Now we're talking. Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky says free will is a myth:
After more than 40 years studying humans and other primates, Sapolsky has reached the conclusion that virtually all human behavior is as far beyond our conscious control as the convulsions of a seizure, the division of cells or the beating of our hearts.
This means accepting that a man who shoots into a crowd has no more control over his fate than the victims who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane.
Sapolsky bases his belief on biology. Lots of research suggests that neurons fire in our brains and actions are then carried out before we exert any conscious control over them. After the fact, our brains invent stories to "explain" why we did what we did.
I think Sapolsky is right. Hell, I don't even believe in consciousness, only self awareness. But I go further still: I believe free will is a myth thanks not to biology but to basic physics. The universe appears to be governed by mathematical law, and there's no good reason to think this suddenly stops at the boundary of the human brain. All that happens is that as biological structures get more complex they get harder to predict. ChatGPT is hard (impossible?) to predict too, but no one thinks it has free will.
The best argument against all this is: Oh come on. Jim Jordan just lost a vote for Speaker of the House and you're saying this was merely the end result of billions of years of a clockwork universe ticking away?
That's a pretty good argument! It really does seem unlikely, doesn't it? And Kevin, you don't act as if you lacked free will, do you?
Nope. Like everyone else I act as if I have control over my actions. And I treat other people as if they have control over their actions. I am a slave to the way my brain is constructed, just like you.
Needless to say, this is a very old religious and philosophical argument, and neither Sapolsky nor I are going to settle it. But we're right.
The question of "free will" is customarily confused by confusing two concepts:
1) Will that is independent of things external to the porson that makes the decision.
2) Will that is also independent of all the physical processes inside the person.
(1) we clearly have, (2) we clearly don't.
But as long as you don't distinguish between these you can argue any position you feel like forever.
Pretty close to a perfect answer. Its all in the definition. Another way of defining the question is that Humans have evolved beyond evolution.
We make multiple decisions all day long which have nothing to do with whether we survive to pass on our genetics, or which increase the chances of our genetics surviving.
That would be my definition of free will. And we have it.
There are also multiple human decisions so influenced by physical inputs that such decisions are not in fact "free" ---- but I don't see the existence of that class of decision as an argument against free will generally.
To say free will does not exist at all is a pretty heavy analytical lift.
Well said.
The question "Do we have free will?" requires that you first answer the question, "What *exactly* do you mean by 'free will?'" Once you answer question #2, the answer to question #1 is generally pretty obvious.
(There is also question #3, which is "Will the answers to questions #1 and #2 actually matter in any way?")
So, you read The Mathematical Universe by Tegmark?
Fantastic book!
I would say, your brain works at the speed of light and makes it's decision miles before it's able to get that through to your consciousness, but that isn't determinism.
Your conscious personality is an interface constructed to interact with the outer world so it's necessarily limited to immediate problems, like a lock that needs a key on and a key on the outside, and whatever decision might be needed needs to be fitted into that lock which takes time. So your consciousness is far behind the decision you've already made, which might look like determinism but still isn't.
And this is why half of stupidity is having a stupid personality that nothing can penetrate, as when a person might technically know the right answer but are incapable of not doing or saying the wrong thing.
This is a mess.
It isn't clear what you mean by the brain "working" at the speed of light, but signal propagation through nerve tissue ranges between about 4 and 120 meters per second, depending on the tissue type.
The bit about decisions being made before you're consciously aware of them is true. In fact for a lot of quick things like picking something up, you're usually still consciously making up your excuse for doing so after you picked it up.
But that has nothing to do with determinism. It just demonstrates our emergent self-awareness is a typical bureaucrat, trying to look in-control when it has no idea what's going on.
FWIW, I'm also a determinist. But Kevin is right, it is effectively untestable, so it is a belief more akin to religion than anything else.
Good point about the speed of thought. Carl Sagan mentioned this in an episode of Cosmos, showing a donkey-pulled cart and saying it was going at the speed of thought.
