Category: free will

A muddled argument: Shermer argues for the reality of free will

February 22, 2026 • 10:00 am

Michael Shermer has a new book out called Truth: What it is, How to Find it, and Why it Still Matters, and I’ve mentioned it before. I’m reading it now, and there’s a lot of good stuff in it. But one of the twelve chapters—the one on free will—is, I think, misguided and confusing. In the preceding link you’ll find a video he made about free will, as well as my critique of it. You may not want to read this post if you’ve read the previous one, but the video differs slightly from the article I discuss below.

So here’s my take 2 on Shermer’s views, recently expressed in a longish article in Quillette. (Michael was kind enough to send me a pdf, so I presume he wants my take.) Read it by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived for free here.

In short, Shermer is somewhat of a compatibilist—or so I think, for though doesn’t seem to fully on board with libertarian “you-could-have-done-otherwise” free will, but neither does he accept physical determinism.  Further, he doesn’t seem to think that “you could have done otherwise” is even testable, as we’re never in the same situation twice.

He’s right about the untestability criterion. But that doesn’t matter, for even if we were in the identical situation, with every molecule in the universe exactly as it was the first time, there are fundamentally unpredictable events of the quantum kind that might lead to slightly different outcomes. And the more distant in the future we look, the more divergent the outcomes will be. I’ve already noted that the future is probably not completely determined because quantum events could be cumulative.  In evolution, for instance, natural selection depends on the existence of different forms of genes that arise by mutation. If quantum effects on DNA molecules can lead to different mutations, then the raw material of evolution could differ if the tape of life is rewound, and different things could evolve.

Further, if quantum phenomena affect neurons and behavior, it’s possible—barely, possible, I’d say—that in two identical situations you could behave differently. I don’t believe that, and neither does neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, but quantum phenomena that affect molecular movement or positions do not give us free will, as our “will”, whatever that is, doesn’t affect the physical behavior of matter. And so, if we use Anthony Cashmore’s definition of “free will” as given in his 2010 paper in PNAS (the paper that made me a determinist), fundamentally unpredictable quantum effects do not efface free will. Cashmore:

I believe that free will is better defined 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. 

Cashmore takes care of quantum effects by lumping them as the “possible stochastic laws of nature.” (Some physicists think that quantum mechanics is really deterministic though it seems otherwise.)

But Shermer doesn’t talk much about quantum physics—in fact, he doesn’t mention it at all.  He simply argues by assertion, saying that yes, we could have done otherwise, and we could have done so on the rather nebulous bases of “self-organization” and “emergence”.  Let’s take the assertions first. I’ll have to quote at greater length than usual:

Since philosophers love to employ thought experiments to test ideas, here’s one for you to consider (feel free to plug yourself and your spouse or significant other into the situation): John Doe is an exceptionally moral person who is happily married to Jane. The chances of John ever cheating on Jane is close to zero. But the odds are not zero because John is human, so let’s say—for the sake of argument—that John has a one-night stand while on the road and Jane finds out. How does John account for his actions? Does he, pace the standard deterministic explanation for human behaviour (as in Harris’s and Sapolsky’s definitions above), say something like this to Jane?

Honey, my will is simply not of my own making. My thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which I am unaware and over which I exert no conscious control. I do not have the freedom you think I have. I could not have done otherwise because I am nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which I had no control, that brought me to the moment of infidelity…

Could John even finish the thought before the stinging slap of Jane’s hand across his face terminated the rationalisation? If free will is the power to do otherwise, as it is typically defined by philosophers, both John and Jane know that, of course, he could have done otherwise, and she reminds him that should such similar circumstances arise again he damn well better make the right choice… or else.

This is argument against free will by assertion alone.  What his wife is evincing here is her illusion of free will. Nobody denies the fact that we feel that we could make real choices. But that doesn’t mean that we do.

But where’s the evidence that John Doe could have refrained from his one-night stand?  He is correct in thinking that he could have not done otherwise (how could he unless some undefinable, nonphysical “will” affected his libido?), but his wife, subject to the universal illusion that our behavior is more than “the unavoidable consequences of the genetic and environmental history of the individual and the possible stochastic laws of nature”, believes in some undefinable property called “will” that could change the outcomes of a given situation. She thinks that John could have chosen not to fall prey to the allure of that other woman.

So Jane gives John a slap (that slap, too, was determined). And the slap could change John’s future behavior so that he refrains from other affairs, for, like all vertebrates, we learn from experience. That’s the result of evolution. (Keep kicking a friendly dog and see how long it remains friendly!).  He concludes what’s below (bolding is mine): But nobody with any neurons to rub together argues that changing behavior via learning somehow violates determinism.

More from Shermer:

But this is not the universe we live in. In our universe (unlike the one in which thought experiments are run), the Second Law of Thermodynamics and entropy means that time flows forward and no future scenario can ever perfectly match one from the past. As Heraclitus’ idiom informs us, “you can’t step into the same river twice,” because you are different and the river is different. What you did in the past influences what you choose to do next in future circumstances (the technical name for this is “learning”), which are always different from the past. So, while the world is determined, we are active agents in determining our decisions going forward in a self-determined way, in the context of what already happened and what might happen. Our universe is not pre-determined but rather post-determined, and we are part of the causal net of the myriad determining factors to create that post-determined world. Far from self-determinism being a downer, it’s the ultimate upper because it means we can do something about the future, namely, we can change it!

I don’t really understand this paragraph, nor the part in bold. In what sense are we active agents in determining our decisions in the future? Shermer doesn’t tell us, but he seems to be thinking of some nonphysical power of “will” to change the physics that governs our brains and behaviors. In fact, there is redundancy here: we determine our decision because our behavior is self-determined!

Apparently Shermer rejects physical determinism because, given the present, more than one future is possible. The laws of physics are likely to be, at bottom, unpredictable, though their effects on “macro” phenomena are probably minimal, and their effects on the behavior of human and other creatures is unknown. Shermer is even somewhat rude to determinists like Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky (and, implicitly, me, as I’m with them): we are hidebound reductionists plagued by “physics envy” (bolding is mine):

Do determinists really fall into the trap of pure reductionism? They do. Here is the determinist Robert Sapolsky defending his belief that free will does not exist because single neurons don’t have it: “Individual neurons don’t become causeless causes that defy gravity and help generate free will just because they’re interacting with lots of other neurons.” In fact, billions of interacting neurons is exactly where self-determinism arises. But Sapolsky is having none of that: “A lot of people have linked emergence and free will; I will not consider most of them because, to be frank, I can’t understand what they’re suggesting, and to be franker, I don’t think the lack of comprehension is entirely my fault.”

