A handful of musings about free will have been popping up in my blog reader of late. Jerry Coyne has been discussing the issue with Eric MacDonald in a series of posts (further links therein). Russell Blackford writes a long post that he promises isn’t the post he will eventually write, David Eagleman has an article in the Atlantic, and Zach Weiner also chimes in. So we have a biologist studying theology, an ex-Anglican priest turned agnostic, a philosopher and neuroscientist both of whom write science fiction, and a webcartoonist studying physics. That constitutes a reasonable spectrum of opinion. Still, what discussion of reality is complete without a cosmologist chiming in?
In some ways, asking whether free will exists is a lot like asking whether time really exists. In both cases, it’s different from asking “do unicorns exist?” or “does dark matter exist?” In these examples, we are pretty clear on what the concepts are supposed to denote, and what it would mean for them to actually exist; what’s left is a matter of collecting evidence and judging its value. I take it that this is not what we mean when we ask about the existence of free will.
It’s possible to deny the existence of something while using it all the time. Julian Barbour doesn’t believe time is real, but he is perfectly capable of showing up to a meeting on time. Likewise, people who question the existence of free will don’t have any trouble making choices. (John Searle has joked that people who deny free will, when ordering at a restaurant, should say “just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined I will get.”) Whatever it is we are asking, it’s not simply a matter of evidence.
When people make use of a concept and simultaneously deny its existence, what they typically mean is that the concept in question is nowhere to be found in some “fundamental” description of reality. Julian Barbour thinks that if we just understood the laws of physics better, “time” would disappear from our vocabulary. Likewise, discussions about the existence of free will often center on whether we really need to include such freedom as an irreducible component of reality, without which our understanding would be fundamentally incomplete.
There are people who do believe in free will in this sense; that we need to invoke a notion of free will as an essential ingredient in reality, over and above the conventional laws of nature. These are libertarians, in the metaphysical sense rather than the political-philosophy sense. They may explicitly believe that conscious creatures are governed by a blob of spirit energy that transcends materialist categories, or they can be more vague about how the free will actually manifests itself. But in either event, they believe that our freedom of choice cannot be reduced to our constituent particles evolving according to the laws of physics.
This version of free will, as anyone who reads the blog will recognize, I don’t buy at all. Within the regime of everyday life, the underlying laws of physics are completely understood. There’s a lot we don’t understand about consciousness, but none of the problems we face rise to the level that we should be tempted to distrust our basic understanding of how the atoms and forces inside our brains work. Note that it’s not really a matter of “determinism”; it’s simply a question of whether there are impersonal laws of nature at all. The fact that quantum mechanics introduces a stochastic component into physical predictions doesn’t open the door for true libertarian free will.
But I also don’t think that “playing a necessary role in every effective description of the world” is a very good way of defining “existence” or “reality.” If there is anything that modern physics has taught us, it’s that it’s very often possible to discuss a single situation in two or more completely different (but equivalent) ways. Duality in particle physics is probably the most carefully-defined example, but the same idea holds in more familiar contexts. When we talk about air in a room, we can describe it by listing the properties of each and every molecule, or we speak in coarse-grained terms about things like temperature and pressure. One description is more “fundamental,” in that its regime of validity is wider; but both have a regime of validity, and as long as we are in that regime, the relevant concepts have a perfectly good claim to “existing.” It would be silly to say that temperature isn’t “real,” just because the concept doesn’t appear in some fine-grained vocabulary.
We talk about the world using different levels of description, appropriate to the question of interest. Some levels might be thought of as “fundamental” and others as “emergent,” but they are all there. Does baseball exist? It’s nowhere to be found in the Standard Model of particle physics. But any definition of “exist” that can’t find room for baseball seems overly narrow to me. It’s true that we could take any particular example of a baseball game and choose to describe it by listing the exact quantum state of each elementary particle contained in the players and the bat and ball and the field etc. But why in the world would anyone think that is a good idea? The concept of baseball is emergent rather than fundamental, but it’s no less real for all of that.
