Do We Have Free Will?
This is a question that many theologians, philosophers and scientist have spent much effort studying and arguing over. And yet most of us non-academics will quickly answer that of course we have free will. Most people believe that they have the free will to make choices when presented the opportunity to make a decision. On the other hand, some reductionist scientists argue there is no free will. Our thoughts are nothing more than deterministic biological algorithms driven by causal chains based on genetics and previous experiences. Some scientists have also argued that the randomness of quantum mechanics means we cannot have free will. If our choices are influenced by random quantum events then we are not exercising our will because our choice is random.
Well, this essay is my effort to just think about it for a while. What are the factors that bear upon the answer to this question? Can I find my way to my personal answer to this question without getting bogged down in the esoteric (dare I say pedantic?) discussions of the philosophers and neuroscientists. I ended up with a shotgunned approach to thinking this out rather than some logical well thought out discussion and have asked myself many questions without coming up with answers. But for what it’s worth, here goes.
Many centuries ago St. Augustine deduced that we must have free will in order to explain why we have evil in the world. Since we were created by an all powerful, benevolent God there could be no evil in the world unless we humans were given free will by God and misused that free will for evil. ( I’m going to set this argument aside because I believe that humans were created by evolution and are the product of natural selection rather than an intentional God.)
If a decision maker is predictable does that mean that it doesn’t have free will. If a decision maker is unpredictable does that mean that it does have free will. Does predicability have anything to do with free will? A quick check of chaos theory tells us that deterministic processes (with no free will) can give widely different results due to seemingly insignificant differences in their inputs. The result is a deterministic process with an outcome that is, for all practical purposes, unpredictable. So I’m thinking that predicability is not a factor in this free will argument.
Maybe the way to look at free will is to consider the constraints that exist on the decision maker. In other words, it is not a characteristic of the “thinker/doer” but a characteristic of the environment of the thinker/doer. This is certainly the way to consider freedom. So how is free will related to freedom? Is free will equal to freedom to exercise will? Does there need to be an action for will to have been exercised. I think not. So even if a person has many constraints placed on his ability to act, he can still have intent and consciously make choices about what he thinks.
Intent: having the mind, attention, or will concentrated on something or some end or purpose
When reductionists talks about free will do they mean the same thing as when a lawyer talks about free will? The law and our morals are based on the assumption that we have free will. The law talks about “intent” Do you have to have free will to have intent? Are free will and intent essentially the same thing? Perhaps intent is the result of exercising free will in one’s own thoughts. Yes, that’s right!
From a reductionist’s point of view is free will just impossible because of the structure of our brains? Is free will logically impossible? NO! Is there really no freedom to choose.? But people make choices all the time. So does free will have nothing to do with choices? Wrong. I think in the minds of most all humans the ability to consciously make choices is the very definition of free will.
Those that say we have no free will say that causal chains of unconscious brain functions form the basis of our apparent choices. All our past experiences, both mental and physical, form a causal chain that leads to the apparent choices we make. Our past experiences define our present thought patterns, which define the choices we will make. There is certainly a lot of evidence that this is true in a general sense. The question is whether this causal chain is so rigid that there is no room for free will or not. I think that when this unconscious chain of brain processes becomes conscious, there is still the opportunity for the conscious brain to make a choice via a conscious process.
Consider some different decision makers contained in a metaphorical black box where we don’t know the inner workings.
A random number generator
A quantum event splitting the universe.
A simple deterministic machine.
A chaotic machine (deterministic but chaotic and therefore unpredictable)
An animal.
A human.
An AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Witch, if any of these, can have free will? What’s the difference of one from another? Can we determine something of the inner workings of each black box based on the observed decisions of said box? All of the above “decision makers” can be capable of yes/no answers to any question. The first four (without the means to understand a verbal question) could not give meaningful answers to even the simplest questions. (e.g. Would you like a drink of water?) An animal (e.g. a dog or non-human primate) could give some meaningful responses to simple questions like “Do you want to go for a walk?” They can be taught to respond to very simple verbal question with a bark or a sign. Because we can’t really know what these animals are thinking it would be hard to know for sure if their answers reflect a free will choice or not.. Are they forming conscious thoughts or trained responses? Humans make conscious choices and as humans we can understand human choices as they come out of our metaphorical black box. At some point it will become difficult to determine whether a human is in our black box or an AI. This is the so called Turing test for general intelligence. Once we have an AI that passes the Turing test, if we argue that humans have free will, does this mean that an AI has free will also? We know that a human is conscious because we are humans and we experience consciousness, but we can’t know if an AI is conscious because we are not inside its “mind”. Of course we can ask the AI if it is conscious, but can we trust its answer? So I wonder if you have consciousness do you also have free will? Yes, I think so. And if you don’t have consciousness can you still have free will? I don’t know about that.
If consciousness is necessary for free will and reductionist scientists cannot satisfactorily explain consciousness, perhaps this is a flaw in their thinking on the subject of free will. Free will requires intent and intent requires consciousness. Consciousness is an emergent quality that is apparently not associated with a specific physical component of the brain. It is entirely possible that free will emerges as consciousness emerges. You need to be self aware in order to have a will or have intent.
My example of what free will means to a human being is as follows. Reductionist scientists conduct a study in which they examine the wills of a group of subjects. The scientists run a series of tests to determine exactly how each subject’s brain works and use this description to predict where each person will be located one week from now. (e.g. sitting on a particular park bench) If their predictions are correct they hope to demonstrate humans do not have free will. Part of the protocol of the experiment is that the scientists inform each of the subjects what their predictions are. This clearly gives each participant the opportunity to demonstrate their free will to appear at that time and place or not. If they do not appear they have demonstrated free will. If they do appear they will have not demonstrated free will. Now, on the face of it I am confident that each of you readers will consider this a ridiculous scenario. There is no way that any scientist can know how each mind will “compute” over the next week and the state of all the sensory inputs to that mind over the next week with enough accuracy to know the exact location of a participant in a week later (unless these are evil scientists that plan to put external constraints on these participants). Does this mean that it is impossible to prove that humans do not have free will? Let’s go a step further. Suppose that the scientists could make such a prediction with great accuracy. Would not each participant in the study still be able to exercise their free will by showing up at that spot at that time or not. Every person has their own personality, prejudices and tendencies, but this does not mean they don’t act with conscious intent.
Changes happen in the mind every second. How does this fact affect the free will issue? There does not have to be a permanent self to exercise free will. Whatever state the mind is in at the moment can exercise free will.
What about the Buddhist teaching of no self? If there is no self, can there be free will. I think there does not need to be a separate, permanent self for thinking to happen. If thinking can happen then free will can happen if that thinking is conscious.
Is the state of human civilization an argument in favor of free will? Yes, I think so. Could our current technology and civilization have been created without free will? I think not. Certainly intent is needed to have created this civilized world as we now know it. And as I’ve argued above, free will is necessary to manifest intent.
Is it possible that the brain is simply choosing a preference subconsciously rather than consciously making a decision. For example, when I order the same thing every time I go to a particular restaurant. Maybe it’s not really an action initiated by my consciousness but a passive response to the necessity of ordering my food. So it could be argued that this situation is not me exercising my free will. But in this case this argument should be discounted. In this case my conscious mind has still exercised a choice, even if it was simply accepting the choice proposed by the unconscious brain processes. As long as I consciously recognize the possibility of making a choice other than my normal preference I am still exercising free will in my mind. Now take another example when I make a wrong turn while driving. I might have not been thinking about where I am going and I come to a familiar intersection where I always turn right, and so I do turn right even though the correct direction to get to my destination (which I’m not thinking about) is to turn left. This might be a good example of when I am not exercising free will. But of course it doesn’t mean I don’t have free will, it just means I didn’t use it because the decision to make that turn was not a conscious one!
So here is the bottom line in my thinking. Any decision maker that is conscious has the capacity to form an intent. An expression of a conscious intent is the very definition of exercising free will. I will leave the issue of whether an unconscious decision maker can exercise free will as an open issue. You decide.