Determinists like Harris and Sapolsky have physics envy. The history of science is littered with the failed pipe dreams of ever-alluring reductionist schemes to explain the inner workings of the mind—schemes increasingly set forth in the ambitious wake of Descartes’ own famous attempt, some four centuries ago, to reduce all mental functioning to the actions of swirling vortices of atoms, supposedly dancing their way to consciousness. Such Cartesian dreams provide a sense of certainty, but they quickly fade in the face of the complexities of biology. We should be exploring consciousness and choice at the neural level and higher, where the arrow of causal analysis points up toward such principles as emergence and self-organisation.

So what is there to behavior beyond atoms moving around according to physical principles? Shermer doesn’t tell us, but he seems determined (excuse the pun) to convince us that we do have free will, and it seems to be of the libertarian sort! He even evokes the mysteries of consciousness, which many people, including Francis Crick, think is best studied not from a “top down” approach, but from a reductionist “bottom up” approach.  And we know from various experiments and observations that we can affect our notion of “will”, making us seem like we have it when we don’t (people who suddenly confabulate a purpose when they behave according to stimulation of the brain), or making us seem like we lack it when we are actually acting deterministically (e.g., ouija boards). We can take away consciousness with anesthesia, restore it again, or alter it with psychedelic drugs.  All this implies that yes, consciousness and “will” are both phenomena stemming from physics.

Shermer rejects bottom-up approaches, raising the spectres of “self-organization and emergence” as arguments against Cashmore’s form of free will:

This we have through the sciences of complexity, in which we recognise the properties of self-organisation and emergence that arise out of complex adaptive systems, which grow and learn as they change, and they are autocatalytic—containing self-driving feedback loops. For example:

Water is a self-organised emergent property of a particular arrangement of hydrogen and oxygen molecules.

Complex life is a self-organised emergent property of simple life, where simple prokaryote cells self-organised to become more complex eukaryote cells (the little organelles inside cells were once self-contained independent cells).

Consciousness is a self-organised emergent property of billions of neurons firing in patterns in the brain.

Language is a self-organised emergent property of thousands of words spoken in communication between language users.

That list goes on, but it’s muddled. First, what do we mean by “self-organized” properties?  Is water “self organized” beyond behaving in a glass in ways that are consistent with, but not necessarily predictable from, the behavior of a single water molecule?  Ditto for complex life.  In what sense are life and water “self-organized” rather than “organized by physics”? Yes, there are emergent properties, like the Eroica emerging from the pen of Beethoven, himself an admirable collection of organic molecules with the emergent property of writing great music.

Let’s dismiss “self-organization,” which seems like a buzzword that doesn’t advance Shermer’s argument, and concentrate instead on “emergence.”  Yes, water is wet. “Wetness” is a quale evinced in our consciousness, yet the properties of water that make it feel wet are surely consistent with, and result form, the laws of physics, just as the “pressure” of gas in a container is an emergent property of a bunch of gas molecules acting as a group. But nobody says that gas molecules have free will, even though some of their properties are “emergent.”

The issue here is not whether emergence is something predictable from a reductionist analysis, but whether it is something physically consistent with its reductionist constituents. If the laws of physics be true, then that consistency does nothing to efface determinism. Shermer’s failure is that he neglects to tell us the nature of something called a “will” that interposes itself between molecule and behavior.  And often, with greater knowledge of physics we can predict emergent properties from a reductionist analysis. (The gas laws are one such thing.)

I’ll draw this to a close now, adding one more note. Shermer’s failure is twofold. He fails to suggest how an undefined “will” can affect the behavior of matter, and he mistakes determinism for predictability, a rookie error. If quantum mechanics is a good explanation of physics, then the future is not 100% predictable, even if we had perfect knowledge of everything, which of course we don’t. And physicists tell me that quantum effects were important at the Big Bang, so at that moment the future of the entire universe was unpredictable. That says nothing about free will.

Shermer closes with another paragraph that I don’t understand; it sounds in some ways (this may anger him, but I apologize) like Deepak Chopra:

It may seem odd to think of yourself as a past-self, present-self, and future self, but as suggested in this language, your “self” is not fixed from birth, destined to a future over which you have no control. We live not only in space, but in time, and as such no matter the pre-conditioning factors nudging you along a given pathway—your genes, upbringing, culture, luck and contingent history—there is always wiggle room to alter future conditions. The river of time flows ever onward and you are part of its future.

Act accordingly.

This is more argument by assertion alone. I’m not sure what he means by “act accordingly”, much less “wiggle room.”  Of course we can be influenced by what we read, but we don’t have a “will” that could alter what we do at any given moment. As Cashmore said in his article:

Here I argue that the way we use the concept of free will is nonsensical. The beauty of the mind of man has nothing to do with free will or any unique hold that biology has on select laws of physics or chemistry. This beauty lies in the complexity of the chemistry and cell biology of the brain, which enables a select few of us to compose like Mozart and Verdi, and the rest of us to appreciate listening to these compositions. The reality is, not only do we have no more free will than a fly or a bacterium, in actuality we have no more free will than a bowl of sugar.

I don’t mind being like a bowl of sugar, or, rather, a complex piece of animated meat.  I admire Shermer for all he’s done to further skepticism and attack quackery, but I think that on the issue of free will he’s gone awry.

From AI:

Michael Shermer on free will

January 28, 2026 • 10:15 am

Michael Shermer‘s new book is out, and in the video below, 55 minutes long, he gives an oral summary of its contents (a link to the book is at the bottom). The video was sent to me by reader Barry, who called my attention to the section on free will, and I’ve started the video at the 45-minutes mark—right when Shermer discusses the intractability of the “hard problem” of consciousness and then segues to free will. Here are the YouTube notes.

In this episode, Michael Shermer walks through the core ideas behind his new book Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, breaking down how humans confuse meaning with reality, stories with facts, and confidence with correctness.

I’ve put a few remarks about Shermer’s view of free will, which seems to me confused, below the video.

Shermer avers that he’s a compatibilist: someone who accepts both determinism and free will. As Wikipedia puts it under “compatibilism“:

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.

And yet Shermer says he’s not a determinist, although he does define free will as “libertarian, could-have-done-otherwise” free will.  Shermer rejects libertarian free will because he says it’s dualistic, drawing a distinction between mind and matter, and here he’s absolutely right.

But then he argues that “determinists are wrong”! Why? He doesn’t say, but makes a confusing argument that the “could-have-done-otherwise” notion of free will is bogus because it involves replaying a tape of what happens when an instant of “choice” occurs.  Shermer says that if this is the contention, then of course you will do the same thing when you replay that instant, but argues that this is simply because you’re replaying a tape that already has a known consequence, like replaying a record. But if he thinks that, then what does he mean by saying that libertarian free will, which is the contention that replaying the tape could yield a different consequence, is wrong? He says that replaying the tape will always give the same result because it’s a tape. But that is not the argument that physical determinists make. The argument is that you are starting a fresh tape at the moment of choice, but it will always give the same result—absent any quantum effects (see below).