However, I think determinism is testable, to an extent. We can manipulate the brain with chemicals and magnetic fields and get people to do certain things.
What people don't get is that realizing everything is deterministic is liberating. It is a key point of Losing (there is a picture by Kevin in there, too).
https://www.losingmyreligions.net/
Yes, my natural style is hyperbole and it's hard to resist even when I should.
By the speed of light I meant really fast, so much faster than the speed of speech, and all our interaction with the world,
that it might as well be the speed of light.
And I would add that our brains aren't perfect, but they're close enough relative to the physical world we have to deal with and that will have to be good enough even for some creatures who may be millions of years more advanced than we are, should there be any.
Maybe I'm weird, but it's always seemed intuitively obvious that free will (as defined by the religious, as well as by most lay folk) is an impossibility. Minds are a process, and while living inside one it may appear that we make choices freely, from the outside it's all either determined (if the universe is deterministic) or all random (if the universe is not deterministic and our minds incorporate randomness). Neither of these involve sentience making choices.
Kevin's correct that everyone (including me) treats ourselves and others as if we all have agency. From our subjective, inside-our-minds perspective, we do. But in an absolute perspective (say, God's perspective), we don't.
It's still free will - with inputs.
The very existence of self-awareness and the after-the-fact justifications of actions that may not have been based on free will can impact future decisions.
This means that our very self-awareness and justifications influence future below-consciousness "decisions", which means we have ... free will.
You may not be able to determine to shoot the crowd in the moments before you take the shot, but the life you led up until it massively influenced that action. Which means that perhaps in the moment you don't have free will, but over a lifetime you do.
The idea that we have no free will is a dangerous notion.
Suppose everyone in a society believed this.Folks would feel absolved of any responsibility whatsoever for their actions. They'd simply yield to their basest impulses and insist they had no control to avoid their actions. Further, if juries believed this, they'd have no basis to convict anyone, ever.
If there is no expectation for people to choose right over wrong, society is a sham.
I dont think you have to worry. If there is no free will, there is no yielding to baser instincts. You do what you were inevitably going to do - good or bad - no matter what.
If we think people have no free will, but only the ability to justify actions after the fact, then we must engineer our environment to constrain us. If the mass shooter has no ability to stop themselves, then our only hope is to destroy all the guns.
The idea that we have no free will is a dangerous notion.
Probably the most dangerous notion of all. But also somewhat moot because there's no imaginable future where we change our laws to reflect this idea. With good reason! Murder would surely increase if one didn't risk prison in committing it.
If you had no free will how would you make the determination as to whether to do something or refrain from doing it based on consequences? And if I have no free will why did my response to you not come out:
Thrioghroeueoinojnoeb
If you had no free will how would you make the determination as to whether to do something or refrain from doing it based on consequences?
Beats me. But very clearly, if we legalized murder, we'd have more of it. Attribute the increase to whatever force you like.
This is where the argument gets interesting. You can be a determinist and also believe this is true - that a belief in free will keeps the automaton acting how "we" want. Effectively, it would elevate Straussianism to a primary motivator, and otherwise do really nasty things to the notion that the search for truth is positive action.
I don't know if you've noticed, but there seems to be an uptick in nihilistic attacks on society that has nothing to do with reflections on free will.
That doesn't prove you're wrong about determinism, but it suggests there if your concern is social stability, there might be more pressing concerns.
Oh, good grief Kevin!
What other than your own free will possessed you to write this click bait piece? What other than your indomitable will convinced you that in the midst of so many really important events around the world, which seem to be totally out of control (let alone OUR control), you would inject a little chaos into an otherwise organized, thoughtful blog?
You have definitely demonstrated that in the world of thought, the most important principle is the second law of thermodynamics.
The mathematics of the universe determined that he would write it. It was foretold.
