Free Will is Beyond Your Control
Everything is
Corrine Purtill, writing for the Los Angeles Times, recently interviewed Robert Sapolsky for the launch of his new book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.
This isn’t a review of the book, but a response to the ideas in the article of Sapolsky and those opposed to him, and to the response given by John Martin Fischer in an opinion piece also published in the Los Angeles Times.
There were three main misguided ideas contained in those two articles:
The basis for free will might be found in neurobiology or quantum physics.
No free will means no agency and that all actions are involuntary and externally caused.
Touting the ideas of determinism and no free will are dangerous and lead to a breakdown of moral responsibility.
These ideas and their arguments are either flawed, misguided, or reliant on bad reasoning. I’ll address each of them here.
Where would we have control?
The hard line of my argument is that if we want to hold on to the basic tenet of causality in physical reality, then we have to concede that there is no free will.
The extremely high hurdle of causality doesn’t seem to be enough to satisfy those who hope to find some fundamental physical or neurological basis for free will.
Such attempts lead to two misguided ideas:
Indeterministic behaviour in neurobiology suggests determinism is false and provides space for free will
Probabilistic behaviour in quantum physics suggests determinism is false and provides space for free will.
The first was implied in the neuroscientist Peter Tse’s response summarised in the article:
“Neural activity is highly variable… with identical inputs often resulting in non-identical responses in individuals and populations. It’s more accurate to think of those inputs as imposing parameters rather than determining specific outcomes. Even if the range of potential outcomes is limited, there’s simply too much variability at play to think of our behavior as predetermined.”
And the second was implied in Fischer’s response:
“Some neurobiologists, including Sapolsky, hold that neurobiology supports determinism — that the brain activity science has uncovered reveals essentially mechanical procedures that cause human decisions. Other neuroscientists believe that at a fundamental level the brain works indeterministically, perhaps in accordance with quantum mechanics, which allows for randomness and unpredictability. In other words, whether the past and laws of nature dictate my choices and actions remains scientifically controversial.”
Quantum Leap
These arguments are flawed. The specifics of quantum mchanics or neurobiology don’t free us from the bounds of causality.
It doesn’t matter how signals are processed by neurons if those neurons are simply obeying the laws of physics and causality.
And unpredictability doesn’t change determinism. Predictability is a property of our ability to understand reality, not about reality itself.
If there are indeterministic processes at the quantum level, that doesn’t mean what happens as a result of those processes isn’t deterministic.
And it certainly isn’t a straight-forward argument that because such indeterminism exists at that level, that we — macroscopic conscious beings — can therefore get in on that action and change the course of events.
We, and everything happening in our neurons, are the outcome of processes long-since departed from the quantum realm.
Neurotic
The physics of neurons could possibly allow for probabilistic outputs (so “non-deterministic” in a computational sense), but that would still be deterministic from the perspective of the laws of physics — something has to be the cause.
And, either way, it would be an incredible claim that because neurons can vary in their outputs from identical inputs that we therefore have free will.
As far as we can tell, neurons produce the consciousness that you’d be claiming has free will, so how is consciousness supposed to have control over the neuronal activity which produces it?
That’s not to make an appeal to incredulity — it’s an interesting idea, and it’s not wrong just because it’s an incredible claim — but to make the claim you would have show some evidence for it, or explain the physics, and without that it’s vacuous.
Even if we take the softer version of the argument and say that “there’s simply too much variability at play [in neurons] to think of our behavior as predetermined”, well, what causes that variability?
Again, perhaps we can’t determine it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not determined. It just means we don’t have access to the information that would allow us to determine it.
Presumably that variability is caused by some property of the physical world, obeying physical laws, acting on the neurons — and not caused by consciousness.
Besides, the speeds of quantum mechanical and neurobiology processes are so unimaginably fast that it makes little sense to think that they could be halted long enough for us to deliberate on what comes next in reality.
You can’t stop time.
Where’s the space for us to have control?
What part of us could imaginably have that control?
And what could it possibly have control of?
Agency vs Control
In Fischer’s response to the original article, he stated:
“…let’s say determinism were true. Why exactly would it follow that we lack free will? Even if our choices and actions are shaped heavily by external factors, couldn’t they still be caused in a way that involves the human capacity for reasoning? Coughs, sneezes, seizures — these behaviors are easy to dismiss as beyond our control. Not all causal chains, however, are like those that trigger involuntary movements. Equating all human behavior to a cough is an egregiously hasty generalization.
Consider, as a simple example, my decision to sit down at my computer to write these sentences. Yes, my past and the laws of nature may have crucially led me here. But I did so also because of deliberation. I weighed the pros for writing against the cons and chose to do it. It wasn’t like a sneeze; it was a process that involved reasoning. Determinism helps explain why I started typing, but it does not in itself rule out my free will.”
These arguments contain three misguided ideas:
Determinism means all causes are external to human agency.
Determinism means all behaviour is involuntary.
