An Essay called "My Surprisingly Novel Thoughts on the Freedom of the Will"

My Surprisingly Novel Thoughts on the Freedom of the Will

The mainstream, secular debate about free-will is a verbal dispute: it boils down to a question of framing. The debate happens under shared beliefs about the nature of the mind and the physical laws that give rise to it, as well as shared beliefs about the results of famous experiments (the Libet experiments) and recent work in neuroscience. This means there can’t be a “further fact” in dispute (indeed, a logical positivist would probably say there ought to be no debate at all). The only thing in dispute is how we should conceive of the concept of free will -- more specifically, whether there is a sensible way of modifying the traditional/religious or intuitive 'concept' such that it is compatible with the scientific facts, or whether there is no such sensible way because the idea of free will is an *inherently* superstitious concept that sits in irrevocable conflict with the facts. This is a question of framing.

Of the two framings that do exist in this debate, it seems to me that the “incompatibilist” framing is more popular among secularists than the “compatibilist” one. I think there are obvious reasons why one might expect this, despite the fact that we are all intuitive “libertarians” about the will. If you do take the word “freedom” in anything like our intuitive sense of it, the notion of free will is clearly absurd.

First of all, as soon as you dispense with the Cartesian Ego, you conclude that the mind must come from the brain (and only the brain), and that this hunk of matter must be subject to the bio-chemical-physical laws of our universe, just as all things are. This means that everything in your mind must be determined by these laws, including every aspect of your personality (whether you are good, bad, violent, non-violent, smart, dumb, rational, irrational, sane, insane, sociable, solitary) and all the decisions you make. There may well appear to be a division between the voluntary and the involuntary (we say addiction makes people zombies, for example), but it is more or less illusory. This means that when we deem murderers sane according to clinical standards – thereby implying they had a choice whether or not to kill their victim – we’re probably making some kind of error. There are, to be sure, degrees of insanity; some murderers might have genuinely weighed up the options, and experienced hesitation or regrets. However, even for these murderers, the deliberation was done according to fixed natural laws inside their brain. The reason a particular man ends up committing murder and his cousin doesn’t is almost certainly due to some slight abnormality in the man’s brain (caused by a bad set of genes, or a bad environment that led to the expression of bad phenotypes, or some kind of braindamage from physical trauma or drug abuse (probably also combined with bad genes and a bad environment)). There is no mysterious Will that somehow disrupts the natural processes going on in the brain and produces a truly spontaneous action (in any case, would the Will really be you, or just some part of you?). It may be true that quantum mechanics – the laws at the bottom of reality – are not deterministic but probabilistic, and seem to produce utterly random outcomes. While this suggests that your decisions were not predetermined from the moment of the Big Bang (which seems to be slightly more reassuring than believing they were), it still means your decisions have nothing to do with you (whatever “you” is).

Secondly, you (whatever “you” is) have absolutely no control over the vast majority of things that shaped and shape you (genetic and environmental): you don't choose your parents, your uterine environment, your general infantile environment, your city, your state or your nation, your infantile and childhood diet, the quality of the air you breathe, your parents' wealth, the size of your house, the number of books in your house, your siblings, the school you attend, your teachers at school, and so on ad infinitum.

Thirdly, as that annoying shithead Sam Harris writes, a number of findings in neuroscience have proved that “Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this ‘decision’ and believe that you are in the process of making it.” This means that the subjective feeling of deliberation has no connection to the actual machinations of deliberation that are going on in your brain (to which you have no access whatsoever). Consciousness of decision-making is therefore irrelevant to the question of free-will.

It is easy to see why these truths make free-will in our intuitive sense seem absurd. Define freedom in any normal way, and you will conclude that we don’t have it.

And yet, somehow, compatibilists still exist. Even more strangely, their arguments (i.e. ways of framing) aren’t totally insane either. They somehow manage to accept all these facts and still argue that we have the freedom required for moral responsibility (the only people who don't have freedom, they say, are the manifestly deranged or impaired). So how do they do it? In order to pull off this great feat of philosophical artistry, they have four main tacks.

