Free will sits among the most explored philosophical topics (among other giants like Ethics and Rationality), and for good reason, as it has seemingly direct consequences for the way we (choose to?) live our lives. The question has existed since ancient times, but recent scientific advances have added structure to the question, as we’ve discovered more and more about the laws according to which our world works. As it stands now, the free will question amounts to this paradox: the world seems to operate according to set laws (going down all the way to the level of particles), but at the same time, we seem to be able to make choices. Which view is right? Perhaps surprisingly, it all hinges on how you think about “we”.
Before diving in, let’s take a step back and align briefly on the particle-level conception of the world that will be assumed through the rest of this post. Our species has made tremendous progress over the last century or so in understanding the underlying machinations of the universe – we’ve discovered atoms, molecules, electrons, photons, quarks, and a whole slew of other elementary particles. In addition to discovering these particles, we’ve identified laws governing their interactions, allowing us to understand macro-phenomena down to a micro level. Our investigations are far from complete (we’re still missing major parts, like how gravity is transmitted, or the constitution of dark matter), but they’ve extended far enough to strongly support the idea that at the lowest level, our universe is a rules-based system (or at least, mostly rules based at a close-to-lowest level – quantum mechanics may add in some indeterminacy). The working assumption for this post will be that this is the case – that complete information of both the current states of all particles and the laws governing their behavior would be sufficient for determining future states (within the bounds of quantum mechanics).
It may seem that we’ve just ruled out free will from the start – after all, we’ve just conceded that our world is a sea of particles bumping into other particles according to specified laws. However, let’s examine what we mean when we ask the question of whether we have free will. It seems there’s two main ways of viewing this concept:
- We have the ability to transcend the laws of physics to act in such a way that creates new (undetermined) futures based on our chosen actions
- We have the ability to act based on our chosen actions
The first conception is certainly ruled out by our deterministic view of the world. However, when you dive deeper into this conception, it’s hard to imagine any context in which it could make sense. Let’s say you make a decision to buy a candy bar, as you’re hungry and craving candy. For the first conception of free will to hold, it would have also needed to have been possible for you to choose not buy the candy bar, in exactly the same state (hungry and craving candy). But, as demonstrated, in this state you would decide to buy it; the decision is not random, but instead a product of your thoughts and desires at the time. Note that if we start to think about changing preferences, we move to the second conception – the first conception requires that a different decision could have been made in the exact same circumstances. Rather than open the door to free will, this conception seems to shut the door on it, asking for our decision to be essentially random, rather than based on our thoughts and desires at the time. This type of free will is not the type many people hope to have, but strangely does seem to be the type many philosophers argue against.
The second type of free will, in contrast, is the type most everyone hopes to have; we want to be in the driver’s seat, rather than passengers on life’s journey. When we make a decision to buy a candy bar, we want both for that to have been our decision, and also for that decision to have been the cause of us buying the candy bar. While the first type of free will was most certainly ruled out by a deterministic worldview, this view doesn’t seem to fare too much better, at first glance – if the particles and laws are the ones in the driver’s seat, that doesn’t seem to leave much room for us. But what is this “us”? When we say there’s no room for “us”, it seems we’re looking for a way to fit in an “us” that comes from outside the determined system; we’re looking for a way to impart our influence (from outside the system) on the determined particles, and finding there’s no way to do that. However, when we look closer at ourselves, we can see that we’re actually inside the system – we are particles and laws and organs and neurons firing. The part we identify with most strongly is our conscious mind, which is a particularly interesting pattern of matter, but inside the system nonetheless (this post goes into a bit more detail on the specifics with regards to consciousness, but for the purposes of the present discussion we only need to recognize it generally as neural activity).
The fact that we exist within the system means that we do have an ability to influence the world; when you choose to buy the candy bar, you send signals to your muscles to put it on the counter, hand the cashier some cash, and then unwrap and eat it. This sequence of actions happens because of the way particles interact, but it equally happens because you desired a candy bar and so you took the appropriate actions to get one. You are a particular pattern of particles, and your desires are a particular pattern of neural activity – and you and these desires are free to act as you deem best.
