Why we don't have the controversial kind of free will, why it's okay, and why it's important - part 2 of 2
In part 1 I argued that we don't have any of the "controversial" type of free will - the type of free will that requires your future be "open" to other possibilities before you act. That is, the philosophical view called libertarianism (not the same as the political view) is wrong.
This is relatively uncontroversial among philosophers; this survey of philosophy professors suggests about 86% agree that libertarianism is wrong. (A small majority of professional philosophers believe we have the kind of free will that's compatible with being completely determined to do what we do - the kind a deterministic robot would have if the robot had genuine wants. Again whether that really counts as "free" will isn't much of an issue, in my book.)
Life without free will isn't so bad
But libertarian free will (which I'll just call "free will" from here on out) is the kind of free will almost all of us thought we had before we really looked at the issue. And the discovery that we aren't free in this sense can be very upsetting. A comment on my part 1 post by @tom1gorman exemplifies a very typical reaction:
If it were true that we do not freely make choices nothing we think or do would be of any significance whatsoever. Even deciding to believe that determinism is true would be meaningless! Therefore, since free will is a necessary condition of meaningfulness in life, it seems best to assume we have it. If we do not then life is meaningless and who cares?
Well, if it's true that we have no free will, and you care about important truths even when they're sad, then that is reason to care. And obviously just because some conclusion is sad is no reason to think it's false. It's sad for me to conclude (based on induction from past experience) that this post will not earn more than $2 on Steemit. But the fact that conclusion is sad to me doesn't mean, by itself, that my conclusion is false. (It might be false for other reasons - and I can always hope it will earn more than $2, even if I don't actually believe it will!)
But is this conclusion so sad? Would life really be "meaningless", as @tom1gorman says, if we have no free will? Consider this little thought experiment. Suppose you found out today that, much to your shock, you are actually a robot - there are chips, not neurons, in your head. By downloading the software in your head scientists can see that your chips are running a very sophisticated program that determines what to do in every circumstance, given the inputs it has received from all your senses. By simulating the exact same inputs and internal state your program, they can predict exactly what you will do next every time - there is never a moment where the future is "open" given that state of your chips. So whether or not the rest of us have free will (of the libertarian sort), you at least demonstrably do not.
This woud be a shocking discovery, of course. But would you now feel that life is meaningless? For example, would you be totally indifferent if people said "so, since you're only a robot following a sophisticated program, now we're just going to permanently turn you off"? Or would you be like "well actually, I was really looking forward to that concert tonight"? Remember, everything still feels the same as before. Even if your future is never open and you are just following a deterministic path, that path is complicated and unknown to you. You can still be pleasantly (and unpleasantly) surprised at all the twists and turns your life takes. And meanwhile, ice cream still tastes good, even if it's "just" your programming telling you so, and telling you to go get some after the concert. So why kill your (robot) self, and deprive yourself of that (robot) life?
I think we all are robots like that - just made out of meat instead of metal. And maybe our neural chips have random elements too, so we're not even in principle totally predictable. But random coinflips don't actually make us free, as we discussed in part 1.
Why it really matters that we don't have that kind of free will
Well, okay, so fun is still fun, and life is still worth living, even if you're that robot. But here's a deeper worry you might have: as such a robot, nothing you do is really to your credit, because it's all just the result of whatever programming (nature and nurture) you happened to get. If Jane wins the Nobel Prize for Physics, it was because she was born with the right genetic predispositions (smarts, drive, and such), and then had the right teachers, and worked on just the right problem at just the right time - and at the end of the day, really it was all just a matter of luck.
And on the flip side, if Jane ends up losing every job she ever had and living on welfare, then that's not ultimately her fault, either - there are always reasons she loses all these jobs, and the reasons for those reasons and so on are ultimately out of her control. (Or else it was genuinely random factors - but again, that's not her fault.)
