"We human beings are macroscopic structures in a universe whose laws reside at a microscopic level."
-Douglas Hofstadter
Hofstadter poetically raises the paradox of selfhood: Do we control our actions, or are we just the product of physical laws? Can a self emerge from impersonal rules and indifferent matter? Do we even generate our own thoughts?
Choose Wisely… or Did You?
The idea of “free will” has emerged over the past two millennia as the canonical designation for a significant kind of control over one's actions. I tend to have a hard time imagining a true platform for top-down control. In my view, us feeling like we have it is only a byproduct of our conscious "user-illusion", which deposited a few evolutionary advantages. Every behavior I exhibit has its roots in physical causes and laws outside of my awareness, sweeping molecules and cells around the cluster of organized material that is my brain. The higher-level thoughts and feelings are rendered versions of cognitive processes, otherwise as imperceptible as my metabolism, accessible only, not driven, by me.
As far as I can tell in my layman's understanding of the universe, there seem to be no breaks in chains of causality at any relevant levels. While we may never be able to predict future states because of difficulties related to nonlinear or chaotic systems, that doesn't mean that those bodies don't participate in causal chains with deterministic rules; they just suffer from computational irreducibility. This view has implications on moral responsibility (how can you hold someone responsible for actions that are in no way under their "control"?), justice systems, and human development.
This is a hard determinist position, which falls under incompatibilism (meaning free will and Determinism are incompatible) and, further, holds Determinism as the true state of the universe. The view has been around since the golden age of Greek philosophy, mulled over for thousands of years, bearing implications wherever you land with it. Scientific disciplines have taken up the mantle in various fields, which have informed fuller pictures on the concepts. A few other different schools exist under Determinism which have slightly different approaches.
The other competing positions on free will are worth looking into, and there are many.
Besides Determinism, the two other broad, and most relevant to this blog post, positions are Libertarianism and Compatibilism.
Libertarianism, like Determinism, is also a broad incompatibilist position but with the opposite take. According to their account free will is true and Determinism is therefore false: choices are executed independent of prior causes and natural laws. This preserves moral responsibility, handing the reigns of choice to an individual, and preserves ethical frameworks centered on self-determination and autonomy. There are a few flavors of Libertarianism, like Event-Causal and Agent-Causal, that place emphasis on different parts of the equations cause, but they all hold that you could, at various forks in the road during life, "choose otherwise". Heavy criticisms (my own included) come from neuroscience and physics. As the decades have ticked by and the experimental evidence has mounted, the space that "agency" has to operate in continues to contract. Think "god of the gaps" but for free will.
Other attempts to reconcile experimental data of physical laws and systems with Libertarianism involve placing the "sufficient cause" needed for agency behind indeterminancy (whether quantum or not), which might not offer much of a better defense: randomness doesn't provide control.
One final broad view is Soft Determinism, or Compatibilism, which holds that free will and Determinism are compatible; one does not preclude the other. Most people, I would imagine, think along the lines of this position. Compatibilists, who can count Daniel Dennett, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume among their number, argue that even if Determinism is true, people act "freely" in the sense that their actions align with their intentions, desires and rational deliberations.
That is a subtle shift of definitions worth noting: if you have the motivation that you'd like to stay healthy and avoid sweets, the compatibilist says something like:
"Leaving prior causes to one side for now, since this is the desire, we can define your will as simply that. Do you act and make choices in accordance or against it?"
A software program running on a processor in a robot might be considered to have "will" and "motivation" in this sense, as such displaying "free will" when acting in accordance with its programming. I feel certain you can see some logical hurdles to Compatibilism, right? Criticisms tend to center on the redefinition of "free will"; determinists and libertarians alike think it side steps the actual question ("Could one choose otherwise?"), but the practicality follows much of how we think about things in our day-to-day lives. There is certainly philosphical meat to bite into with higher-level psychological "causes" and variables.
Even so, we have retreated, when we deem appropriate, behind a wavering line of deterministic absolution of guilt for crimes committed when it is judged that someone could not choose otherwise due to things like manic episodes, or at the onset of Huntington's. Compatibilism leaves room for causality while maintaining moral and ethical responsibility. As more comes to light about the conditions and mechanics of neuronal networks, we will hopefully be reevaluating this line, but the troubling question is: Where is the line?
While small individual differences are key, brain and their cells are largely made from the same physical substances that follow the same broad rules: It's the same serotonin that opens up the same sodium channels that fires the same action potentials that drive the same voltage spikes from -70 to +40 mV. Mountains and mountains of evidence have confirmed these mechanics time and again, even across species. The thresholds and mechanics are tweaked in certain cases, like during a manic or schizophrenic episode, but but a typical brain doesn't operate outside of these conditions.
Know thyself? What's the point?
The reason I am even writing this post is because, after having run the gamut of positions on this debate, I still have trouble settling myself. Day-to-day, I probably sound like a Compatibilist. And I have to admit: Compatibilism is appealing. It's useful to talk about events and my role in them through the lens of "intent", "what I meant to do", "choice" and "desire". While I truly believe I could not have "chosen otherwise" in any circumstance in my life, you wouldn't know that from the way I speak about my life and the events in it.
However, I don't like the Compatibilist subtle redefinition of will that avoids the answers most seek with the overall question of free will. As I said earlier, I truly do believe that Hard Determinism is the case of the world and I am trapped in a "user illusion": a simplified representation of reality much like a desktop user is presented with a simplified graphical interface that allows said user to interact with what is actually an incredibly complex tool.