Likewise for free will. We can be perfectly orthodox materialists and yet believe in free will, if what we mean by that is that there is a level of description that is useful in certain contexts and that includes “autonomous agents with free will” as crucial ingredients. That’s the “variety of free will worth having,” as Daniel Dennett would put it.
I’m not saying anything original — this is a well-known position, probably the majority view among contemporary philosophers. It’s a school of thought called compatibilism: see Wikipedia, or (better) the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Free will as an emergent phenomenon can be perfectly compatible with an underlying materialist view of the world.
Of course, just because it can be compatible with the laws of nature, doesn’t mean that the concept of free will actually is the best way to talk about emergent human behaviors. (Just because I know the rules of chess doesn’t make me a grandmaster.) There are still plenty of interesting questions remaining to be clarified. At the very least, there is some kind of tension between a microscopic view in which we’re just made of particles and a macroscopic one in which we have “choices.” David Albert does a great job of articulating this tension in this short excerpt from a Bloggingheads dialogue we did some time back.
I don’t generally think that the superior wisdom one acquires via training as a physicist grants one the power to see clearly through complicated issues and make philosophical conundrums dissolve away. But this is a case where insights from physics might actually be useful. In particular, what we are faced with is the task of reconciling effective theories at different levels of description that have apparently incompatible features: the impersonal evolution of the microscopic level (whether we go all the way to atoms, or stick with genes and neurons) and the irreducible possibility of “choice” at the macroscopic level.
This kind of tension also appears in physics. Indeed, the arrow of time is a great example. The microscopic laws of physics (as far as we know) are perfectly reversible; evolution forward in time is no different from evolution backward in time. But the macroscopic world is manifestly characterized by irreversibility. That doesn’t mean that the two descriptions are incompatible, just that we have to be careful about how they fit together. In the case of irreversibility, we realize that we need an extra ingredient: the particular configuration of our universe, not just the laws of physics.
In fact, the connection goes beyond a mere analogy. If you look up arguments against compatibilism, you find something called The Consequence Argument. This is based on the “fundamental difference between the past and future” — what we do now affects the future, but it doesn’t affect the past. Earlier times are fixed, while we can still influence later times. The consequence argument points out that deterministic laws imply that the future isn’t really up for grabs; it’s determined by the present state just as surely as the past is. So we don’t really have choices about anything. (For purposes of this discussion we can ignore the question of whether the microscopic laws really are deterministic; all that really matters are that there are laws.)
The problem with this is that it mixes levels of description. If we know the exact quantum state of all of our atoms and forces, in principle Laplace’s Demon can predict our future. But we don’t know that, and we never will, and therefore who cares? What we are trying to do is to construct an effective understanding of human beings, not of electrons and nuclei. Given our lack of complete microscopic information, the question we should be asking is, “does the best theory of human beings include an element of free choice?” The reason why it might is precisely because we have different epistemic access to the past and the future. The low entropy of the past allows for the existence of “records” and “memories,” and consequently forces us to model the past as “settled.” We have no such restriction toward the future, which is why we model the future as something we can influence. From this perspective, free will is no more ruled out by the consequence argument than the Second Law of Thermodynamics is ruled out by microscopic reversibility.
None of this quite settles the question of whether “free will” is actually a crucial ingredient in the best theory of human beings we can imagine developing. I suspect it is, but I’m willing to change my mind as we learn more. The context in which it really matters is when we turn to questions of moral responsibility. Should we hold people who do bad things responsible for their actions — even if our understanding of neuroscience improves to such an extent that we can identify precisely which gene or neuron “made them do it?” (This is the focus of Eagleman’s article.)
This is a resolutely practical question — who gets thrown in jail? Criminal law has the concept of mens rea, guilty mind. We don’t find people guilty of crimes simply because they committed them; they had to be responsible, in the sense that they had the mental capacity to have known better. In other words: we have a model of human beings as rational agents, able to gather and process information, understand consequences, and make decisions. When they make the wrong ones, they deserve to be punished. People who are incapable of this kind of rationality — young children, the mentally ill — are not held responsible in the same way.