"What if she's just-plain lazy?" you ask. Well, as usual, we can ask: what caused Jane to be lazy? If it was in her genes, that's hardly her fault. If her parents and/or mentors and/or peers taught her on average that it's not worth it to work hard, that's not her fault either. ("But she picked her peers!" - Okay, why did she pick those peers over better ones? See where this is going?) Even if she became lazy because she read this post and misunderstood its implications, deciding that "nothing matters so I may as well give up" - well that's not really her fault either, because again we just repeat the "why": why did she misunderstand my post? Did she not have good enough teachers, or was she just not born with this kind of reasoning ability? Whatever the answer is, we repeat until we see that ultimately it was just a matter of bad luck that she lost all her jobs.
I think it's true that nothing is ultimately to our credit or ultimately our fault. We have no true moral responsibility, as Galen Strawson puts it. This has serious implications for (at least) two major policy questions: criminal justice, and redistribution of wealth.
Criminal justice without free will
My students always ask at this point: since nothing is ever anyone's fault, does this mean we should scrap the criminal justice system? Should we never punish anyone, and let anyone do whatever they want?
No. Punishment can still be justified, on this view - but only when it brings net good consequences. To see what I mean, imagine Jane commits crimes that are clearly not her fault (even if you believe in free will); for example, suppose that she sleepwalks and stabs people while asleep, not at all aware of what she's doing. Well, it's not really her fault - so should we let her keep stabbing people? No. We should take her knives away. We should maybe contain her so that she can't be around other people. We should try to get her treatment and cure her of this condition. Even if the treatment is a little unpleasant and Jane doens't want it, society is justified in making her take the treatment if it's the best way to stop her from stabbing more people.
To force Jane to do something she doesn't want is a kind of punishment. This suggests we can justifiably punish Jane even when it's "not her fault" if there are net benefits to it, such as preventing future such crimes.
Those of us who think there is no free will think all criminal punishment should be like that. One such person was the 1920s lawyer Clarence Darrow. He was most famous for the Scopes "monkey trial", but he also famously defended thrill killers Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty. He really believed that even those thrill killers - kids who committed murder just because they thought they were smart and wanted to get away with it - were not really deep down at fault. They obviously had some twisted background that made them so deeply psychologically sick, Darrow reasoned. If Darrow had his way they would have been treated like hospital patients with a dread disease, because they were the unfortunate victims of a lot of bad luck to make them the monsters they became. And again, Darrow really believed this - he wasn't just cynically trying to get his defendants off the hook. Similar sentiments are in his address to the prisoners of the Cook County Jail.
If Darrow and I are right, this means the criminal justice system should never cause people to suffer just because they deserve it for their crimes; there should be no retribution, as philosophers call it. Instead, punishment should be designed primarily to "treat" the criminals of the conditions that caused them to commit the crime in the first place - whether the "sickness" is desperate poverty, lack of any marketable skills, a hopeless outlook, a psychological illness, or just bad anger management. Causing people to suffer just for having such rotten luck is like condemning them to jail for getting pneumonia - as chapter 10 and following of Samuel Butler's classic satire Erewhon suggests.
Wealth redistribution without free will
The same can be said for reward as for punishment. It's okay to reward people for good things they do, but again only if it's for the net best to do so, never because they deserve it for what they did.
Now think about how many people defend against redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor - it's not fair, the claim often goes, that the rich work so hard for their money and then have it taken away. The rich deserve to have wealth as a result of their hard work, and the poor deserve to suffer for failing to contribute. But if you don't believe in (libertarian) free will, no one deserves anything in this sense; the rich were just lucky, and the poor unlucky. The desert argument evaporates. This is obvious in cases like where the rich inherited their wealth, or the poor are oppressed systematically and prevented from holding employment. But it's even true where the rich came up from nowhere (they were lucky to have the right drive, mentors, etc. to become rich) and the poor fell from privilege (they must have still had some unfortunate disadvantage to make them poor).
