Why am I cursed with a love of philosophical discussion? Or, if I were more honest, I would say I’m cursed with a love of philosophical monologue — I keep doing it even though I get little to no response.
But in any case, I once again find the 140 characters that Twitter allows too few to express my thoughts adequately. So here goes.
Over on Identi.ca (an open source, de-centralized version of Twitter), I got into a discussion with @teddks about the god that both he and I don’t believe in. But don’t worry, that’s not the discussion I want to talk about here.
While talking to @teddks about all this I made a statement about free will that John Goerzen picked up on. After a little back–n–forth, John asked (and here I translate freely from the twitterese he used):
What you’re saying has echos of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism where he said “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.” Is unhappy knowledge better than blissful ignorance?
Now, I hadn’t read anything about John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. So I did what anyone who’s mildly curious would do: I read the Wikipedia article.
After that quick read, it looks like Mill’s Utilitarianism is a distraction. Sure, I can see the similarities between “if free will doesn’t objectively exist, it won’t affect my choice to believe that it does” and “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”, but I don’t really think its relevant.
Instead, my point is existentialist: who cares about theories of reality when they don’t match our own experience of reality? Even if you don’t believe that free will actually exists, you still make choices.
Dwelling on the proof of free will is, itself, a distraction. Don’t get me wrong: acceptance of free-will is important — it affects the choices we make. But proving or dis-proving it existence is futile. We’ll still end up making choices.
To me, the interesting bit is how often we’ve re-visited the argument for or against free will. Before classical physics, men developed systematic theologies that relied on God’s omnipotence to eliminate the possibility of (at least some) choice.
The we got Newtonian physics which, taken to its natural conclusion, seems to say that everything is predictable. Take a snapshot of a system (even, say, your brain) and you can predict with precision any future state. In other words, if you know all the variables, you know the future.
Now-a-days we have quantum physics — something I don’t pretend to understand at all — but it seems to allow some sort of free will.
Even without quantum, though, we can’t model all the variables. The future is unknowable. The choices others will make can’t be predicted. Our own choices are still, effectively, our own.
As a result, isn’t it best to believe in free will and act as if it exists? Believing in our own ability to affect change in the world empowers us. Denying free will seems to lead us to nihilism — something I’m not too excited about.
Why it matters
I seem to be afflicted by the same philosophical bug as you 😉
Several points in response:
#1 – why it matters. Our society is built in many ways upon the assumption of free will. An example is the criminal justice system. We assume that people are capable of choosing to commit a crime, or not, and if they do, that they deserve to be held accountable. If free will is even partially an illusion, it throws that entire calculus into doubt. Is it ethical to punish someone for doing something he or she didn’t choose to do? Generally we have said no.
#2 – existing limits to free will. Society has, in general, already concluded that free will is not complete or absolute. Our laws, for instance, recognize that someone that is legally insane may not be in control of his actions or may not be able to understand the consequences of them. (Interesting side discussion: who IS in control of his actions in this case?) In other words, this person is unable to exercise free will, and thus the regular punishment would be unethical. Other examples include people impaired by drugs, which may cause a chemical addiction that compels a person to seek out more doses with surprising disregard to the consequences.
#3 – Denying free will does not deny our ability to change the world or to make choices. Hard determinism, the most extreme form of free will denial, asserts that we are a product of genetics and environment. These factors completely determine what options we are able to choose when presented with a choice. Example: someone that has never been exposed to the concept of spending money wisely may not be able to avoid splurging on the latest shiny car or phone, and someone else may not be able to choose to use illicit drugs. As an example: one might say that I could always choose to go out and find some illicit drugs, but if you know me, you know that, in reality, that is *never* a choice I am going to select. Is that decision due some inner character, or due to heredity + environment? If due to my inner character, where did I get that character from? Is it all heredity + environment in the end? Where does my ability to make a free choice apart from heredity + environment come from?
#4 – Many people, such as myself, choose to raise their children in what they think is as wholesome an environment as possible, thinking this will impact their children’s character and choices down the road. If this laudable goal is true, doesn’t this deny the element of free will in the children?
Some links:
http://www.uwec.edu/beachea/Philstudy2answers.htm
http://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
– John Goerzen
Re: Why it matters
It looks like what you’re calling “free will” is the ability and means to make any choice at any time.
Meanwhile, I’m simply arguing that when presented with a choice of A vs B, you always have a choice.
It could be that both of us are arguing against straw men. AFAIK, no one argues that you can many any choice at any time.
But at the same time (as I said in my bit on the existential nature of free will) no one that I know of would deny that given a choice between A & B, you can always predict what someone will choose.
Even the mentally ill have a choice. Even addicts have a choice. I didn’t say their choice was easy or natural: just that they have one.
This doesn’t mean that if someone commits a crime we can’t consider their circumstances in determining how to handle the situation: but it does mean that we don’t let serial killers walk the streets simply because they are mentally ill.
At every point in your life, you have choices. You may not be conscious of them, you may choose to live habitually — never making taking action that you haven’t decided on long ago — but at every point you have a choice.
At any point, you can make the very difficult choice to change direction completely.
As far as moral responsibility, I’m not concerned with drawing hard lines. You have the power to act based on your own circumstances.
There is a story the Orthodox tell about a man who murdered 10 people getting into heaven while his neighbor, who murdered no one, went to hell. Why? Because the murderer was fated to murder more than 10 people, but he didn’t. He did better than expected. Meanwhile the person who didn’t murder anyone was an accountant who stole small sums of money from his client.
The point of the story is simply this: you have a choice to act better or worse than your circumstances allow. You are responsible for whatever action you take.
And this is why I find the existential approach to free will the best: it reveals the truth of my circumstances. It doesn’t make a claim about the objective nature of reality (which none of us know), but tells that *here* and *now* we have a choice.
Great post, Mark! I’ve even took care to translate the second half in Russian. I find that this (existentialist’s) approach is very fruitful indeed to describe the necessity of many religious ideas. It’s important not to get lost with (crippled human) reasoning, but to remember why we need them.
A couple of examples to support your point that even if the world were perfectly deterministic, its future would be practically unpredictable (due to lack of information and overall complexity). The first is Chaos Theory: with a perfectly deterministic equation and only a few variables we often cannot predict the state of the physical system in practice. A small disturbance may have great effects. The second one are games: even in chess, with perfect information, with only 64 squares, and only two people, the result is effectively unpredictable.
Better free will and try to do something than passively sit by as a victim and just let life happen.