The idea that we have libertarian free will, in the real sense of “being able to make any one of several decisions at a given time”, has made a comeback in the pages of The New York Review of Books, a magazine that never quite recovered from the death of editor Robert B. Silvers in 2017. It was once the magazine to read for thoughtful analyses of books, but it’s gone downhill. I had a subscription on and off, but quit a while back.
But I digress. In the latest issue, the respected author and historian of science James Gleick reviews a recent book on free will, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell. I haven’t read the book, so all I can do is reprise what Gleick says about the book, which is that Mitchell’s case for libertarian free will is convincing, and that determinism—or “naturalism” as I prefer to call it, since I take into account the inherent unpredictability of quantum mechanics—is not all there is to our actions and behaviors. Mitchell, says Gleick, maintains that natural selection has instilled humans with the ability to weigh alternatives and make decisions, not only apparent decisions but real ones, decision that involve us weighing alternatives, thinking about the future, and then making make one of several possible decisions even at the moment you decide. In other words, determinism doesn’t rule all of our behaviors and decisions. Apparently, this is libertarian free will: facing a restaurant menu, with everything else in the universe the same (a classic scenario), you could have ordered something other than what you did.
The problem is that Gleick never defines “free will” in this way; he only implies that Mitchell accepts libertarian free will, and then tries to show how evolution gives it to us.
But I’m getting ahead of myself: click on the screenshot below to read:
Gleick argues that life without libertarian free will is pointless. I maintain that this is incorrect—that the point of our life is the gratification we get from our actions, and we don’t need libertarian free will for that. All we need is a sense of satisfaction. You don’t even really need that if you define “point” post facto as “doing what you felt you had to do.” But, say compatibilists like Dennett—and compatibilists are all physical determinists—we need to have some conception of free will, even if what we do is determined, for society would fall apart without it. And Gleick agrees:
Legal institutions, theories of government, and economic systems are built on the assumption that humans make choices and strive to influence the choices of others. Without some kind of free will, politics has no point. Nor does sports. Or anything, really.
. . . If the denial of free will has been an error, it has not been a harmless one. Its message is grim and etiolating. It drains purpose and dignity from our sense of ourselves and, for that matter, of our fellow living creatures. It releases us from responsibility and treats us as passive objects, like billiard balls or falling leaves.
One senses from these statements that the choices we make are not merely apparent choices, conditioned by the laws of physics, but real ones: choices that we didn’t have to make. In other words, we have libertarian, I-could-have-done-otherwise free will.
That construal of free will is buttressed by Gleick’s characterization of Mitchell’s argument as showing that we have purpose, and that purpose (again, not explicitly defined), is the proof that we have libertarian free will:
Agency distinguishes even bacteria from the otherwise lifeless universe. Living things are “imbued with purpose and able to act on their own terms,” Mitchell says. He makes a powerful case that the history of life, in all its complex grandeur, cannot be appreciated until we understand the evolution of agency—and then, in creatures of sufficient complexity, the evolution of conscious free will.
And this purpose is apparently an emergent property from natural selection, not only not predictable from physics, but somehow incompatible with physical law, which, are, says Gleick, are only descriptions of the universe and not really “laws” that the substance of our bodies and brains must obey:
This is why so many modern physicists continue to embrace philosophical determinism. But their theories are deterministic because they’ve written them that way. We say that the laws govern the universe, but that is a metaphor; it is better to say that the laws describe what is known. In a way the mistake begins with the word “laws.” The laws aren’t instructions for nature to follow. Saying that the world is “controlled” by physics—that everything is “dictated” by mathematics—is putting the cart before the horse. Nature comes first. The laws are a model, a simplified description of a complex reality. No matter how successful, they necessarily remain incomplete and provisional.
The incompleteness apparently creates the gap where you can find libertarian free will.
