Free will problem

The Free Will Problem

The Free Will Problem is a long-standing problem in philosophy. The answers to the questions it raises strike at the very heart of what it means to be a human being. Most people assume they have free will. Those that say tht they do not believe in free will seldom act as if they do not have free will.

The Free Will Problem problem presents a number of challenges:

First, there is the task of determining what counts as having free will. What is meant by "the free will problem?" depends on how you answer "what is meant by "free will?" We do not have time in an introductory class to consider all the different ways to characterize what it might mean to have free will. We will consider the version of the free will problem that is generated by our scientific world view.

Here is how we describe what it means to have free will:

Someone's choice is free if they could have chosen otherwise than they did even though all of the antecedent circumstances were the same.

First, note that if someone has free will, what is free is their ability to choose to perform an action. Whether someone actually can perform an action that they freely chose to perform depends on things people cannot always control. I can choose to fly by waving my arms, but that does not mean I lack free will if I do not fly.

Second, reflect on what is meant by "antecedent circumstances" in "if they could have chosen otherwise than they did even though all of the antecedent circumstances were the same." By "antecedent circumstances" is meant everything the world (including the person) was like when someone chose to do something. It means you could have chosen to do otherwise even though all your brain states were exactly the same as they were when you chose to do what ever it was that you did. It means you could have chosen to do otherwise even though your situation is exactly the same as it was when you choose to do whatever it was that you did (for example, even if you climbed out the open window of a car sinking in a river before it went under, you could have chosen to stay put as the car sank.) Thus it means that even if everything in your body was exactly as it was when you chose to do whatever you did, and even if everything outside you body was exactly as it was when you chose to do whatever it was that you did, you could have chosen to do something else.

Third, reflect that by "choice" is mean the mental initiation of a chain of physical events (presumably events in your brain) that constitutes the initiation of an action. This is sometimes called "willing the action." By "choice" is meant an act of will. To chose to climb out of a sinking car is to mentally initiate the action by making you brain send signals to your muscles.

Someone's willing themselves to climb out of a sinking car is free if they could have willed themselves to stay put even though everything in their body and the world was exactly like it was when they did will themselves to climb out. (That is, their brain was doing exactly what it did right up to the instant that they initiated the act of climbing out. Despite their brains doing exactly what it did right up to the instant they initiated the act of climbing out, they could have stayed put.)

Why does that claim present those of us who believe that science explains physical reality with a problem? It presents us with a problem because science tells us that every physical event has a physical cause, and both climbing out and staying put are physical events.

So what? Why is that a problem?

It is a problem because if science is right, every physical action our body performs has a place in a (very long) chain of physical events going from the action back into the past that are. These physical events are related to one another as cause and effect.  In our example, this means that there is something about the physical world that causes our brain to cause us to climb out of the sinking car, and as long as this cause happens, we had no choice but to climb out. That is, we could not have done otherwise than we did assuming all the antecedent circumstances were the same.

Our concept of free will requires that it is possible that we choose to stay put even though what science says caused us to climb out still happens (happens in our brain, and outside our brain). To say someone has free will is to say that even though what caused them to climb out happens (some activity in the brain), they could have willed to stay put, and had they done so, then they would have stayed put as the car sank.

If people have free will, then they can cause something to happen when nothing causes them to cause it to happen. If so, then the laws of science do not apply to people making choices. If people have free will, they can cause their body to do something even though nothing caused them to cause their body to do something. They can initiate a chain of physical events, when nothing makes them initiate that chain of physical events. The just choose. That is what you have to believe to believe that people have free will.

How can it be reasonable to believe that people have free will?

To the extent that people have physical bodies that function like the physical bodies of other animals, and given that other animals do not have free will, how can it be reasonable to hold that people have free will?

"Scientific Determinism" (in the past, this view was called "Hard Determinism") is the name for the view that people's choices and actions are caused by physical events over which they have no control, just as is the case with all other physical things. If Scientific Determinism is true, then people do not have free will.

