Determinism and Free Willby Kenneth E. Nahigian
Philosophers make much of the apparent conflict between determinism and free will. We are obviously machines, made of atoms, but if so, how can we act freely? Various thinkers have obsessed over this since the advent of materialism (ever since Democritus in fact). It has become the kind of intellectual black hole that swallows minds and careers. You can deal with the problem in at least three ways (or four, if ignoring it counts). First, you can decide free will is an illusion, so there. That's the B. F. Skinner approach, and it is popular in circles of academia, but it has obvious disadvantages, not the least of which is that it gets you into arguments. Or, you can decide that the material world is an illusion, or at least that people are somehow exempt (at least partly) from the laws of physics and chemistry. The theologians will love you, but this stance has problems also. Burden of proof, for example. Think about it. Molecules follow chemical laws, and human beings are made of molecules. What could be more obvious? Two centuries ago the notion that the chemistry of living bodies is fundamentally different from chemistry done in test tubes was a popular fancy of armchair scientists (called natural philosophers in those days). But the scientist/philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz, the l9th-century father of psychophysics, fairly well refuted the notion of a "life force" (elan vital) separating living things from non-living. These days, vitalism is as dead as phlogiston; and modern biochemists, who are synthesizing carbon- based organic compounds and even creating "protocells" in the laboratory, have put one more nail in the coffin of this quaint idea. Life may seem magical to us, but I know of no major credentialed life-scientist who would agree. (Creationists do not count.) Some philosophers hedge a bit. They suggest that molecules follow strict chemical rules of behavior except when clustered into the kind of system or configuration we call a "human brain". When so clustered, the laws/rules of physics are somehow suspended, wholly or partly, and on some holistic level the system leaps free from chemical law. Even on the face of it, this seems like a bad case of special pleading. It bucks precedent, including tens of thousands of well- documented results from physics, chemistry, biochemistry and psycho-neurology. Obviously it has a burden of proof. In fact, as an extraordinary claim, it demands extraordinary proof. (None of which seems to be forthcoming.) If our minds are partially exempt from the control of chemistry, one wonders, why must anything affect us at all? If the brain has found a way to break free of the chain-mesh of physical causes, why do we have involuntary desires, compulsions, mental lapses? Why do TV jingles dance in our heads until we want to scream? Why are people so predictable? For that matter, if our brains have evolved an exemption to physical law, you'd think our bodies would do the same. Why, we should be able to float through walls, fly, teleport, mend wounds with a wish. Why are we humans so infuriatingly subordinate to physics in every way except the minuscule process of decision- making, and then apparently, only sometimes? Enough. Must we dance back and forth between the brain-boggling wastelands of clockwork materialism and theological fancy? Must we either drag mind into the camp of matter, or drag matter into the camp of mind? No, for there's a third stance to take. It is more subtle. To understand it, let's look at a recent version of an old puzzle called Newcomb's Paradox. Imagine several people in a sealed room, and with them a super- computer programmed with all laws of physics and the exact knowledge of all atoms in the room. No one can sneeze or hiccup or think any thought without the computer knowing in advance. Annoyed with the apparent violation of free will, one person asks the computer, "What will I say next?" Silently, he thinks: "Whatever this bucket of bitmaps predicts, I will do something else! If it predicts a sonnet, I'll recite a limerick. That'll fix it!" What happens? Of course you could cheat and suggest that the computer declines to answer, or it answers in Sanskrit, or chooses to lie. Or you could suggest that the questioner falls immediately into an aphasiac stupor and recites just what the computer directs. None of these seem like satisfactory answers to Newcomb's Paradox. Assume the computer gives an honest, comprehensible reply. God does not intervene to knock the questioner into a stupor. Even if free will is an illusion, what could possibly prevent him from foiling the prediction? In fact, nothing. In fact, as philosopher William Poundstone aptly points out, such a computer could not exist-and not because determinism is false! To see why, just imagine how you would have to program it. Obviously no simple rule or algorithm is going to predict exactly how something as complex as the human brain, with over ten thousand million nerve cells, each connected spaghetti-like to thousands of neighbors, will react in all circumstances. To do the job, the computer will have to run a program that models or simulates each separate atom in the room. In fact, since the computer is in the room, interacting with the other residents, it will have to model the electrons in its own circuitry. Here's our clue. The computer must predict its own predictions as well as the reactions of the questioners. The model must include the computer itself, in toto. Is it possible? The computer will have to set aside part of its memory for a model of itself. The model must include the entire memory. The memory includes the model. Obviously we will run out of room very quickly. No matter how complex is our super-computer, its memory chips must be of finite size, finite number and finitely describable states, in order to be modeled. Otherwise you get an infinite regress, which no computer made of atoms or electrons can attain. The program, and the prediction, is therefore impossible. Of course it would