And the paragraphs below, describing the results of natural selection, seem to constitute the heart of the book’s thesis:
Biological entities develop across time, and as they do, they store and exchange information. “That extension through time generates a new kind of causation that is not seen in most physical processes,” Mitchell says, “one based on a record of history in which information about past events continues to play a causal role in the present.” Within even a single-celled organism, proteins in the cell wall respond chemically to changing conditions outside and thus act as sensors. Inside, proteins are activated and deactivated by biochemical reactions, and the organism effectively reconfigures its own metabolic pathways in order to survive. Those pathways can act as logic gates in a computer: if the conditions are X, then do A.
“They’re not thinking about it, of course,” Mitchell says, “but that is the effect, and it’s built right into the design of the molecule.” As organisms grow more complex, so do these logical pathways. They create feedback mechanisms, positive and negative. They make molecular clocks, responding to and then mimicking the solar cycle. Increasingly, they embody knowledge of the world in which they live.
The tiniest microorganisms also developed means of propulsion by changing their shape or deploying cilia and flagella, tiny vibrating hairs. The ability to move, combined with the ability to sense surroundings, created new possibilities—seeking food, escaping danger—continually amplified by natural selection. We begin to see organisms extracting information from their environment, acting on it in the present, and reproducing it for the future. “Information thus has causal power in the system,” Mitchell says, “and gives the agent causal power in the world.”
We can begin to talk about purpose. First of all, organisms struggle to maintain themselves. They strive to persist and then to reproduce. Natural selection ensures it. “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does,” Mitchell says.
My response to this is basically “so what?” Natural selection is simply the differential reproduction of gene forms, which, when encased in an organism, can leave more copies when they give that organism the ability to survive and reproduce. Organisms thus evolve to act as if they have purpose. But that “purpose” is simply anthropormorphizing the results of the mindless process of natural selection. So, when we decide to go hunting for food, or get pleasure from being with a mate, we can say that those embody our “purpose”. But there’s nothing in all this that implies that, at a given moment, we can make any number of decisions independent of physics.
But, Gleick implies, there is a way we can do this: by leveraging the “random fluctiations” in our brains:
It’s still just chemistry and electricity, but the state of the brain at one instant does not lead inexorably to the next. Mitchell emphasizes the inherent noisiness of the system: more or less random fluctuations that occur in an assemblage of “wet, jiggly, incomprehensibly tiny components that jitter about constantly.” He believes that the noise is not just inevitable; it’s useful. It has adaptive value for organisms that live, after all, in an environment subject to change and surprise. “The challenges facing organisms vary from moment to moment,” he notes, “and the nervous system has to cope with that volatility: that is precisely what it is specialized to do.” But merely adding randomness to a deterministic machine still doesn’t produce anything we would call free will.
That’s correct, though what Mitchell or Gleick mean as “random fluctuations in the brain” is undefined. Robert Sapolsky argues, in his recent book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, that there are no “random” fluctuations in the brain: neurons interact with each other according to the principles of physics. To have true free libertarian will, those neurons would have to fire in different ways under exactly the same conditions in the brain. Sapolsky spends a lot of time convincingly showing that this cannot be the case. Ergo, no brain fluctuations.
But, as Gleick says above, randomness alone doesn’t give us agency. Still, under Mitchell’s model it’s essential for free will. And this is the big problem, for how does one’s “will” harness that randomness to come up with decisions that are independent of physical processes? Gleick:
Indeed, some degree of randomness is essential to Mitchell’s neural model for agency and decision-making. He lays out a two-stage model: the gathering of options—possible actions for the organism to take—followed by a process of selection. For us, organisms capable of conscious free will, the options arise as patterns of activity in the cerebral cortex, always subject to fluctuations and noise. We may experience this as “ideas just ‘occurring to you.’” Then the brain evaluates these options, with “up-voting” and “down-voting,” by means of “interlocking circuit loops among the cortex, basal ganglia, thalamus, and midbrain.” In that way, selection employs goals and beliefs built from experience, stored in memory, and still more or less malleable.