Determinism is based on an understanding of the universe that does not take quantum mechanics into account. Quantum mechanics is indeterministic. While there is something called superdeterminism, I don't buy it - my understanding is that it's essentially handwaving by saying that quantum mechanics only appears to be indeterministic because we aren't omniscient. It's not based on anything solid.
That's what Einstein thought for a long time. "I can't believe God plays dice with the universe."
But later, he relented.
What other than your own free will possessed you to write this click bait piece?
The same forces that possessed you to write that column: The laws of nature.
Well, if so, I see no reason to pay attention to what Kevin says. Because he had no choice but to say what he did. And in a world without free will, there is no truth, because all judgements of truth or falsity are predetermined, and therefore cannot reflect anything about the "true" state of affairs.
Brave New World, Kevin.
Besides quantum mechanics, there are a number of reasons to question absolute determinism.
1. We don't yet know all of the physical laws of the universe. To assume that the laws we don't yet know are absolutely deterministic is an article of faith, not science.
2. Our attitude towards the nature of the laws we do know about must be provisional acceptance. We cannot prove them because we cannot be sure that we will not find exceptions in the future. We accept them because they seem to work in all cases examined so far. If and when they don't, we must modify existing physical law. To assume that existing "laws" are the final word in any sense is unscientific.
3. Science is all about objective evidence. It cannot even explain why subjective experience arises from objective laws of nature. Until it does, there is no reason to assume that we know everything about the Universe, including that everything that happens is predetermined.
can you define your usage of free will, consciousness and self-awareness? because if humans don't have them, based on your post, it seems you think free will is just a fictional concept that simply can't exist and i really don't understand what you think about consciousness and self-awareness or why. and this isn't to say i disagree with you, but these are subtle cocepts dependent on very specific definitions.
That is just the confusion between the two definitions that I highlighted in my previous response (first in this post).
Kevin is yalking about sense (2), and you seem to interpret it in sense (1).
Right about what? All you did was transfer some philosophical argument from one side of the brain to another, not that you had any idea you were doing it /s. The thing about metaphysics is that it is the ultimate sanctum of irrelevance to be conducted by those with most to waste. Let’s put it this way, do you think a Palestinian mother in Gaza is thinking about how her brain operates?
“The universe appears to be governed by mathematical law…” is odd, unless you mean math = physics. Isn’t math just another product of human brain chemistry?
Yes.
Isn’t math just another product of human brain chemistry?
The intrinsic reality of mathematics—does it exist in nature or is it merely a human construct—is a very old and thorny intellectual controversy.
It was a close call. But after much internal debate, I have convinced myself that you are correct.
Needless to say, this is a very old religious and philosophical argument, and neither Sapolsky nor I are going to settle it.
Sapolsky may be a neurobiologist and that makes his thesis sound very science-y. But it's clearly not. Other scientists make the same argument, that free will does not exist, but they are operating outside the domain of science when they do so.
If scientists simply claimed that science cannot find and describe the mechanism by which free will operates, that would be one thing. When they say free will does not exist, they are stating a belief. They have no greater claim to holding a valid belief than those who claim free will does exist. When the two sides argue, it's a battle ideologies, but it's not very enlightening as to which conclusion is correct. It's a debate that's outside what can be proven.
Other thinkers and philosophers are more careful distinguishing beliefs from other possibilities.
The best argument against all this is: Oh come on. Jim Jordan just lost a vote for Speaker of the House and you're saying this was merely the end result of billions of years of a clockwork universe ticking away?
The clockwork universe went out the window when quantum theory walked in the room. Many of the arguments against free will went with it.
Yep. His argument is science-y in the same way that certain political claims are truthy. But truthiness isn't true, and science-y isn't innately true either.
Kevin the Fatalist: Prêchez tant qu’il vous plaira, vos raisons seront peut-être bonnes; mais s’il est écrit en moi ou là-haut que je les trouverai mauvaises, que voulez-vous que j’y fasse?
This is an old argument, but I side with those who say that religion invented freewill as a way to justify guilt.
