were themselves determined by nondeterministic quantum coin flips.
In principle free will could be one of these strange effects that bleed in from the quantum world. The problem is that there is absolutely no evidence of this. Worse, it is impossible to imagine what such evidence would look like. This is why the hard problem is the hard problem.
I’m sorry but determinism really isn’t an option short of some kind of ugly super-determinism theory. I otherwise agree with the criticism of Ball. He is just incoherent.
I think you misunderstand. Even if quantum rather than classical mechanics played a dominant role in our behavior, which I don’t think it does, THIS DOES NOT GIVE US FREE WILL in the sense I defined. As for your assertion that the classical laws of physics are the result of quantum events, I don’t think most physicists agree with you. Do note that both Greene and Sean Carroll are determinists in the sense I use.
Quantum mechanics does not give us libertarian free will. Period.
Quantum mechanics absolutely does play a dominant role in our behavior in exactly the same way that atoms play a dominant role in the properties of chairs. You want to divide the world into quantum and classical realms but that division is artificial. You cannot prove that a phenomena is impossible by proving that it is classically impossible. Otherwise you could simply prove that the computer you are using is impossible.
You like many well educated rational people have an affinity for determinism or at least naturalism. But naturalism does not require or even imply determinism. A quantum computer is inherently and exquisitely nondeterministic. It gets its vast power exactly because it is nondeterministic. You could say that it is naturalistic but for many that is a hard pill to swallow. Einstein for example could not accept randomness. He would probably have called quantum computers witchcraft. Even our understanding of naturalism has to change and adapt.
If there is an observable phenomena that we call “free will” then we may need quantum mechanics to explain it. The problem is we are aware of no such well defined observable phenomena. Even if it exists we could not see it because we have no idea what to look for. There is no experiment that you could do that even addresses the problem let alone answers it. The entire question is horribly and pointlessly premature.
I think we are mostly in agreement about free will although I am far more cautious about conclusions because I don’t think the question is well formed. We differ in our understanding of determinism and naturalism.
The fundamental problem for me is not free will but conscious experience itself. Even if we have no free will it is hard to deny that we experience the world. That fact seems to have no explanation.
I don’t think you grasp what I’m saying. Yes, classical mechanics is a special case of quantum mechanics, but admitting that does not mean that we can’t make accurate predictions, much less say that we have an amorphous will (you seem to realize the latter). If everything was that unpredictable and influenced by quantum unpredictability, we couldn’t fly rovers to Mars.
And no, given that some people explicitly have a view of free will that defies the laws of physics (libertarian free will, in which a nonphysical “will” interacts with matter), we can refute it. Nobody with any sense thinks that quantum mechanics give us libertarian free will–the only kind of free will in which I’m interested.
And others, including Matthew on this site, who wrote a whole book on the brain, would take issue with you that “consciousness” and “qualia” have “no explanation”. We don’t fully understand them, but to say that there is no possible explanation is a statement akin to religion.
I don’t think you grasp what I’m saying. Classical mechanics is not a special case of quantum mechanics anymore than a chair is a special case of an atom. Classical mechanics is a construct of the deeper theory that only approximates it at some scales. I should also point out that quantum mechanics is far far more than just adding randomness. It truly does add a kind of magic that challenges all of our epistemological and ontological priors. Anyone interested in philosophy really needs to study quantum mechanics. It is mind blowing. It is also a trap for those who can’t set aside their own philosophical agendas.
I agree that there is nothing here that validates some kind of amorphous will. But there is nothing that invalidates it either. The problem for free will is much simpler. The problem is that it is so poorly defined that the question isn’t even scientific. If there is a question to be answered at all we have not yet reached the point that we can answer it.
I do agree that simply and directly claiming that free will is supernatural is… problematic. I have previously agreed that your criticism of Ball was on point.
I have read many things attempting to explain “qualia” and they all entirely miss the point. They all fall afoul of Church/Turing and substance independence. Bring Mathew on.
I did not say that qualia have no possible explanation. We just don’t have the first clue what that explanation is. The problem is so hard that some deny that qualia is a scientifically useful concept at all. Much like the denial of free will. My only point is that examining the origin of qualia gets us much closer to the heart of the problem than examining free will.
But it is still an enigma.
Okay, this is the fourth time you have made this statement, and clearly haven’t read the philosophical literature about how to approach the “hard problem” of explaining consciousness. Since you have said the same thing over and over again, there is no need for you to say it again.
“At any rate, physics—naturalism—rules out this type of free will.”
I’d go further and say that thinking alone suffices to rule out libertarian free will. It’s an incoherent concept. God himself, if he existed, wouldn’t have free will.
