Given how many different conceptions of free-will exist, it is not likely that any debate about it conclude in my lifetime – does it exist or not? And if it does, what is it? I am convinced that, like so many philosophical problems, this comes down to a problem of terminology, meaning, and “a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Wittgenstein). When people argue about free will, they seldom all have the same definitions in mind.
G.E. Moore, another analytical philosopher, also had deep concerns with muddled thinking caused by imprecise language which confuses rather than clarifies. Moore strongly believed that muddled thinking and imprecise language confused our thinking about reality. He thought that a combination of common sense and precise language were sufficient to address most philosophical questions. Because of the laxness in the use of language when addressing complex issues, philosophers exacerbate the complexity and create problems out of nothing. Such is probably the case with Free Will.
This is why is the question of free will is so confusing. In this way, it is similar to other confusing concepts like “life” and “consciousness” and “soul”. We mostly don’t really know what we mean when we use these words. As typically used, the concept of free will is incoherent, vague, and poorly expressed. No wonder there is such confusion and debate! So there are at least three problems – what do we actually mean by free will, does it exist, and if it does exist, what is it?
Where does this question come from? Why are people asking it? How to even address it - it is so multifaceted. Conversations about it seem to develop into a cascade of assertions, objections to those assertions, and then a renewed push into a different branch of assertions, and then objections to those. One way to approach it would be to deal with the low hanging fruit first and dispose of those.
Dualism
A good place, then, to start would be with "Dualism", a concept formalized by Rene Descartes a few hundred years ago. He developed a theory of human beings are split into "mind" and "body". The core of his assertion was that mental phenomena (including consciousness and will) are non-physical, while the body is a physical controlled by the mind, and they are forever separate things.
Unfortunately for Descartes, there has been a trend away from Cartesian dualism which continually grows stronger with the maturation of all branches of science that touch on it (biology, medicine, physiology, neuroscience, psychology), and even with changes in religious concepts of the "soul". Discoveries in science are pulling back the drapes from the mystery of how the brain works and how the mind emerges from brain function. The inescapable logical conclusion seems to be that everything we do is controlled by a brain that itself is "just meat" (i.e., there is no spiritual agent controlling the mind), and that along with all other physical events in the universe, all of our mental activity is caused by physically and temporally adjacent events immediately preceding them. In other words, the "state of affairs" in our brains the millisecond before we make a choice determines that choice, and the state of affairs two milliseconds before that choice determined what happened a millisecond later. Carried to the extreme, everything we do is ultimately determined or caused by what just happened before. So, how does "choice" even occur? If you could peer deeply enough into the human choice-making process, wouldn't it turn out to be just a very complicated, but completely determined and predictable mechanism that works with inputs, processes them through its current state and configuration, and emits a predictable decision? Could we just be marionettes or very sophisticated robots, fooling ourselves into thinking that our choices and our will are free and unencumbered? These are the questions that people continue to ask about free will. It goes against each of our experiences to conclude that we are mindless puppets. Dualism sought to escape from this conclusion. It seemed to Descartes that the best way out of this would be to ascribe to a higher, etherial entity "the "mind") which was not incorporated in the "body".
A coffin nail in the dualist understanding of Dualism was most famously formed by a friend and correspondent of Rene Descartes. Descartes promoted a dualist interpretation of man's nature - a mind and body - two separate entities. The mind was supposed to be entirely immaterial, while the body was purely physical. Elisabeth, Princess Palatine of Bohemia, was critical of Descartes’ dualistic metaphysics. In their correspondence, Elisabeth questioned Descartes’ idea of dualism and how the soul and the body could interact. She rightly questioned how something immaterial (Descartes’ idea of the mind, which smells strongly of "soul" or "spirit") could move something material (the body). It seemed that there would have to be some sort of connection, figuratively some kind of steering mechanism that the mind would use to control the body. Descartes answered the question that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This form of dualism proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion. However, there never has been any evidence that such a connection exists, and if it did, there is no explanation for how an immaterial mind could influence the pineal gland. And there is no evidence of a non-corporeal mind/spirit/soul floating around out there. Many western religions have evolved to talk about these things a little more metaphorically than they were discussed decades or centuries ago. So, to those unrepentant dualists and committed fire and brimstone damners of sinful souls, I have nothing more to say on Dualism.
