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 wish I had found this blog a little earlier. Can’t change that regardless of free will, but the consequence is that I’ll be doing a little more exploration to see what else is out there. Is that pre-deterministic, or was it chance, or was it the result of a continually variable being, (influenced by a set of past exposures and genetic make-up and whatever and whatever as well as free will).
I maintain that the belief that our understanding of physics and laws determined from our observations and analysis still has vast gaps in it based on the limited range of our present perceptual abilities, as well as our understanding of a brain and the mind that develops within, or with it. Much of this type of discussion still depends on definitions, which in spite of all efforts, still vary individually. It’s one of the most dramatic (and fun and sometimes scary) aspects of what it is to ‘be.’
But yes, free will is. My free will is, at 64, to keep looking for, keep observing all, keep learning more, keep imagining more and keep foremost in my ‘mind’, which seems to reside in my brain as the receptor and manipulator and analyzer of all of my senses, that there will always be more to understand.
I see little to be gained by including a vague and amorphous concept of a God in this discussion nor do I see any advantage in a vain hope of understanding or defining the insanity, drives, or causal relationships that become a serial killer. At the same time, trying to learn how society can detect them and try to minimize their impact on the rest of us can’t be other than worthwhile. But I seriously question any level of ‘understanding’ that will permit prevention of their development.
The awesome variabilities of being and evolution will always provide some things or some actions that we don’t understand and can’t control and therefore fear. The best we can hope for is to gain enough understanding, within the limits of our perceptial abilities, to enable us to better control their impacts. That, I think, also applies to everything else that we think about.
There are way too many attempts to compress our understandings of anything into elegant and simple formulae and laws and rules, based on beliefs and concepts that we can stop the continual evolution of and variable changes in anything long enough to make that determination.
Rather, for myself, it’s much more interesting to explore and evolve, with the thought that there will always be more, because everything will evolve and change beyond my present understanding.
Great article, by the way.
Suppose we lived on a closed timelike curve. All the microscopic particle worldlines and field values are appropriately periodic in time, so everything is consistent. What would be our perception? Would we “remember” the future by recalling the past cycle of time? Would we feel free will in the same way, or would the illusion be spoiled?
It seems this debate is moving towards an unofficial conclusion that there may actually be an element of free will in everyone. If that is the case, and I’m not saying that is the unanimous consensus, then the the next question would be how much are our actions predetermined by everything that has molded each of us up this point, and how much are our actions determined by chance/free will, or however you define it. I’d suggest looking at the case of identical twins in various environments to make a scientific analysis of it.
My superficial past reading of how identical twins behave would lead me to believe that there is a much smaller proportion of free will in all of us than we are led to think. Of course, the identical twin analysis adds an interpretational problem. Perhaps we should treat them as one quantum
mechanical object who change TOGETHER subject to a higher level of free will than their individual differences would indicate. That is, perhaps their behavior is still dictated by a high level of chance but whatever that behavior is there is then a strong correlation between the action of the two twins. My understanding is that this would agree with quantum principles on much smaller scales. It is confusing how one should interpret this.
@Habegger: For one take on the heritability of political beliefs, see Alford’s 2005 twin study: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=poliscifacpub&sei-redir=1#search=%22alford%20twin%20study%22
Summary from Sciencedaily:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080206091437.htm
“On the issue of property taxes, for example, an astounding four-fifths of identical twins shared the same opinion, while only two-thirds of fraternal twins agreed.”
One of the better twin studies was by Bouchard, of twins raised apart, and he found: “When journalists first began interviewing Bouchard’s twins-raised-apart, they focused on the spectacularly similar pairs, like the Springer-Lewis twins. But those twins turned out to be outliers in the Minnesota study….. On average, identical twins raised separately are about 50 percent similar — and that defeats the widespread belief that identical twins are carbon copies.” source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/twins/twins2.htm
Justin, thanks for the references. I read them all and was really impressed with the first one you mentioned.
I would like to point out that under a model of determinism, there is no such things as willing slave
Apperently the spam filters find the words “free content” to be spam, wild,
Noise is free too.
@ Max Thomas (73): When I say “My robot butler made me a sandwich” (or, less fancifully, “my chess computer chose to move a pawn”), I am not suggesting that either has free will.
While I believe in free will, we should take note that there are already machines that process information (with embedded feedback mechanisms), consider various alternatives, and then select a course of action (i.e. they “make choices”). Chess computers are an obvious example. Humans engage in the speculation of the counterfactual position that we “could have” made different choices in the past, whatever our actual choices were. So long as human choice selection algorithms were chaotic (i.e., incredibly sensitive to initial conditions) to explain the high degree of (seeming) variability in human decisions, I don’t see how we can definitively state that the counterfactual is true.