The discussion that follows assumes that the reader knows what science is. It assumes that you know how science is done, and know the general method used to do science (the method used to test claims about what the physical world is like, and to test claims about what causes a specific physical event to happen). It assumes you know the difference between the basic areas of science, such as physics, biology, chemistry, geology, and astronomy. These are all things that should be learned in high-school. If you are rusty on these things, I suggest you google them. It is important to know that approaching a problem scientifically requires assuming that physical events always have a cause (do not just happen randomly). It also is important to know that in one area of physics, called quantum mechanics, it is maintained that some physical events are random. This is very controversial. That is, some physicists accept this and others do not. It also is important to know that quantum mechanics is the science of the smallest bits of matter there are. These bits of matter are called sub-atomic particles. You also need to know that the rules that apply to the behavior of sub-atomic particles are very different from the rules of cause and effect that apply to the physical objects that you perceive existing in the world around out. Finally, Scientific Determinism assumes that physical events involving physical objects such as those that you perceive in the world around you always happen for a cause, never randomly. Scientific Determinism is silent as to whether the behavior of sub-atomic particles is determined in the way that the behavior of sugar (dissolves in water), an earthworm (moves away from salt) or a human being is determined. When we mention the laws of nature we are not talking about sub-atomic physics, we are talking about the physics of everyday life.

If a person is a physical object and their bodies obey the laws of nature, this commits us to agreeing that when someone does something, their doing it was caused by the physical state their body was in at the time. We now have to consider what caused their body to be in that physical state at that time, The answer is, the interaction of their bodies with the external world. So the answer is, what caused their body to perform an  action was caused by how the external world affected their body, given the state their body was in when it interacted with the external world. Further both the state their body was in and the state the external world that cause their action were each caused by the state both were in an instant earlier. And that earlier state of the world was caused by the state the world was in the instant before that. This chain of cause and effect goes back indefinitely in time.

Scientific Determinism implies, for example, that if someone is swinging a bat now, their doing so was caused by the state both they and the external world were in at the moment of their conception (or at whatever time "they" came into being). But things do not stop here. Something about the physical state of the world prior to your conception caused you to be conceived. And some state prior to that state caused that state. If it was not for the state the physical world was in when your parents were teenagers, you would not have been conceived, and you would not be swinging the bat now.

But, of course, things do not stop there. The causal chain of physical events extends back in time to the Big Bang. The Big Bang is the event that physicists tell us brought the universe (physical reality, space-time) into existence. Physicists tell us the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago.

The state of the universe an instant after its coming into existence was determined by its state the instant it came into existence.

The state of the universe at the instant it came into existence determined what it would be like five minutes later, 10 years later, one billion years later, thirteen billion years later and, significantly, right now, at this very instant.

If people are physical objects, and every physical event has a cause, and the chain of causes extends back to the Big Bang, then free will is an illusion.

Even if the chain of causes and effects does not extend back to the Big Bang, as long at what is happening now was caused by things outside and inside our our body and over which we have no control, then free will is an illusion.

There are lots of Youtube videos on the free will problem. If you want to watch one or more of them, go for it. Just search "Youtube: the free will problem." But be forewarned...all of the ones I just looked up do not limit themselves to discussing Scientific Determinism. They also discuss other versions of the free will problem. As a class, do not have time to go over the other versions. I am happy to discuss any of them with you via. email if you want to do that.

We study Scientific Determinism because (1) it presents us with the strongest of the various arguments against free will, and (2) the concept of free will that Scientific Determinism argues we do not have is the kind of free will necessary to being a real person (we have not yet said what we mean by "real person).

To argue that people have free will,  you need either to find a flaw in the reasoning advanced by Scientific Determinism, or you need to find a way around Scientific Determinism. One way to try to get around Scientific Determinism is to assert that people are not reducible to their physical bodies. You can maintain that a person is a mind (consciousness, spirit, soul) and its body is something it has, not what it is.

One problem with this attempted solution to the Free Will problem is that it gives rise to the Mind-Body problem. The following question is at the core of the mind-body problem: If the mind is not physical, how does the mind bring about changes in the body, and how do changes in the body bring about changes the mind? The only thing physical objects can causally interact with are other physical objects. If the mind is not a physical object, how can it initiate an action in the body by mentally choosing to perform the action? How can mental willing have any affect on a physical body? Further, how can physical events in a brain cause experiences in the mind?