Shermer contends that “the past is determined, but the future isn’t”.  He doesn’t explain why, but here again I agree with his claim that the future is not absolutely determined. But Shermer doesn’t explain why it isn’t.  I will: the future is not completely determined only insofar as fundamentally unpredictable physical effects occur—that is, quantum effects, which as far as we know defy absolute predictability. We know quantum effects applied at the Big Bang, so at that moment the future of the universe was not predetermined.

But do quantum effects apply to human behavior and “choice”?  Perhaps; we just don’t know. Maybe an electron in a neuron in your brain will jump at the moment you’re ordering dinner, so you order fish instead of a hamburger.  If that could happen—and again we don’t know if it does—then yes, you could have done something other than what you did. However, because there’s no mind/body dualism, there is no way that you had any agency in moving that electron; it just happened. Is that what Shermer means by “free will”? If so, it’s a lame kind of free will, because the average person who believes in free will thinks in a dualistic way. Although they don’t say this expicitly, they contend that they have agency that can affect our neurons, brains and behavior.

I’ve written before about how predictability doesn’t equate to determinism, and by determinism I mean physical determinism, defined by Anthony Cashmore this way (this paper is what made me a determinist):

I believe that free will is better defined 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.

Cashmore adds that the environment is still “chemistry”, which of course is also “physics”:

Here, in some ways, it might be more appropriate to replace “genetic and environmental history” with “chemistry”—however, in this instance these terms are likely to be similar and the former is the one commonly used in such discussions.

In other words, to Cashmore (and to me) this form of free will involves dualism. It’s woo. Cashmore, who admits that unpredictable quantum effects can lead to a universe where pure predictability is impossible, adds that that still does not give us free will as defined above—free will not governed by the laws of physics.

We know now that on a macro level, predictability is quite good: we can predict, using classical mechanics, when solar eclipses will occur, where the planets will be in ten years, and we can also use classical mechanics to put people on the Moon. But since classical mechanics is simply a reification on a large scale of quantum mechanics, the future is not completely predictable as quantum effects accumulate. I’ve used as an example the possibility that genetic mutations could be quantum phenomena in some way. If that’s the case, then we can’t predict at a given moment what mutations will occur, and if that is the case, then the raw material for evolution is unpredictable, which further means that evolution is unpredictable.

Nevertheless, because our behaviors are still controlled by the laws of physics, if there is no mind/body dualism then there is no “agency” as most people believe it, and thus there’s no libertarian free will.

But Shermer, as an avowed compatibilist (he appears to be strongly influenced by Dan Dennett), thinks that we do have a form of “free will”, and supports it by using as an example his ability to affect his own future by making preparations for tomorrow’s morning bicycle ride, even if he doesn’t want to ride. He puts his bike in the trunk, he lays out his bicycle clothes for the morrow, and so on. As he says:

“I can choose to do certain things now to make my future different than what it was in the past. That’s freedom; that’s volition; that’s choice. That’s free will.  That’s as good as it gets. So all the determinists, they’re wrong; they’re just simply wrong; they’re assuming we live in a universe that we don’t live in: a predetermined universe.”

It’s sure not choice the way most people mean it, and believe me, I’ve had this argument any number of times. People are not physical determinists, but dualists, just like the saxophone player who nearly attacked me when I told him that at the moment he decided to play an improvised jazz solo, that solo was not something he could alter by thinking.  People are not sophisticated enough to draw a distinction between free will and physical determinsim; they are not sophisticated enough to see that the only physical force that can ultimately change a behavior is quantum mechanics.

Shermer contends that “In the real universe, determinists don’t exist.” He says he’s never met one. Well, Mr. Shermer, meet Mr. Coyne and Mr. Sapolsky, both physical determinists.  We don’t distort the notion of “free will” just so we can say people have it. (Dennett thought that belief in determinism would erode society, and that’s why he wrote two books redefining free will for the masses.)

Finally, Shermer tells us why he doesn’t think there are true determinists: it’s because we act as if we have free will.  He says that some people who pretend to be determinists take pride in the books they write. As he says, “Why would you take pride in your books? You didn’t do anything; it was all determined at the Big Bang.”  Well, I don’t have to respond to that, Shermer knows better. We may well be evolved to think we have agency. We certainly do think that, and have evolved to think that, but I don’t know if natural selection produced that frame of mind. Regardless, we can’t help taking pride in our accomplishments, or looking down on people who do bad things, because that’s the way our brains are configured. That does not mean that physical determinism should not affect our views of punishment and reward: it should, especially with regard to the justice system. But I’ve discussed this many times before.

The last thing I want to say is that some atheist writers whom I admire greatly—people like Shermer, Pinker, and Dawkins—seem to shy away from the free-will problem. I am not sure why; perhaps they realize that if you deny libertarian free will, people will think you’re crazy. You tell me!

Here’s Michael’s book, which came out yesterday from the Johns Hopkins Press.  I haven’t yet read it, but surely will. If you click on the cover you’ll go to the Amazon site:

The Atlantic denies the existence of free will but says that determinism makes us behave badly

December 28, 2025 • 10:00 am

I can’t resist calling your attention to a 2016 article on free will, mainly because it appeared in The Atlantic—a magazine many here (including me) admire. And as I’m reading Matthew Cobb’s terrific new biography of Francis Crick, I see that Crick was a determinist like me, though he realized that different phenomena require different levels of analysis. Crick didn’t think that free will was even worth considering, and avoided it like the plague though he was deeply concerned with consciousness. His research program for understanding the brain is deeply deterministic and pretty reductionist. But read Matthew’s book for yourself.

In view of Crick’s ideas that I’ve just learned about, and a reader calling my attention to this article, which I haven’t seen, it’s worth seeing how author Stephen Cave deals with determinism.  You can read the article by clicking below, but since it’s likely to be paywalled you can find it archived here.

The article’s main points are these, two of which are summarized in the title and subtitle (my take):

1.)  We have no such thing as free will in the libertarian sense of “you could have done other than what you did”

2.) But studies show that if you reject free will, you are likely to cheat, be lazy and fatalistic, and reject the idea of moral responsibility

3.)  To avoid these injurious social effects, we must confect a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better. This can enhance “autonomy” (not “agency” or “autonomy in the sense of ‘ability to govern oneself'”, neither of which we have) but “autonomy” in the sense of “adhering to behaviors that help our selves and society”.

Now #3 may look like a bogus solution, and author Steven Cave sort of admits that, but we can clearly improve our behaviors with the right carrots and sticks.  It’s a misconception about determinism that people’s behavior can’t be changed. Clearly, the influence of others, blaming and praising people for actions they consider respectively injurious and admirable, can, over time, change your neurons in such a way that you begin behaving in ways better for you and for society.  The fly in this ointment is the infinite regression of determinism: whether and how we even try to change people’s minds is itself determined by people’s genes and environments. But I won’t go down that rabbit hole here.

