Free Will: Who’s in Control?
deepfix.substack.com
deepfix.substack.com
I always find the conclusion to this being that it shows we don't have free will to be missing a key point; it only means that if we are expecting our 'consciousness' to exist outside of our physical reality.
Our consciousness and our free will and everything that is us IS our brain and body and biochemistry. Of COURSE our brain waves show up before we are aware of them, because our brain waves ARE our awareness. It is not coming before our awareness, it IS our awareness.
I feel like the conclusion people make is along the lines of, "Hah! See, you aren't in control of your actions, your brain is!" That is us! Yes, our decisions are influenced by the physical world because we are part of the physical world. This is the same as the example of Charles Whitman. Yes, his actions were at least partially caused by his brain tumor, because his brain tumor was part of him. It changed who he was, but that is still him. Your brain is a physical thing, that doesn't make it not you.
Read the links provided in the quote: "Yet copious studies from science, economics, mathematics, and theology seem to point by consilience, to the impossibility of free will." https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
Maybe it is a trick our minds plays to make us survive, and we know the brain has many: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...
However, on "free will" itself, the GP's point (which I agree with) is that the logic that "you don't have free will because XXX determines your choices" is flawed in the sense that, if XXX is actually you (or at least a part of you), then there's no conflict. The fallacy or problem is that it is very hard to define who oneself is, and as such we have culturally been indoctrinated to believe that we aren't our brains, we aren't the society that influences us, but some sort of abstract thing that totally lies beyond the reach of the physical world. (And many people believe this assumption even though they logically know that's not true.)
In a sense the reason for this flawed assumption might come back to the concept of "responsibility". When society wants to blame and punish some poor soul for making their own "free choices", it's convenient to invent this abstract, ill-defined but "free" personality so that the rest of society can distance itself away to disclaim any associated responsibility. Because, if we don't apply this mental trick, upon closer inspection, a lot of "moral wrongs" committed by "bad people" would turn out to be the result of influences of their environment. We want to pretend bad people are inherently bad, so nobody else gets a share of the blame.
I'm no Zen monk, but having studied a bit of Zen-Buddhism and having practiced meditation for close to 10 years in a regular manner, the idea that we might not have freewill doesn't sound all that bad.
I think people are putting way to much emphasis on the concept of an "I" who has or doesn't have freewill. Trying to figure out whether or not we are "free" is like the eye who tries to see itself, or the fire that tries to burn itself. Maybe science is finally catching up to the Buddhist concept of the absence of ego.
For me the biggest implication is that, and this is my own personal lighthouse in these dark and uncertain times, true freedom is not having options or the "freedom" to choose. True freedom is not needing anything to be my real self and to be at peace. Zen is the real self.
How can one prevent a drop of water from ever drying up? By throwing it into the sea.
Either it exists or it doesn't.
If it exists, we can make our own decisions and change them however.
If it doesn't, we wouldn't know anyway. Because if free will does not exist, then even your choice of whether or not to believe in it is predetermined. I would have no choice on whether or not to post this, you would have no choice on whether or not to read it, no choice on whether or not to respond, etc. Turtles all the way down. Even if I were to type all of this up and then not post it, that's what I would do. I didn't have the choice to do that. It's just the sum of the stimuli working on me. All of which also does not have free will.
But there is absolutely no way to test it either. No matter what test you can conceive, the test would be different by the very nature of being held at a different time. Let's say we put you in a room. And in this room, is a table, chair, and a marshmallow on a plate. You have to stay in the room for 30 minutes. You may eat the marshmallow or not. No reward or punishment is given depending on your actions. Then the next day, we do it again, to see if you make a different choice. If you make a different choice, does that prove you have free will?
No. Because it is a different day and today the circumstances are different because yesterday you participated in the test, whereas yesterday when you participated in the test, it was the first time you had. That very experience informs your future decisions.
The only way to truly test free will would be to rewind existence itself and see if you could make a different decision on that first test.
So we can't know if it exists and the difference between it existing and it not existing is imperceptible. So it truly does not matter.
And if that information makes turns you into a callous asshole who thinks the lack of free will absolves them of any blame, that's what was going to happen. Because there are those who will not think that and hold you accountable still because they believe in free will or believe that even still, we shouldn't be dicks to others.
It aimed to be a thesis on the topic that anyone could verify by interrogating their own experience. As opposed to most approaches that appeal to either religion or scientific studies.
