- People who argue against free will sometimes try to portray free will as a concept that’s self-contradictory by its own definition. The concept of free will itself is simple in essence, so if it were inherently self-contradictory then the contradiction would be obvious, and all but the insane would realize that before ever believing in free will, much like with the idea of a square circle. Free will is an intuitively, universally understood concept, but it’s hard to pin down a formal definition. So, when people attempt to rigorously define it for the sake of making arguments against it, they tend to just make something up that sounds close enough and satisfies the analytical machine. Therefore, the arguments they then make against it are essentially straw man arguments.
- Some people say that free will is not possible because the only alternative to an action being caused, or determined, is for it to be absolutely random, or some combination of being caused and random, and that meaningless randomness isn’t any more conducive to free will than determinism. Yet by posing those as the only two logical possibilities and then alleging that, in each one, free will is logically ruled out, one is effectively ruling out free will by definition, which I debunked in the first bullet point. Also, if free will were rulable out by definition, then it wouldn’t be necessary to even mention the two alternative possibilities of randomness and determinacy to prove its self-contradiction because they’re not parts of the definition, so the proponent of this view has to be thinking about the problem incorrectly.
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One way of looking at this problem with this argument is that it’s assumed that randomness lacks meaning or reason, in the sense in which meaning or reason would be necessary for it to be conducive to free will, but this isn’t necessarily the case. Insofar as “randomness” is the only logical alternative to determinism, “random” only means undetermined, or intrinsically unpredictable. But just it being undetermined or intrinsically unpredictable doesn’t imply that it’s necessarily empty, meaningless, or without reason as a cause of further events.
The phenomenon of free will is fundamentally non-mechanistic, which implies that it can’t be fully mathematically modeled or predicted. We imagine that the only way there could be any meaning, substance, or rhyme or reason behind an event is that it’s mechanistically caused by previous events (or maybe not even then), but that’s just because we’re unable to imagine any kind of meaning or reason beyond mechanism, which is due to our having been thoroughly conditioned by our systemically scientistic, rationalistic, left-brained culture.
By the way, you don’t even have to take my word for it that the phenomenon of free will is fundamentally non-mechanistic; all that’s required for my argument to be valid is that it’s possible that free will is a non-mechanistic phenomenon, the aim of my argument being that the argument that free will isn’t possible because everything must be either random, deterministic, or a combination of the two isn’t valid.
Of course, a fully deterministic universe would be incompatible with my justification for the possibility of free will (and I do believe determinism is incompatible with free will), and believing in determinism is many people’s reason for not believing in free will, so I’ll explain why determinism isn’t likely the case, here.
The assumption of determinism is merely an extrapolation from physics’ ability to predict the behavior of certain kinds of systems to a high level of accuracy and precision. Nature was once thought to be largely wild and capricious, then came along Newton with his invention of classical mechanics, and then suddenly so many phenomena were understood and predictable that people went overboard and assumed that the whole world was fully explainable and predictable, if not by Newtonian mechanics, then by some hitherto unknown set of principles.
Physics only got better and better at understanding and predicting nature after that, such as with the inventions/discoveries of general relativity, quantum mechanics, particle/nuclear physics, chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum chromodynamics, astrophysics, cosmology, etc., further contributing to the vision of a fully deterministic universe, at least for some.
But there remain tons and tons of things that can’t be predicted, such as cloud formation, just as one example. I know, I know, cloud formation is a chaotic process, so it’s just way too complex to measure and predict, but we understand and can predict how the individual atoms involved bounce around.. well, that’s assuming the macroscopic behavior of the clouds really does fully reduce to the behavior of its individual microscopic components. There’s no way to test that; reductionism is a core principle of scientific understanding that’s just taken for granted.
But more importantly, the chaotic formation of the clouds may be influenced by quantum-random events, which are unpredictable. They’re so unpredictable that physicists tend to regard them as “absolutely random,” as in they’re not just unpredictable due to limitations in knowledge, they’re unpredictable even in principle.
It’s easy to assume that we just don’t yet know the principles determining their behavior, and thus characterize the idea that quantum randomness is a source of free will or of anything else as a “god of the gaps” theory, but this relies on the unfounded assumption that science can and will eventually understand and predict everything, or at least that it could, in principle.