(The view that a person is a mind with a body is called Dualism. We will say more about Dualism later.)

Some people try to justify the claim that people have free will by appealing to some of the things they think physics says about the physical world when physics describes what the world of sub-atomic particles is like. They say that since some events that occur at the sub-atomic level are random, and so cannot be said to be caused by this or that prior events, this can explain how people have free will. Free choices are random.

There are many things wrong with this, but right up front we can point out that when we say a choice is free, we are saying it is not random. If you could have stayed put in the sinking car, it is not because nothing caused you to climb out or stay put. It is because you initiated an action by willing it. You willing the action is not random. You did it for a reason. Does this mean the reason caused the action? No, choosing to act for a reason is not being caused to act by the reason. Nothing makes you choose to act on a reason. But you can choose to do so, and if you do, you act is not random. This is what is meant by free choice. Random acts are not examples of free choices.

You run across the appeal to physics relatively often these days in online news sources. So it is worth saying a bit more about this bad line of reasoning. It often is introduced with something like this "the principles of quantum mechanics explain how people have free will." Never mind that the principles of quantum mechanics apply only to domain of sub-atomic particles, not to the physical objects we experience in daily life. Never mind also that in addition to the theory of quantum mechanics, physics has the theory of General Relativity and the theory of Special Relativity. Physics needs all three theories to deal with different domains of physical reality, but as yet has not been able to come up with a way to integrate all three theories. The fact that some events in the sub-atomic domain of space-time may be random (in a very specific sense of "random") cannot be used to explain how human choices that occur in a different domain of space-time can meet the conditions that they have to meet to count as free choices.

A second attempt to use quantum mechanics to explain free will holds that the indeterminate nature of sub-atomic events provides a way to explain free will. The claim is that a sub-atomic event's properties are indeterminate until the event is observed. For example, a sub-atomic particle does not have a specific location in space-time until it is observed. Aside from the problem that this only applies in the domain of sub-atomic particles, it does not give us what we need for free will, which is being able to choose our actions without anything causing us to choose our actions.  

Also interesting are attempts to use quantum mechanics to argue that we do not have free will. Again, what applies to the domain of sub-atomic particles cannot be assumed to apply to the domain of everyday events. Nor is randomness or indeterminacy at the sub-atomic level proof of either in the sphere of human choice.

If we cannot appeal to quantum physics to show that we have free will, what then?

Sometimes, in a discussion of free will, someone will point out the following: We can imagine that there comes a day when we can predict every choice someone will make. But there is an exception. If we tell someone what we predict they will choose (based on our scan of their brain, etc.), this makes it possible for them to prove us wrong by choosing not to choose whatever we tell them they are going to choose. Whoever points this out will then go on to say that this proves that we have free will, even if only in this limited sort of case. Or they will say that the existence of this sort of case shown that there is a crack in the determinists theory.

Determinists reply that this only shows that telling someone what they will do changes what they will do, it does not show that they have any degree of free will.

I have wondered why no one has considered the possibility that when we tell someone what they will do, and they try to choose not to do it, they find they cannot choose not to do it. This is certainly a possibility. Were it to happen, it would be a very good argument that we do not have free will.

Scientific Determinism is compelling precisely because in the world of everyday life, science works.

Where does this leave us? As yet, we have not found a way to scan people's brains and predict their choices. But neither can we do this for dogs, earthworms, or amoeba. So consider this: what if,  at some point in the distant future, science as advanced to the point that we can predict exactly the behavior of every other living organism. What if the only living organisms that we are unable to predict are humans? Were this to come to be the case, then this would make it reasonable for us to conclude that humans are unlike any other things that exist, in that humans have free will.

On the other hand, suppose that in the future we can predict the behavior of everything based on our knowledge of cause and effect, humans included. This would be evidence that we have free will.

Right now, we cannot do either. So right now, we can continue to believe that we have free will, or not.