Free Will
A few social media debates on the subject of “free will” have
interested me recently (in January 2023). The debate is basically, “Do we have free
will?” If this has passed you by you might think it’s an odd
thing to debate. In essence, there are people who say that we don’t
have free will; we are just automata, programmed to do the things we
do by impersonal physical forces. This is so strangely contrary to
everyday experience that they must have strong reasons for the
assertion and my purpose in this essay is to examine what those
reasons are as well as whether there’s anything in the idea.
Although it’s easy
to say “We have free will” or “We don’t have it”, it’s
not so easy to be sure what these statements mean. What is free will?
The usual statement of freedom is along the lines, “In a choice
between actions A and B, I did A, but in exactly the same situation I
could have chosen to do B”. “Actions” extend to the things we say
and even what we think as well as physical actions, and by “exactly
the same situation” is meant not just a simple repetition, but the
whole universe having the identical configuration; so the choice
really comes just once. Doing A then B doesn’t demonstrate the
claimed freedom because the universe was subtly different the second
time.
That’s the usual
definition in this debate, and it has to be said that there are some
problems in it. The whole claim is based on things I don’t
do. I did A; I could have done B, but I didn’t. This can never be
tested because the chance to do B instead of A in that
exact situation will never come again. No-one will ever have the
chance to see me choosing to do B, so what does it mean to say I
could have done it? It’s
even more tricky with thoughts: “I thought of A, but I could have
thought of B…”; “But wait, you just did! Or did you?”
This
definition of free will is logically consistent but it can never be
tested even in principle. Later I’ll suggest a way of making a more useful definition.
Why
would anyone want to suggest that we don’t have free will? The idea
usually comes from a particular interpretation of science. As soon as
Newton, Laplace and others began to develop the description of the
universe in which everything is made up of particles which move
according to physical laws, the problem posed by this description was
apparent. These particles don’t have any choices, they just
have to follow the laws. So if we’re made of such particles, we
don’t have choices either. Ah, maybe we’re thinking beings? But
either our brains are also made of those choiceless particles, or we
are spirits which have no way of controlling them. To change the
behaviour of our bodies by thought would mean breaking the laws of
physics which the particles making us up must obey. The whole picture
makes us seem like clockwork creatures, very complex maybe, but in
the end completely predictable.
This
is a bleak picture. It seems to exclude morality. What credit is due
to me for doing anything good if I was unable to do otherwise? Why
should I be punished for a crime if I was unable not to commit it?
Whatever I may have done, right or wrong, it was only because of the
unbreakable laws which my brain and body have to obey.
So
why would anyone accept such a bleak picture? The first reason is the
emphasis on deterministic physical laws which I’ve mentioned.
Coupled with this there’s a metaphysical viewpoint. This view of
science is essentially an atheistic
one. Its proponents are alive to the possibility that one possible
escape is to postulate a non-material soul or spirit which lives in
us, giving mind to our brain and controlling some of the matter which
composes us by non-physical means. But once they allow soul or spirit
into their world-picture, it becomes
difficult to definitely exclude God! To exclude Him, they’re
willing to pay the price: deterministic science controls all;
everything is just matter; even our thoughts aren’t really under
our control. That’s where
this whole debate originates, and
it’s a metaphysical motivation, not a scientific one.
This deterministic picture has the disadvantage of being contrary to experience. Every
day in innumerable ways we all make choices. We choose what to eat,
where to go, what to do, who to meet and what to say to them. Our
thoughts do control
the movements of our bodies. We’re
very clear about the fact that these actions are choices
made by us. This is true for materialist atheists as well as the rest
of us. On a practical level
no-one can really live day-to-day
believing they’re just a clockwork mechanism.
The usual explanation (in “strong determinism”) is that we are just spectators. We think
we are making these choices, but really they are just the results of
physical laws. Our strong belief that we’re making choices is also
just another result of those laws working on the matter in our
brains. We could have done nothing other than what we did, even if we
think otherwise. The brain’s role is more one of constructing a
narrative explaining what we do rather than making choices about it.