The first is Derek Parfit’s strategy in On What Matters: highlighting the subtle distinction between “determinism” and “fatalism”. In the relevant chapter of this book, Parfit argues (as I recall it) that those who claim that determinism contradicts moral responsibility are victims of a common confusion of determinism and fatalism. Fatalism, Parfit says, is the condition of reality for Oedipus Rex in Sophocles’ famous play. If you are fated to experience some calamity, as Oedipus is, it means that whatever decision you make, the universe will find some way of putting you back on the path towards disaster. In Oedipus Rex, no matter what Oedipus chose to do, he was always going to end up having sex with his mother – thereby fulfilling the prophecy. But, as Parfit points out, nobody thinks our universe is fatalistic, just deterministic (or perhaps probabilistic, but if that makes any difference at all, it is on the side of compatibilism). In a deterministic universe, he says, our big, complex brains mean we can genuinely “make decisions”. We genuinely have “choices”, and these choices then affect our future. Even if these choices have antecedent causes in bio-chemical goings on in our neural structure (and these bio-chemical goings on have antecedent causes in the laws of physics), they are choices nonetheless. Our language of “decisions” and “responsibility” etc is therefore not in error.

The second tack is to observe how darn complicated our brains are. In his Big Think interview on Free Will, Steven Pinker (who seems to agree with me that the debate on free-will is a matter of framing) points out that the human brain consists of “a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses”. This means, he says, that choices are not possible to predict “in any simple way”. Pinker also observes that there is a significant neurological difference between reflexes (unconscious responses to stimuli like an iris contracting in strong light), and active decisions (say, deliberating over what to get for dinner or where to move a chess piece). The latter involve vast areas of the brain, particularly the frontal lobes, and incorporate a vast array of information. So even if you’re not conscious of all the deliberation that goes into these active decisions (whatever “you” means), the brain has to make far more of an effort – seemingly vindicating the idea that a choice really is being made out of the landscape of possibilities. As a compatibilist would say, Does it matter that this choice goes on under cover of darkness if it’s still the brain in your skull doing it?

The third is to focus on the mentalistic level of analysis rather than the bio-chemical-physical. John Horgan demonstrates this strategy brilliantly in a scathing critique of Sam Harris’ book on free will in an article for Scientific American. His argument is worth quoting directly:

“Harris keeps insisting that because all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined. Of course all our choices are caused. No free-will proponent I know claims otherwise. The question is how are they caused? Harris seems to think that all causes are ultimately physical, and that to hold otherwise puts you in the company of believers in ghosts, souls, gods and other supernatural nonsense.

But the strange and wonderful thing about all organisms, and especially our species, is that mechanistic physical processes somehow give rise to phenomena that are not reducible to or determined by those physical processes. Human brains, in particular, generate human minds, which while subject to physical laws are influenced by non-physical factors, including ideas produced by other minds. These ideas may cause us to change our minds and make decisions that alter the trajectory of our world.

Some of us have a greater capacity to perceive and act on choices than others. The killer with a brain tumor, the schizophrenic, the sociopath, the obsessive-compulsive do not and cannot make decisions--or change their minds--in the way that I do. When I weigh the pros and cons of writing about Harris, my chain of reasoning is determined by the substance of my thoughts, not their physical instantiation.

Consider: When I watch the video of Sam Harris talking at Caltech, is it the electrons streaming through my MacBook, the photons impinging on my eye, the sound waves entering my ear that make me want to respond to Harris? Of course not. It's the meaning of the video that stirs me, not its physical embodiment. I could have watched a DVD of Harris's talk, or read a transcript, or listened to someone summarize his lecture over the telephone. And it's possible that Harris's words, instead of provoking me to write a critical response, could have changed my mind about free will, so that I decided to write a column defending his point of view. Of course, if I thought about it for a moment, I'd realize that the fact that Harris had changed my mind and hence my actions was evidence of my free will.”