Ergo we have to have the brain’s “randomness”, which is neither defined nor, at least according to Sapolsky, doesn’t exist. Then one harnesses that randomness to come up with your decisions:
Mitchell proposes what he calls a “more naturalized concept of the self.” We are not just our consciousness; we’re the organism, taken as a whole. We do things for reasons based on our histories, and “those reasons inhere at the level of the whole organism.” Much of the time, perhaps most of the time, our conscious self is not in control. Still, when the occasion requires, we can gather our wits, as the expression goes. We have so many expressions like that—get a grip; pull yourself together; focus your thoughts—metaphors for the indistinct things we see when we look inward. We don’t ask who is gathering whose wits.
Well, we can always confabulate “reasons” for what we do, but, in my view, the whole process of pondering is simply the adaptive machinery of your brain, installed by natural selection, taking in environmental information and spitting out a solution that’s usually “adaptive”. And because different people’s brains are wired differently (there is, after all, genetic and developmental variation), people tend to have somewhat different neuronal programs, so they behave in somewhat different ways, often predictable. This is what we call our “personalities”: the programs that are identified with different bodies. “Pondering” is not something we do freely; it’s what’s instilled in our brains by natural selection to produce adaptive behavior. We ponder just as a chess-playing computer ponders: working through programs until one produces the best available solution (in the case of a computer, to make a move that best insures you’ll win; in the case of a human, to make a move that gives the most “adaptive” result).
In none of this, however, do I detect anything other than giving the name “free will” to neuronal processes that we get from natural selection, and spitting out decisions and behaviors that could not have been otherwise in a given situation. (That situation, of course, includes the environment, which influences our neurons.) In none of this do I see a way that a numinous “will” or “agency” can affect the physical workings of our neurons. And in none of this can i see a way to do something differently than what you did.
In the end, and of course I haven’t read Mitchell’s book, Gleick doesn’t make a convincing case for libertarian free will. Yes, he can make a case for “compatibilist” free will, depending on how you define that (“actions that comport with our personalities,” “decisions not made under compulsion,” etc.). But as I’ve emphaszied, all compatibilists are at bottom, determinists (again, I’d prefer “naturalists”). Remember, determinism or naturalism doesn’t mean that behaviors need be completely predictable—quantum indeterminacy may act, though we’re not sure it acts on a behavioral level—but quantum indeterminacy does not give us “agency”. “Compatibilist” free will still maintains that, at any given moment, we cannot affect the behaviors that flow from physics, and we cannot do other that what we did. It’s just that compatibilists think of free will as something other than libertarian free will, and there are as many versions of compatibilism as there are compatibilist philosophers.
I can’t find in this review any basis for libertarian free will—not in natural selection, not in the “random” fluctuations of the brain, not in the fact that different people have different personalities and may act differently in the same general situation. You can talk all you want about randomness and purpose and “winnowing of brain fluctuations,” but until someone shows that there’s something about our “will” that can affect physical processes, I won’t buy libertarian free will. Physicist Sean Carroll doesn’t buy it, either. He’s a compatibilist, but argues this:
There are actually three points I try to hit here. The first is that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood. There is an enormous amount that we don’t know about how the world works, but we actually do know the basic rules underlying atoms and their interactions — enough to rule out telekinesis, life after death, and so on. The second point is that those laws are dysteleological — they describe a universe without intrinsic meaning or purpose, just one that moves from moment to moment.
The third point — the important one, and the most subtle — is that the absence of meaning “out there in the universe” does not mean that people can’t live meaningful lives.
(See also here.)
We are physical beings made of matter. To me that blows every notion of libertarian free will out of the water. I’ll be curious to see how Mitchell obviates this conclusion.
h/t: Barry
I used to say that free will arguments made my brain hurt but that is no longer the case. As I’ve read more here and elsewhere (currently halfway through Sapolsky’s Determined) it’s become more clear to me that all we have is this damned evolved illusion of control. It doesn’t exist but it feels like it does, like one of those clever sensory illusions we see from time to time. Cool, but unreal.
I must admit I don’t think it has evolved. My question is, what would our “will” look like if we were completely unaware of the underlying mechanisms that go into the formation of our will(s)?