In conclusion, I’ll share a Reddit post I recently put together covering these same concepts; it’s a bit more abstract, but may help illuminate some of the above points:
From the lowest level viewpoint, our world consists of innumerable particles bumping into other particles and driving certain particle-level reactions. This is a perfectly accurate view of the state of things (though we don’t know all the laws, and can’t go very far in terms of making predictions at this level). Regardless of whether the behavior of these particles is deterministic or indeterministic (as quantum theory may suggest), it fully specifies the world.
In this sea of particles, there are certain patterns which have a tendency to replicate themselves. These patterns range from the extremely simple (e.g. viruses, which can be somewhat appropriately thought of at the particle level) to the very complex. These patterns exhibit behaviors which allow them to better reproduce themselves and protect themselves from the comparative chaos of the surrounding world, but you can still step down a level and view them as particles bumping into other particles.
In the course of the evolution of these patterns (animals), one particularly interesting feature emerged. Through a specific arrangement (the nervous system), the patterns (animals) acquired an ability to represent internally some of the regularities of their environment. In short, these animals began to create abstract concepts (neural representations of the tendencies of their world). This is a journey worth reviewing in more detail, but a bit tangential here – if you’re interested, check out some of my writings on the topic (https://mybrainsthoughts.com/?p=61). Again, looking from a level lower, these abstract concepts are still simply particles bumping into particles; but from the higher level, it is these concepts which explain the behaviors of the organism. “The mouse ran because it saw a cat” and “particles bumped into particles” are both accurate descriptions of an event, taken from different vantage points.
Another interesting thing happened as the ability to form abstract concepts improved. The organism itself was part of the environment from which it formed concepts, and so a concept for “I” was formed. This concept sits at the same level as all the other concepts and dances with them as part of determining behavior. We humans have an especially refined concept of “I”, and it is this “I” that we think of when thinking about ourselves (our conscious experience). This is another extensive topic itself – you can check out another of my posts (https://mybrainsthoughts.com/?p=69), or read “I am a Strange Loop” by Douglas Hofstadter (whose ideas I pull from generously) if you’d like to explore it further.
That was a bit of a long journey, but at the end of it, we’ve seen that the “I” sits at the level of abstract concepts within our brain (and its many bumping particles). What does this mean with regards to free will? To start, it means that “I bought the chocolate bar because I was hungry” and “particles bumped into particles” are both accurate descriptions of events. It also means that there’s no means by which we can “give up” and let the bumping of particles determine our destiny – we can certainly “give up”, but that decision itself would be a result of the dance of concepts; we wouldn’t actually relinquish any control, instead using our control to prescribe inaction. We don’t have an ability to choose whether to engage with the world, as “we” are however we engage in the world – powerfully or weakly.
With regards to the last part – the determinism of the particles doesn’t matter as we (our “I”‘s) are an emergent property above that level. The particles could just as easily be indeterministic, with some randomness built in (although with too much randomness, it may be hard for self-replicating patterns to form). What matters is that the bumping of particles is able to give rise to the dance of concepts; this phenomenon is all we need, for “we” are that dance.
Postscript
This topic likely deserves a post of its own, but I wanted to briefly touch on what this conception of free will means with regards to systems of law and punishment. Frequently, discussions on the topic lead to suggestions that punishment is not right (or at least misguided), as people are a product of their genes, their environment, and more directly, their neural activity at the time (e.g. “the murderer wasn’t a bad man – his neurons were just connected the wrong way”). This type of thinking misunderstands what “we” are – we’re not an outside force struggling against the relentless, mindless activity of our neurons; instead, we are that activity. When a man (or woman) commits murder, they do so because they chose to (e.g. their thoughts and desires were aligned in such a way as to choose to commit murder). There’s certainly unique cases like insanity, where thoughts and desires are affected by atypical factors (someone with a tumor pushing on their amygdala certainly has a claim that their actions [with the tumor] were not theirs [without the tumor]), but for the most part, people retain ownership of the actions they take. Certain people may be more predisposed from birth towards acting against the laws we’ve chosen to set up as a society – but easing the laws for them would take away their (the laws) usefulness. At a certain point, we need to accept that governing society with laws means certain people will never fit in (e.g. strongly motivated pedophiles); perhaps this is cruel to those people, but it’s far less cruel than a lawless state.
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