So does this mean wealth must be distributed perfectly equally in order to be just? No, that is a straw man. It can be to everyone's benefit that there are incentives to be economically productive. Suppose we have two pies to divide up: one is much bigger, but divided into uneven pieces; the smaller one is cut into exactly equal pieces. If the smallest piece of the big pie is still larger than the even pieces of the small pie, we should all prefer the big pie. Because economic inequalities can be to the benefit of all this way, they are fair. But the inequalities should only be in place to the extent that they maximize this minimum share.
This is one way to get to the liberalism of political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls's is the most popular political philosophy among professional philosophers, and I think for good reason ... But I hope to discuss that more in a future "why I gave up libertarianism" post (and then I will mean the political view, not the free will view).
Meanwhile I hope you see why I think this very abstract philosophical problem is at the heart of some of the most crucial "real-world" political issues we face.
Fascinating posts. I have no issue with determinism in and of itself, and certainly would not disagree with your practical conclusions relating to crime punishment/prevention and distribution of wealth, if only for simple humanitarian reasons. I also have no difficulty in believing that on the face of it, an organic mind functions no differently than an elaborately programmed computer or artificial intelligence.
Where I struggle is with what we call consciousness, or as I prefer, awareness, and how this leads each of us to believe that we are responsible for our own choices and actions.
If the deterministic view is correct, then what does this say about awareness? For me, the awareness that I experience (I am reluctant to say my awareness) seems to be the thing driving my inner monologue, and the thing that ultimately makes my decisions. The thing that has driven me to write this reply and chosen the words to put in it. To me it seems illogical that such a complex illusion could have ever evolved, given that in a deterministic universe the illusion of having to agonise over crucial decisions could surely only be an evolutionary disadvantage in life or death situations. Generally things do not evolve when they are not of utility to the species, so surely the facility to make decisions (or at the very least the illusion of having such) would only evolve if such a facility were useful?
Also, given science's current inability to explain how the biological machinery of our brains gives rise to awareness, the central phenomenon of our very being, could it genuinely be possible that awareness itself originate from elsewhere other than from the sum of events in our universe and our own personal history? I am guessing that this would be a libertarian argument, and that you would dismiss this as magic, but could it be simply that there are bits to this puzzle of which we are currently unaware? This is clearly veering into the territory of 'the universe as a simulation' argument as @alexgr has set out in his reply.
I appreciate I have probably not articulated this in the best way. As I said, although this is a topic that deeply intrigues me, I have no real background in philosophy, and only a little in science. Anyway, I would be fascinated to know your views on the nature and origin of the phenomenon of awareness as it is clearly very tightly bound to this topic.
Thanks @matrioshka! Interesting thoughts.
Yes consciousness (particularly what philosophers call qualia, to disambiguate it from the various uses of the term) is certainly mysterious; it's hard to see how it fits into a physical world. I hope to post on this issue too someday soon(ish).
But again just finding something non-physical is not enough for free will. I didn' t really emphasize this enough in my posts, but in the end it's not really about determinism or not. I keep linking to this Peter van Inwagen article in my replies, because this issue comes up a lot in comments. In this article van Inwagen argues that even (nonphysical) angels would face the same free will problem. Basically, we can ask of this non-physical consciousness: was there a reason it steered me this way rather than that? If yes, we ask for that reason; if no, it was random - and again either way we bottom out at something not truly yours.
Meanwhile, it's true we have a kind of running monologue in our heads that feels like the thing making the decisions. But there are two responses to this.
Thanks for your reply and the links. Again, really interesting stuff, and has had gears clanking and steam coming out of my ears for the last few hours as I’ve done my best to process it all. Now at least I feel a little more informed on the subject, and also have a better idea of the enormous amount of thought that has gone into it over the centuries, even if I don’t fully grasp all of the concepts.