Yes, this is extremely counter-intuitive, but to some it’s a price
worth paying.
I
would actually say that this is an unscientific attitude. Science
should follow observations, not seek to reinterpret
them. Even without doing any “scientific experiments”, a key starting
observation for me is that I’m conscious, I have intentions and I
make choices. My thoughts
animate my body. Real science
will start by acknowledging these observations and building them into
further discoveries, not try to explain them away. As Descartes said,
“I think, therefore I am”.
There’s
an even bigger disaster lurking here for science, but before I go
into it, let me mention a couple of possible escapes from
determinism. These days Newton doesn’t have the last word. To
correctly predict what all the particles in the universe will do
next, we can point out that an infinite amount of information would
be required. We would want the coordinates, speeds, spins etc. of
every particle. To record all this information accurately could
require storage as big as the universe! Modern Chaos theory adds to
the storage required by pointing out that all those pieces of data
would be needed with infinite precision, so actually every single
parameter would require infinite storage. Any attempt to introduce
approximations could change the results out of all recognition.
Finally, there’s Quantum Mechanics: particles
aren’t really as simple as Newton thought and in some situations
they can behave as if their positions or movements are undefined.
All this doesn’t really provide free will though; introducing some
randomness or
uncertainty doesn’t mean we get to make choices among possible
alternatives. (Unless we suspect that minds are in some way “quantum
agents”;
that’s an interesting contemporary speculation which I won’t go
into now).
Well,
what’s the really big issue in all this for science? Basically,
this: if I assume determinism
I seem to have a situation in which two individuals can hold
different opinions about a subject, and both of them have their
opinions given to them by impersonal mechanistic effects from the
chemical reactions in their brains. Let’s say that one of them
thinks “The sky is blue” and the other thinks “The sky is
yellow”. Both of them also have the illusion that they’re free
and able to assess the things they’re thinking about. How
can we decide who is right?
This
dives into a huge area of philosophy around the question, “What is
truth”? How can we define truth? Philosophers offer various answers
to this and I’ll go with the one which seems common-sense and is
also popular in science: a statement is true if it corresponds to
what’s real. So with those two thinkers above, we could observe
that the sky is blue and say that, even though they both think
they’re right, actually the first one is right and the second one
is wrong. This point of view is good for science because it provides
a clear role for observation and experiment.
But
there’s still a big problem; really big. Who decides what
corresponds to reality? We might
think that we can just look at the sky, see what colour it is and
decide which of the two thinkers is right. But we’re in the same
boat as them! If we’re also deterministic, our thoughts about what
we’ve seen in the sky are also the product of mindless chemical
reactions in our brains. We might be deluded; our inner narrative
would never know it. It will be complete accident for us to agree
with one thinker or the other.
What
this comes down to is, if we’re such limited beings, with
deterministic thoughts, no real choices and only an illusion of
freedom, we cannot do science. This
view is a disaster for any kind of conversation based on observations
and notions of truth. There is no reason why containers of complex
chemical reactions should ever be able to discover anything about
reality, although they might “think” they have.
What's more, it’s
always illuminating to take an idea and ask, “What does it say
about itself?” Let me revisit those two individuals and suppose
that they’re now thinking, “We don’t have free thought” and
“We do have free thought”. If the first one is right, we don’t
have it and, again, we’re not the kind of beings which can really
know anything (although we might think we do). If the second is
right, there is a chance that the two of them can do some
observations, talk it over and reach an agreement (of course, they
might still slip up somehow and conclude that the first is right!)
But from our point of view, why would we ever take any notice of the
first thinker? He’s saying that whatever he thinks
he knows cannot be checked;
he has no way of being sure that his thoughts align with reality. So
at the same time as telling us that we don’t have free thoughts,
he’s also telling us we needn’t believe him! His words are
contradicting themselves and therefore don’t carry any meaning. He
can be safely ignored.