Spinoza on Free Will
Spinoza was way out in front of other thinkers of his time who were still into Duality, and the idea that the mind and the will were independent of physical causation. As a Monist, he believed the body and mind were both just manifestations of the same underlying reality, which was God/Universe. He argued that the mind is subject to the same laws of cause and effect as the rest of nature, and that all mental events have a physical cause. This argument gets to the heart of philosophical questions about free will.
For Spinoza, every being is acting and reacting in response to its environment, by sensing through its body and responding with choices. Free will, in this sense, is a comforting human fiction – one that offers the illusion that humans can act spontaneously and aren’t subject to the cause and effect chain of the natural world. We believe we have free will (that our choices are entirely "our own"), but that fundamentally, they are determined by underlying physical causes.
The Free Will Matrix
It seems that a natural outcome of rejecting the involvement of a "spirit" or non-corporeal mind, in consciousness and free will is that everything that happens in our minds ultimately has physical causes. Many people have trouble reconciling that fact with the wealth of experiences of creativity, spontaneity, emotion, inspiration, awareness, and choice. These latter things certainly do exist – to argue that they are illusions requires such mental gymnastics as to be ludicrous. The challenge is to reconcile physical determinism and our experience of creative choice (since we are discussing free will, and not overall consciousness).
There is plenty written about this, and one thing most of the articles and books I have seen on it have in common: they quickly become too complicated and detailed to understand, or else I don't have enough interest to stick it out and fully understand what is being said. Worse, many writers latch onto their favorite definitions of "will" and "free" to prove their point. In this chapter, I'm not going to review all the history of the free-will discussion, nor am I going to visit each of the viewpoints and show their pros and cons. I am going to try to "dissolve" the problem and make it go away, because I don't think it really is a true philosophical problem at all. It is more a case of people arguing about semantics and definitions.
A popular way to dissect free will into types is to think of it as a 2 by 2 matrix, or table, with two axes and 4 quadrants. The vertical axis ranges on the bottom "Our choices are not determined" to "our choices are determined". The horizonal axis ranges from "Free will does not exist" on the far left to "Free will does exist" on the far right.
The lower left cell of the table contains "Hard Indeterminism". This represents the view that our choices are not determined, and that we do not have free will.
The lower right cell is "Libertarianism". This is the strongest position concerning the existence of free will - that we have it and make all of our choices completely uninfluenced by events outside our control. We are totally free agents. This quadrant doesn't really make sense, in that it completely rejects the idea that our decisions are even a little bit out of our willful control. Obviously we at least sometimes are influenced by outside events to make some choices.
The upper left cell is "Hard Determinism". This is the strongest view that free will is an illusion. It does not exist, and all of our acts are determined by causes that we do not control. This view basically supports the idea that we are puppets completely controlled by fate and events immediately preceding the moment of our so-called choices.
The upper right cell "Compatibilism". This very popular view (one that I share) is that we do have free will (we control our own choices), but that at the lowest level, there are deterministic causes for the choices we make. Most people who have thought seriously about this issue (as high as 90%) end up in the Compatibilist camp. People who reject this option have it in there heads that there is a fundamental conflict between Free Will and Determinism. It doesn't matter whether the world is determine or undetermined. Free will is a phenomenon that does not depend on Determinism (or indeterminism) at any level. They are orthogonal concepts.
Acausal free will
If by free will you mean "acausal free will" (i.e., our choices are not the result of physical causes, but are the result of non-material/spiritual forces), then no, of course it does not exist. There is absolutely no evidence for this type of spiritual force. There are very few “acausal” events that happen (i.e., things that have no physical cause). According to some interpretations, quantum events are one of them, although this is not universally accepted. Events like quantum fluctuation and radioactive decay seem to be totally random. But to say that they are "uncaused" is an overstatement. All quantum events have a cause, but the cause never determines the outcome with complete accuracy. All quantum particles are described only as probability waveforms. There are no definite values until they are measured. They are not "acausal", but just "non-deterministic". Free will doesn’t work like that, though. Like all human behavior, free will is “caused” by something – something in the brain, the mind. But it should be noted that even if free will was, at its root, the result of random events, this would not help the cause of free will, but instead would damage it. It would not only mean that free will does not exist, but that what we think is free will is sparked by a randomness under no one’s control (not even our "spirit"). All that the introduction of randomness accomplishes is the removal of determinism. It does not support an argument for free will.