The short version is that free “will” is real; but it is our desires (and how we prioritize them) that we cannot control (and in many cases, cannot even know).
This explains why the "will I/won’t I drop the pen” test of free will is a perfect example of why free will is both real and irrelevant. Of course you have a perfectly free opportunity to either drop or not drop the pen; the choice has (for most of us) almost no bearing on our actual desires.
Certainly I don't think there's much argument that the laws of physics are a moderately good fit for observed phenomenon. They came about by generations of physicists refining previous models.
I would consider the question of why mathematical models that fit observed phenomenon exist at all to be an open question.
Why did a meteor wipe out the dinosaurs? God did it; it was the causal result of initial conditions; the asteroid or some other party acted non-causally (free will). Of these, I've seen the most evidence for the existence of initial conditions, Boltzmann brains notwithstanding.
Your arm moving a split second before you decide to move it just means you, and your will, are more complex than we expected. All arguments against free will rely on describing the brain as a mathematical and statistical model that predicts the universe.
Yet mathematical and statistical models are a feature of the brain and the actual topology of its mechanisms isn’t even close to understood.
But an observation contradicting it would be the biggest discovery in physics in at least a century.
We do see unpredictable effects (randomness) quite often, though. Bell's theorem provides some constrains on their source.
But for one to exercise free will (selection of one of multiple future states from a given present state) to, say, not eat the last oreo by biasing quantum randomness to invoke a whole chain of high-gain non-linear effects (maybe have a sodium ion change it's momentum slightly to cause a neuron to trigger to... etc etc... to send different actuation commands to the muscles to pick up the cookie) would require not just a mechanism for this free-will biasing but also retrocausality to let something in the system "know" that this was the place in its orbital where the electron had to interact in order to choose to leave the cookie until tomorrow. The use of a high-gain effect chain means that the initial instance of free will is smaller, and therefore more likely that we've just not noticed it so far, but it makes it harder to put together a meaningful story for how these free will instances reflect a "choice" instead of just a statistical divergence.
Citation needed. What we call the universe is our brains model of reality it isn’t divine law. It’s more objective than intuition, to be sure, but until we have to do science with completely unrelated minds we’re stuck formalizing our own brains.
Well obviously there is no known mechanism at this point. As far as we know all matter obeys the laws of physics and our brain is no exception. Even if you want to suppose quantum effects are present in the brain (unlikely), that would at most impart some degree of randomness.
The real nail in the coffin for any potential new scientific discovery that could cause free will is that this would have to entail some localized overriding of the currently known laws of nature to work - your motor neurons, or their inputs/etc, not being driven by chemistry but rather by this new "force" overriding chemistry.
The problem of course is that no-one has ever observed the laws of chemistry not being observed, not even once, in our brain or elsewhere, which seems a major problem given that "free will" is subjectively happening non-stop.
So, while it's not inconceivable that some new force/whatever might be discovered that controls matter in ways we've not seen, the real problem is that in this case there is no problem to solve! It's not like postulated "dark matter" invented to solve a problem with gravity ... in the case of brain/body function there is no mystery to solve, and no need for new physics - our brain/body appears to operate entirely under the control of the currently known laws of nature, which doesn't leave anything for undiscovered physics (or dualistic "souls") to control!
This of course is compatibilism[0] which I nearly instantaneously gravitated towards conceptually during my philosophy minor some moons ago, though I don't entirely agree with it. I would add that free will is the ability to act in accordance with one's desires AND choose how to act within a limited possibility space presented by previous determined circumstance towards those desires.
I disagree with your prioritizing comment though, a simple test here is do I put off video games to work on my own projects, the answer is yes, even though I in the immediacy maybe more intensely desire to play video games. Humans can delay gratification for larger payouts later on, which if we could not consciously do then I personally would probably do nothing with my life besides the basic biologic urges and whatever gives me the strongest immediate dopamine hit.
That's basically living with ADHD - so about 2% to 7% of all people have a lot less free will than the rest.
Just as sure as if you were lobotomized, you'd lose free will.
Edit: Plus upon re reading this and not just giving a two second flippant response, you did not clearly read my reply (which I ironically did not then read yours correctly either). I was talking about the ability to prioritize desires, not free will itself on the part you quoted.
The experience of the inner monologue in my brain not being able to control what the rest of my body is doing when not on meds sure does feel like a crippled down version of free will
I’m not sure how this contradicts my prioritizing comment. When you do put off video games, you are not changing the order of your desires, you are revealing how they are already ordered.