It would look like how almost all people think about free will. Just taken for granted, god-given, etc. No?
I’ve read quite a bit by Mitchell and I don’t think he is advocating for libertarian free will. I’m pretty sure that he fully accepts “naturalism” and advocates a conception of will that is fully compatible with physics and biology.
(One could say that Mitchell is a compatibilist; he actually denies being a compatibilist, and a discussion of why that is would be lengthy; it all comes down to different ways people connote these concepts. But, whatever labellling gets applied, I think that Mitchell is pretty much right on the conception of “agency”, “will” and “freedom” that he is arguing for.)
“the denial of free will”
IOW the null hypothesis
“has been an error, it has not been a harmless one. Its message is grim and etiolating. It drains purpose and dignity from our sense of ourselves and, for that matter, of our fellow living creatures. ”
1. My Dignity-O-Meter spiked, so:
The Stupidity of Dignity
By Steven Pinker
The New Republic
May 28, 2008
2. Says Gleick.
“It releases us from responsibility and treats us as passive objects, like billiard balls or falling leaves.”
Yes. It’s a chain reaction. What’s the problem?
… that was hasty – of course, “responsibility” was a lazy way for Gleick to blow off … errmm… responsibility … that sentence needs a ton more work.
Readers here know.
My (longish) take…
Free will holds that the human brain makes choices. Choice requires options. For there to be options, the following seem to be required:
1. Since at any one time, atoms and molecules are already in motion in a person’s brain careening toward an outcome, those motions need first be interrupted so as to prevent the outcome that was already in process. Without such an interruption, the outcome would be inevitable—there would be no “choice.”
2. Once those motions have been interrupted, alternatives need to be identified and evaluated, and then one alternative chosen. (Presumably this could be the outcome already in process before the evaluation started, or a different outcome. Such is “choice.”)
3. If a different outcome is chosen, the atomic and molecular configuration of the brain would then need to be altered so as to enable the outcome specified by the “choice.”
4. Once altered, brain processes would have to resume such that the chosen outcome in fact takes place.
But, who or what is available to interrupt ongoing brain processes, to identify the options, to decide which option to pursue, to alter the brain’s configuration, and then to turn the brain switch back on? It would seem that a disembodied “functionary”—immune from the laws of physics—would be needed to do all that.
When compatibilists say that persons can make “choices” they surely don’t mean the above, for they accept the laws of physics. They must have a different meaning of “free will” or “choice” in mind. The closest I can come to understanding is to think that compatibilists ascribe “free will” and “choice” to outcomes that cannot be predicted given the current state of the brain. I will concede this interpretation of “choice” if they insist upon it, but failure to predict an outcome does not equate to “freedom” of the person to determine one. It just means that we don’t know how all the gears in the causal chain mesh.
Correct, they do. Take an entirely deterministic chess-playing computer. The “options” are the legal moves. The computer considers all of these, computing the relative advantage of each, and “chooses” the best one. That’s what a compatibilist means by “choice”. That’s pretty much what our brains are doing when we choose between options.
If you’re not a compatibilist you might protest that this is not a “real” choice, and that the only way that a choice could be “real” is if it were … um, something different from this, something ill-defined and likely incoherent, and which never happens in the actual world.
So the only “real” choices are the ones that are inconsistent with how the world works. Which is a rather weird conception of what being “real” means.
So the compatibilist figures that the actually real choices, the ones that do actually occur in the world, are the ones akin to the choices being made by a chess-playing computer (and also by the life-playing neural-network computers in our skulls), and sees nothing wrong with applying the language we have to how the world does actually work.
I agree, well said. The inscrutable part in my reading of it is as you say “what is available to interrupt ongoing brain processes, to identify the options, to decide which option to pursue, to alter the brain’s configuration, and then to turn the brain switch back on?”