Randomness
Sometimes quantum merchanics gets thrown in to undermine the influence of determinism. Ususally this idea is introduced by someone who has no actual technical understanding of quantum physics. Sure, we are told that quantum events are unpredictable. Even if that does undercut Determinism, it does nothing in support of free will. It just would make our actions the result of some stoachastic, non-deterministic event. That doesn't make us free - we want our actions to be the caused by our deliberations and intent (whatever the cause of those are), not randomness. If either quantum randomness, chaos, or some other non-deterministic influence was involved, that would not suddenly allow free will to come into existence. It would really just make things even more confusing. Random or unpredictable causes are no more supportive of free will than Determinism is detrimental to it.
To argue that the universe is deterministic up to a point and then quantum uncertainty comes in to play and that is what allows free will is incoherent and irrelevant. If the universe is deterministic, then our choice are determined (and Free Will may or may not exist, depending on your opinion on this). But if reality is goverened by quantum randomness, in no way would this help or hurt the argument for Free Will. At best it would introduce random will, unpredictable. So, bringing quantum events into the free will discussion adds nothing.
Those who believe free-will is impossible because all events are Deterministic should not be cheered if they discover that either some form of chaos or some quantum randomness prevents complete predictability, even when initial conditions are known. Choices that result from a deterministic chain of events will not be qualitatively different in nature from those whose preceding events diverged from complete predictability. In neither case does the actor take on either more or less control. So, any discussion of randomness being injected into the decision making chain does not help or hurt the case for free will. If anything, it just muddies the water. Free will (or any other non-quantum phenomena in the world) can't be acausal (there must be a physical cause) because any alternative would imply a "ghost in the machine" a spirit that is not caused and exists independently outside of the universe. So, obviously things are caused. But simply to be caused does not imply that they are completely predictable. Being caused (determined by prior events) does not necessarily imply being predictable.
The paradox
It would be useful to be able to explain the conflict between the sensation of unfettered choice and the knowledge that, ultimately, all our choices are determined by the physical state of our mind/body system. When you want to resolve a paradox you can try to explain why one of the two conflicting, contradictory views is the right one and the other one is the wrong one. But that often doesn't make it feel like you actually resolved the paradox, until you explain where the illusion came from. The seeming paradox of free will vs determinism stems from people's dualist intuitions - the sense that they are not solely composed of their physical brain and body, but that there is a separate conscious "self" which is separate from their physical self, a homunculus inside of us, what is called a "Cartesian theatre".
This self then makes decisions "acausally", and enlists the physical brain to acts upon. It is easy to agree that every choice we make is completely determined by the state of the world at the time of the choosing, give or take a little quantum indeterminacy. The hard part is reconciling that fact with the competing intuition that we are freely making the choice.
We can make the question of free will vs. determinism disappear or do what is called "dissolving the problem" rather than solve the problem. Dissolving involves "unpacking" the original question and showing that it was poorly framed, badly expressed, based on incorrect assumptions, and fundamentally incoherent. People throw the term, Free Will, around as if there is common agreement as to what it means. I think the concept needs more precision and clarity.
We see choices being made all the time, all around us - people choosing different careers, different lives, and different flavors of ice cream. We should infer the underlying choice-making process is consistent with what the evidence demonstrates - people are considering alternatives and making decisions, free of coercion. A grinding, mindless, robotic program would not be able to generate the wide variety of choices we see being made. The empirical evidence supports the existence of Free Will. This is not a Will completely independent of preceding events and causes, but one that is made without duress, threat, or intimidation. We should not define Free Will to be totally free of influence, nor of completely random choices. We evaluate options and make choices. Those choices are constrained by our genetics, our experiences, and our own internal cognitive and biological "state of affairs" immediately before making the choice - but no one is twisting our arm - we can and we do choose. Unless we are being detained by the police, or living in a dictatorship, or literally lacking in choices due to poverty or circumstance, we have alternatives from which we can freely choose.
Technically we would say that the mind supervenes on the brain. This means that if there is a change in the dependent mental activity (emotion, choice, decision) then there would need to be a corresponding change in the underlying physical brain properties (neural activity, chemical reactions, etc). There can be no dependent mental change without an independent physical brain difference. But, there can be a change in underlying brain activities and properties without a corresponding change in mental properties. So, when we make a choice, then - yes - there are brain structures that lead up to that. But there also can be changes to the brain activity and structures that do not lead to choice.