be another matter if the computer were outside the sealed room, making predictions about the inhabitants. But then our questioner could not ask the question, and Newcomb's Paradox would not arise. Is this better? Does determinism become more palatable if we accept that our determined actions are unknowable? If you think so, you have found the third way to resolve the discord between determinism and free will. Sometimes called the "Compatibilist" position, this stance quite simply sees no discord. To a Compatibilist, determinism does not suggest a compulsive force that drags us about, willy nilly, like puppets on twine. Free will means doing as you please. If what you please is the result of biochemical events in your skull, so what? If your choices are determined, but you cannot perceive the determination in advance, the conflict is moot. You might as well ask a Calvinist to explain what practical difference predestination makes. The future is still unknowable. Ideas, and actions, still have consequences. We can still learn from them, reason about them, use them to refine future choices. We are still responsible. And no one is ever going to take you aside and whisper in your ear with authority, "You are going to eat a bug now." In fact, to the Compatibilist, determinism is the very mechanism that weds free will to responsibility. Doesn't it seem ironic that religious conservatives who call for law, order and a swift system of punishment, are often those who most loudly insist that free will means freedom from environmental influence? The Compatibalist responds that it would be useless to punish people for immoral actions if the punishment (or threat of it) did not in some way influence their behavior. As persuasive as the Compatibilist answer is, it may not satisfy some of those who fulminate against determinism. They will still be unhappy with the suggestion that, if our hypothetical super- computer were only outside the room, it could in principle predict the thoughts and actions of the room's inhabitants. That the room- dwellers can never know the predictions is, in their view, irrelevant. As long as brain-states are really "just" the mechanical consequences of previous states, plus incoming stimuli, personal freedom goes away. In other words, if choices are mechanically determined, they cannot be mentally determined; they are not "really" the results of thinking and deciding. Thoughts are at best an epiphenomenon, a side effect, of the clockwork in our heads, and we can assign no more responsibility for moral choices than for wind or rain. "It ain't me fault, ossifer, it was me neurons." How can we respond to these gut-level sentiments? Think of an ordinary computer. To the hardware specialist, it is just a physical system behaving according to determinant laws: electrons bumping together. To the software specialist, or to the user, on the other hand, the computer's behavior is "determined" by the problem it is solving. Who is right? Is there a conflict? Of course not, just different frames of reference. The program is not a force outside the central processing unit that has to barge in to exert an influence. It is something embedded in the machinery, in such a way that you can say its behavior is a consequence of programming and of physical states. Both are right. Likewise the Compatibilist will remind us that the two answers to the question, "What determines human behavior?", are not rivals but complements. They arise from different views of the same events. Since our conscious thinkings and decidings are embedded in the biochemistry of the brain, there is no contradiction in saying our choices are determined both by thoughts and by neural networks. Personal freedom arises from the fact that we can never "know" our choices with certainty until we make them. The very act of knowing is a change in the biochemical state of our brains, and that throws new variables into the equation, making the previous prediction worthless. Thus, even on the mechanistic assumptions of classical determinism, there are details of our future (and present) we can never know. Rule of thumb in philosophy. Find out what you mean. When we discuss "Free Will", we should ask, "Freedom from what?" If freedom from physical causes, it seems to suggest that choices must be random and meaningless, rather like quantum events. This hardly seems a free will worth having. It makes more sense, on the other hand, if "Free Will" means freedom from duress, freedom from compulsion, freedom to consider alternatives, freedom to think in terms of our own needs, aims and values. If this sounds like a defense of classical determinism, note that none of it actually assumes determinism is true; it only shows that determinism and free will are not at war. In fact, it is old news that the classical "billiard ball" determinism of Laplace lies dead on the doorstep of present-day physics. Quantum mechanics has presented us with an intrinsic uncertainty at least for sub-atomic events, and modern Chaos Theory tells us this randomness may just possibly percolate upward to influence "interesting" events in our macro-physical lives. (Modern determinism has absorbed both Quantum Theory and Chaos, and is best described as the doctrine that all ordered events in nature are retroactively explained by laws and causes which may include an element of chance.) Stubborn anti-determinists, if they are wise, will not rush to find a refuge for free will in quantum uncertainty. Quantum events are truly random and non-directed, like the "free will" not worth having. No teleology here. It is hard to see how two hundred pounds of meat and neural machinery can distill quantum uncertainty into intelligent, goal-oriented choices. Insofar as human decisions are meaningful, they clearly must be determined in some way, either by reasons or chemicals. Whatever component is purely random can never be more than that. The point is, free will does not need a refuge. It is quite at home where it is-as the left hand of determinism..
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