Free will: an intensely compelling ridiculous idea
Talk about strange bedfellows! You will never find any ideas supported by a more diverse following than “free will.” What is free will? Allegedly, it’s the ability to “freely” be in charge of one’s own thoughts and actions. It’s the ability to be “in control.” And as I pointed out here, there is almost nothing human beings fear more than being out of control.
It all gets very interesting, however, when you juxtapose the concept of “free will” with the concept of determinism, the belief “that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.” A few years ago, a friend of mine panicked when I started telling her of some of the recent findings of cognitive science. These were findings that substantiated that humans are animals that are subject to natural laws. She panicked because I was telling her more than she was able to consider (I wrote another post mentioning this episode). She wanted to believe in “free will,” but the incredible sameness and predictability of human cognition demonstrated by cognitive science caused her to fear that she might be a robot–a machine that utterly lacked freedom.
Admittedly, there is not yet any way for scientists to precisely predict human behavior in all situations. Nonetheless, my friend panicked because science appears to be headed in that direction. In fact, if the more people considered what cognitive scientists were up to more carefully, they would be burning down the cognitive science labs and think tanks, calling out that cognitive scientists were evil destroyers of all human values. Thank goodness that more people don’t realize that so many scientists are daring to explore what makes humans tick!
We are finding more and more that, as Robert Wright pointed out in The Moral Animal, our emotions are “evolution’s executioners.” We are highly predictable in more ways than we care to imagine, including our biological routines for relating to our children, our parents, our mates our allies and our enemies. Maybe we don’t yet know how to precisely map all the “causes” for my decision to buy strawberries today, but there are many of us out there (I am one of them) who assume that my behavior did, indeed, result from that particular constellation of causes that preceded my behavior. It is my assumption that science will continue to shine its light further and in a more fine-grained fashion in coming years. In my opinion, there is an inevitability to this process. In fact, in the coming decades, it will be impossible for honest people to overlook the thousands of physical connections human cognition must have with its surrounding environment in order to enable the sorts of things that humans do. Someday (though it might be decades away), the concept of “free will” will be considered quaint.
Here’s where the story gets interesting, however. If everything is caused by an unbroken chain of prior events, is there any room for human autonomy? My friend insisted that human cognition was “different.” In her opinion, all of those natural chains of causation somehow don’t penetrate to the level of human cognition. I cross-examined her, however. It went something like this:
What is the nature of all those gaps and causation such that you are endowed with an ability to “freely” think and act? If you are not subject to the causal chain of natural events, your claim is that you must somehow transcend nature. But you are not a very convincing uncaused entity. To the contrary (I argued), your own body and brain appear to be quite at home in our natural world. In fact, if you study other primates carefully, you will see that humans are only incrementally “different” than the other primates. However you spin it, we are much more like chimpanzees than angels.
There doesn’t seem to be much room for “free will” to the extent that one strongly believes in a deterministic world. If one thing leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to your body and brain reacting in certain ways, there simply can’t be any “free will,” as it is often portrayed by those who believe in free will. Who are those Believers? In my experience, just about everyone on the planet. Why do they believe? Because it terrifies them to not believe in free will.
What is the alternative to determinism? Periodic breaks in the causal chain, and nothing less. What must be true about anything that could serve as a break in the causal chains in which we are immersed? Randomness. Capricious uncaused unpredictable randomness. Therefore, if you don’t want to be subject to the well-established forces of physics and chemistry, your only alternative is to declare that you are a creature that acts randomly. Why did you just think that thought? Not because of anything in your brain. Why did you decide to help that person? No reason at all.
To the extent that you are such a Believer, then, how does it feel to be reacting with your world with the predictability and precision of a roulette wheel? The simple answer is that you don’t react to your environment in a random fashion. This much is clear to all thinking people.
Some have tried desperately to save free will despite the obvious rampant determinism we see around us. For instance, some have written of “soft determinism,” (which, at bottom is determinism), while others have tried to find bits of “freedom” in the randomness of quantum physics. Most folks, however, cling to the patently absurd idea of a “soul,” a supposedly ghostly entity which is not part of the physical world, yet somehow interacts with it in predictable ways. But, truly, the soul is nothing less than a ghost and deserves no more respect than ghosts. But I don’t want to seem one-sided here, so do check out this photograph of the human soul at that critical “melding” stage.
But where does that leave us? When you fall in love, are “you” merely the predictable culmination of a complex symphony of chemistry and physics, i.e., a living robot? Or are you a rather predictable being who is nonetheless riddled with causal gaps, supposedly (but not really) prone to unpredictable misfiring, scientifically speaking?