My answer would be one of two things – 1) new information to the brain from the environment proximal to the decision, e.g. a scent molecule that could trigger a memory of your childhood and a moral lesson reminder to take a different course of action than the “choice” you were intent on taking or e.g. say you hear your mother’s voice saying “no” in that moment when yes was your determined intent. 2) what you’re likely to do given your brain state. What I mean is, let’s say in a moment one could choose to do 120 actions in a given moment. These are a subset of all possible actions that could be taken based on not our genetics as much as our experiential history that determines all of our degrees of freedom. We can only do what can occur to us (i.e. has been experienced and archived as a possible choice). The problem is, in THAT moment we don’t have access to all 120 of our own personal choices but far fewer, maybe just 6 in that moment, and we don’t choose which ones will occur to us in that moment either or possibly even on reflection so it almost becomes random, at least within the behavioral degrees of freedom of that individual. This mode does seem pseudo random but so does #1 except when we can sometimes describe what changed our mind.
Maybe #2 is from random quantum effects but I doubt we need to go subatomic to justify randomness and suspect this might be a ‘free will-of-the-gaps’ argument. I think 1 and 2 above operate simultaneously which is what makes it look random. I would say choice is not random but a constrained version of what’s possible, determined by what’s happening in an individual’s brain at that moment and potentially alterable in that moment (not millisecond timescale but maybe seconds or minutes) by new environmental inputs.
Again, how could one choose something that never occurred to them? We can’t, nor do we really “choose” what we do, it’s kind of done for us but consistent with our experiential learning throughout life.
I agree that influences coming in on the side—such as my mother saying “no” (Good example by the way. :-))—can influence what was already happening in my brain, but they always do so by causing or altering the actions of atoms and molecules. If, when hearing “No!” I do something I hadn’t planned earlier, my ultimate action was still the determined result of atoms and molecules going their merry ways. It’s just that hearing “No” triggered another cascade of molecular events. There was no choice (in the hard sense) involved, although I concede that one might prefer to say that I “chose” to do what my mother told me since there were other imaginable outcomes. But, being able to imagine other possible outcomes doesn’t make them possible and I, as a “hard” determinist hold that they were, in fact, not possible.
I think the ambiguity comes down to what timescale we’re talking about. At the atomic level (e.g. the neurotransmitter glutamate) yes, those molecules are moving which manifest as neurotransmission. Nothing is stopping the inevitable muscle movement at that microsecond timescale. It’s a fait d’accompli. But what about within 1 second? Is that too slow to say that someone’s intended action was interrupted by one’s mother’s voice? Granted, that’s just other chemicals overwhelming the first signals within a second to “make someone do otherwise.” What about 10 sec or 100 after rumination? The point is, not that physics or chemistry or neuroscience are being violated here and I agree that we’re not “choosing” but being buffeted about by inputs that determine our actions.
What makes me less comfortable is that we cannot “choose to do otherwise” but I do think we CAN do otherwise, other than what we sometimes intend, but are unaware of why that is or else we invoke post-facto rationalization to make it self-justifying as a choice. There is an implication in the no-free-will camp that suggests an inevitability and fatalism of outcome that a thought, once thunk, cannot be undone like a Newtonian body in motion. That’s probably true but I would say a bit misleading because it surely depends on the timescale we’re discussing. Has the thinking fast and slow paradigm been discredited? If I asked you “You have 1 second to answer – who loves you the most?” And you reflexively blurt out “my mom!” but after 3 seconds, said “no, that’s not right, it’s my daughter,” how come the first you of 3sec ago was wrong?
Premise 1 can’t be right:
So, in order to have a free decision, the thing that makes me me, my brain function, has to be interrupted? This is a very strange idea of freedom.
A simple argument for free will.
1) If there is no free will, there is no moral responsibility.
2) But there is moral responsibility.
3) Therefore, there is free will.
1) If I don’t have $250 in my bank account, I can’t pay my power bill.
2) I need to pay the power bill.
3) Therefore, I have $250 in my bank account.
It’s quite clear what “$250” means, but what is “moral responsibility”?
Disagree with preposition 2)
Two reasons … it’s begging the question
secondly, it confounds our sense of morality and concept of morality with reality. How can one pattern of moving molecules take on morality and another not?