But
I said I’d offer a better definition of “free” and find an
escape from all this. To do
that, I’m going to go back and base things on the
definition of truth and the method of
science, which is pre-eminently our best method for finding out about
the natural world. So a
statement (a scientific theory even) is true if it corresponds to
reality. We find out what corresponds to reality by the methodology
of science, which typically works in stages:
-
Making some observations
-
Forming a hypothesis which explains those observations
-
Designing an experiment to test the hypothesis
-
Performing the experiment and observing the results
-
If the results contradict the hypothesis go back for a new
hypothesis. Otherwise let the hypothesis become a theory and start
looking at how it links up with other theories.
My
proposed escape from the confusion is this: to do science we must accept that we are the kind of creatures
capable of doing science. Some of the justification for the “no free will”
idea seems to be from an interpretation of science, but if we’re using
science we have to accept that it means something and that human beings
can learn from it successfully. Now
it’s clearer what having free thought must mean: I have real
choices about what to think; I’m capable of deciding what
observations mean; I’m able to use logic and rules of inference
to assess observations and form hypotheses; I’m capable of
deciding whether an idea corresponds to reality – whether
it’s
true. If all this isn't the case, nothing can be learned from science.
I
can therefore define “free” like this: my thoughts cannot be just
a by-product of chemical reactions. They correctly embody logic
and its rules of inference, and they're under my control to
direct as I see fit. This is not an illusion. There’s no
reason why chemical reactions in my brain should embody these things,
so thought isn’t solely produced by those reactions.
(Once I’ve asserted the necessity of free thought, free will won’t
be a problem; I can think about what to do at
every moment). OK,
I might still slip-up and misinterpret observations and I’ll never
be able to know everything, but at least I can get started.
I
have to stress that this
isn’t a preference. It’s not what I want or
choose to be true. It’s
what must be true
before beings like me can find out anything.
It’s what’s called an axiom. Without this view of thought,
science is impossible and nothing can be known. Anyone who says it
isn’t true is essentially contradicting
themselves and has nothing
meaningful to say.
As this is an axiom I have no way of proving it; proof just isn't a thing that applies to axioms. To
give another example, in Euclid’s geometry there’s a
starting axiom that,
given any two points, a line can be drawn between them. You can never
prove that this is true using geometry, but if it isn’t true
there’s no such thing as geometry.
However, in the case of
science I think I can make an argument for plausibility by pointing to how
successful it is. Just think of how different our lives are to how they
would have been in the stone age. Consider advances in medicine based
on our understanding of how our bodies work. Think about the
technological marvels available to us, including the devices we're
using right now. See how far through space we've thrown our
gadgets. It's not plausible that our ideas derived from
science are only right “by accident” and the whole enterprise really
has no foundation in truth.
So if a piece of scientific work seems to say that we don't have the free will needed to do science, it has
to be rejected. It's like the thing that may well have happened to you
if you do much maths: after several pages of algebra you end up concluding
that -1=1. The conclusion is wrong, and you don't need to go back over
all the work to know that you've made a mistake. Finding the mistake
might still be hard, but knowing that it's in there somewhere is easy.
I take the same view of any interpretation of science which says we're
incapable of doing science; it’s wrong because it says it is.
I
know that there are some who won’t like this viewpoint. It will
seem to let in the idea of a non-material soul or spirit which has
some relationship to my brain and supplies the necessary freedom in
my thoughts. Atheists won’t like this because, if a soul gets in to
our world-view, what’s to
keep God out? I make two answers to this. First, if we start to speak
about a soul, I don’t know any more than anyone else. I’ve gone
as far as I can by
asserting that if we’re going to do science we have to be creatures
which are capable of doing science. Using science I can’t deduce from this what’s
going on “behind the scenes” on
any non-material level where science doesn't look.
Second, I’m not impressed by someone who's willing to deny the possibility
of knowing anything just to avoid knowing about God! To try to knock
away the foundations of science just to maintain a metaphysical
prejudice seems to me very
silly. It’s like the man up a tree sawing off the branch he’s
sitting on. To such people I say, “OK, carry on sawing if
you like, but don’t expect
me to join you up there!”
Essays index
Home