This is one of those arguments that is largely semantic... what do you MEAN when you say free will.
TLDR; The devil made me do it!
After many decades of studying humans and other primates I have decided that I have free will but everybody else is a robot, especially humans.
If I didn't have free will why should anybody believe what I say? Why would you believe someone if what he says is just the result of random collisions of atoms?
It is probably true that free will is a myth, although for the more basic reason that nobody had ever come up with a coherent notion of free will. This is not dependent on modern biology. But there is an unfortunate tendency in people newly discovering this to draw bad conclusions from it. The quoted passage above that is supposed to draw the conclusions from it is mostly nonsense.
After the bolded passage which is true in a sense, but false in a more important sense, we get this " It means treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane." But this is silly. We have seen that a significant amount of drunk driving can be deterred by producing consequences for drunk driving. It is hard to see how the same thing could be true of people who have heart attacks.
That is, the realization about free will should mitigate concerns for revenge (although it likely can't in practice do that entirely) but does nothing to end the value of deterrence.
At a more complex level, realizing that free will doesn't exist means that we can't be held responsible for acting as if free will exists. And it is probably better for society that we act as if free will exists.
"... nobody had ever come up with a coherent notion of free will"
That is wrong.
The problem is that there are two coherent definitions of free will, and people confuse between them. See my first response to this thread.
Kevin means free will in sense (2), the people that object mean it in sense (1).
I came here to say much the same thing, in a bit of a different way — we know how to treat heart disease; we don’t have much success with alcoholism. “treating drunk drivers who barrel into pedestrians just like drivers who suffer a sudden heart attack and veer out of their lane” is a stupid statement.
Oh-KAY!!! I get to eat that ice cream sandwich, because it isn't up to me!!
I reject this idea, by the way. (I'l just eat half of it.)
Just another reminder of the old definition of philosophy: two blind men in a room debating the color of the walls.
Sapolsky is not a philosopher. That’s the problem here.
If time is a cloud, rather than something that progresses in a strictly linear fashion, then this premise is wrong. And if "consciousness" is actually a product of the entire body, rather than just some localized area of the brain, then the premise is similarly wrong. I say this entirely of my own free will, by the way.
I could not disagree more with this:
"The universe appears to be governed by mathematical law"
Combine quantum mechanics with chaos theory and predictability goes out the window. Hell, there's no closed-form solution to the damn 3-body problem.
Why do you need chaos theory?
You don't. I brought it up because there are people who don't understand or necessarily care about QM. Chaos theory takes an entirely classical and deterministic system - like the TBP - and shows you can't solve even those simple differential equations in closed form. Hence, no long-term predictability, where "long term" depends on the system.
Until we know what consciousness is we can’t say if we have free will.
Consciousness is not simply complexity. The most complex computer is still executing algorithms and no algorithm can encompass experience. I look at the sky and experience the color of the sky. The most unfortunate person who is barely conscious can still experience something of life.
Personally I posit that consciousness is an emergent property of some biological systems akin to the way that superconductivity is an emergent property of some lattices. In other words, the ability to feel or sense is a basic property of this universe. We can imagine different experiences and then choose the one we desire.
I’m happy to agree that we only partly use our free will. Much of our life is reflexive based on the world around us and doesn’t require free will.
I like this observation:
"Until we know what consciousness is we can’t say if we have free will."
I think we sometimes tend to overlook or dismiss the fact that even 21st century science has no explanation for consciousness. In Kevin's case, he seems to lean towards dismissal (as far as I can tell from this one blog post).
But I personally suspect that science will never be able to explain consciousness. Science is an objective field of endeavor, and there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but the objective frame of reference does carry its own inherent limitations. And in the exploration of consciousness, science hits some of those limits.
Why? because consciousness is pure subjectivity. Trying to analyze pure subjectivity through the objective lens of science may be like looking for the proverbial lost key under a street light even though the key was lost inside a dark (and mysterious) house. We'll never find the key under the street light, it's just not there. But that's where our frame of reference provides some illumination, so it's the only place we can look.