Cave’s solution is at least better than that of compatibilists like Dan Dennett, who simply redefined free will so that we could tell people they had it. Since Dan adhered to point #2, thinking that belief in strict determinism was bad for everyone, he wrote two books designed to convince people that they had free will in a meaningful way. I found his arguments unconvincing.  Dan later stressed that he was not making this “little people’s” argument, one similar to making the “belief in belief” claim that even though there’s no God, it’s good for society to be religious. But in Dan’s own writings I did find him making the Little People’s argument, which I quoted in a post here in 2022:

Here, for example, are two statements by the doyen of compatibilism, my pal Dan Dennett (sorry, Dan!):

There is—and has always been—an arms race between persuaders and their targets or intended victims, and folklore is full of tales of innocents being taken in by the blandishments of sharp talkers. This folklore is part of the defense we pass on to our children, so they will become adept at guarding against it. We don’t want our children to become puppets! If neuroscientists are saying that it is no use—we are already puppets, controlled by the environment, they are making a big, and potentially harmful mistake. . . . we [Dennett and Erasmus] both share the doctrine that free will is an illusion is likely to have profoundly unfortunate consequences if not rebutted forcefully.

—Dan Dennett, “Erasmus: Sometimes a Spin Doctor is Right” (Erasmus Prize Essay).

and

If nobody is responsible, not really, then not only should the prisons be emptied, but no contract is valid, mortgages should be abolished, and we can never hold anybody to account for anything they do.  Preserving “law and order” without a concept of real responsibility is a daunting task.

—Dan Dennett, “Reflections on Free Will” (naturalism.org)

But you can be a “hard determinist” and still believe in responsibility!

Dan is no longer with us, but I did post these when he was alive, so I’m not beating a dead philosopher.

I will try to be brief, discussing the three points above. Quotes from the Atlantic article are indented, while my own take is flush left:

1.)  We have no such thing as free will in the libertarian sense of “you could have done other than what you did.” To his credit, Cave admits this straight off, noting that science supports determinism.

In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.

. . . . The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. But it left some room, at least in the popular imagination, for the possibility that we could overcome our circumstances or our genes to become the author of our own destiny. The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

This is what I believe, and also what Crick believed.  Now we’ll never know enough to be able to predict people’s behavior, but if quantum effects don’t manifest themselves in behavior (making you choose a salad rather than french fries, for example), then yes, determinism could lead to absolute predictability. But that will never happen, because we’d have to know enough to predict environmental factors like the weather. Besides, scientists have not decided that quantum phenomena affect behavior. Crick himself rejected that as “woo”, and I’m awaiting evidence for such influences. (We have none.) Finally, even if quantum effects do scupper determinism for some behaviors, they are not effects that we can control by “will.”

I won’t add here the many experiments showing that you can largely predict people’s (simple) decisions before they’re made, beginning with the study of Libet.  As these studies continue, we can, by monitoring brain activity, predict what people will do in simple binary tasks farther and farther ahead of the time they’re aware of making such decisions (up to ten seconds, I believe). Free willies, however, always find ways to reject these studies, since that work suggests that our feeling of agency is a post facto phenomenon occurring only after the brain’s neurons have made a “decision”. 

2.) But studies show that if you reject free will, you are likely to cheat, be lazy and fatalistic, and reject the idea of moral responsibility.  Much of this is based on an early study of Vohs and Schooler showing that college students who are “primed” by reading passages on determinism are more likely to act badly and to cheat than students primed by reading about free will.  But that was just over a very short time, was a highly artificial study on college students, and a later meta-analysis showed no deleterious effect of rejecting free will on “prosocial” behaviors. (Note that most of the studies tested behaviors lasting at most a week or so after “priming”.  Cave does, however, mention one study suggesting inimical effects of belief in determinism, though:

In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic.
I suggest you look at that study (it appears to be Stillman et al. 2020, “study 2”), as it doesn’t contain a multifactorial analysis using all the cross-correlated factors. Furthere, the p values are low, yet the authors did not correct for multiple tests of significance using something like the Bonferroni correction.

But even if the evidence did show small deleterious effects on behavior stemming from determinism, are we supposed to pretend to believe we have agency so we can behave better? How can you pretend to believe something you don’t? It would be like asking atheists to believe in God because that belief has salubrious effects. It can’t be done—at least not for rational people. It’s like asking a lion to stop chasing gazelles and start eating salads. It’s not in us!

Two other points.  We always feel like we have free will, so I doubt that the scientific truth will make people fatalistic. Whether this belief evolved by natural selection or is merely an epiphenomenon of our evolved brain structure is not clear, and I doubt we’ll ever know.  So I don’t take point #2 seriously in most circumstances. Where it IS important to recognize the truth of determinism is in our system or rewards and punishment, most notably in the legal system.  If people who act badly are simply people with “broken brains,” then how we treat them depends crucially on recognizing this.  A society in which we realize, for instance, that a thief had no choice about whether or not he stole, or a killer about whether or not he pulled the trigger, we would have a very different system of punishment than a society in which we think people had a choice of how they behaved. (Yes, I know that some people say that belief in libertarian free will wouldn’t change how we dispense justice, but I reject that view.)

This does not mean that we should do away with the idea of responsibility and punishment. Far from it. While I don’t consider people morally responsible in the sense that they could have done something “moral” rather than “immoral”, that doesn’t mean that every criminal obtains a get-out-of-jail-free card. People are responsible for their acts in the sense that they are the people who do the acts, and that leads to the idea that those people need, for their own sake and society’s, to be punished or rewarded. Punishment is still justified under determinism to keep criminals out of society, to give them a chance to be rehabilitated, and (to most) as a form of deterrence. What is not justified is retributive punishment like the death penalty, as that implicitly assumes the criminal made a choice (the death penalty isn’t a deterrent, anyway, and can’t be revoked if someone is later found to be innocent).

Finally, praise is as justified as punishment, for praising people for some actions, even if they had no choice, will almost always lead them to perform more good actions, because we’re evolved to appreciate praise, which raises our status. In the end, though none of us have choices about how we behave, we go about our lives feeling as if we did, and that’s enough for me. When the rubber hits the road, as when determinism really matters (as in punishment), we can still revert to what science tells us.