At that point I’d say the burden is on your idea to say how it’s not.
Schopenhauer:
> Man can do what he wills; but he cannot will what he wills.
-- On the Freedom of the Will, 1839.
Instead, our brains will create a model of the world that is optimized for utility (in a Darwinian sense). In fact, this happens at different levels. Some centers of the brain (those that regulate basic functions as well as sensory input) will have access to different information to what reaches our consciousness.
A "purple" flower doesn't emit "purple" photons, but rather a combination of photons that our sensory system aggregate to "purple". Another mix of the same types of photons, but at different relative number may look "brown", "gray", "white", etc. In other words, all such qualia are some kind of illusion, or maybe more accurately, aggregated information.
The same is true for most categories of concepts. Physical objects, surfaces, fluids, living objects, etc. Including what we think of as "agents".
"Agents", whether they are the tiger we imagine in the forest, another human or indeed ourselves, and whether real or imagined, are also way too complex for us to comprehend in detail.
What we're interested in (or rather, what has Darwinian utility) when dealing with "Agents", as opposed to non-"Agents", is that "Agents" tend to respond to stimuli in more sophisticated ways than non-"Agents". If we look big and scary, a wolf may decide not to eat us or a robber from robbing us, but it will not stop a house fire from burning us.
As a consequence, there are actions we may take to improve the odds that the "agent" types around us behave in ways that are beneficial to us. Just like we're not able to comprehend something as simple as "real" photons behind the color "purple", our brain is not able to calculate EXACTLY what we can do to reach that goal, however.
Instead we (most of us) seem to have a simplified framework more or less built in to find something approximate to optimal ways to modify the environment in ways that affect the behavior of the "agents" around us. "Free will" or "consciousness" or not perfect representations of the ways the brains of "agents" work. But the concepts are simple enough that our brains can reason about them (at some level), while predictive enough to have significant utility and also to be hard to "hack" for an agent that may have conflicting interests.
Roughly speaking, the utility of the concept "free will" is that it allows us to communicate to others a set of behaviors that are likely to be met with retribution, while mostly limiting such threats to situations where the threat itself is likely to prevent the unwanted behavior from happening in the first place.
Actually having to dish out punishment is usually not high utility behavior. It can be both costly and expensive. Having to do it, can mean one (or more) out of three things:
1) The punishment isn't harsh enough
2) The adversary does not see the threat as credible. A thief may think they will not be caught, or a state leader thinks the ally of a country will not help defend them.
3) The adversary is not able to understand the threat, or in some other way incapable of taking the threat into account when acting.
In the case of the last one, one can have a rule that punishes people from killing other people, for instance. If the punishment is severe enough, and the likelihood of getting caught is close to 100%, most people will stop killing each other. However, SOME people will not be able to take the information into account for some reason or another. It could be that they go into a rage that make them ignore any kind of upcoming punishment, there may be some kind of mental disease, they may not have enough intelligence to understand the threat, or avoiding killing them could require some skill they do not possess (maybe they were not able to tell the gun was real, and indeed loaded).
If we were able to isolate all cases that fall under type 3, we might call those cases acts should not be punished, in other words, they did not have the "free will" to avoid them.
But the distinction may be hard to identify. Making too many exceptions will often both increase the number of people who do not see a threat of punishment as credible AND also increase the number of people that would be able to understand what the rule was.
So, basically:
- "Free will" is a simplification of the kind of process that causes threat of punishment to prevent us to do some set of actions that will be met by retribution. If legal systems (or similar informal retribution threats) are set up properly, those who actually have "free will" about the type of action, will really be punished for it.
- Those who DO get punished will very often NOT have "free will", in the sense that they are unresponsive to stimuli about that type of action. When people DO end up in prison (and assuming that punishment is strict enough and the police is able to catch most criminals), will be those NOT responsive to the threat of punishment, for some reason or another.
- This may still provide close to optimal utility for the set of people who decide what to punish. The cost of punishing those who are for some reason not able to avoid doing the "crime" is lower to that group than the benefit gained by the threat causing many others to NOT commit the "crime", when they otherwise would have.
- Indeed, since we are not capable of a fully detailed analysis of the "real" things happening inside the brains of "agents", we have no choice but using a simplified model. Some concept like "Free Will" is probably needed to lay out consequences of actions. Also some people have more of an ability to understand the details and limitations of such models, so simpler models have the advantage that it is easier to communicate. (To children, people with limited cognitive abilities or immigrants with poor cultural understanding.)
