We (probably) don’t have free will, but does that matter?
I don’t think so.
It is difficult to convince most people of the above, as it turns out.
“Surely we have free will!” most people respond zealously. “I chose to get out of bed this morning; I chose to make my tea; I chose to read this article! If it appears so convincingly that we have free will, then how could it be that we don’t?”
This article contains no rigorous arguments; its purpose is rather to plant seeds of possibility: free will is not a given. Perhaps our seemings that we have regarding our own free will — i.e., our sense that we have control over our actions — are not quite as convincing as they might superficially appear; perhaps they are misleading. So let’s investigate this.
We can build human consciousness from atoms and demonstrate that free will does not necessarily follow; in fact, for free will to follow from our agreeable construction of consciousness, some very spooky stuff would need to take place.
Does it really seem like we have free will?
I don’t think so, and to demonstrate this, let’s follow a brief tangent.
There is a famous argument against external world skepticism — i.e., the view that the external world does not exist — provided by the philosopher G.E. Moore. He argues that he can prove the existence of the external world, “…by holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another’.” (see [G.E. Moore — “Proof of an External World” 1939])
He is arguing that in so doing he has proven ipso facto the existence of the external world. In other words, by the very fact that it appears to him that he has two hands, he can, by extension, safely come to the conclusion that the external world exists.
The simplicity of this argument is its greatest strength as well as its greatest weakness. No sensible person is going to argue that they don’t have two hands attached to their body, but it also feels like a stretch to use such a simple fact as a defense against such a heavy theory as external world skepticism.
G.E. Moore has a hidden premise in his argument: our beliefs are innocent until proven guilty; we are justified in holding beliefs about how things appear to us so long as we have no reason to doubt them. We have no reason to doubt that the external world exists, so holding up our two hands will suffice as foundational evidence that things are as they are.
If you look down at your hands and see that your fingers have fingers, you would be justified in believing that is true until, for example, you remember about that strange mushroom you found and ate earlier in the day.
This hidden premise is very reasonable to hold, especially considering that if we do not take it to be true, we would not be justified in any of our beliefs until they are proven true.
So how does this relate to free will? Well, one could easily apply Moore’s argument to free will. “I chose to hold up my hands; I hold up my hands; therefore, I have free will.” Just as no sensible person is going to argue that they do not have two hands, it seems like no sensible person is going to argue that they don’t have free will. Free will is, therefore, innocent until proven guilty, so in order to argue against the existence of free will, we must have some reason to doubt it.
There is reason to doubt it, and this is where I suggest we investigate below the first layer of our faculties. Is feeling like you chose to get out of bed this morning, followed by you getting out of bed, enough to demonstrate that we have free will — as Moore would likely argue?
Take a moment to look down at your hand, and after however many moments feels appropriate to you, move your finger. If you chose to move your finger immediately, why did you choose to do so? If not, why not? Could you have chosen to have chosen to wait a few moments longer to move your finger? Why didn’t you?
The deeper you look into your faculties, the more automated the process becomes. You don’t choose to breathe; you don’t choose to blink. At first, it appears like you can choose to, but even when we are aware of our own actions, it’s not immediately clear where our choices come from.
Consider further the set of beliefs that makes up who you are as a person. If you don’t believe in God, can you choose, then, to believe? If you consider yourself to be liberal, can you choose to be conservative? The answer is evidently no. What we believe is core to us and is what constructs our personalities — but where do those beliefs come from? They are a result of our environments, and given those environments, it seems that our beliefs are not chosen by us; they simply arise. So, do you have any choice regarding who you are?
This is by no means a proof against the existence of free will, but at the very least, it should make you question how in control you truly are. Now, the burden is placed on free will rather than the lack thereof. To investigate this further, we are going to need to build a brain.