It’s not as if science was ever once able to predict more or less everything, and then we discovered these weird quantum-random events that are only relevant insofar as you specifically regard them; science was never able to predict all kinds of things, or even anything with absolute precision and certainty, and quantum randomness is a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics, which is our entire model of nature on the most fundamental level besides general relativity. If there were a fundamental/metaphysical limitation to the predictability of nature, it would make sense for it to crop up exactly in the form of quantum randomness.
Some may argue that there exist deterministic interpretations, and even theories, of quantum mechanics, but none of these theories are actually able to predict any quantum-random behavior, and the proof is in the pudding, as it were.
One might argue that quantum-random events typically only happen on a nanoscopic scale, and that they even out to predictable behavior on an aggregate/macroscopic scale, but this is not always the case. Sometimes quantum-random events can have macroscopic effects, and this may be particularly possible within our brains, since the brain operates “at the edge of chaos,” and in a chaotic system, the tiniest perturbations can have large-scale consequences, such as in the butterfly effect. The workings of the brain are not well enough understood to say for sure whether quantum randomness plays a part in mental processes.
Furthermore, it’s not really that clear at all that quantum randomness typically only happens at small scales. By some accounts, the entire universe can be seen as one big quantum wavefunction. When a wavefunction is measured (or, to use more pop culture lingo, observed) and therefore “collapses” into an observable state, which possible state it picks happens at random. (This kind of randomness is inherently unpredictable, but, again, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily without rhyme or reason). So, that quantum randomness could ultimately determine anything and everything you experience. This notion also seems to be supported by the quantum theory developed in 2000 called QBism.
I’d say that behind the “random” events of quantum mechanics is life, and life is fundamentally free, non-mechanistic, ineffable, and PFM (Pure F*king Magic). (For some support of this notion, see Playback argument (why a neural network can’t be conscious) « A brood comb and Why a neural network can’t be conscious (2) « A brood comb.)
- Free will actually pertains to mind—the inner reality/experience. This arena is not particularly known to necessarily adhere to a causal, mechanistic paradigm like the external world more or less does. We don’t have any experience of a deterministic overarching ruleset in our minds/inner lives, and nor do we have any particular reason to believe any of it is just random, or at least meaninglessly or absolutely random. And by its nature, the inner/mental world lends itself much more to a paradigm of “rhyme and reason” being behind things without an underlying mechanistic or deterministic basis than external reality does.
(Yes, scientists largely believe that mind is produced somehow solely by the physical brain and its processes, but that is only theoretical, while I am talking about the natures of “mind” and “external/physical reality” as concepts. I wrote more about this here.)
It’s hard to describe why the inner/mental world lends itself more to the a neither-determined-nor-random, non-mechanistic paradigm than the physical/external world does, but here are some aspects: its whimsical and transient nature; the level of pure freedom involved in its constructions; the perhaps mystical (or, at least, mysterious) nature of its constructions; the fact that concepts and emotions can bleed into each other, transcending any boundaries the mind uses to analyze and modularize things; and the non-reducibility of its contents (e.g. thoughts and imagined forms can’t be internally dissected and found to be composed of thought-atoms or anything; even if some thoughts can be argued to be made of component thoughts, those component thoughts are still monadic).
- Some people think that we have no free will because our actions are determined by our wants/desires, and we presumably can’t choose our wants or desires. In other words, since we can’t will to will something, we don’t have free will. Yet in my experience we do have some control over what we want. But it doesn’t really matter, because where does one draw the line? That is, does one demand that we be able to want to want what we want? Or to want to want to want what we want, etc.? It would seem totally arbitrary to stop at two levels, so, by this logic, where would it stop? Taking this demand all the way to its telos, therefore, leads to an infinite regress, where you must will your will to will your will to will to will… ad infinitum.
This of course doesn’t prove that free will doesn’t exist, but rather the opposite: since demanding infinite regression would be a logical absurdity, it shows that the fundamental idea of requiring that we choose what we want is going about it the problem in the wrong way. The logical absurdity is not the problem of free will, because it’s not defined to imply ability to will our will, or ability to will our will to will, etc.
Furthermore, not everything we choose to do comes out of wants/desires in a static sense. Some actions come from a place of pure, flowing creativity, and that’s where free will shines the most.