If, by claiming that free will is an illusion, you mean that we do not have a capacity for control and evaluation of consequences and planning alternative courses of action based on anticipated consequences, then that is manifestly untrue. Of course we have this capability. To insist otherwise would be to flagrantly deny the data in a very irresponsible way. If we can be precise and clear about exactly what we mean by the term, free will, I think we will see that it can mean at least two very different things - an individual volition that is free from all physical causality - that operates, at some level, without being influenced or "caused" by other elements in the environment. A second meaning of free will would be an ability to choose that is free from obvious coercion and incorrect knowledge. If the first definition is correct, that none of us can choose freely, then none of us has the moral competence to sign a contract, to buy a car, to take out a mortgage, to enforce the law, to mete out punishment. Why? Because you have to have free will to sign those documents - you "sign of your own free will".
Compatibilism
Compatibilists maintain that determinism is compatible with free will. It may, however, be more accurate to say that compatibilists define "free will" in a way that allows it to co-exist with determinism. Compatibilists argue that determinism does not matter; what matters is that individuals' wills are the result of their own desires and are not overridden by some external force.[107][108] To be a compatibilist, one need not endorse any particular conception of free will, but only deny that determinism is at odds with free will.[109]
Most "classical compatibilists", such as Thomas Hobbes, claim that a person is acting on the person's own will only when it is the desire of that person to do the act, and also possible for the person to be able to do otherwise, if the person had decided to. Where that will comes from seems to be the sticking point for those who deny Free Will. But for compatibilists, it just doesn't matter.
Spinoza wrote: “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.”
When you examine a choice you have made, you can correctly say "this choice was completely determined by the state of the world at the time that I made it, and that state of the world includes my emotions, my preferences, my beliefs, my expectations, my subconscious/unconscious mind, my history, my habits, how I was raised, my early childhood experiences, my epigenetics, socio-biological and cultural influencers, my hormones, my metabolism, the external environment, the reinforcement / punishment paradigm I are operating in, and so on. And all of those preceding states were determined by similar events prior to that point in time. Every state of affairs in time was predetermined by the state of affairs immeidately preceding it in time. And so we have no choice to to take they action that they collectively drive us to. So how can it be that I am freely making this choice.
The answer is that our choices ARE determined by all these things, but that this fact does not undermine another fact - that even so, we have Free Will. How can this be? David Hume discussed the possibility that the entire debate about free will is nothing more than a merely "verbal" issue. He suggested that it might be accounted for by "a false sensation or seeming experience" (a velleity), which is associated with many of our actions when we perform them. Just a psychological state where we think we are freely making choices as they enter our conscious awareness. "Humean Compatibilism" says that one is free when they can tell a plausible story about why they did what they did in terms of their deliberations. The instigator of the decisions need not be something outside the causal structure of reality (actually, how could it even possibly exist in that realm?). If one were to learn that some facts about how their deliberations occur are the result of physical processes in the brain and mind, that is not a problem. As long the right thing to say is that they did something because they willed it rather than someone held a gun to their head, then they have Free Will. To that extent, we have free will. If we are not being constrained or coerced by outside forces to do other than we want to. In other words, we have Free Will when our actions are the result of the exercise of our will. But here it gets difficult because there are so many levels of freedom. I freely choose, but what if I have an addition or compulsive habit - does that still allow me to say I have free will? Or I get tricked or deceived into an action, and act based on bad information - how does that affect my free will?
That is, I don't believe in contra-causal free will, but do believe in "volunteeristic" free will. It is obvious that the direction of change and state of affairs of the universe at one moment "causes" or determines the state of affairs of the next moment - each instant was effectively pre-determined by the preceding instant. The state of affairs of the universe is not random, nor is it controlled by some agent outside the universe, which just leaves the deterministic option on the table. David Hume stated that most human decisions are the result of both prior causes as well as conscious acts of volition. If “we” individuals are not the ones making choices, then who is? A denier might say, “you are not in control of your choices”, but that makes no sense. Yes, are choices are caused – by our genetics, our past experience and memories, our current metabolism, our mood, what we were just thinking about or feeling immediately prior to the choice, and possibly an arbitrary switching between alternatives – these all influence the choices we make. But note that these are all parts of the person making the choice, they are “you”. You are your genetics, your experiences, your memories, your moods, your current metabolism, and even your psychological quirks. These are all you – they are nobody else. This “you” is making the choice – is exercising its volition and will, if prepending "free" to this is offensive, then leave it off - probably too much emphasis is attached to the "freedom" of will.