Free-will-free Brain Recipe
For the purposes of this recipe, and in the spirit of remaining as scientific and agreeable as possible, we will be taking physicalism to be true. That is to say, when it comes to our brains and “minds” all that is is physical — there is no soul. This means that the only ingredients we will be using to build our human brains are atoms and their constituents.
Atoms follow laws. These laws are not like societal laws; they are physical and cannot be broken. This means that their fates (in a closed system, at least) are entirely deterministic. That is to say, if two particles collide, their final trajectory can be predicted exactly using physics. Effect is determined by cause.
Consider the process of rolling a dice. If you were to roll the same dice the exact same way 100 times, it would land on the same side every single time. “Exact” is a very important word here. The laws of physics are time-independent in this regard. No matter how many times you conduct the experiment, if the conditions are the same, then the result is the same — every time.
What applies to atoms thus applies to molecules like water; nothing changes. Atoms come together to form molecules and these molecules can engage in chemical reactions with one another. These processes are similarly deterministic.
Things become more complicated when the epiphenomenon of such chemical reactions is life; this is where most people believe that the hard determinism ends and the free will begins. But why? Cells — within the physicalist framework — are nothing more than immensely complicated chemical reactions which are themselves complicated physical reactions. Brains are nothing more than an immensely complicated network of cells — each just their own set of complicated chemical reactions. These chemical reactions have patterns to them, but so do the orbits of the Galilean moons around Jupiter. What reason do we have to suggest that the determinism ends?
If we were to suggest that there is something special about the transition from molecules to cells, that would require that we abandon the physicalist framework and admit that something spooky is happening when life sparks into being: a soul of sorts is added to the ingredients. Thus, it appears that for there to be free will baked into life, there must be some additional ingredient besides the atoms themselves.
If we were to reverse time all the way back to the Big Bang and we let it play out again given the exact same conditions, would we see ourselves come to be in the same way? Of course we would. Without “soul”, there is no chance built into the system. Given the same cause, the same effect follows. It is just like the dice.
Now, it is the lack of free will that is innocent until proven guilty rather than the other way around.
What about quantum mechanics? Unlike classical mechanics, quantum mechanics appears probabilistic, so can’t that allow for free will? This is a common response to the above type of argument, but I am not convinced. Firstly, the fact that the smallest known particles exist in a realm of probability does nothing to help the search for free will in the human mind. Would you really prefer that your choices be the result of probability? That doesn’t seem free to me.
Secondly, just because quantum mechanics appears probabilistic doesn’t mean that there isn’t an underlying determinism built into the framework. It is possible that we simply don’t understand the relationships yet, or like the three-body problem, they are too difficult to reasonably compute. And that leads us back to where we started.
Life without control . . .
This conclusion that we may not be in control of our fates and actions can be an unsettling one. How are we supposed to live knowing that our fates are sealed?
Justice and law is the largest problem to consider. It is huge, in fact. If people fundamentally are not in control of their fates, then how can we justify punishing them for their wrongdoings? This is a problem that I am going to leave for the ethicists, as my area of expertise is not in this realm. It is a major problem to consider, but it does not impact how most of us live — and that is what I prefer to focus on.
I have always appreciated Kurt Vonnegut’s approach to this topic of free will. In his book Slaughterhouse-Five, there is a group of aliens — Tralfamadorians — that can see all of time at once. In Chapter 4, a Tralfamadorian is explaining is to the protagonist Billy Pilgrim as follows:
“I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.”
Billy Pilgrim then asks the Tralfamadorian if it believes in free will, to which the Tralfamadorian responds: “If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings I wouldn’t have any idea what is meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”
Once again, this is no rigorous philosophical proof — it is literature. But where philosophy fails, literature often succeeds. Do our lives fundamentally change if we don’t, in fact, have free will? I don’t think so. Either we have free will or we don’t. If we don’t have free will, as I think should be the default view, then we never have, and that hasn’t prevented us from living well up until this point.
We’re just along for the ride — bugs in this beautiful amber.
Written by Curran Collier
2024.08.14