At this point, I could start writing about how empathy comes into this, how empathy is modulated by a feeling of kinship or shard identity as well as a perception of being threatened by someone, but that would make this post quite long :)
So sure, maybe all my decisions are on rails, and I experience the illusion of having made them. But there's no reason to dismiss that illusion as immaterial. It can be thought of as a sanity check. A sort of after-the-fact free will for future unconscious processes to consider. Which in practice, feels exactly like the free will of having made the decision in the first place.
There are people who spend their entire lives directing their attention internally. Instead of experiencing your own relatively unexplored subjective experience and then extrapolating it, what if you consulted the experts?
Others can definitely stabilize their attention to the point where they avoid responding to the stimulus of a moving trash can.
Even children immersed in books can do this.
Our laws and economic systems are structured as if we all have complete autonomy. What if we don't?
“Moreover, the deterministic perspective allows for compassion towards others. And this applies to anyone — those who are criminals, members of the opposite political party, the guy who cut you off on the highway on-ramp, and anyone less fortunate than you. Because these humans did not choose their parents, did not choose the society they were born into, and did not create the cells in their body, they cannot be to blame for their actions — they have merely been dealt some unfortunate life playing cards. In a certain sense, awareness of the deterministic model can be an antidote to the arrogance and hatred that are rampant in modern society.”
If the universe is deterministic, then compassion is an illusion as well. Things just are.
I also like to point out that although we may not have free will, we still are not fully predictable as the universe is fundamentally non-deterministic.
It goes over my head, but those with a better understanding of quantum mechanics should check out the Free Will Theorem lectures by John Conway for interesting thoughts on the subject.
I get the feeling that a lot of people, like the author, think philosophy is easy, but in my opinion, it is damn hard. And one can't go on talking about something that they don't even define.
This doesn't mean we're solely on auto-pilot. People do change with circumstances over time but it's not on the drop of the hat that they change 'at-will.' That part seems to be the contention, in my opinion.
And as for being aware of every choice you make, that just seems like a pointless distinction. I've often made decisions that weren't just based on what I was aware of at a given moment but probably due to past information still lingering in my mind even if I wasn't directly aware of it. This just means we're a multi-layered being that isn't free of causality which is different from perfect determinism/causality (as in all cause and effect chains can only occur as the given sequence and no deviation from said sequences are possible).
> Every decision we make can be reduced back not to our agency as individuals, but instead simply to a set of neurons firing
Why not? I thought that pile of firing neurons IS an individual.
> in the brief moments before you become aware of what you will do next, your brain has already decided your next step
I'm pretty sure "me" and "my brain" are the same person. I am observing my own thoughts ("consciousness"). I guess it takes a while to close this feedback loop, but it's still "me" on both sides of it, right?
> Neuroscience has confirmed there is no physical place where the “self” exists in the brain.
I'm pretty sure the place is "inside my skull". Too large, or what? Would "inside left prefrontal lobe" be more acceptable, if that was the case? Or would the question just shift to "But where in the prefrontal lobe?"
I've never understood how a higher plane or soul or whatever would get you to free will. It seems to me that the fundamental disproof of free will is the existence of cause and effect: if you trace through the causal chain of your actions, at some point you find some cause that wasn't you (in the limit case, the big bang). If it turns out the root cause of your actions is a soul or whatever, how is that "you"? How is that free will? And then also, what causes your soul?
Basically, if there is no free will, there is no point in debating, because it is already determined what you will believe in a way that has no relationship to logic.
In addition, without free will a lot of what we consider human rights are meaningless. For example, freedom of speech, freedom of religion are useless in a deterministic world.
Morality itself is pointless in a world without free will.
Kind of like Pascal's wager, if you are wrong about there being free will when there isn't, it doesn't change anything. If you are wrong about there not being free will when there is, it is a big problem.
Human rights might be cosmically meaningless, but there would still be those who act as if they do have meaning. And they would have no choice in the matter.
A world without free will looks exactly like the world with free will. And that's why it's pointless.
What do you mean by "understanding"? What does "understanding" mean in a world of determinism without free will?
I don’t understand this. There are plenty of tasks with deterministic outcomes that are no less worth doing. Sorting a big list of numbers is deterministic, yet it’s often worth doing. There are many tasks which are deterministic but have results which cannot be “predicted” any faster than by simply performing the task.