Might we someday understand the brain so well, reducing thought to a series of mechanical processes, that this model ceases to be useful? It seems possible, but unlikely. We know that air is made of molecules, but the laws of thermodynamics haven’t lost their usefulness. Thinking of the collections of atoms we call “people” as rational agents capable of making choices seems like a pretty good theory to me, likely to remain useful for a long while to come. At least, that’s what I choose to think.
I’m not sure why people object so much to the notion of free will. Sure, it’s not a very accurate or physically descriptive term but it is historically defined as a key concept. That should be enough to legitimize discussion of it. We shouldn’t think of free will as being something that allows us to be independent of all current and previous forces in our lives. Rather it should be seen as allowing us for short time periods to rise above (or below) those influences. We know those exceptional and unexplainable events occur occasionally and you can’t discount them. It just seems to me that it is an unfortunate historical accident that it came to be called free will. It may not be any more free than events that we understand.
I have a vague feeling though that for every one of these odd events in each person’s life there will be a corresponding opposite reaction in another person somewhere else in the world/universe. I do think humans have portions of both classical and large scale quantum mechanical processes working on them. Most of the time it is classically modeled but not always.
Perhaps this old quote of JBS Haldane’s is pertinent here 😉 :
“If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motion of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to believe that my beliefs are true… and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”
If we have free will or not, how would we know? It certainly feels as if I have free choice, but perhaps all my decisions, including those that seem “free” to me, were predetermined eons ago?
How is attributing free will to quantum indeterminacy different from saying that human behavior is at least partly the result of tossing really, really small coins? And what is the moral significance or utility of that?
Brendan, Some things don’t have an answer and any attempted answer by me would just be a facile response.
I think you make two very good points that are often overlooked in this discussion, and quickly lead down blind alleys — one is that quantum mechanics’ indeterminism doesn’t give carte blanche to those arguing for free will; the other is that just because something isn’t present at the fundamental level, there’s no sense to saying it ‘doesn’t exist’ if it very clearly is part of a useful description on the applicable scale (I have sometimes joked that just because a description of my body on the cellular level does not mention my arms, it does not make sense to say that my arms don’t exist). So in that sense, both the ‘the universe isn’t deterministic, so we can have free will’ and the ‘the fundamental laws contain no freedom’ camps are missing the point somewhat (besides, I can’t resist pointing out that QM’s indeterminism is quite interpretation-dependent).
But, as is very often the case in such discussions, I believe there is a slight case of misunderstanding here, as not everyone is talking about the same thing when they talk about ‘free will’. Those that point towards the immutable time-evolution of physical systems given the requisite laws and boundary conditions generally argue against a ‘could have done otherwise’-definition of free will: that even given the exactly same physical conditions, a different course of action would have been possible. Such a concept, I think, requires an irreducible metaphysical component.
However, while this is certainly a position held by some, I think there is actually more variance to the concept. For instance, another definition is that the will is its own ultimate cause, which superficially seems to be saying the same thing — but there is a somewhat subtle issue here that permits drawing a distinction, and that is the fact that Laplace’s Demon can’t always accurately predict the future, even in a completely deterministic universe, even given complete knowledge of all the physical laws and states. Or rather, he can’t predict it without doing the equivalent to observing the system’s evolution.
The reason for that is computational: a sufficiently complex system may be regarded as a universal computer; being able to uniquely predict its evolution then would be equivalent to being able to solve the halting problem. Take a ‘ballistic’ computer, essentially an n-body problem; set it up appropriately, such that its evolution performs some computation. The question of what state the system will be in after a certain time can then always be re-interpreted as the question of whether or not the computation will halt. Even Laplace’s Demon, provided he does not have access to hypercomputational means, will have no other choice, in order to ‘predict’ the system’s evolution, to observe the system’s evolution, though possibly in some simulated form — which, however, does not change anything about the system’s essentials: whatever states the system goes through, the simulation must also undergo.