The fourth is simply to draw attention to the fact that determinists are far too demanding. Horgan partly uses this strategy in the argument quoted above when he points out Harris’ obsession with “prior causes”. Determinists like Harris say that “prior causes” are all we need to refute free will. But, if you think about it, this creates a kind of absurdity. It means that anyone who denies the existence of a Cartesian ego – which makes no sense anyway – is led to believe that a human is no freer than a toad or an amoeba. In effect, therefore, if you accept the formula prior cause = no freedom, then free-will isn’t even a question. This seems obviously unacceptable: if free-will is not even a possibility on a given formula, then it’s clearly the wrong formula. Although this objection might seem like a mere bromide, it is actually an important semantic point. After all, it clearly makes sense to say that a human is more free than a chimpanzee, or that a highly intelligent, highly rational person is more free than some paranoid schizophrenic. Indeed, this brings us to one of Dan Dennett's main arguments: Dennett claims that, though we should (gleefully) abandon the intuitive or religious conception of free will, we can legitimately adopt the engineer's concept of "freedom" instead -- the view of freedom as a kind of continuum, varying in terms of degrees of 'movement' and extent of complexity. Crucially, this way of thinking allows us to say basically what we want to say: that a rock has no degrees of freedom, an ant has slightly more, a frog has more than an ant, a cat has more than a frog, a chimp has more than a cat, a mentally ill human has more than a chimp, and a mentally healthy, temperate, rational human has more than a mentally ill human. And once you accept this way of talking as legitimate (and it seems hard to reject), the shoe suddenly flips to the other foot: instead of being on the defensive, compatibilists can now accuse the incompatibilists of a kind of absurdity. How is it reasonable to deny the property of free will to the most intelligent and most complex organism in the known universe? How is it reasonable to deny free will to the animal that is the best candidate for it?

   I’m not really sure that one way of framing the debate is better than the other, although I am sympathetic to both sides. My favourite perspective on free will is that of Noam Chomsky, who frames the problem in a third way – one that commits him to neither side while also not committing him to mysticism.

Before I explain what this brilliant third perspective is, I should point out that I don’t agree with all of Chomsky’s comments about free will. For example, I know that he often makes a quip about free will that I believe to be facile: the classic meme that people who write “learned tomes” denying the existence of free will are refuting their arguments by the very act of writing a book (why would they bother making the effort if they really believed their actions were inevitable?). I know Chomsky makes this quip in jest (that’s why it’s called a “quip”), but even so, I think the quip itself is the result of a common misconception about free-will: namely, the Parfit-identified confusion of “determinism” and “fatalism”. It is not a primitive mistake to think that decisions exist in an important sense (even if you deny that they exist from the eye of the universe). It is undoubtedly true to say that people put effort into certain activities. Our language isn’t totally misleading us.

Now onto Chomsky’s perspective.

To put it briefly, Chomsky is sceptical that we even have the right categories to answer whether we have free-will or not – or perhaps even to phrase the question in the right way. He suggests that the main reason why our intuitions of free-will seem so out of whack with our best science is that we only have two scientific concepts to bring to bear on the problem – randomness and determinacy – and both of them seem utterly inappropriate. As he remarks, an intelligent Martian might be “looking at us and thinking how stupid we are – why do we keep to determinacy and randomness when there’s obviously that thing out there (that I can’t point to ‘cause I’m a human)?”

Even though Chomsky doesn’t suggest this, I can’t help thinking that what we should do to overcome this conundrum is invent some new words ourselves. They probably wouldn’t catch on (since they presumably would have been invented before if the concepts they express were congenial to our way of thinking), but it would be an interesting thing to do nonetheless. In fact, I've even made a start myself:

Perhaps we can say that brains have the property of deterministic spontaneity (only an apparent oxymoron), bio-spontaneity or neuro-spontaneity. Perhaps we can argue that bio-freedom or weak-freedom is an emergent property of neural complexity (as people say about consciousness). Perhaps we can say that humans have, instead of free-will, deterministic freedom (another apparent oxymoron), weak-freedom, bio-freedom or neuro-freedom. Perhaps we don’t even need compound words, but can just invest an entirely new word: we can say that brains have the property of spontaneation or that humans have libertaneity. Perhaps we can use the Old English word for freedom, freodom.

If you accept this new usage, it immediately solves the philosophical problem of free-will. The answer to the question, “Do humans have free-will?” goes from “It depends on how you frame it” to “That’s the wrong language; we have libertaneity” or “That’s the wrong language; we have freodom”. The answer to the question, “How does a physical brain, subject to natural laws, give us this “libertaneity” or “freodom”?” is “The brain is sufficiently complex for the emergence of the property of “spontaneation”.

Isn’t that wonderful?

[This was given a fairly significant edit on 5 July 2016]