It seems to come down to proving the point that physics is deterministic, which either means:
– the underlying quantum level is deterministic too;
– the underlying quantum level doesn’t affect physics.
Just assuming that physics is deterministic because there seems to be no evidence to the contrary seems to be weak point in the argument here. That is because there is reason to believe it may not be as the underlying quantum level may not be deterministic.
I view free-will as an emergent phenomenon, just like conscience, whereby the concept “emergence” is defined by the physicist Philip Anderson (matter can acquire unusual properties, Anderson called superconduction an emergent phenomenon).
I have always hated the over used “emergent phenomenon” trope. It is vastly lacking in explanatory power. Superconductivity is best seen as a phase change much like the transition of water to ice. There are a vast number of complex details but the basic idea is pretty simple. Calling it emergent adds nothing.
I can’t really see consciousness as an emergent phenomena anyway. Intelligence? Maybe. But I can see no necessary connection between intelligence and consciousness. For example the Alpha Go program can play Go far above the human level. I see no evidence that it experiences the game.
Emergence is a slippery concept. Perhaps some do lean on it more than they should. However, I do believe it is useful.
Commenter eric uses an interesting phrase: “atoms-to-decisions calculation”. Although we know that fundamental physics ultimately determines our decisions but it is not possible to calculate what decisions we will make in the future. When we discuss human behavior, it is not relevant or useful to do it in terms of the state of fundamental particles. It can be said that our behavior is emergent relative to the universe of particles and forces.
Another way to look at emergence is as levels of discourse. Physicists can talk about fundamental particles and forces without regard to human behavior and psychologists can talk about human behavior without regard to fundamental particles and forces, even though the human behavior is completely dependent on the low-level physics. Concepts in one domain are just not useful in the other domain.
This independence of domains is also why we can say that quantum mechanics does not have a direct effect on consciousness (in opposition to Penrose, Hameroff, and others). Obviously consciousness and all other brain activity consists of physical processes described by QM but not directly. There’s no QM-specific concept (entanglement, tunneling, etc.) that is directly responsible for our consciousness, IMHO.
“Emergence” is fundamental:
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization ]
ADDED: I just found that the page script is partly broken, at least in my browser [Chrome] on my machine [Windows 10]. If I comment twice in a row, the new comment appears at the bottom instead of as a “Reply”. I had to update in between to link the reply correctly.
If intelligence can emerge, why can’t consciousness? There doesn’t need to be one-one mapping – machine intelligence isn’t evolved but biological consciousness is.
[On a related context of evolved emergence, it seems biologists are making inroads to the phenomena of sleep. On the one hand, it may be related to intestine rather than brain function – what kills animals in sleep deprivation may be a massive failure of the intestinal integrity caused by buildup of reactive oxidative species [ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/06/study-reveals-guts-role-in-causing-death-by-sleep-deprivation/ ]. On the other hand, it has been tracked down to have likely roots in stem animals since they think they see something analogous in cnidarians with minimal nervous systems [ https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/41/eabb9415 ].
In any case I think it illustrates that emergence can be counterintuitive, inside and outside biology.]
I’m a determinist but I might go even a bit further than that: free will is likely a useful-but-fundamentally-wrong model (for some purposes). Like QM superseding NM, there are still times when it makes sense to use NM, because of it’s usefulness (and because it’s a lot simpler). Treating people as if they had free will is likely useful for a lot of economic and sociological models. And a lot simpler than trying to do any atoms-to-decisions calculation.
“… what I’m really interested in is determinism of the physics sort, and, as far as we know, determinism is true except in the realm of quantum mechanics—where it may still be true, but probably not.“
I’d also add – which I think everyone here knows, but it is worth saying – chaotic systems are deterministic.
I read about that from I think a David Deutsch book and one of Marcus DuSautoy’s recent books.
This sounds overly general to me: One would be able to apply the same argument to chemistry, or biology, for instance. But clearly the effort is not futile.
There are two ways of understanding this: profound but false, or trivially true.
QCD is a theory of the constituents of nuclei. Given that most of human behavior is based on the motion of electrons, of course analyzing Dickens with QCD is impossible!
More profoundly, perhaps Ball intends for this example to generalize: That given the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics, or at the very least, the quantum state of your brain and everything it interacts with, you cannot actually predict the choice one is going to make because it is beyond the regime of applicability of quantum mechanics. Profound, but almost certainly false. So claiming that would be to claim, more generally, that theories do not reduce to other theories in the appropriate limits, akin to saying that relativity, at speeds much less than that of light, does not give you Newtonian mechanics.