The stumbling block and cause for much debate is on the use of the words, "free" and "will". If you choose to define "free" as completely undetermined by physics, chemistry, and biology, of course there’s no "free" will. But, if "free" means that you’re not constrained by outside force, intimidation, law, social convention, insanity, a physical or psychological spasm, but you "choose", we humans (and other animals) do that all the time. This more generous definition of "free" simply means "not under duress". With this understanding, Free Will doesn't mean what we usually intuit that it means. "Free" doesnt' mean free from causality - nothing is free from causality, but only that it is not under outside constraint or duress. Compatibilists accept physical determinism but argue that man is free as long as his own will is one of the steps in the causal chain, even if his choices are completely predetermined for physical reasons.
Those who support the notion of a deterministic universe that lacks free will frequently present a strawman argument against Compatibilists, saying that although we accept determinism, we irrationally believe in some immaterial cause of volition and choice. That is not a fair or accurate representation. They don't choose to follow the looser definition of "Free", and ungenerously choose to apply that rigorous definition to everyone else's position on free will.
The problem is in the definition of "free". I don't use free in the sense of totally uncaused, or free from an underlying mechanical process. A less onerous definition of free means unfettered, uncoercersed, unforced. Volition, will, and choice are clearly present in all higher animals who observe and react to their environments. From jellyfish to prairie dogs to humans, all living creatures make choices every day as they live their lives. Some of those choices may be very simple, and others more complex (follow the warm current, hide from overhead shadows, move toward the light, avoid the high pH water, buy a car, take a new job). The ability to "decide" does not imply a sophisticated intellect and analysis of alternatives - much of the decision making mechanism is probably hardwired into the organisms's nervous system. It seems likely that the same processes that allow a rat to "will" his way out of a maze, or to choose how to solve a puzzle are at work in humans as they solve more complex problems. Of course, humans, unlike jellyfish, rats, and prairie dogs think about their decision making - we think about thinking, we have metacognition. Humans are able to examine alternatives more analytically. Just because a more simple organism is making less complex decisions has nothing to do with the phenomenon of Choice. Their choices are different than ours only in degree. Our consciousness, awareness, perception, calculation, motivation are all "caused" by physical events, and even the perception (however illusory) that these choices are utterly free is ultimately caused by physical events. Yes, we humans may be deluding ourselves if we think are choices are completely controlled by our conscious will, even if it feels that way. But we do make choices, we do "will" things to occur. It is not the fact of Determinism in physical systems that is the problem with Free Will. It is the onerous and arbitrary definition that Free Will deniers have chosen. Despite what a denier would argue, they would be just as likely as anyone else to curse the driver that cut them off in traffic or thank the kind person who held the door open for them. Why either curse or thank an action that was completely determined and not an act of Free Will?
Daniel Dennett (a famous Compatibilist) defines Free Will as "a moral competence that permits an agent who is well informed, has well ordered desires and preferences, is able to detect when he is being manipulated, can protect himself from manipulation from others, and is morally responsible (capable of being punished for making the wrong choice), to make choices and decisions". By this definition, an infant, a drunk, an insane person, a robot, or someone who has bad information, someone who is being misled and tricked does not have Free Will. For many of these people, we don't hold them to the same level of responsibility as someone who has "moral competence". Mr Dennett, like most compatibilists, does not let the fact of Determinism weigh heavily in his consideration of Free Will. Obviously, things are caused - there is nothing in the universe that we have seen that is uncaused. His version of Free Will is simply the ability to make well informed choices without coersion.
Emergence
Free will does not exist in our atoms, molecules, cells, or organs. It is not the given to us by an external spiritual force. So, how does it come about? The same question could be asked for love, hunger, fear, desire, hope, and consciousness. These higher level human traits are not present in our constituent elements, either. The answer is that they are emergent phenomena that evolve in all living creatures, including humans.
There’s nothing like “Free Will” anywhere to be found in the fundamental laws of physics or in the atoms, molecules, and cells that make up the human brain. However, at the higher-level description of "minds", we should ask whether our best emergent theory of human activity includes the idea that we are decision-making agents with freedom of action. Until we come up with a better description of human beings, we should admit that Free Will is “real”. It is the best explanation for the phenomena we see living beings producing. It’s not to be found in the most fundamental ontology, but it’s not incompatible with it either; it’s simply a crucial part of our best higher-level vocabulary.