3.)  To avoid this injurious social effects, we must confect a new take on free will, encouraging others to behave better, which can enhance “autonomy” (not “agency” or “autonomy” in the sense of “ability to govern oneself”, neither of which we have, but “autonomy” in the sense of adhering to behaviors that help our selves and society.  Author Cave is wise enough to accept the science and the determinism it suggests, but he still thinks we need a solution to the problem that belief in determinism leads to bad behavior.  I am not convinced that this is true, as different studies show different things. And I don’t think we need to do what Dennett did, writing big books confecting new definitions of a “free will worth wanting.”  It is this last part of the article that most disappointed me, for Cave suggest a tepid solution: we all need to behave better. (He cites Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University):

Yet Waller’s account of free will still leads to a very different view of justice and responsibility than most people hold today. No one has caused himself: No one chose his genes or the environment into which he was born. Therefore no one bears ultimate responsibility for who he is and what he does. Waller told me he supported the sentiment of Barack Obama’s 2012 “You didn’t build that” speech, in which the president called attention to the external factors that help bring about success. He was also not surprised that it drew such a sharp reaction from those who want to believe that they were the sole architects of their achievements. But he argues that we must accept that life outcomes are determined by disparities in nature and nurture, “so we can take practical measures to remedy misfortune and help everyone to fulfill their potential.”

Of course Obama was determined to say this via the laws of physics, but his words may still have had a good effect on society. Poor people don’t choose to be poor, nor homeless people to be homeless. We need to realize this, for that form of determinism is good for everyone (except perhaps for some Republicans).  Cave admits that accepting determinism but trying to be good is somewhat bogus, but at least it’s nor harmful—not in the way I think Dennett’s views were.

Cave:

Understanding how will be the work of decades, as we slowly unravel the nature of our own minds. In many areas, that work will likely yield more compassion: offering more (and more precise) help to those who find themselves in a bad place. And when the threat of punishment is necessary as a deterrent, it will in many cases be balanced with efforts to strengthen, rather than undermine, the capacities for autonomy that are essential for anyone to lead a decent life. The kind of will that leads to success—seeing positive options for oneself, making good decisions and sticking to them—can be cultivated, and those at the bottom of society are most in need of that cultivation.

To some people, this may sound like a gratuitous attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. And in a way it is. It is an attempt to retain the best parts of the free-will belief system while ditching the worst. President Obama—who has both defended “a faith in free will” and argued that we are not the sole architects of our fortune—has had to learn what a fine line this is to tread. Yet it might be what we need to rescue the American dream—and indeed, many of our ideas about civilization, the world over—in the scientific age.

Well, that’s a bit dramatic, but we do need to reform our notions of praise and—especially—blame. I’ve outlined some of the changes in the justice system we should make in light of determinism, and Gregg Caruso (e.g., here) has done so far more extensively.  But I don’t think we should go around telling people that the classical notion of free will is true.  Although I’ve been kicked out of a friend’s house and also threatened by a jazz musician for defending determinism (in the latter case by telling him that his saxophone solos were determined rather than improvised under free will, so that he could not have played a different solo), I’m still a diehard determinist.

Yes, the Atlantic article is nine years old, but the field hasn’t moved very far since it was written. Do people even need to think and write about free will, then?  Certainly Francis Crick didn’t think so: he completely ignored the problem in his late-life work on the brain, dismissing free will as a nonstarter. But because notions of free will still permeate our justice system in a bad way, yes, I think everyone needs to think about determinism and accept the science buttressing it. Then we can go about our everyday lives acting as though we have choices.

h/t: Reese

Another wonky critique of determinism in a review of Sapolsky’s book “Determined”

January 26, 2025 • 11:30 am

I’ve read Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, and it’s pretty good, making a material—in his view, neurological—case for determinism, though the book is a bit long and can be tedious in parts if you don’t want to plow through a lot of neurobiology. But I think that in the end he makes his case (of course, I’m a hardcore determinist so I’d agree!). If you don’t want to read 528 pages, there’s also Sam Harris’s Free Will or Gregg Caruso’s books on free will (he’s a determinist).

But Sapolsky’s book has gotten some negative reviews, and I should have realized that writing about determinism will immediately get people’s hackles up, because their feeling of having free will (and I’ll be talking here about libertarian “you-could-have-chosen-otherwise” free will) is so strong that they can brook no determinism. I’ve already recounted how I was menaced by a a jazz musician for intimating that is “extemporaneous” solos were determined before he ever played them, and was also kicked out of a friend’s house simply for calmly espousing and explaining determinism. As I always say, it’s harder for me to convince a creationist that evolution is true than to convince a “free willer” that determinism is true. And there are a lot more of the latter than the former!

But of all the reviews I’ve read of Sapolsky’s book, by far the worst just appeared in what was once a great venue, the New York Review of Books. (It went downhill fast when its wonderful editor Robert B. Silvers died in 2017.)  The review is free to access (also archived here), and you can read by clicking on the headline below.  It shows no understanding of the free-will controversy, or of science itself, and offers no alternative to determinism (it has to be some magical nonphysical agent that can affect material objects), though I suspect the author, because of her frequent references to God and theology, might believe that free will has a goddy supernatural origin. (Even if it doesn’t, libertarian free will has to rely on something supernatural.) Here’s the description of the author from the NYRB:

Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford. She is currently writing a book about the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the history of evolutionary theory. (February 2025)

Although I’m usually loath to dwell on credentials, a historian, even of biology, is not the person to review Sapolsky’s book. Perhaps a philosopher or a neurologist, but I can explain the pervasive awfulness of Riskin’s review only by appealing to massive ignorance of the topic.

I really don’t want to go through this long review bit by bit, but I’ll highlight a few weird things.

Ignorance of science.  Riskin doesn’t realize that getting evidence for phenomena (e.g., evolution) is very often a step-by step-process: you have an initial hypothesis, and then you either reinforce or reduce the likelihood of its being true with new data. This is a Bayesian approach, though often it’s implicit rather than specified using Bayes’s theorem.  You don’t “prove” determinism or free will, you simply gather evidence that makes one of them more likely. I would note that determinism should have high priors simply because our brains and bodies and environments, the source of our behaviors, affect our behaviors materially–usually through neuronal wiring.  (That’s why Sapolsky concentrates so much on neurons.) And material objects universally obey the laws of physics.

Riskin WANTS determinism to be proved, and says that Sapolsky doesn’t do it. But I say she’s put the bar too high, that Sapolsky makes a good case and that, combined with the presupposition that true libertarian free will must involve forces that we don’t know about—while the laws of physics appear to apply universally—should put Riskin on the defensive (which she is).

Not only are we “not captains of our ships,” he writes, “our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.” (This gives a taste of Sapolsky’s late-night-dorm-room literary style.) [JAC: it’s not ALL like that, so her comment is inaccurate.]

How does he know? Because of science. Sapolsky tells us that “the science of human behavior shows” it to be deterministic. But none of the scientific evidence he offers turns out to demonstrate this. He describes psychological studies revealing changes in people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) taking place milliseconds before they were aware of making a decision, but he dismisses these—reasonably enough—as “irrelevant.” He presents other studies demonstrating that people can be subconsciously manipulated; that hormones, cultural beliefs, and moral values influence behavior; and that maturation, aging, and experience induce alterations in people’s brains and bodies with corresponding behavioral changes. After each discussion he asks, “Does this disprove free will?” and responds—again reasonably—with “nah,” “nope,” “certainly not,” and “obviously not.” Readers might wonder, equally reasonably, why they’ve slogged through all this irrelevant nonevidence.