“Free will” is the same as human agency
Internal vs External
There is a difference between internal causes and external causes, and determinism doesn’t mean everything is external.
The argument that we don’t have free will isn’t saying that all our behaviours are externally caused — of course not: different people respond to the same phenomena in different ways, and that difference is determined by internalcharacteristics.
What’s important for determinism is simply that we have no conscious control over any part of that process, including the things that happen internally.
What matters isn’t whether things are internally or externally determined, just that they are determined.
Voluntary vs Involuntary
Similarly, we shouldn’t confuse involuntary or impulsive actions with actions that aren’t in our control.
The argument that we don’t have free will isn’t saying that “controlled” actions don’t exist or that they aren’t qualitatively different from impulsive ones — deliberative actions are different from a sneeze — and that difference relates to major differences in the type of process occurring in the brain.
But even the most controlled, conscious, though-out action is the result of blind, physical processes you have no control over bringing about.
Free Will vs Agency
Importantly, arguing that there’s no free will is not the same as arguing that we don’t have a sense of free will, nor an argument that we don’t have “agency”.
But our agency — the fact that we can affect our environment, like picking up cups — doesn’t mean we have the kind of free will where we have any fundamental conscious control over those effects.
Our capacity, as organisms, to be the cause of some event — even events we intend, want and apply highly-focused and controlled actions to bring about — doesn’t change the fact that causality strongly implies that we have no fundamental control over any of it.
And the capacity to be a cause has nothing to do with whether or not our actions were the results of entirely internal processes or somehow influences by external factors, nor whether we were aware of or intent on our actions or whether we just sneezed uncontrollably.
Language vs Reality
Here, it’s important to not confuse common uses of language with its use in statements about the way reality fundamentally is.
It’s not inconsistent to say “I chose to do X” and “You do not fundamentally choose anything” if the first is referring to our agency and the language we use to describe it and the second is referring to a property of reality.
This is more than just a silly matter of semantics, it’s at the heart of many disagreements about free will and determinism:
We experience choices, and we talk about making choices, and we hold people responsible for their choices. Our language is structured around the idea of free will, and our experience of choosing is reasonable grounds for claiming it.
That’s all fine and consistent with determinism, because, fundamentally, all of those experiences and the options and outcomes of your choices emerge into the present through deterministic cause and effect.
It doesn’t mean you don’t experience the choice.
But experiencing the choice doesn’t mean that you — the conscious part of you — has any fundamental control over it.
If you want to call that sense of control and the capacity to affect our environment “free will”, then OK, have your free will, but we will be at odds about the appropriateness of that term and what it should mean.
But is this idea dangerous?
The jump from “no free will” to “we therefore can’t be held morally responsible for our actions” is a huge one, and nowhere near as straight-forward as everyone quoted in the articles seem to assume.
I’ve addressed this misguided idea before, so I won’t repeat it here.
But I will address the last idea, that:
It’s dangerous to say we have no free will
The article mentions a study, noting that:
“A widely cited 2008 study found that people who read passages dismissing the idea of free will were more likely to cheat on a subsequent test. Other studies have found that people who feel less control over their actions care less about making mistakes in their work, and that disbelief in free will leads to more aggression and less helpfulness.”
First, how an idea affects people is not an argument for or against the truth of it. That’s an appeal to consequences.
And, either way, if we have free will, who decided to be affected by the idea?
I can personally attest to the fact that realising we don’t have free will does not necessitate a loss of a sense of agency. Because it doesn’t actually change what agency you have.
Whether or not I believe that free will is behind my ability to pick up a cup doesn’t change the fact that I can still pick up the cup.
I can still intend to pick up the cup. I can still decide to pick up the cup. The action of picking up the cup doesn’t occur without the accompanying intention and decision to do so.
That’s enough to make me feel in control of the action, and enough to motivate me to apply my agency to do such things in the future.
I just know, ultimately, that my intention and my decision to do so are not being caused by the part of me that is conscious of all those things.
I know that I have no control over whether that motivation will arise or not or whether it will lead to an intention. But nothing in that realisation stops me from wanting to do things.
It also doesn’t make me want to do bad things. Because, luckily, I’m not the kind of person who wants to do bad things.
How to Proceed
This is in direct contrast to the argument that “those who push the idea that we are nothing but deterministic biochemical puppets are responsible for enhancing psychological suffering and hopelessness in this world”, as Tse was quoted as saying.
If anything, such an argument is evidence to the fact that we don’t have free will.
If the idea causes us to feel “psychological suffering and hopelessness”, then why did we choose to feel that way?
We didn’t.
I’m all for the power of belief in our own abilities, but we shouldn’t hide from reality just because our interpretation of the facts about it makes us sad.
That’s not a great way to proceed in science, or in life.
What we need isn’t a way to deny the truth of our predicament in order to not feel depressed about it.
What we need is to think a bit harder about what the determinism of reality means for our lives, and a better understanding of that reality so that we can be more sure of not fooling ourselves.
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