Prof. Coyne agrees with #1, in fact argues for it. #2 does not beg any question, but of course is not proven true by this argument. Whether there is moral responsibility is a big subject in philosophy. Aside from philosophical considerations, the fact is that everyone these days is filled with moral indignation. That includes Prof Coyne, usually rightly in my opinion. Giving up on moral responsibility is not easy to do. It means heading into the wilderness of moral irrealism. Anyone ready to do that?
Yes, we should give up on the idea that morality is “objective”. “Moral responsibility” is purely a social construction. That is, it suits us to hold other people “morally responsible” since doing so affects how people behave. It’s purely pragmatic, and it works just fine under naturalism.
(Indeed it would work just fine in a deterministic universe, though personally I consider that the underlying physics is indeterministic, though that is irrelevant to issues of morality.)
Then why not just call it responsibility?
I believe commentators like Sapolsky and Dennet are thinking of this from the wrong end of the problem that ironically is not entirely grounded in mathematics and practical reality.
Rather than show that free will exists, I believe that first we can show that determinism itself doesn’t exist.
Here’s my thinking.
1. Theoretical determinism versus practical determinism – the limits of determinism
For Determinism to work in driving free will, it would require knowing all variables and states up front which would be impossible, both at a quantum level and at an everyday practical level (e.g. how can you know everything that went on in someones life). This can be seen through quantum indeterminacy (you can’t know all quantum states), and from looking at the logical constraints reality imposes on Laplace’s Demon (discovered in the nineteenth century by Henri Poincaré) and also the ‘n-body problem’ where there is no analytical solution to predicting the motions of the planets for greater than three bodies. So while organisms must follow physics, as we are physical entities, practically there is no determinism guaranteed by physics.
2. Emergent behaviour and chaos
Even in highly deterministic systems like a dripping tap, with effectively all variables known, you see non-deterministic behaviour (i.e. chaotic behaviour). As more variables are added you see emergent behaviour e.g. murmuration of swallows leader/follower dynamic behaviour. Experiments with cellular automata show that you can start with one or two simple rules (constraints) and states, and generate complex dynamical systems that exhibit unexpected and unpredictable properties. This suggests that the universe is not completely deterministic, and complex behaviours can emerge that cannot be predicted based on constraints and initial conditions.
While this does not strictly constitute free will it does show two things:
a) above a certain threshold systems may obey predictable physical laws but are nevertheless non-deterministic.
b) deterministic arguments against free will fail on this basic test of perfectly predicting the real world from initial conditions.
3. The non-completeness problem
Determinism and knowing variables/states is actually a mathematical system, and such systems cannot completely describe all possible systems or outcomes (see Godel etc) therefore they cannot be said to be deterministic. This reinforces point 2.
This point also talks to another viewpoint espoused by determinists – that aggregating bottom-up deterministic systems necessarily means the whole system we are looking at must therefore also be deterministic. So here they assume that human thought is deterministic because the brain subsystems, all the way down to neuronal activity, are also deterministic systems. This is like saying we can look at a brain in a scanner and know and predict everything about that person. This is clearly wrong, and is simply a re-statement of the problems discussed in issue 1, 2 and 3 above. You cannot know up-front all the states of all neurons in the brain, and even if you could you would still see emergent behaviour. Its unclear what role chaos theory plays in neuronal activity, and it may just even out – we don’t really know.
4. Determinism versus constraints in human lived experience
Determinists confuse or elide the differences between determinism and constraints. They represent constraints as being effectively the same thing as determinism. This view presupposes that the constraints experienced in a human life lead to pre-determined choices/outcomes. Constraints are actually acting as a strong guide within a dynamic feedback system. For example, a child born and raised in a culture, is constrained about that culture but thinks about their own state and acts on those thoughts to change the course of their life. We see this with even kids raised in exceptionally violent environments. While genes certainly help here from a dispositional perspective, they cannot determine individual thoughts and behaviours because there are too many such to encode genetically and no mechanism has been shown to allow this. Therefore constraints are not deterministic to human lived experience.