That might be a fair criticism of Sapolsky’s style, but I don’t remember him saying that this evidence is irrelevant (it’s been a while since I read the book). But I do think that predicting behaviors before one is conscious of performing them raises the priors of determinism, as do the many, many ways that you can trick people into thinking they have agency when they don’t (brain stimulation, effects of drugs, computer experiments) or thinking they are not doing something consciously when they are (Ouija boards). Sean Carroll’s essay “On Determinism” (with extensive quotes by Massimo Pigliucci) makes a good case that the universality of the laws of physics leaves no room for libertarian free will. (Sean is a compatibilist and, although a determinist, says we have “free will” in a different sense. Dan Dennett used to say the same thing.)

More waving away of the notion of  proof:

Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds. Here’s another from Sapolsky’s final chapter: “What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning.” This might sound like the opposite of saying that science shows there’s a divine intelligence behind the world-machine, but it’s the direct descendant of that earlier claim, and comes to the same evacuation of meaning and agency from the mortal world. This isn’t a scientific proposition. It remains what it has been from the beginning: a theology.

This is wrong. One can gather data for and against determinism. If, for example, we found out that people could move objects by thinking about them, that would suggest that there is some nonmaterial brain force that can actually influence events, buttressing (but not “proving”) the case for free will. And saying that determinism is “a theology” is also wrong, for theology in the West is involved in exegesis of the Bible and beliefs in a supernatural being.

What’s the alternative to determinism?  Here Riskin is silent, though it looks from her frequent references to God and theology that she sees divine action as a possible counter to determinism and a buttressing of free will. (I can’t be sure of this, though, as Riskin doesn’t lay out what she sees as a viable alternative to determinism.) Riskin has described herself as a “Jewish atheist”, and given that she herself doesn’t see divine provenance out there, the onus on her is to admit that she is invoking some kind of supernatural but non-Goddy action.

Her only argument seem to be that because people look like they have “agency” (and they do in the trivial sense of being able to do things), this is evidence for free will. For example, this part seems deeply confused:

It’s because the many factors influencing behavior, Sapolsky thinks, place the burden of proof on defenders of human agency. It’s they who need to show that neurons are “completely uninfluenced” by any external factors and that “some behavior just happened out of thin air.” But why must human behavior be either deterministic or impervious to any influence? Sapolsky doesn’t explain; he takes as given that to show any influence at all is to show a determining influence. Similarly, he writes that we have “no control” over our biology, culture, or environment. Sure, we don’t control these things, but there’s an important difference between not controlling something and having no effect on it, or at least so anyone with teenagers is inclined to hope. Biology isn’t insulated from behavior any more than behavior is from biology. As Sapolsky himself points out, virtually everything a person does has an effect on their physiology. And a wealth of empirical evidence from Aristotle to Oprah suggests that people can indeed have cultural influence.

What is the sweating reviewer trying to say here? That there is some free will? I cannot tell. In fact, her own confusion and incoherent arguments seem to be imputed to Sapolsky, as if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve read the book, and I disagree. And “cultural influence” my tuchas! What does that have to do with refuting determinism?

Is there a god in this argument? The author makes the old “why is there something instead of nothing” argument:

Sapolsky’s turtles are of course metaphorical; they stand for deterministic causes, and by “a turtle floating in the air” he means a magical event. We must accept a strictly causal chain extending back to the beginning of time or acknowledge that we believe in miracles. But why are these our only choices? And are they really so different? Wouldn’t a chain of deterministic causes imply a miracle of some sort at the beginning—the old infinite regress problem rearing its domed shell again?

Yes, and we don’t know why there is something instead of nothing, though there have been some scientific suggestions that do NOT involve miracles. And obviously since Riskin is an atheist, she doesn’t believe in miracles. So what is her answer. She doesn’t tell us.

More touting of “agency:

Sapolsky tells the story of Phineas Gage, who suffered a metal rod through the brain while working on a construction site in Vermont in 1848 and was never quite the same afterward. He offers Gage as evidence that people’s personalities depend on their “material brains,” which he thinks poses a challenge to anyone who wants to defend the idea of free will. But why should the fact that humans and their brains are made of material parts mean there’s no such thing as human agency? There’s a good answer, but it’s historical rather than scientific: because determinism retains crucial elements of the theology from which it arose, according to which the material world was a passive artifact lacking any agency of its own.

It would be nice if Riskin would tell us what she means by “agency”.  Real “I could have made either choice” agency or simply the appearance of agency? The intimation that determinism is a form of theology again arises, but denial of free will in the world is simply not theology. It’s analogous to denial of a supernatural being, which Riskin presumably does in her atheism. Is this atheism theological?

I won’t go on here, as I don’t want to waste my time. I will simply say that Riskin sounds like she’s trying to be clever, but in so doing fails to confect a consistent argument against determinism. Her sniping at Sapolsky may occasionally hit home, but she comes nowhere close to dispelling determinism, simply because she doesn’t engage in the necessarily arguments. Read for yourself how she throws in lots of historical figures like Darwin and Paley and Laplace to show her erudition, but doesn’t deal with what libertarian free will would really entail. 

This egregious review also goes to show how far the mighty New York Review of Books has fallen. Yes, it likes cleverness and erudition, but in the old days it also liked substantive arguments in its reviews. Riskin doesn’t provide any. But don’t take my word for it; if you’re interested in the topic, read the review and see if you can find any structure or coherence in it.

 

h/t: Barry

An unconvincing attack on Robert Sapolsky’s argument for determinism

December 22, 2024 • 10:00 am

I’ve mentioned before Robert Sapolsky’s recent book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, a 528-page behemoth that at times is a bit of a slog and at other times an inspiration. (See here, here, here, and here for previous posts about it.) I found his argument against libertarian free will convincing, but of course I already believed that there is no good argument for libertarian (“you-could-have-done-otherwise”) free will (LFW), so I was on his side from the outset. I’m a hard determinist, and that’s based on seeing that the laws of physics obtain everywhere. But people are still maintaining not just that we can confect some form of free will despite the truth of determinism (these people are called “compatibilists”), but that we have real libertarian free will. They are wrong.

The video below, arguing for LFW, came in an email from Quillette touting their most popular articles of 2024.  But this was a short (4.5-minute) video, not an article, and I don’t think the video was one of the top items. Perhaps the note referred to a Quillette article by Stuart Doyle (below) on which the video is based, but that article was published in 2023.

At any rate, listen to the video first, and then, if you want to see what I consider an unconvincing argument against free will (though it does make some fair criticisms of Determined), click on the headline below to read Doyle’s argument that we have “not disproven free will.”

The narrator of the video isn’t named, but she pretty much parrots what’s in Doyle’s essay, emphasizing an argument for free will that Doyle considers dispositive, but to me seems irrelevant.