It is flawed reasoning that leads one to conclude that there is no Free Will. This flaw in this reasoning is a reliance on a reductionist approach to the problem. The error is what leads one to decide that because the mind depends on the brain, and the brain depends on physical and chemical reactions, and those reactions depend on atoms, and those are all just bouncing around in a deterministic way overlooks a key concept - that of emergence. This reductionist approach assumes that lower level objects and events fully determine the higher level complex systems that emerge from them. The emergent behavior that the complex system which is the mind exceeds the behavior of the parts that it is constructed from. Although the individual constituents of the brain are physical, the mind exceeds those separate components. Mental activity cannot be reduced to its components. Its properties cannot be derived purely from analyzing the interactions the simple rules that made the system. So even though purely deterministic movements characterize the elements which constitute the mind, the mind itself - consciousness, philosophy, morals, love, and even free will, could never have been predicted by examining the properties of the elements which underlie them. In a strongly emergent system, the underlying rules, which led to the system are not useful in explaining the new behavior. Although there is much agreement that weak emergence is real, much disagreement exists regarding strong emergence. There is not a single example that has unanimous agreement.
Sean Carroll is a proponent of Free Will being an emergent property of the Mind, and a confirmed Compatibility. See "Sean Carroll" for an interview where he outlines his view. His opinion is that the whole Determinism/Random nature of reality is a red herring - entirely irrelevant. What matters is that Free Will, as a theory of human behavior, makes accurate predictions and is consistent with every other theory we have about how humans work. Neither souls, spirits, Determinism, nor randomness get in the way to change those predictions. Our shared, conventional model of human behavior uses Free Will very effectively to explain and predict individual behavior and social interaction. He uses the analogy of Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics to illustrate his point. That is an area where we have a perfectly rigorous fundamental theory of how atoms and molecules bounce off of each other, alongside an emergent theory of temperature and pressure and viscosity, etc. that involve large numbers of these interacting elements. The emergent Thermodynamic theory (temperature/pressure/density/energy flow) is useful, appropriate, and relevant when talking about large scale interactions. It is not "fundamental", but emerges from the lower level interactions of particles. Free Will is similar to Thermodynamic properties. We should have no more difficulty using the concept of Free Will than we do using concepts like temperature, pressure, flow, density, turbulence, and viscosity. A person cannot get through the day without viewing other human beings as autonomous agents who are making choices. That is because Free Will - the ability to make choices - is a crucial part of our emergent, macroscopic way of talking and thinking about human beings. To those who would say Free Will is an illusion, it is no more of an illusion than temperature. Both are "weakly" emergent phenomena that are consistent with the microscopic dynamics that underlie them. In principle (though maybe not in practice) both temperature and Free Will could be predicted by a full and complete understanding of the states of their lower level components. Carroll's popular theme of "poetic naturalism" is applicable here. At a low level, it makes sense and is useful to look at individual elementary components. But when the conversation changes from the atomic level to the macroscopic level, it is more useful to employ language and concepts that apply in that context. If you were to ask someone what the current temperature is, and they answered by listing the position and velocity of all the atoms in the room, that would be useless and silly. In the same way it would be silly if you were to ask someone why they made a certain choice, and they insisted on denying that a choice was made, but instead tried to describe the state of all their brain chemicals and cells. Free Will is no more an illusion or fiction than temperature and pressure. For that matter, it is as real as any other emergent phenomenon like planets or dogs. All of them are combinations of lower level components (atoms and minerals in the case of planets, and cells and organs in the case of dogs). Carroll says, “We can talk about human beings as agents making choices, while also agreeing that we don’t violate the laws of physics.” There is nothing in the concept of Free Will that conflicts with any other theories or facts that underlie the physics and biology of what it means to be a human being. Free Will is a perfectly valid way to talk about how human beings behave, just as we meaningfully talk about other emergent human phenomena like desire, knowledge, emotion, hope, and fear. It is perfectly valid to assign responsibility to people who make those choices.
Carroll's idea has some similarities to a concept found in Roger Scruton's book, "The Soul of the World". He used the term, "cognitive dualism" to describe the multi-level view of reality. He didn't really conceive of these views as hierarchical, but more of an "either-or" choice, complementary but non-compatible modes of comprehending the world. Cognitive dualism allows us to see the same world in two different ways: the way of science and the way of interpersonal understanding. The latter is concerned with the "Lebenswelt", or world of life. In this view, persons are treated as free subjects, making choices, having free will, who can explain the reasons for their actions. "Lebenswelt" rejects the treatment of people as purely biological organisms whose actions can be explained by a chain of causality. Modern societies tend to forego "Lebenswelt" in favor of the biological lens, but this is unfortunate. It causes us to view one another as objects rather than subjects. He argues that it’s only through religion and the mystical that we can reorient our attitudes toward meaning, accept our role as free moral agents, and confront the most difficult and important crises in our lives. Unlike Carroll, he leans on a religious backstop. But there is a similarity in that both of them agree that the same reality can be interpreted and comprehended in several different ways. There is no single "correct" view of reality. They are complementary and non-conflicting.