So go ahead and pick your poison: are you a robot lacking true autonomy or are you just wacky and unpredictably out-of-control? If you choose the former, this might cause you to sometimes see the world in a hideous light. That person who was your “Grandma” might sometimes be seen as a complex adaptive system of highly organized and intensely interactive simple parts. Your grandma is a bunch of atoms if you are determinist, though she is admittedly a very interesting bunch of atoms. If you choose the latter approach of non-causation, your grandma must be an inexplicable earthbound singularity. This is hard to believe, however, since you know (you really know) that she acts with most of the same predictable ways that all of the rest of us exhibit. She meshes well with her environment no less so than any other animal meshes with its environment.
So here we are, between Scylla and Charybdis. Or at least that’s my take on it. Either everything is part of a causal chain or, to the extent that there are breaks in the causal chain, they are uncaused (and therefore random) breaks that could not account for any meaningful source of autonomy.
There are many people that will have trouble contemplating this conundrum because they find it too terrifying. They fear that both of these options, if true, would result in everything in their lives becoming pointless. Really, though? Isn’t it more true to say that things are what they are? We do seem to have deeply grounded senses of meaning and understanding (at least most of us do) regardless of whether we are completely ensconced in a network of causation. No matter how far I’d dare to contemplate the causal web that envelops me, I remain an intensely social being who is driven by affect. No matter how philosophical I get, I still care about many things and I still feel strong moral compulsions.
Most of the time, however, I don’t contemplate this topic of “free will.” As was the case with David Hume (who played backgammon as a retreat from his philosophy), I take numerous breaks from my own potentially unnerving philosophical excursions. When I return, however, I always come to the same conclusion: we are completely part of nature and completely subject to the laws of nature. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem that we are completely determined. It doesn’t feel like I’m a robot. It feels like we are actually choosing things that we seem to choose. But I know better . . .
One of Nietzsche’s main questions was how truth can be made “bearable.” He argued that we have many useful untruths that are confused to be literal truths. He contrasted these useful truths with actual truth and he asked “to what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?-that is the question; that is the experiment.” This is the question he asked at the end of section 110 of The Gay Science, where he listed other useful truths:
Origin of knowledge.-through immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors; some of them turned out to be useful and species-preserving; those who hit upon or inherited them fought their fight for themselves and their progeny with greater luck. Such erroneous articles of faith, which were passed on by inheritance further and further, and finally almost became part of the basic endowment of the species, or for example: that there are enduring things; that there are identical things; that there are things, kinds of material, bodies; that a thing is what it appears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me is also good in and for itself.
Why do we fight so hard to maintain free will? Because it is an illusion which has served us so very well. I also think that we are terrified by the thought that there is no free will, most of us, most of the time. It is a great threat to peel back our comforting facades and to really consider that humans are animals that are subject to the natural order. It might even be dangerous. Free will is Santa Claus for adults. We believe in it without any evidence of it. Somehow, “free will” gives us a cheap sense of meaning, even though this meaning is supposedly based to a greater or lesser extent on randomness. Free will is convenient for us because it allows us to exert power by punishing and praising each other.
In the absence of free will, “Why would we do anything at all?” people say. Without free will, praising and punishing each other would make no more sense than praising or punishing an amoeba or an ant. Pushing each other around is how we get things done, however, and we insist on feeling good about do it. Hence, free will.
But I don’t want to end this post on a note that will push some people over the edge. So . . . let us raise our glasses and toast the concept free will, just as we sometimes smile at people dressed up like Santa Claus. You are quite a compelling phrase (though not to me, some of the time). You are calming medicine to those who suffer existentialitis. Thank you, Santa Cause, for making our ride on this planet more enjoyable, more endurable. But may whole-hearted Belivers in free will someday dare to consider you with a skeptic’s eye, at least when they are ready.
From Daniel Dennett: The implications of all this for the notion of free will are many. I have come to realize over the years that the hidden agenda for most people concerned about consciousness and the brain (and evolution, and artificial intelligence) is a worry that unless there is a bit of us that is somehow different, and mysteriously insulated from the material world, we can’t have free will—and then life will have no meaning. That is an understandable mistake. My 1984 book, Elbow Room: the Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, set out to expose this mistake in all its forms and show how what really matters in free will is handsomely preserved in my vision of how the brain works. I am returning to this subject in my next book, with a more detailed theory that takes advantage of the tremendous advances of outlook in the last 15 years.
http://www.searchmagazine.org/Archives/full-dennett.html