You may notice some problems with the “rebuttal” described in the video. For example, it seems irrelevant to argue that “just because a neuron doesn’t have free will doesn’t mean that the bearer of a collection of neurons (a person) doesn’t have free will.”  This is an argument that the emergent property of LFW can still appear even if neurons themselves behave according to physical law (a large argument in Sapolsky’s book).  Also, if quantum physics is truly and fundamentally unpredictable (and we don’t know this for sure), that itself, says the narrator, poses a problem for free will, because it means that, at any given moment, a quantum event may change your behavior.

There are two problems with the quantum-indeterminacy argument. First, nobody ever maintained that quantum events like the movement of an electron can result from one’s volition (“will”), so unpredictability at a given moment does not prove volition. Further, we don’t even know (and many of us doubt) that a quantum event can change human behavior or decisions on a macro level. Some people have calculated that it can’t.  So the whole issue of quantum unpredictability is irrelevant to the main problem: whether, at a given moment, you can, through your own agency, have behaved or decided differently.

This brings up the problem of predictability. The narrator’s (and Doyle’s) argument is that if you cannot predict someone’s behavior or decision—even with perfect knowledge of everything—then we have free will. As I just said, quantum physics may cause such fundamental unpredictability, but doesn’t support the notion that we have LFW  Yet the video and Doyle suggest there is another form of fundamental unpredictability that can cause a lack of predictability despite perfect physical knowledge: computational undecidability. Both the narrator and Doyle accuse Sapolsky of complete ignorance of this concept, which, they say, constitutes “a major flaw in Sapolsky’s argument.”  The narrator says that if human behavior is fundamentally unpredictable, then it supports the idea that free will exists. The premise of this criticism is, of course, is that if you can’t predict human behavior and decisions, even with perfect physical knowledge, then you can’t say that we lack free will. But these arguments using predictability are flimsy arguments against determinism, and, in fact, we’ll never have the perfect knowledge we need to predict behavior.

The problem is that quantum mechanics can in principle wreck perfect predictability of behavior, but that possibility doesn’t support free will. So does “computational undecidability”, another thing that impedes prediction, leave room for free will? I don’t think so (see below).

 

The essay by Stuart Doyle on which this video is based can be accessed by clicking the link below, or you can find it (archived here). Doyle is a graduate student in psychology at the University of Kansas.

Let me start by saying that Doyle’s essay, while it makes its points clearly and strongly, seems almost mean, as if Doyle takes great joy in telling us how stupid Sapolsky is.  And this is coming from someone (me) who’s been accused of the same thing. (I plead not guilty, at least for my published work.). But for a scholar publishing a rebuttal on a major site, it seems to me uncharitable to say stuff like this:

Sapolsky’s conclusions about morality and politics stand on nothing beyond his personal tastes. His book was marketed with such authoritative headlines as “Stanford scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don’t have free will.” In contrast to the hype, Determined is ultimately a collection of partial arguments, conjoined incoherently. And Robert Sapolsky is to blame.

Sapolsky is to blame? Well, yes, of course he is, he’s the author, but the concept of blaming someone for writing a book they don’t like, and and accusing them of incoherence (I disagree) is not civil discourse. But let’s move on.

The observation that every object in the universe obeys physical law does directly imply that there is no amorphous “will” that can affect the laws of physics, something that physicist Sean Carroll (a compatibilist) has emphasized. To me, this puts the onus on those who accept LFW to tell us what aspect of human volition is independent of the laws of physics.What form of nonphysical magic can change the output of our neurons? So far, nobody has done this.  Thus, to a large extent, I think, one can tentatively accept determinism simply from knowing that every physical object obeys well-known laws and, as Carroll has written, “The laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood.”  Carroll:

All we need to account for everything we see in our everyday lives are a handful of particles — electrons, protons, and neutrons — interacting via a few forces — the nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism — subject to the basic rules of quantum mechanics and general relativity. You can substitute up and down quarks for protons and neutrons if you like, but most of us don’t notice the substructure of nucleons on a daily basis. That’s a remarkably short list of ingredients, to account for all the marvelous diversity of things we see in the world.

So yes, Carroll is a determinist in a way that refutes libertarian free will, but in the link saying he’s a compatibilist, you’ll see that he says that we have a sort of free will instantiated in the emergent properties of humans acting as agents and expressing preferences. (Of course our tastes and preferences are also formed in our brain by the laws of physics.) Well, there is no real emergence that defies the laws of physics: emergence may not be predictable from lower-level phenomena, but it is consistent and derives from  lower-level phenomena. Saying, as Doyle does, that “The ‘mechanism’ that produces deliberative choices is the whole person” is to say nothing that refutes determinism.

As I reread Doyle’s paper, I realized that although he does point out some contradictions in Sapolsky’s arguments, Doyle does nothing to dispel determinism.  What appears to be the central contention of his essay is that there is another way that physical objects can behave unpredictably beyond quantum mechanics, and that way is computational decidability. But that supports LFW no more than does any unpredictability of quantum mechanics.

Here’s what Doyle says:

So what could give us the ability to surprise Laplace’s demon? Computational undecidability. This is a term describing a system that cannot be predicted, given complete knowledge of its present state. This fundamental unpredictability shows up in algorithmic computation, formal mathematical systems, and dynamical systems. Though an unpredictable dynamical system may evoke the concept of chaos, undecidability is a different sort of unpredictability. As described by one of the greatest living information theorists, C.H. Bennett:

For a dynamical system to be chaotic means that it exponentially amplifies ignorance of its initial condition; for it to be undecidable means that essential aspects of its long-term behavior—such as whether a trajectory ever enters a certain region—though determined, are unpredictable even from total knowledge of the initial condition.

If a system exhibits undecidability, then it is unpredictable even to Laplace’s demon, while a system that is merely chaotic is perfectly predictable to the demon. Chaos is only unpredictable because the initial conditions are not perfectly known. So it would be fair to dismiss that kind of unpredictability as mere ignorance—an epistemological issue, not an ontological reality. But the delineation between the epistemic and the ontic falls apart when we talk about what Laplace’s demon can’t know. An issue is “merely” epistemological when there is a fact of the matter, but the fact is unknowable. There actually is no fact about how an undecidable system will behave until it behaves. For a fact to exist, it must be in reference to some aspect of reality. But nothing about present reality could ground a fact about the future behavior of an undecidable system. In contrast, the exact actual state of present reality grounds facts about the future of chaotic systems. We just can’t know the exact actual state of present reality, thus unpredictability is “merely” epistemological in the case of chaos, but not in the case of undecidability.

Arguably, human behavior is undecidable, not just chaotic. And that would mean that human choice is free in exactly the way we’d want it to be; determined—by our own whole selves, with no fact of the matter of what we’ll choose before we choose it. But Sapolsky seems unaware of undecidability as a concept. He mislabels cellular automata as chaotic, rather than recognizing the truth that they exhibit undecidability. This is a major factual error on Sapololsky’s part.