For me though, this reading has brought me to the conclusion that whether or not free will genuinely exists is academic in a universe where everyone intuitively believes that it does. What I mean to say is that were someone able to give me explicit, easy to grasp and irrefutable proof that we inhabit a fully deterministic universe and that free will unquestionably does not exist; and even if I could fully understand and accept this evidence on an intellectual basis, deep within me I would still reject it. This is simply because my everyday experience of awareness leads me to believe that I do have free will; I believe that I weigh the evidence in any decisions that I make, believe that I am free to chose one way or another, and believe that the decisions evidently influence the unfolding of my life and the lives of others. I take accountability for these decisions, and believe that I should be held responsible for their impact on others, for better or worse. I accept that the decisions I make will have been influenced by my past and current state, however not that they are actually determined by them - I instinctively feel that the awareness that I experience has the freedom of choice over the options before me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the ability to make these choices is one of the prime attributes of that very awareness. This awareness of choice will not stop even if someone proves that it does not exist, and I would not alter my decision making process on the basis of such evidence. I expect that this viewpoint is shared by the vast majority of people.
So, to the crux of this. From where I’m standing, there are either flaws in the arguments for the non-existence of free will, (and proof of this one way or another is far beyond my intellectual capability), or, if this is not the case, then the belief that one has free will is in actual fact of more consequence to everyday reality than the actual possession of free will. This latter possibility is a highly unusual proposition - in my life I have generally felt that evidence trumps belief when it comes to establishing reality, however, seemingly not so if your arguments are correct?
Ha this is a typical position to be in when doing philosophy ... feeling your worldview turning around and a bit stuck. The ancient Greeks called it aporia. It's not comfortable, sometimes - but it's better than being oblivious to the problem, right? I'm so glad you're considering this stuff so openly and honestly!
Probably you won't be able to respond to this given the reply depth limit (I've lost count) but let me add a few more things that might console you about not having free will - without pretending it's the last word.
I agree that you weigh evidence when you make decisions. I agree that your decisions influence the unfolding of your life and the lives of others. And I think you should be held responsible for the impact of these acts - at least, responsible the same way we hold sleepwalking Jane responsible, taking her knives and making her undergo treatment. All this can be true without your actions' being free (again, in the libertarian sense). You do choose things, based on your rich past, in basically the same way AlphaGo chooses its next move. And the things you choose affect what happens next (just as the move AlphaGo makes affects the next player's move).
So this may help some: it's easy to confuse causal determinism with what we often call fatalism - the idea that some future thing will happen no matter what comes before. So you might mistakenly reason to yourself that "well, either I'll make money on Steemit or I won't; since that's already determined, then it doesn't matter whether I actually post." I just recently learned this is called The Idle Argument, and maybe you can see why it doesn't work: if you are already causally determined to make money on Steemit, it's because you were already causally determined to post good stuff!
You've conflated feelings with facts and, in that sense, have mischaracterized my objection. It is most certainly true that there can be no actual meaning to any part of reality in a determined universe. So you can declare all of the universe to be determined and "choose" (sic) to feel like there is meaning anyway but that would not be the same as the universe or any life within it actually possessing meaning. On your view, it cannot. So in a determined universe everything you have written ends up being an absurdity. Persuasion, moral responsibility, using words like "should" and "ought" or "deserved" or "earned" are bereft of any meaning. All things just ARE, all the time and they could not be any other way.
As Nancy Pearcy has written,
Being a materialist, I can understand why you might believe that it has been discovered that we are not free in any sense but the latest science says otherwise. The info-theoretic/digital physics interpretation which has emerged as a result of decades of experiments in quantum mechanics specifically contradicts physical realism and locality (eg. http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05949 ). An experiment from Anton Zeilinger et all in 2012:
And, given everything we know of quantum gravity, spacetime is emergent from information and physical reality is holographic in nature. See people like Seth Lloyd, Fotini Markopoulou, Ed Fredkin, Herman and Erik Verlinde, and Leonard Susskind to name a few. They represent the consensus position and all quantum gravity research to speak of currently is going into emergent spacetime, where spacetime emerges from patterns of entangled quantum information.