5. The clockwork universe problem
If we except deterministic arguments, then the logical corollary of determinism is that the universe is a clockwork – everything is preordained and predictable from initial conditions. But the initial conditions of the universe didn’t include the vast majority of things we see today – bees, wood, wars, gender theory, art and music etc, and due to the incredible temperature and pressure and chaotic nature of post-big bang state, could never include information required to create these. Arguably you would have needed a state machine the size of the universe to model the initial conditions of the universe, which isn’t practical (see issue 1). There is no rational explanation of how we go from a ball of hot hydrogen to the world we live in today, we simply can’t predict such outcomes from the initial conditions. This circles back to point 4 again but from a physics perspective – it provides physical constraints (e.g. cellular respiration requires electron transport etc) but that’s it, then non-determinism takes over.
6. What is free will and how can it exist?
Taking the second point first. I think 1-5 show that if it does exist, free will is not subject to determinism because determinism itself, as posited in the free will arguments, cannot exist. So what is free will? Again many pundits never define it but I like to think of free will as the thoughts and actions that I may choose to have and take in the future, which result from my cognition and decisions (mentally agreeing to a belief or course of action), such that if I looked back I could say that I could have taken a different path in my choosing had I thought differently about that path. Based on my argument I can’t say for sure this does exist, but that wasn’t the point of my argument. What I can say with reasonable surety is that determinism doesn’t exist.
“…non-deterministic behaviour (i.e. chaotic behaviour)…” – Nukefacts
Chaotic systems are not to be equated with non-deterministic ones!
“Although some popularized discussions of chaos have claimed that it invalidates determinism, there is nothing inconsistent about systems having the property of unique evolution while exhibiting chaotic behavior (much of the confusion over determinism derives from equating determinism with predictability—see below). While it is true that apparent randomness can be generated if the state space (see below) one uses to analyze chaotic behavior is coarse-grained, this produces only an epistemic form of nondeterminism. The underlying equations are still fully deterministic. If there is a breakdown of determinism in chaotic systems, that can only occur if there is some kind of indeterminism introduced such that the property of unique evolution is rendered false.”
Chaos: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chaos/
The existence of free will, however defined, is a special case of strong determinism, however defined. Whether either is correct — could any animal have made a different decision? Could things have been other than they are? — is an empirical question. Thinking about the question is no doubt great fun but since the question is empirical only experiment can answer it. Where’s the experimental evidence?
Please don’t hit me with incantations about the laws of physics. They can’t be violated, end of that discussion, but they don’t give us a closed form solution to the three body problem. I think this is sufficient to refute strong determinism.
I’ve found an in-depth interview / debate in which both Kevin Mitchell and Robert Sapolsky take part. I’m still trying to understand all the implications and am not sure where I end up. And their debate leads them to remarkable amounts of agreement.
https://youtu.be/V9Y1Q8vhX5Y?si=PQTUvZ-jJlN-_syL
In my view we project the ‘property’ of free will on other people. We do this because we can have no view of *all* the precursor circumstances (Big Bang, physics, genetics, development, environment) that are acting within the ‘black box’ of another person. So their behaviour (what we worry about most) is difficult to predict – but the notion of ‘free will’ is a useful fiction to help us guess (or confabulate) what they might do next. If they regularly ‘choose’ strawberry ice cream then the chances are that they will choose it again, and we don’t have to know why, just make sure we buy some in.
Of course when you use the useful fiction about other peoples’ free will it makes your own life easier if you assume the useful fiction about yourself too. After all most people (including me) have only a superficial view of why we do things, so it’s usually more efficient to dodge all that heavy thinking about prior circumstances.
If current physics is right it means that the future is fixed except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence. Chaos, complexity, unpredictability (Dennett) or weak emergent properties (Sean Caroll) don’t change this fact. Physics leaves no room for any real moral responsibility.
Still we can do what we want even when we now that we are not the ultimate source of our actions or desires but it’s certainly not what philosophers are laymen mean with freewill. That makes compatibalism a believe that only refers to a kind of freewill that only exists in a religious sense.