First of all, from what I’ve read of computational undecidability, it is a phenomenon not of physical objects, but of  philosophy combined with mathematical concepts and models. As Wikipedia says (and yes, I’ve read more than that article):

There are two distinct senses of the word “undecidable” in contemporary use. The first of these is the sense used in relation to Gödel’s theorems, that of a statement being neither provable nor refutable in a specified deductive system. The second sense is used in relation to computability theory and applies not to statements but to decision problems, which are countably infinite sets of questions each requiring a yes or no answer. Such a problem is said to be undecidable if there is no computable function that correctly answers every question in the problem set. The connection between these two is that if a decision problem is undecidable (in the recursion theoretical sense) then there is no consistent, effective formal system which proves for every question A in the problem either “the answer to A is yes” or “the answer to A is no”.

Two points here. First, Doyle gives not one example of a biological system in which “computational undecidability” would obtain.  If there was one, why didn’t he mention it? It seems to me solely a mathematical/logical concept, and my (admittedly cursory) readings have turned up nothing in biology or physics that seems “computationally undecidable”, much less in a way that would give us free will.

Second, even if there is a fundamental and non-quantum form of unpredictability in physics and biology, that doesn’t open up the possibility of free will. That would depend on whether our “will” could, in some non-physical way, affect the behavior of molecules. If it cannot happen with quantum mechanics, then how can it happen with computational undecidability? Unless Doyle tells us how this mathematical/logical idea can somehow affect our behavior according to our “will”, he has no argument against determinism and thus has no argument for free will.

Now it’s true that belief in “physical determinism—folding into that term quantum and other unpredictable effects not affected by our volition)—is largely a conclusion from observing nature. But just because we cannot absolutely prove determinism of behavior from science, we can still increase determinism’s priors by various experiments. These include recent studies showing that you can predict, using brain scanning, binary decisions that people make before they are conscious of having made them. For example, if people are given a choice of adding or subtracting two numbers, scanning their brains shows that you can, with substantial probability (60-70%), predict whether they’ll add or subtract up to ten seconds before they are conscious of having made a choice. And this is from crude methods of measuring brain activity (e.g., fMRI). Perhaps by measuring individual neurons or groups of neurons we could predict even better. But the experiments so far imply that decisions are made before people are conscious of them, and that raises the Bayesian priors that people’s behaviors are determined by physics, not by their “will”.

And there are various other experiments showing that you can both increase or decrease people’s sense of volition.  Electrical stimulation of the brain can make people think that they made a decision when in fact it’s purely the result of stimulating certain neurons. This causes people to make up stories of why they did things like raise their hand when a part of their brain is stimulated (“I decided to wave at that nurse”). But that sense of volition is bogus. This kind of post facto confabulation, which occurs very soon after you decide something or do something, is what makes us think what we have LFW. Further, there may be evolutionary reasons why we think we have libertarian free will, but I won’t get into those. Suffice it to say that I think that our feeling of having LFW is merely a very powerful illusion—an illusion that may have been installed in our brains by natural selection.

On the other hand, you can make people think that they didn’t have volition when in fact they did. A Ouija board is one example: people unconsciously move the “cursor” around to make words when they think that it’s moving independently of their will.  There are other experiments like these, all showing that you can either strengthen or weaken people’s sense of volition and will using various psychological tricks.  And they all go to refute the idea of libertarian free will

So yes, I think Sapolsky is right. His determinism agrees with nearly all the scientists (including compatibilists) who think that the notion of libertarian free will is bogus. To think otherwise is to believe that there is some kind of non-physical mental magic that can change the laws of physics.

One final point. Arguments about free will are not just philosophical wheel-spinning, for they play directly into an important part of society: reward and punishment—especially punishment. If the legal system truly embraced determinism of behavior, we could still have punishment, but it would be very different. We would punish to keep bad people off the streets, to give people a chance for rehabilitation (if they can be rehabilitated), and to deter others.  But what we would not have is retributive punishment: punishment for having made the wrong choice.

Legal systems are grounded on the notion that we are morally responsible, but under determinism we’re not. Yes, we can be responsible for an act, but “moral” responsibility is intimately connected with libertarian free will; it’s the idea that we have the ability, at any given time, to act either morally or immorally (or make any any other alternative decision, even if it doesn’t involve morality). Yes, I know there are some who think that the justice system already implicitly accepts determinism, but they are wrong. For if it did, we wouldn’t have any form of retributive punishment, including capital punishment.

As for rewarding good behavior, well, yes, you couldn’t have done otherwise than, say, saved a drowning person. But rewarding people who do good is a spur for other people to do good.  Even if the rewarded people don’t “deserve” plaudits in the sense that their accomplishments didn’t come from LFW, handing out rewards for things that society approves of is simply a good thing to do—for society.

Oh, a p.s.  Because people feel so strongly that they do have libertarian free will, I have faced more opposition when touting determinism than when touting the truth of evolution. As I always say, “It’s much harder to convince a free-willer of the truth of determinism than to convince a creationist of the truth of evolution.”  People feel so strongly that they have LFW that I have suffered two unpleasant consequences for touting determinism. I’ve told these stories before, but a big jazz musician nearly attacked me for implying that his solos were not truly extemporaneous, and that he could not have played a different solo, and on another occasion an old friend kicked me out of his house because he couldn’t abide the notion of determinism. No creationist has ever treated me in those ways!

James Gleick favorably reviews a book arguing that humans have libertarian free will

January 14, 2024 • 10:00 am

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:

here

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

A new magazine collaboration between Big Think and Templeton

November 1, 2023 • 12:45 pm

Reader Dave called my attention to this new online magazine called “The Well”. Click on the screenshot to go to the site.

And below that, the scary part (I’ve outlined it in red):

Templeton!  There they go again with the Big Questions, except some of them are answerable this time (“no, we don’t have free will,” and “no, evolution is not directional”).  What Templeton is doing, and is coopting a pretty reputable site to do so—though “Big Think” is sponsored by the Charles Koch Foundation—is to claim that there is Something Beyond Science, something numinous or ungraspable. Remember, the John Templeton Foundation was set up by the hedge fund billionaire to show people that the more we learn about science, the more we understand about God (now “spirituality”). As reader Dave wrote me:

Templeton’s continual attempts to usurp science is consistently repulsive — particularly by way of its other facade, Nautilus Magazine. So I couldn’t resist passing the aforementioned along.
Here’s something even sadder in the first issue, some self-help with Jon Haidt. The 11-minute video is okay, but I wouldn’t lend my name to Templeton. Now Haidt is one of the prize horses in Templeton’s stall:

And here’s an article saying that the “self” is real, and that buttresses the idea of free will:

As Vonnegut said, so it goes. . .