Even the existence of the "user illusion" itself is evidence to make me doubt free will: if consciousness is just the data in the human mind creating a user illusion, then what gap does free will fit into?
I reside in a virtual reality cockpit and am often talking of navigation: quite a subtle paradox.
What's the point of invoking it if I don't stay consistent, especially when I conceptualize events in my own mind? And where do my views on morals fit in if Determinism calls those into question?
Wrestling with Determinism
A recent book I read was Robert Sapolsky's Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will which largely laid out, in a much clearer way and with all the weight of neuroscientific expertise that Sapolsky has earned, my struggles. In it, Sapolsky endeavors to talk about this topic from a scientific perspective, an approach that I find grounding when topics become airy and abstract: what is even possible in the physical world, and should we reform our concepts based on that? Everyone from Aristotle to Augustine to Aquinas have made a meal of it philosophically, but modern experiments consistently drive reconceptualizations of old philosophical problems. The book itself is obviously worth the read (his previous book, Behave, even moreso), but a few summaries of the book and his views can be found scattered across the internet.
In the book, he runs through Libetian experiements, Phineas Gage and sliding scales of free will, the neurobiology and endocrinology of intent, and a writeup of Aplysia californica, the same analysis of which won Eric Kandel a Nobel prize in physiology. This chapter is absolutely golden for explaining the physiology and biology of responses, learning, and memory, of the exact kind I talked about in another blog post. It was reassurring to have a neuroscientist of Sapolsky's caliber share in my inability to understand where, in these long, complex chains (more like networks) of biological causality you'd find the space for an untethered free will. He also expresses the same frustrations with an inability to act like he knows all of this.
The machinery of memory and learning, according to Aplysia californica
Morality without Free Will
So after all this talk of physical systems and biology and neuro-mechanics, let's back up a second to a common objection: How do you even figure out what's "good" or "bad", "right" or "wrong" in the midst of all this? What do biology and physics tell you of such and on what grounds? The ideas of "morally good" and "morally bad" behavior seem skewed if someone's Pre-Frontal Cortex configuration and white matter connections or their socialization and development trajectories (also ensconced in their brain) make it impossible for them to do anything else. So then, aren't those brains and systems just doing things the only way they can; simply following their own mechanics? How might we judge anything at all, identifying one behavior over the other as desirable?
Don't we run the rist of moral notions losing meaning?
I don't think so.
Say you design a determined universe, with people and societies, from first principles. Could you do a better and a worse job, given you know that all things rely on prior causes? Could you leverage the circumstances of change to biological and neurological systems, psychology, and society to form better or worse outcomes? Could you build a system of accountability around such ideas, separating the harmful people as judged by legal and criminal standards, and moving forward into a future of better sequelae, addressing the social and biological determinants of harm and crime, while ridding ourselves of the idea of morally-righteous and tribal punishments of the "burn them at the stake" variety? Could we leave behind the idea of someone "deserving" punishment and simply have a process of addressing and rehabiliting any detrimental gene mutations and poor environments for the better?
Do you think it's possible that some configurations result in better lives for the individual and society and world?
I think so.
I think we would be quite well-moored if we choose this approach as a moral substrate. It's a version of the moral realist's take. Determinism doesn't erase morals, it reframes them.
The Absurdity of Blame
What holds us back from a world without punishment and one centered around circumstantial change, where the carrying out of justice is more akin to a medical quarantine model (akin to operant conditioning, for you psych nerds), is one of the very systems that Sapolsky knows so intimately: the dopamine reward pathways. It feels good to retributively punish people in the same way it feels good to accomplish a goal. It's a phenomenon as old as humans, althoughx the same systems and mechanisms show up in primates and other animals, in fact. Gluticosteroids are reduced, dopamine and serotonin are released, and the neurosystems that promote tribalism and selfishness are satisfied.
All of this is, unfortunately, a holdover that doesn't scale as well with modern society. It may be that we have to intervene on these systems to hope to have an overhaul of morality and justice that sticks. Despite the endeavors of neuroscientists and biologists, society still largely holds coarse notions surrounding behavioral antecedents that are under no control of ours, often rendering pitchfork-and-mob judgements. If the punishment of crime is reclassified as a short-sighted, but very real, hedonistic indulgence under the light of science, what good is spending money on known inefficiencies in our judicial systems like Joe Arpaio's idea of justice, especially as we are able to intervene on genes and biology more and more? Shouldn't we aim for lasting change above all?
To return to my own question earlier: what's the point of all this if I can't even always remember not to color others' intents and behaviors with a veneer of "you could have chosen otherwise and you deserve retribution"? It seems like moving in a direction away from the moral highgrounds and retributive punishment might not only be the best direction for us as a whole, but me individually. It bakes a rationale into interactions with others that helps temper my own dispositions; there is an almost Rawlsian logic to it.
While he doesn't wade very deep and mostly sticks to the shallows of philosophy in the book, he does bring up one philosopher: Albert Camus and Absurdism. Absurdism is the philosophical thesis that life, or the world in general, is absurd. Sapolsky thinks Hard Determinism might even bring Absurdism to a new level: not only might life be meaningless and the universe be indifferent, we are not even free to make our own decisions. We are not captains of our ship; our ship never even had a helm, let alone a captain. We are automatons, but stuck with an illusion of agency and sensations that make us think our will is applied to the universe instead of the universe applying to us.
Morally punishing a person for the way they act is the same as morally punishing a storm for thundering: absurd.