The impression that we have free will in making choices, could simply be a byproduct of our remembering that we were considering different possible choices, much as a chess computer considers various possible moves, even though e actually had as little ability to defy our biological programming as that chess computer would have had to defy its program.
An excellent statement of the compatibilist position in 1966 by then future Nobelist, the great neurologist Roger Sperry:
Mind, Brain, and Humanist Values, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists September 1966:
http://people.uncw.edu/puente/sperry/sperrypapers/60s/125-1966.pdf
(This is a pdf of a photocopy.) The essay evolved into Sperry’s book Science and Moral Priority.
Sperry asked “Is it possible … in principle, to construct a complete objective explanatory model of brain function without including consciouness and mental phenomena in the causal sequence?”
Sperry said that his “mentalist” position was then in a tiny minority, but per Sean it seems to have gained since then.
Quotation from Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (1998), pp. 214-215:
“If we want to be independent sources of activity in the world, we must accept ambivalence, uncertainty, struggle, and conflict within ourselves – all of which are connected to the indeterminacy that is required for free will. The ambivalence, uncertainty, and risk are in turn related to competing images of the good that must inevitably confront those who would be ultimate creators of their own ends.”
Professor Robert Kane teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and received his PhD from Yale in 1964.
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See this book
Free Will: The Scandal in Philosophy
for a complete, detailed and thoughtful treatment of the subject
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/books/scandal/
Interesting comments and references offered here. I think it might be worthwhile reading Doyle’s book that was just listed if I had more hours in the day. Going back to the reference : http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=poliscifacpub&sei-redir=1#search=%22alford%20twin%20study%22
…it says in it that identical twins as they are growing up often try to act as independently from each other as possible in order to be recognized by first their parents, and then their other siblings, and then their friends and acquaintances. It sounds like they artificially create a slight variation on how they really see themselves so they can each have their own identity.
Later when they become adults and get some spatial separation they naturally give up that self induced differentiating. The similarity in lifestyle, professions and political views between them often become profound at that time even if there is not much communication between them. If you think about this they really are behaving conceptually exactly like quarks in a nucleon. That is, there is asymptotic freedom when the twins are in close proximity. This would be the high energy state when the quarks are close together. In the low energy condition when there is almost complete spatial separation their actions then become highly correlated and similar.
It might seem like this is stretching analogy to the point of ridiculousness. I just happen to think that these patterns keep showing up at larger and larger scales because quantum interactions in biological systems are perhaps what makes the difference between inanimate (or animated objects) and what we define as life. What we define as life is just the arbitrary line we have come with for large objects that are defined largely by quantum principles and indeterminism rather than classical behavior.
That was a bit of cold blooded analysis by me. It does not represent the real feelings I attach to life. I think William Blake might have been the one that said all life is holy. I agree with that.
I like to make an analogy with signals. A signal can be random, regular, or , between those two, it can carry a message.
Absolute lack of free will would make us automatons, like a regular signal going through the same bleeps and blorps (though the analogy is that sentient beings automatically follow laws of physics, not that they repeat their actions).
Absolute free will would mean making decisions without basis on sensory input, it would be a random signal. However, I believe we do act randomly when newly born, and that that’s how we learn how to act with purpose. You cannot be a moral actor with this kind of free will (if it were permanent).
Meaningful free will is like a signal with a message. Unlike the other two kinds of messages, this kind is worth listening to. We choose our actions based on sensory input (including the influences of past perceptions), so it’s not random, but it’s not entirely regular either, if such free will exists. Oddly, this concept of morality seems to require a striving toward regularity, trying to become an automaton. (There may be an extra analogy possible here, involving zipping a file. To be moral, you must be as predictable as possible, or the most zippable.)
Maybe we think we have free will because we never get all the way from randomness to regularity.
@70: Some guy punched me really hard in the face, then tried to convince me I shouldn’t blame him because I agree that free will is like baseball in the sense Sean describes.
I had to bend over and listen closely to hear him make his argument though, since he was doubled up on the ground as a result of my knee striking him so hard in the groin in reaction to his punch. From what I could make out through his whimpering it sounded like some sort of silly attempted reductio ad absurdum of a straw man version of compatibilism couched as a joke that wasn’t even amusing the first twelve times I heard it, so I lost interest pretty quickly. I put some ice on my black eye and it’s fine now though.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, treated species as artificial categories and living forms as malleable-even suggesting the possibility of common descent. Though he was in opposition to evolution, Buffon is a key estimate the history of evolutionary thought; his work influenced the evolutionary theories of both Lamarck and Darwin.