Now, humans are systems of the required complexity; thus, in order to find out whatever a human will do, the only way is to either observe their actions, or simulate them and observe the simulation — which, however, would be entirely equivalent: the simulated human would make the decision in just the same way the ‘real’ one does; he would know no difference. In this sense, then, the will may be its own ultimate cause, while still there is no possibility of ‘could have done otherwise’ — indeed, the notion does not make sense in this analysis: there is no fact of the matter of what one could have done, as the only factually certain thing is what one actually has done; and as Dennett observes, the ‘same exact situation’ is something unique, so it makes no sense to talk as if one could revisit it and ‘change one’s mind’.
This still does not solve the problem of moral culpability — here, I think, Dennett’s concept of ‘evitability’ bears fruit: one can’t escape the outcome of any given situation, but one can modify the likelihood of some undesirable outcome occurring in a host of similar situations. Like the golf player can train himself to make the put in more cases than the amateur, although in any given case, his success is precisely determined by the physical variables, so can a moral agent ‘train’ himself to raise his ‘evitability’, i.e. his ability to evade consequences considered morally undesirable in any given situation. The judgement of being ‘morally good’ is thus put on the same, unambiguous footing as the judgement of being good at golf; criminal prosecution and punishment constitute ‘training’ towards greater moral capacities, towards higher evitability.
There is no free will.
There is no evidence to support the existence of free will.
I think the error being made by (almost) every post here is to focus solely on the ‘free’ part rather than the ‘will’. If you assume that the will/mind is entirely materially based, usually by equating it with the brain, then of course it becomes part of the natural laws that we know about, whether quantum or otherwise.
However, there are big problems with this assumption, one of which is that there really hasnt been put forward any satisfactory explanation for how a purely physical object would result in consciousness. You can point to its adaptive usefulessness (which im sure it has), but that only partly explains why there are lots of us with it, rather than explaining its unique properties. I think this has come about due to a huge exaggeration of what we think we can know from neuroscience, which is in fact an incredibly crude and inexact science. Many of the claims upon which this tendency to ascribe consciousness to the brain are based are actually laughably bad from a scientific point of view.
Anyway, given how little we actually know about how the brain works, and the fundamental lack of a satisfactory explanation for how a physical object alone could produce consciousness, we have to allow for the possibility that mind, and in this case will is something of a type that we do not yet fully understand. Im aware that this smacks of the religious explanation, but I think its more of agnostic view. We have to accept sometimes that there are things we do not (yet) understand, rather than assuming everything fits into the rules and laws we already have. It seems pretty arrogant, though hardly a new thing, to think that with a few latest discoveries we’ve solved problems that have persisted for millenia
well, here goes: several years ago I worked out the six-fold set of semantic confusions underlying the concept of ‘freedom’ when applied to volition – it’s not even clear what ‘free’ adds to voluntary as opposed to involuntary behavior, a thoroughly respectable neurological distinction without any necessity for metaphysical overtones. Anyway, I’ll be glad to send the whole argument to whomever would like to think the question through; who knows, I may have overlooked something! try m.corner@hccnet.nl.
Free will is two words. Will which is defined as our ‘ability to make decisions.’ Free defined as ‘without restraint.’
Most people who say ‘free will’ really mean ‘will’.
Certainly we make decisions, but we do not do so without restraint. Ordering off a menu is a good example, I can go to McDonald’s and decide between a Big Mac and Chicken McNuggets but can’t decide on a Whopper.
What we have is not a free will, but an influenced will, we make decisions based on the influences around us, most of which of out of our control. I didn’t choose to be a first-born male to poor parents (who later became middle class) in the United States in the late 60’s. Nor did people choose to be born to Ethiopian parents during the famine of the 80’s. Who would choose that given a ‘free’ choice???!! These events so obviously out of our control have a dramatic effect on the choices we do make throughout our lives.
Baruch Spinoza: “Free will is merely ignorance of the causes of our actions.”
Regarding criminal culpability:
If free will exists, it is right that we judge and punish people for their crimes and the harm they inflict.
If free will does not exist, then we have no choice as to whether we judge. If we do judge and punish, then we were always bound to do so.
In other words, judgement and punishment is either good or unavoidable.