But if there is no free will, you should not even try to stop someone from debating if there is a free will, because they have no choice but to debate it.
Of course I realize that if there is no free will you have no choice but to try to stop people from debating if there is a free will.
OK, I'm going to choose to stop going down this rabbit hole now.
The point on the latency between the body and conscious mind is certainly crucial to any discussion on free will.
I tend to 'believe' that free will and fate are not mutually exclusive - they seem to weave together into something more closely resembling 'destiny'. Perhaps our sciences will get to the bottom of it, but for now, 'destiny' is my working model.
This is probably one of the most important yet overlooked findings in all of science. Free will as it's normally conceived is an illusion. The conscious mind is along for the ride, not in charge. The feeling of being in charge is an illusion. (It's pretty easy to reveal this to yourself: just try to change one major habit. Or try to think of a single thought (like a red triangle or pink elephant) for more than a few moments.)
Anyway from there the question is raised, "if there is no free will, what do you do with this information?" It should be immediately obvious this is a foolish question: we just said there's no free will so you don't do anything with the information, because you don't do anything at all.
I don't think that study shows that we don't control our own actions. Certainly 99%+ of our actions on a daily basis are instinctual/unconscious, but my unconscious is something that I consciously shape and develop over time. Nobody has perfect agency in a particular moment; your immediate choices are the outcome of the agency you exercised over the past months and years. You still have the free will to change, it just takes time.
Were you always like this or did you become this way?
Changing major habits is much harder, I would agree, but it's just something you have to work at & study. Nobody will change if they aren't motivated to do so. I don't think that really is a free will issue.
If you look at extremely simple choices, you may be able to say this. But these generally aren't the sorts of decisions we walk about when we talk about free will. Perhaps an analogy to business can help make the distinction. A CEO is only going to be informed after the fact, if at all, of the minor details of how a business operates. But the CEO is setting much broader directions and is indirectly regulating those who make the minor decisions.
Or more logically pedantically, you could simply say that the existence of some choices that happen before conscious awareness of them doesn't mean all choices happen that way.
> Or try to think of a single thought (like a red triangle or pink elephant) for more than a few moments.
This is something that people can and have trained themselves on. It's far from impossible, even if it's not a simple skill.
Good point, and I appreciate the clarification. It still seems to suggest (to me) that the "locus" (if there is one) of decision making is in the unconscious portion of the mind, no?
> This is something that people can and have trained themselves on. It's far from impossible, even if it's not a simple skill.
This is what I was hoping to talk about: the idea that we (might) start out as "meat robots" but we have the capacity to develop free will and become "real people" (whatever that might mean.)
What if free will is a matter of degree?
So by that logic, if there is free will I should be able to fly if I want to? We're still bound by the laws of reality, including our own brain chemistry. Our wills have to work in the confines of the reality they try to manipulate.
That's not to say that you (meaning your brain/body) might behave differently in the future as a result of deducing or being exposed to this idea, but nothing you can do about that.
Evolution may have selected to strengthen the illusion of free will (although the illusion itself is just due our innate association of actions with actors), since I'd imagine believing you have no control over your actions would be pretty deadly!
I don't have the ability to visualize at all (I have aphantasia), so I can't comment about visualizing triangles. I have and do change habits in small ways almost daily, and have made some big changes when necessary.
I think there is a misconception that free will involves immediate results with one simple thought that's more akin to magic than anything else. "I now no longer crave ice cream!", "Poof!", done. I think my aphantasia has helped me realize how much of our brains are not directly controllable. When a lot of people work through a problem consciously, I'm usually starting to do that then "fading away", coming back only later with or without a solution (sort of like highway hypnosis). Maybe everyone does this, but I don't hear it talked about that often, and people around me have found it strange when I do this around them. Must not be completely uncommon I guess because the phrase "lost in thought" is pretty common.
I think of our brains as housing more than just the conscious "me", it also involves other portions of the brain that aren't directly accessible. Thus we try to affect other areas of the brain in different ways. Sometimes a simple command works, other times we have to trick or cajole or excite another portion of us to do it for us, sometimes many many times (such as when instilling a new habit or changing an old one). If this cajoling, intimidating, engaging, or influencing isn't exerting free will, I don't know what is.
...unless the other parts of our brains are showing us unreliable information in order to get us to make the changes they want us to make, which I hope isn't true. But that's a fight for control which would imply free will anyway, I guess.
Somebody who wants you to do what they say, because they said it. There's an obvious answer to that.