Which is all to say that materialism has been falsified - by physicists - and so has deterministic causality.
Since my interests tend more toward philosophy, however, I find the Introspective Argument alone sufficient to reject materialism ( http://blog.proof.directory/2014/05/25/introspective-argument/ ) while the science is supportive.
It takes courage to acknowledge the truth that humans are almost ...automatons with no free will. The only reason most humans can't comprehend it, is because the number of parameters to factor is so large that it's convenient to discard as chaotic.
Obviously, as you point out, the lack of free-will has extensions in politics, economy, justice etc. But to implement any form of change you'd have to ...convince the masses who still think there is free will!
On a more "positive" note, the possibility of free will exists if we go through the unification theory of simulation. However that free will would have to "originate" from outside our simulation - the level where this reality was programmed and the level where our "spirit"-self controls this avatar. At that level there is the potential to break the "closed-loop" of the avatar (our human self) and its environment feedback loop.
Thanks again for your thoughts @alexgr!
"Almost"?!
Yeah, it's an uphill battle - but so was abolitionism. "The philosophy of one century is the commonsense of the next."
Interesting thought ... but I don't see how that would work. It seems whatever's outside the simulation - the "spirit-self" - is subject to just this same trouble. As Peter van Inwagen argues, it seems impossible for even angels to have free will.
I say "almost" because there is a way to break the closed feedback loop of this reality's chain of stimuli and reactions.
It would work like this: All our thoughts and actions within this reality domain are 100% deterministic, as one triggers the other etc etc. At some point, if say, new stimuli originates from outside this reality domain, the deterministic results are upset because an "uncertainty" has been introduced.
This can be as simple as having an intuition or a prophetic dream which was communicated from our "higher" / "spirit" self, which then shifts our actions to new directions - which are still deterministic reactions to our stimuli. But in the act of even having that intuition, the chain of equations that was predicting behavior is then broken because the "anomaly" was introduced and suddenly the end result changed to something different.
It would be pretty difficult to ascertain what is the state of affairs in the higher-order reality beyond this virtual reality because we have no idea how it works and if it can likewise experience a similar intervention from above (if it is in itself another virtual reality within a virtual reality). We can speculate though.
Thank you for writing what I have been saying for decades. I often point out that if you were given an endless stack of scratch off lottery tickets and started scratching, it would be absurd to feel proud for winning or to feel guilty for losing. In life we are all just scratching off lottery tickets.
People resist the truth of not having free will because it is the foundation that their whole ego is built upon, their whole drama is based on being the doer living amongst other doers. To accept the truth you and I know is to take the life out of the ego, and to those identifying with being the doer, that is the death of who they really believe they are. Egos are afraid to die. The consciousness that witnesses that death, in the moment of witnessing it, realises its own eternal transcendental nature. The non-dual mystics of the east say that in the end the only thing that can be said is that there is Sat Chit Ananda (Existence Consciousness Bliss). Knowing the truth eliminates judgement, anger, hate, and vengeance - it reveals non-judgement, equanimity, love, and compassionate assistance.
I will be sharing this. I considered this topic as a possible focus for my adventures on Steemit... But, I decided to start with "I sold 3,000,000 doses of LSD for the Cause... (coming out of my UV fractal colored closet)" instead.
Yeah, I scratched off that lottery ticket...
Drat - somehow I hit 'submit' after typing 'philo' for the first tag. I think I am used to tab-completing labels in some other programs. There's no way to change the main category back to 'philosophy', is there?!
It should be there in all 4 categories... but the answer is no I think.
Hey, @spetey,
You responded to my very first post here on Steemit, one about bitcoin key generation...
So, I came across your response today and wondered what had happened to you? And I skimmed your articles on free (or not so free) will...
I found those very interesting, and appreciate them. If you're still "out there," and see this comment... If you respond, I'll give it an ~$2 upvote... :D
😄😇😄