Until, that is, we change our frame of reference. We need to adopt subjective methods to explore consciousness. And that brings us unfashionably far from science. And thus consciousness will remain a mystery unless and until our cultural values undergo a profound transformation.
I never took Kevin for a nihilist before, but this post definitely changed that.
I don't agree but let's pretend KD is right, then: So what? Whether we are or aren't trapped in a deterministic universe doesn't change anything that actually matters. I still have to pay my taxes and not be late to work and eat a certain number of calories a day.
Also, I'm pretty sure the notion of strict mathematical determinism was obliterated by quantum theory, Heisenberg, Schrödinger et al. Only a smug asshole looks at this cosmically fraught argument and simplistically says "but I'm right".
Anyway this is maybe the ultimate and most extreme episode of the long-running series "That thing you're worried about (all of human civilization)? It's not a big deal to me, Kevin Drum."
Regarding Kevin's statement:
"The universe appears to be governed by mathematical law, and there's no good reason to think this suddenly stops at the boundary of the human brain. All that happens is that as biological structures get more complex they get harder to predict."
I believe this is more or less in line with positivism (per Wikipedia):
"Historically, positivism has been criticized for its reductionism, i.e., for contending that all 'processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events,' 'social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals,' and that 'biological organisms are reducible to physical systems.'"
If there's one thing I'm against (and which I'm constantly struggling with in my own thinking), it's reduction. So, consider me a dedicated anti-positivist.
I believe very strongly that such things as inspiration, insight, imagination, intuition, and many other possibly inexplicable aspects of our psyche, or consciousness, should be taken more seriously. It is the very nature of such phenomenon to defy objective quantification or simplified explanation. They are part of the great mystery of life and all of life’s manifestations.
And the primacy that positivists give to material conditions as the determinant of consciousness potentially does more to confuse rather than to clarify the complex reality we actually live in.
This was put to bed in 2016, when millions of voters had absolutely no choice but to vote for Trump, because someone applied the term "deplorable," in a closed forum, to 1/3 of them.
A powerless horde of pre-programmed zombies descended on polling places, as if their arms and legs were moved by outside forces.
I ate a blimp that tasted like pickles and now whenever I do cartwheels on top of puffins my wigwam explodes
I typed that sentence out of my own free will. I have never written that before, nor has anyone else in human history. Nothing pre-programmed about it. So while the amount of free will we have is tiny, it definitely exists.
This is my first post here. I've saved a snippet by William Irwin on this very issue for many years. It's always lingered in my mind as undeniably true yet utterly absurd and likely pointless.
"In the traditional sense, having free will means that multiple options are truly available to me. I am not a computer, running a decision-making program. No matter what I choose, I could have chosen otherwise. However, in a materialist, as opposed to dualist, worldview, there is no place in the causal chain of material things for the will to act in an uncaused way. Thus only one outcome of my decision-making process is possible. Not even quantum indeterminacy could give me the freedom to order steak. The moment after I recognize this, however, I go back to feeling as if my decision to order pasta was free and that my future decision of what to have for dessert will also be free. I am a free will fictionalist. I accept that I have free will even though I do not believe it."
I can't get around it. Imagine time can be rewound. You order the pasta, time is rewound and restarted, you order the pasta again. Repeat as many times as you like and a deterministic universe will produce the same "choice" every time. That doesn't sound like free will. But the only other possibility is that, somehow, sometimes I order the steak. But how is that free will either? Why would I sometimes choose differently when absolutely nothing leading up to the decision is different? To order steak would seem to imply my "choice" is actually random.
And yet we all act as it we have free will because there is simply no other way for a human mind to function. We truly cannot accept - not in any meaningful way - that we're merely aware of what's happening but not in charge of anything, because we cannot stop feeling like we're choosing.