I agree with RP and others: I may WISH to visit the Moon or levitate to 1000 meters with nothing but my own volition, but my alleged ‘free will’ is influenced and constrained by circumstances beyond my control within the natural environment governed by physical law. Whatever I MAY achieve (like deciding to make coffee or tea) must always be confined within the potentially doable. The capacity to ‘decide’ on a permissable course of action isn’t at all evidence for ‘free will’. Not even a respectable hint of it.
Our ‘wills’ are subject to our experience of what is potentially doable. If some hitherto unknown physical phenomenon provides a fresh direction for action, we discover we’ve expanded the frontiers of our potential ‘working space’ and call that ‘learning’ (and that addresses our definition of ‘intelligence’ – the ability to capitalize on information), but our ‘freedom’ must remain within the penitentiary of the laws of nature. And so it is with our practical wherewithal – I COULD conceivably visit the Moon if I could summon enough money and persuade and organize armies of engineers to obey my bidding. The laws of nature do not explicitly forbid it, but there are many such limiting probabilistic inertias that make many such goals so exceedingly unlikely as to represent many layers of nested barbed-wire fences around the compound…and those fences prescribed by physical law are innumerable and exist at every scale. Some of the barriers may have chinks of weakness or may even be entirely illusory, but there must inevitably be those that are impassable, in principle and as a matter of practicality or probability.
If determinism can’t escape the boundaries of the possible, certainly, neither can mere wishful thinking whimsied up by human imaginations partial to illusions such as the ‘self’, ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ or whatever else we fancy might be in the driver’s seat. But while free self-determination is an illusion, nature is luxuriously generous with what games and toys and dreams we ARE allowed to play with. If we ever attained authentic freedom, it would be tantamount to being dead…but then we wouldn’t be ‘we’ anymore, would we?
Compatibilism describes the extraordinary word juggling that you are driven to when compelled to reconcile incompatible beliefs that are the inevitable consequences of your ideological mindset. If you must have your cake and eat it, can I recommend solipsism as a world view. All things are possible there.
In fact there is a far better approach that comprehensively solves the problem if you adopt the position that laws of nature are merely descriptions of observed regularities (Regularity vs Necessitarianism). I would hazard that this is the only defensible position for a card carrying atheist.
See this article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The Regularists’ Trump Card – The Dissolution of the Problem of Free Will and Determinism( http://www.iep.utm.edu/lawofnat/#SH5f )
This article correctly identifies that free will and free choice are different concepts with different meanings. Since the article talks about free choice almost exclusively, I find it regrettable that the distinction wasn’t better elucidated… not that this deficiency isn’t found as a pervasive condition throughout the general writings on will and choice.
For my purposes, I think of freedom of choice as being on a scale where one’s freedom to choose among options is in direct proportion to ones ability to influence the brain ahead of time. With this model (soft determinism perhaps?), the choice may be impacted by our efforts through conditioning or environmental exposure, but by the actual moment in time when the choice is made, one’s own ability to actually choose is effectively zero.
I have found the pervasive belief of freedom to act quite perplexing. We are not free to act in any way we wish or choose. I cannot fly by flapping my arms. In like-kind fashion, I cannot cause my brain to produce predetermined behaviors because my physical architecture provides no such mechanism for the absolute control of the brain. I only have the benefits of habitual/systematic behaviors which are easily activated as a consequence of their presence/existence which ultimately derives from outside of me, either from inherited genetics, epi-genetics, or environmental conditioning.
The freedom to will is limited both by the relative degree of freedom to choose and the opportunity to realize choices through action.
There are some inaccuracies in the article. Both libertarianism and compatibilism are basically physicalist theories (or actually classes of physicalist theories). Neither ” invoke[s] a notion of free will as an essential ingredient in reality, over and above the conventional laws of nature.” Libertarianism says that free will or moral responsibility is only compatible with indeterminism while compatibilism says that free will or moral responsibility is compatible with determinism.
In fact there is a far better approach that comprehensively solves the problem if you adopt the position that laws of nature are merely descriptions of observed regularities
psmith #64: I read the article about “Regularism” with interest (as I have sympathy with the idea), but there’s a crucial issue that the article doesn’t address.