I think you are being unfair to Ball here. By “beyond the regime of applicability of quantum mechanics” (assuming you were quoting him accurately), he surely means that knowing quantum mechanical facts doesn’t help you answer questions about human behavior. A few (Penrose, Hameroff, etc) do believe that QM informs consciousness but most do not. AFAIK, Ball doesn’t say that human behavior is not ultimately implemented via processes that QM describes, which is perhaps what you were claiming here.
You could check the article if you’re worried about me misquoting him.
No, Ball does not outright say that human behavior is not implemented via QM, but that is why I included the paragraph before that. Again, I don’t know which interpretation he had in mind, but those are the only two that seem reasonable to me. Either trivially true, or trivially false.
He explicitly said that “It is not because of the sheer overwhelming complexity of the calculations” that we don’t apply QCD to Dickens. If he does not intend for the sentence to generalize, what’s the point of writing it? If he does, then it’s simply false.
“This sounds overly general to me: One would be able to apply the same argument to chemistry, or biology,”
That was also my very first thought. With these arguments, Ball could declare practically every field of science, with the exception of physics, to be meaningless.
Setting aside the fact that we have evolved the propensity to interpret the bodily behavior we call “decisions” as a product of conscious rather than unconscious processes, it seems to me that “free will” prophets are taking advantage of that propensity to push a magical religious “soul” into a perceived gap of nature their theological and/or philosophical superstition attempts to wedge open. Ball is just advocating it more openly.
I find it problematic as always and as intended to discuss physics from a philosophical terminology. It is a fact that physics cluster processes into deterministic “clockwork universe/Laplace demon” and random “stochastic”. But both clusters are thus propagating under physics laws, so when philosophers describe the former as physics determinism it is a match but when they call the latter “indeterminism” there is no match.
Specifically, and I have noted this before, quantum physics propagate states deterministically but during interactions the wavefunction collapses stochastically and this is perfectly analogous to how evolution has both deterministic selection and stochastic variation mechanisms and still obey physical laws. Nevertheless modern quantum field theory is relativistic and processes interacts through localized particles (enforced by relativity) in the light cone set by the universal speed limit, there is no generic philosophic “cause and effect” or “indeterminism” but interaction causality.
Recently I have found it simpler to point to LHC completing the standard particle model and hence excluding significant magic “soul” interactions. We are biochemical machines, and both evolutionary “conscious decisions” and magic “free will” are convenient respectively inconvenient illusions.
Objection, Your Honour …
I’m not a machine.
And I’m definitely not a machine whose behaviour is unpredictable because of a few quantum jumps – pardon me, transitions between quantum states – during “its” lifetime.
But I do not plead guilty.
It wasn’t my free will which made me enter the holy grounds of Congress.
Physics says that we are biomolecular machines – which would agree with evolution and chemistry – since the 2012-2017 period when the Large Hadron Collider sufficiently (at 60 % coverage of interactions) verified the standard particle model.
The quantum vacuum has, when observed through the relativistic particle physics that it makes explicit in Feynman diagrams, the property of significant completeness. If the standard model can be characterized by low energy perturbation methods and is hence predictive to some 10^-13 parts for some interactions, it has verified that all types of significant interactions – including physical exotic but also magic, “non-physical” – are known. And that the rest too rare to matter.
Physicist Brian Cox made a point in his “The Infinite Monkey Cage” 2017 to say that this made away with ghosts, but I would say that it makes away with magical “souls” and “free will” as well.
As I said earlier, I think the notion that stochasticity is somehow relevant for making a claim of magic “free will” is a philosophical device at best. If the question is how we can evolve a propensity to interpret the bodily behavior we call “decisions” as a product of conscious rather than unconscious processes, it is allowed by physics. I responded to David Farrelly with links to how renormalization theory makes it impossible to model different energy scales without doing experiments even if we know the particle physics at a fundamental level (such as for the standard particles now). The problem is explicitly not of stochasticity but of renormalization “emergence”.
Very articulate, intelligent discussion! We all know that biology/genes does make some difference. it can influence whether you’re predisposed to become an alcoholic, to be compulsive, or to get certain kinds of cancers or be overweight, however, there are many factors that influence what happens to us, and the choices that we make are paramount among those things. It’s not always possible to predict exactly what people do, because humans are very complex. In many instances, psychology is a better predictor of how people will choose than biology/genetics.
“Is there anything we know about science that tells us that we can “will” ourselves to behave differently from how we did?”
Ok. Now, let me rephrase:
Is there anything we know about science that tells us that we can “will” ourselves to behave differently from how we will?
Answer that and I predict taht I will be very happy. But will discover if and when.