Eliding laws of physics with fixed future outcomes is a common logical error people make in this argument. Everything conforms to physical laws but these laws can’t specify future states e.g. three body problem.
“Everything conforms to physical laws but these laws can’t specify future states e.g. three body problem.”
That not true. Chaotic systems are completely deterministic, they are just difficult to predict because what happens depends very sensitively on initial conditions.
Quantum events are not “occasional”, they are continually happening in utterly vast numbers.
And, if by “real” moral responsibility you mean that the sort of moral responsibility that does actually exist (as in, the socially constructed sort of moral responsibility) then that is entirely compatible with physics.
“real” moral responsibility vs social/biological constructed moral responsibility. I agree, only the second type is real compatible with our science. But social/biological constructed moral responsibility is meaningless because people’s actions are wholly determined by factors that are morally arbitrary.
Quantum events : if **you** could influence them than you would have a point, but you can’t. Ironically random events do often increase predictability (f.i. Radiocarbon dating, random movement of gas molecules). What we observe is that quantum events do manifest themselves seldom macroscopically (like in our brains).
Socially-constructed moral responsibility is not “meaningless”, it is entirely meaningful in terms of human nature, values and desires.
Yes, it’s meaningful subjectively and it’s consequences are real. It’s important to us because we are the slaves of our opinions, emotions and desires.
You could argue that the socially or biological constructed moral responsibility isn’t morally arbitrary. But this is not what we observe and also not very likely from what we know about our universe.
IMHO, Jerry in his comments doesn’t seem to grasp the role that *time* plays in Gleick’s (and Mitchell’s) argument.
Personally, I was disappointed that there is no reference in Gleick’s article to William James, whose classic essay, “The Dilemma of Determinsm” (1884), is still worth reading.
It should be mentioned that there are several theories of libertarian free will; so if one of them is defeated, it doesn’t follow that all of them are.
See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-theories/
The problem with compatibilism, I believe, is that it tries to reconcile two false dualisms. One is that we are separate from and able to act independently of determinants. The other is that we are separate from but determined by determinants. Both are false dualisms. Determinism isn’t about being determined, it’s about being inseparable from the determinants and the logical process of determinance. See why that must be so and I believe the idea of free will will be seen to be nonsensical and circular – it’s an idea that corresponds to no possible reality.
I heard Mitchell on Ginger Campbell’s podcast Brain Science. He is indeed a libertarian, but failed to explain (on that podcast) why he thinks that’s necessary.
Gleick gets this part right:
But that doesn’t show that all laws have exceptions – which is what a libertarian would need to claim.
Jerry says:
I dunno about society falling apart. It would certainly be different. But for this compatibilist, we need to keep the ordinary conception of free will, and not allow it to be dressed in dualistic mystical mumbo jumbo. Looking at the real physics of laws, time, and causality will make the apparent need for such extra-physical stuff disappear. Libertarian Free Will is an imaginary solution to an imaginary problem.
All these rear-guard arguments for free will are essentially the same. They create a fog of words containing many reasonable inferences and, along the way, they bury one or more false ones or logical leaps. They then challenge the clear thinker to find it in the fog. Thank you for doing this work in this case.
I’ve been a hard determinist for many decades. I don’t think we have free will, but I behave as if we do (at least for most day-to-day activities). For me, the benefit of demoting free will is in how we treat criminals.
As a side note, Science News has an article about “willpower” and “self-control”:
Science News
January 4, 2024
Sujata Gupta
“Most people say self-control is the same as willpower. Researchers disagree. Psychologists say self-control is about planning ahead to avoid needing willpower in the moment.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/self-control-willpower-psychology
But what about willpower in the moment. Do some people have more or less willpower then? And what exactly is willpower? The article doesn’t address that, as it’s not about free will per se.
Mitchell is doing a talk at the RI on Monday 18th March
https://www.rigb.org/whats-on/evolution-free-will
I am going (was a fill-in as I was due to attend another event that was cancelled & was going to London anyway) -not streamed unfortunately.