Instead of talking about physical theories in the abstract, let’s talk about a specific theory, like the Standard Model. And instead of debating whether the Standard Model “necessarily” holds, let’s consider only the empirical fact that it has been found to hold, in every low-energy, non-gravitational situation known to humankind.
Now, is the Regularist view that the Standard Model can be violated inside a human brain? If, as the article argues, “the laws of nature accommodate themselves to our choice” (whichever choice we make), then it would seem the answer has to be yes, since the Standard Model (within its domain of validity) gives a complete set of rules for evolving an initial quantum state into a final one. (Unless, that is, the role of our choices is to retroactively determine parts of the initial state of the universe, which is an interesting though radical idea.)
In any case, the point I’m trying to make is that, if you want to talk about the laws of nature “accommodating themselves” to human choices, then you can no longer stay safely on a philosophical plane! Like it or not, you’re now (at least in principle) asking empirical questions about physics.
One of the only things I feel confident about here is that, if you notice your metaphysical views on free will influencing your views on crime and punishment, you’re making a mistake! As an example, it’s not the case that determinism would invalidate “some” reasons to punish criminals (like revenge), and not invalidate other reasons (like public safety). Any reason to punish that’s good in an indeterministic world is equally good in a deterministic one! The simple argument for this was already given by several commenters; see especially the Ambrose Bierce poem quoted by Braden #38.
Personally, I even find something patronizing about the strangely-persistent idea that the determinism of the laws of physics (if true) could ever be a valid legal defense. It’s as if people reason: “yes, of course those poor uneducated criminals steal and murder all the time: they have to, because of their genes and environment! But shame on us educated enlightened people if we choose to punish them, since our free will was never in question.”
This is as silly as arguing that computers cannot add numbers. At a certain level, they can’t. They can only manipulate electrons so that the relationships between the original and final voltages and currents can be interpreted as adding two numbers. There is nothing that “adds” in a computer circuit any more than in a mechanical adding machine.
Biologists are as bad as computer scientists. They’ll correct you when you say that MRSA has evolved resistance to antibiotics. Bacteria don’t evolve resistance, they’ll say. It is only the selection by the toxin as applied to the statistical population that changes the frequency of the blah blah blah. I usually stop listening even before this point.
Free will is about the decision process, and we know that making decisions involves ATP, oxygen and neurotransmitters. We call people lacking ATP, oxygen and neurotransmitters dead and, in most cultures, they are regarded as incapable of making decisions without the help of a shaman, ouija board or executor. With suitable instruments, we can even watch decisions being made as neurons interact to produce a consensus, and we’ll be seeing a lot more of this in the future. Free will is no less free for being predictable and comprehensible. That’s why we have novels. (I’m re-reading Lord Jim, so I’m sort of wallowing in this.)
I’ll agree with Scott Aaronson among others. The issue of moral responsibility operates at a societal level. It has nothing to do with how individuals make decisions, but rather how our societies enforce behavior. Libertarians tend to have a problem with this because they have one particular belief system about how behavior should be enforced and, like so many others, defend it on religious, though not supernatural, grounds.
One brief observation: Scientific or physics specific descriptions of reality appear to negate metaphysical concepts, for some people, according to one line of reasoning. Accordingly, if the reductionist deterministic argument is the one that’s held (which John Conway of Princeton disagrees with http://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf), then it follows the future is strictly determined. Essentially, a determinist in that sense shouldn’t be bothered to debate anyone, since the outcome of that argument has likewise itself been determined itself.
Of course, it may be predetermined that you will argue for predeterminism anyway, and that John Conway is predetermined to disagree with you.
In any case, as Dr. Conee and Dr. Sider argue, if a determinist is punched in the face, he really shouldn’t be angry about it. After all, it was bound to happen anyway.
I quote this amusing solution:
“If someone believes in hard determinism, here’s a little experiment to try. Punch him in the face, really hard. Then try to convince him not to blame you. After all, according to him, you had no choice but to punch him! I predict you will find it very hard to convince him what he preaches.” (Conee & Sider, 118, Riddles of Existence)
good stuff
Disclaimer:
No advocacy of violence in philosophical debates is implied or suggested by my citing the above quote from Conee & Sider.
