A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Could we turn out not to have free will?

Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a blog post suggesting that some forms of atheism make free will and moral reasoning absurd. Will Wilkinson responded by essentially saying that this is a psuedo-problem (link via Unqualified Offerings).

I think Wilkinson doesn’t really acknowledge the source of the worry here. He writes:

Here are two things you know: free will exists (it is obvious: go ahead, touch your nose) and the universe is made of whatever it is made of (obvious, if anything is). Therefore, you know the conjunction of those two things. Therefore, you know that the crazy proposition that says that one of them must be false isn’t true! There’s no need to get hung up on an arbitrary conjecture about the trascendental conditions for the very possibility of the existence of something when things you already know rule it out.

He seems to want to say that this is a psuedo-problem because we already know that we have free will, so whatever the universe turns out to be like must be compatible with that fact.

But the whole point of the worry about determinism or physicalism that Ponnuru originally raised was that, if the universe turned out to be a certain way, we might not have free will after all as we originally supposed. In other words, there are possible ways the universe might be that are, on closer inspection, incompatible with free will.

Wilkinson is certainly right that we can distinguish voluntary from involuntary actions, and that this distinction isn’t threatened by whatever metaphysical account of reality we come up with. But this isn’t the meaning of “free will” that people who worry about determinism and/or physicalism (incompatibilists in the philosophical jargon) usually have in mind.

There worry is something more like this: if the universe consists entirely of the sorts of things and events described by physics, then it seems that what we take to be actions based on reasoning and choice would turn out to be really explained by the laws of physics. Moreover, these laws make no reference to things like intention or value, so it would appear to be false that the cause of my choosing x was that I believed it to be the best course of action all things considered. Rather the real explanation would make reference to various physical events in my brain, body, and environment.

Essentially, it boils down to this: free will (in a deeper sense than just voluntary action) appears to be threatened if the real springs of our actions lie in non-rational causes, whether this be some Freudian subconscious motive or the interactions of subatomic particles. It is the question whether rational thought and choice are causally efficacious in virtue of their own unique properties, or whether they are “epiphenomena” generated by other non-rational causes.

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10 responses to “Could we turn out not to have free will?”

  1. Enigman

    My thinking on this is that they could only be epiphenomenal if one is oneself epiphenomenal, since one knows that one makes one’s choices, and that the latter is surely known to be absurd if anything is.

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  2. Camassia

    I may be misunderstanding you, but I don’t think determinism necessarily means rational thought and choice are epiphenomenal so much as they are middle links in the causal chain. That is, we make choice for the reasons we think we make them, but those reasons are themselves determined by factors outside our control — our innate nature, our upbringing, our present circumstances, etc.

    This all reminds me of a Star Trek (TNG) episode where the ship entered some kind of space-time rifts where a zillion different Enterprises appeared from a zillion alternate universes where things turned out differently because people had made different choices. The morality of free will, it seems to me, depends on the idea that those alternatives are in some sense real — that if it were possible to run the tape over again people might really make different decisions, instead of going through exactly the same thought processes that led them to those decisions.

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  3. Camassia

    I should add, I realize that Freud and some other determinists do/did dismiss the importance of rational thought. I’m just saying that’s not the only way to be a determinist.

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  4. Andy

    Back in college one of my friends and I used to go to bars regularly to talk about philosophy and invariably it always came back to free will as the hinge of all philosophical questions.

    I think the real angst here is that if we found out for sure that we had no free will all our other discussions would be rendered meaningless, kind of like the philosopher’s panic in Hitchhikers’ Guide when Deep Thought is going to give the the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. We’d rather not know.

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  5. Lee

    Yeah, I was sort of conflating determinism and physicalism there – there not the same but I think the worry raised by them is similar. If determinism is true or if physicalism is true we’re faced with the prospect that our thoughts and decisions are ultimately caused by non-rational events outside of our control. (As you point out, thought may be part of the causal chain, but they’re ultimately determined by some earlier event).

    It’s possible to be a physicalist and not a determinist, but I’m not sure that helps because what that usually means is that you believe there are indeterminate events (e.g. quantum events) that aren’t strictly determined. But this doesn’t get you meaningful intentional action as far as I can tell.

    The TNG episode is a good illustration of the concept of free will that I think people rightly feel is threatened by determinism: it has to be the case that in some genuine sense you could’ve chosen otherwise than you did.

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  6. Consumatopia

    (As you point out, thought may be part of the causal chain, but they’re ultimately determined by some earlier event).

    Not necessarily. The fact “W is the most rational course of action for organism X with intention Y in situation Z” is true or false independent of whether X and Z actually exist in the world. Physics supplies X, Z, and sometimes Y, but the W resulting from this combination exists in the Platonic world of pure logic that precedes physics.

    Tricky part is where intention Y comes from–timeless reason dictates the most efficient means accomplish the goal, but the goal itself is just a product of physical history.

    Two reasonable non-theist approaches to that would be to either deny that this is a problem (the desire for desires that are free from physical causation must itself be a product of physical causation–specifically, a derivative of the homo sapiens drive for autonomy) or deny that God does anything to solve it (why should we want what God wants? why does spiritual indeterminacy of souls solve the problem any better than quantum indeterminacy of brain matter?)

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  7. bs

    Good stuff:

    http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/pecorip/SCCCWEB/INTRO_TEXT/Chapter%207%20Freedom/Freedom_Compatibilism.htm

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  8. gaius sempronius gracchus

    I am not aware of any philosopher who is a physicalist and not a determinist, though there are many who are not incompatibilists.

    Taking “determinism” in the free-will dispute to possibly encompass indeterministic phenomena in the physical sense.

    You may (or may not) find this interesting.

    Democracy in America: Smokers, Homosexuals, Pederasts, and Serial Killers

    Physicalists handle the mind-body problem in at least two different ways.

    Reductive materialists attempt to show that mental phenomena in general, like episodes of believing or desiring or willing, etc., can plausibly be held to be identical to physical events.

    Eliminative materialism gives up on that and insists our conviction that there are mental phenomena – anyway, beliefs and desires, in particular – is just false “folk psychology.”

    You and RP seem to be referring to the latter view as something that might “turn out” to be true. I wonder how he envisions that. The “turning out” part, I mean.

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  9. gaius sempronius gracchus

    Oh, I am not aware of any modern or contemporary philosopher who accepts physicalism and also accepts libertarian free will. All are either hard or soft determinists.

    (On the other hand, I’ve never seen a fifty foot shark, either.

    Fans of Ben Kingsley will know what that means.)

    Those who accept a reductivist view of mental events (episodes of believing, desiring, whatever) can consistently maintain that all of these play a real causal role in human choice and action.

    That does not stop them being determinists. And it does not prevent some being incompatibilists.

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  10. Lee

    I don’t actually think eliminative materialism could turn out to be true – I think it’s patently false.

    But that doesn’t in my view remove the concern about physicalism. Rductive physicalism (or even epiphenomenalism) turn out to be just as threatening to the causal efficacy of the mental qua mental.

    In other words, the real issue as I see it is whether or not mental events play a real causal role in virtue of their mental properties (as opposed to in virtue of physical properties with which they’re associated).

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