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But the key to this is that you are nothing more than the sum total of those emotions, preferences, history, and physical body and beliefs and habits and so on. So to say that those things together deterimine your choice and to say that you make the choice are actually to say the same thing. You are all those things, and all those things work together to exercise choice. The seeming paradox comes from the fact that we have this inclination to think we have this "other" self that is separate from those things that make us up, but we don't. There almost certainly is some set of emergent properties that arise from the combination of all parts (consciousness, personality, awareness), but there certainly is no other special ingredient. We talk about those traits belonging to that self, but in fact they ARE that self. There is no distiction. What drives the concern about free will is that people are concerned that if the human being, the brain, the mind are fundamentally mechanistic and naturalistic, and that they obey the rule of cause and effect, that this means that we are just robots doing what we have to do. Most people don't want this to be true, and so follow several paths to escape the "robot" conclusion. They choose to believe in a Cartesian duality, where the mind is independent of physical causality, or they invent some kind of "quantum" indeterminacy explanation to escape determinism, or some other escape. But these gymnastics are not necessary because the conclusion that we lack free will because of physical determinism and causality simply does not follow, anyway. For billions of years on this planet, life existed but no free will - algea, single celled organisms, plants, and other simple creatures obeyed the call of nature to find food, eliminate waste material, escape danger, and otherwise try to survive. How is it that we humans now have free will? How did this occur? Physics didn't change. Causality and determinism didn't change. Nature didn't change. Our biology and our mental capabilities changed. Human cognition has evolved far beyond those lifeforms I just mentioned - our capabilities and ability to conceive of possibilities are far greater than any other creatures. One of those capabilities is self-reflection - we don't just respond to causes, but we form mental representations of those causes, we think about different reactions to causes, and choose reactions from among the alternatives. Humans can take responsibility for their actions and choices because they can consciously choose or not choose. We don't just react to external and internal causes, but we react to reasons that we represent to ourselves, consider, and evaluate. This gives us both the power and the obligation to take responsibility for our actions in a way that no other animals can do. Our brains, mostly our frontal cortexes, can consider the consequences of different potential actions and allow us to choose from those actions. We have a mental model of the world, of events, and of possible responses to the world. We can predict the consequences of those responses and select from them on the basis of those consequences - that constitutes free will. All of those things comprise the behavior that we call free will. By this definition, we could even extend rudimentary free will to other higher-level animals that are able to analyze situations and come up with innovative and creative solutions - racoon, chimpanzees, crows, octopi, dolphins, and others. They are not robots, and their behaviors are not any more predictable than ours. They don't share the same level of consciousness that we do, and they probably don't ponder philosophical issues such as this, but they too react to representations of possible actions based on likely outcomes. To limit free-will to humans as something that distinguishes us from all other animal is just another example of species-specific chauvinism that humans have always exhibited. It is clearly the case that our behaviour and our thoughts are the result of physical processes in the brain. Those processes are "caused" by other physical processes, and not by a "ghost in the machine" operating outside our bodies (as DesCartes would have us believe). Because the the enormous complexity of the brain and of the universe as a whole, the predictability of outcomes is limited. Even with perfect information about the current state of affairs, we cannot predict with absolute certainty how things are going to evolve over time. Chaos is a real thing - turbulence and unpredictability exist, and they emerge in most complex systems. Even when we admit that phyical determinism is true, perfect predictibility is not true. SDIC (sensitive dependence on initial conditions) or the "butterfly effect" will guarantee that even when two systems are in the same initial state, they will evolve differently, and the more time elapses, the more they will diverge. We cna't have infinite precision in setting up initial conditions, and even if we did, chaos would eventual emerge due to entropy and randomness. Anyway, back to the “free” part of free will. The obvious question is: free from what? That’s where coherence quickly becomes a problem. Unless you are a dualist — a thankfully dying breed among philosophers — you can’t possibly mean free from causal interactions with matter/energy, i.e. independent of the laws and materials of the universe. The will, whatever it is and however we like to conceptualize it, is grounded in the biological activity of our neurons. And last time I checked our neurons are made of matter, exchange energy (in the form of electrical currents and chemical reactions), and are subject to the laws of physics. So if that’s what you mean by “free,” it’s a no starter. What all of this seems to suggest is that the undeniable feeling of “free will” that we have is actually the result of our conscious awareness of the fact that we make decisions, and that we could have — given other internal (i.e., genetic, developmental) and external (i.e., environmental, cultural) circumstances — decided otherwise in any given instance. That’s what Dennett called a type of free will that is “worth having,” and I consider it good enough for this particular non-dualist, non-mystically inclined human being. daniel dennet interview point of inquiry "Free will is moral competence of the following sort. A person - an agent - has free will who is well informed and has well-ordered desires and preferences, who is good at detecting when he or she is being manipulated by other agents, and is good at protecting itself from manipulation by others, and also in order to have free will in the requisite sense you got to have ... "skin in game" - you've got to be punishable ... have something to worry about ... so it can be motivated not to do things because it would hate to be punished." Neuroscientsists have said that because of the way our brians are built, we suffer from an illusion of having free will, and so therefore need to rethink our justice system (because they believe that ultimately people are not responsible for thier choices). They have taken the least sophisticated, most literal defiition of free will possible, the least science-friendly definition of free will possible and decided tahts the right version of free will to go with and say, "well thats an illusion". Well they are right about that (freedom from all causation, and a result of deterministic features of reality). But that doesn't mean that there isn't another vision of free will, which is sane, important, grounds our laws and our system of punishment. If they really want to say free will is an illusion, they should consider these implications: it would mean that no one has the moral competence to sign a contract, to make a promise, to buy a house or car, to take out a mortgage. Why? because you have to have free will to sign those documents - you must sign "of your own free will". But certainly they and everyone else of legal age would insist that they do, in fact have the moral competence and authroity to sign contracts. or to make promises. So, that shows for them and everyone that they do have a free will that is not in the least jeapordized by a determistic universe or anything coming out of neuroscience. People seem to be convinced that free will and determinism (as in causal determinism) or incompatible. There really is no evidence of that at all. Free will and determinism are unrelated - they are orthogonal. It doesnt' matter whether the world or physics is determined or undetermined and non-deterministic. free will is a phoenomenon that does not depende on indeterminism at any level. According to Dennet, free will is: • Free will is "moral competence"with these features: • a person or "agent has free will who is well informed (has the facts straight). • has well ordered desires and preferences • can detect when they are being manipulated • canprotect themselves from manipulated • have to have "skin in the game", have to be able to suffer conseqnences from poor decisions. Young people and children are not normally held responsible for the deeds because as a socieity we regonize that they do not have a well developed since of free will. Free will is not a matter of separating the mind from causation - that is a ridiculou idea - since we are the physical elements which make us up, and all physical elements are part of the causal chain of events in the universe. Separting from causation has nothing to do with free will. In fact you want, and need, to be imbedded in the causation around us. We want to be caused by our genes, our experiences, and the current environment so provide to us the information that allows us to make decsions and choices that meet our "well ordrerd desires". If we have that and we are not being manipulated or controlled by someone else, then you have free will. The conventional (libertarian) idea of free will makes no sense and cannot be brought into register with our scientific picture of the world. We also agree that determinism need not imply fatalism and that indeterminism would give us no more freedom than we would have in a deterministic universe. http://bigthink.com/videos/daniel-dennett-explains-consciousness-and-free-will http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/may/22/daniel-dennett-aristotle-flaming-idiot David Hume discussed the possibility that the entire debate about free will is nothing more than a merely "verbal" issue. He suggested that it might be accounted for by "a false sensation or seeming experience" (a velleity), which is associated with many of our actions when we perform them. On reflection, we realize that they were necessary and determined all along.[ I am a compatibilist. I believe that determinism is true, and I still think that both free will exists, and that even if you went back in time to some previous point and replayed the "movie of life", it would turn out differently. So, I think that it is true that events at time T+1 are fully predicted by the state of affairs at time T preceding it, and that time T+2 is determined by events at time T+1, etc, that events at time T+bigNumber cannot be predicted. This is a paradox. It is not the same paradox as the sorites paradox, but seems kind of similar. What is true for micro changes is not true of the big picture. See the Determinism entry in wikipedia. One explanation for this might be chaos theory and "sensitive dependence on initial conditions", where some small difference in initial conditions due to measurement error or minute lack of precision can result in enormous differences down the line. There may aslo be some kind of "emergent" Generative processes or randomness that occurs at sufficient levels of complexity (also discussed in the wiki article) I conclude that humans have "will" (a cognitive function that turns our desire into conscious action), it is just not completely free. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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