- Free is defined as having a lack of restraint. The laws of physics, contrary to popular thinking, cannot be restraints per se, so the laws of physics don’t contradict free will, and wouldn’t even if they were deterministic. So-called physical “laws” are an aspect of the very nature physical existence and its constituents; a thing or its actions cannot be restrained by its own nature and what makes its existence possible, any more than a square can be restrained by the fact of its having four corners.
A physical impossibility may be ultimately a logical impossibility, which would be the very reason such a thing doesn’t occur. A thing is not restrained from doing something that is a logical impossibility; the idea of doing (or being) something that is a logical impossibility is an absurd and flawed hypothetical to begin with.
If physical laws were restraining, constraining, or otherwise enactors of some sort, then you’d need further/more-meta laws to enforce or constrain those laws, because why would they continue to consistently do what they do otherwise? (Or if they would just naturally continue to constrain or enforce, then it’s equally plausible that the physical “laws” are just things naturally doing what they do, rather than doing those things because they’re constrained or enforced by laws.) And we’d need further laws to enforce those laws, etc., to infinite regression. And not to mention that it would probably require infinite energy for this infinite tower of laws to rule. So determinism, therefore, doesn’t counter free will—at least not by that definition.
So, in one sense, determinism is compatible with free will (this particular bullet point is a compatibilistic argument for free will), thus defeating the argument against free will even on deterministic grounds.
Incidentally, I think that what we experience and know of as “free will” is not possible in a deterministic world, as its nature is wholly spiritual, magical, ineffable and nonmechanistic.
Even if free will weren’t compatible with determinism, I don’t even believe a deterministic world is possible, because (a) the entire timeline would be boil down to a continuous logical/mathematical transformation of state, so there’d be no room for an ever slowly progressing “now” because logic itself is instantaneous, and (b) that would make all the information of the world compressible into nothing but an initial state plus a set of laws that acts on it until the end of time, and any frame of reference that doesn’t see the universe in its most compressible state is arbitrarily seeing duplicity of information where none necessarily exists. I wrote more about this (a long time ago) here.
- If you are disappointed by your conclusion that you don’t have free will, then that is proof that you’re not thinking rationally. To borrow an analogy I saw someone once make, it’s like the fish that is saddened because he suddenly learns that the water he’s been swimming in all his life is actually urine. (Obviously that fact can’t make his quality of life any better or worse than it already was, and he already knew exactly how good or bad his life was.)
- It makes no sense to say that free will is an illusion. An illusion is the appearance of something that’s not really there. If free will is an illusion by nature, there is nothing else that it can appear to be. If there were something we could think is free will—and therefore something to say that the alleged free will is an illusion of—then that has to be what free will is, because free will can only be experienced, and we can’t be wrong about what we experience…what we think a given experience is/what we call, it is what it is. For example, if you’re feeling sad, how can sadness be an illusion?
(And for those who think that free will is an illusion just because they think consciousness must be an illusion—if there are any such people—I have a refutation of that idea here.)
- You can argue about free will and try to find logical flaws in it, but that requires arguing based on definitions, and any definition is only approximate (except for those of words created solely to stand in for a particular definition, such as in mathematical jargon, for example). Defining a word is an art, not an exact science, so, to some degree, the meaning of free will (or of almost anything) is not subject to rigid analysis. The real meaning and magic of free will is not necessarily encapsulated in its definition, and logical analyses of free will rely heavily on definitions. I wrote more about meanings versus definitions here.
- The bulk of the sentiment that free will doesn’t exist seems basically to rest on the scientistic notion that mind reduces to physical stuff, particularly the brain or neurochemical processes (and that physical stuff appears to be wholly mechanical). But I’ve shown why this is impossible here. I also talk about the subject here.
- G.K. Chesterton said, “If there were no god, there would be no atheists.” Similarly, if free will were not a part of our nature, or a part of the cosmos (it is, and can only be, both), we would not yearn for it and we would not argue over it. It’s not “wishful thinking”. Wishful thinking requires a reason you know of what you’re wishing for, and not to mention a reason to wish for it. If not for free will, we probably would never even think of the idea, and if we did, we wouldn’t care.
I think we have free will in the deepest sense one could possibly hope for. Our mechanistic and rationalistic thinking on the matter doesn’t stand up to the magic and open-endedness of the universe.