One more thought: (seriously, as opposed to the above)
Rather than using the example of crime in this debate, it is also useful to consider such syndromes as schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, adhd, etc. Each of these illnesses have significant genetic components, and although the specific genes have not been found, they likely will be found in the future.
It is non-trivial to state that individuals suffering from each of these disorders have been stigmatized by society and held culpable for their illness in past history. Before the 20th century, mental disease was seen as a consequence of sin or other misconduct or other types of misdeeds by parents.
Recent genetic advances challenge that bigotry. Science shows that these people are not at fault for their illnesses and that their parents do not cause them, as was regrettably suggested by previous psychologists.
In these instances it is useful and morally important to know the cause of illnesses, to recognize that they contribute to impairment in judgment, and yes, free will. By illuminating the real causes, the mystery of mental illnesses is dissipated.
If free will is only thought of in libertarian terms, then it is easy to condemn the mentally ill homeless person, and dismiss their fate as the simple result of poor decisions.
These people have impaired power of choice, i.e. impaired free will, and the laudable and important contribution of science has been to illuminate that fact, not because society wants to excuse bad outcomes or violent behavior, but because we need to understand these illnesses, the way in which they impair brain function, so that we can treat them.
Additionally, this scientific understanding of psychiatric disease, allows psychiatrists and families to come to terms with their patients and family members respectively, and to recognize that perceived bad behavior reflects a disease process that can be treated. Society, when it recognizes the person behind the disease, in spite of misconduct and poor behavior, and understands the disease process at work, can be moved to better treatment and humane care.
In that sense free will can be lost, through illness or disease, and possibly regained, through enlightened treatment and potential advances in the future.
Freedom is not universal at all times and for all people; the goal of science should include the restoration of free choice to those who have lost it, through disease, accident, or other misfortune, and to understand to the extent possible, how it is that bad outcomes and misconduct occurs, so that, to the extent possible, it can be treated.
For an alternative view of the subject consider Philip Clayton’s paper:
Neuroscience, the Person and God: An Emergentist Account
http://www.akademieforum.de/grenzfragen/open/Grundlagen/Clay_Neuro/NeuroscienceThePersonAndGod.pdf
Terry Horgan provides a very clear exposition of the compatibilist position here:
Causal Compatibilism and the Exclusion Problem
http://sites.google.com/site/vcoloquiofilosofiadamente/CausalCompatibilismandtheExclusionPr.doc
Every claim that “I did something,” or that “you do something,” presupposes free will lest those claims make no sense. When I say, “I made a sandwich,” I claim that I am the cause of the sandwich and that I alone am the cause of that sandwich. Free will is when the agent is the sole cause of something, in the sense that without that agent’s acting, the something would not have happened. Most human beings are causal agents such that they choose something without there being any prior cause compelling them to do it.
Moral responsibility comes into play when I choose to do good over evil, or evil over good, and although I am tempted to choose evil, nothing forces me to do so. That is, I cannot be forced to choose evil because such is a contradiction between “choice” and “being forced.”
If I was compelled to kill her, then I did not actually commit the killing because the true cause is whatever compelled my body to perform in that way. I am compelled by my body to recover from a stumble because that recovery is nothing I choose to do. But, if I murder her, then I am the sole cause of her death, such that without my acting, she would not have died.
Thus, the existence is free will is not proved so much as it is presupposed in nearly everything we do and think. Of course, there can be no scientific (empirical) proof of free will because science necessarily and rightly presupposes that nothing happens without a cause.
It is absolutely ludicrous that anyone can “understand consequences”. That is the whole point of the result of Bell’s inequality. So there is absolutely no certain outcome to any event until after the observation of the consequence occurs.
The flaw in some of your statements is that you are still warped by some notion of universal justice, which simply can not be supported based on the strengh of human logic. Human logic is invaribly flawed when put to paper, and contradictions arise and propogate through the system and are exploited by people everyday (go talk to some tax lawyers if you don’t believe me).
So the only understanding one has to have is que sera sera, which is entirely a probabilistic situation and has nothing to do with fate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbKHDPPrrc