Thoughts On Free Will

I've recently discovered the fascinating philosophical discussions around the subject of free will. We surely all have free will and are responsible for our own actions, right? It turns out the answer is not obvious. Many famous philosophers have studied this question and don't agree on the answer. In this blog post I'd like share my discoveries and hopefully encourage you to think deeply about this topic.

I'm a regular listener to Sam Harris' Waking Up podcast, where I discovered Sam's opinion on the topic of free will. He claims that free will is not real and is just an illusion in our brains. Some very intelligent people share(d) this opinion.

... it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord…. So would a being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.

Sam Harris starts with the assumption that determinism is true (without rejecting the possibility of randomness). Note that determinism does not necessarily mean that if you knew the entire state of the universe and all laws of physics then you could predict every state in the future. This type of determinism is very likely wrong because quantum mechanics proves that the universe doesn't behave in a predictable way. Therefore let's only discuss the types of determinism that just state that events always have a cause and don't make any further assumptions (and are therefore more compatible with science).

Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature.

In his book Free Will, Sam Harris agues that decisions are ultimately made by unconscious processes in our brains. Think about it: can you really decide what thought is going to pop up next in your head? Can you really control all neurological activities that ultimately affect what decision you make, like what you are going to eat for dinner tonight? If that's not the case, our conscious self might not be truly making any decisions. Instead, the decisions might just "appear" from our subconscious. This is not really free will. Sam confirms this by using self introspection (via a kind of meditation) to see through the illusion and to conclude that there is no free will. Another argument he brings to the table is that the more neuroscience discovers about the brain, the more we'll blame bad behavior on biology rather than on the individual's choice (see this case where a brain tumor caused pedophilia). In the end, every behavior might be explainable by the configuration of your neurons.

According to him however, having no free will doesn't mean that we can't hold people accountable for their actions or that we should just sit back and watch life happen. I don't fully understand how you can state this if you don't think we can make any decisions consciously. My summary of his opinion is probably not perfect, therefore I recommend his presentation in the Festival of Dangerous Ideas (video below) if you are looking for his own summary of the book.

Now, if you are like me, you might try really hard to find what is wrong in Sam Harris' argument. It can't be true, we want to keep free will! This is where the view of compatibilism comes in (or a least tries to). Compatibilism is the view that determinism and free will can coexist. One compatibilist idea is that actions that are determined by causes internal to an agent can be called free. Also, there are different ways to interpret the statement "I could have done otherwise". Daniel Dennett is a great philosopher and he is on the side of the compatibilists. Daniel Dennett has had long discussions with Sam Harris and they seem to fundamentally disagree on this topic. Even though compatibilism sounds very desireable, I personally don't find it very logical, and therefore I can probably not expose its arguments here very well. If you have over an hour to spare, and your brain is not tired yet, I recommend this lecture by Dennett that is pretty much a direct counter-response to Sam Harris' arguments.

If you only have 9 minutes, the video below by Crash Course gives a nice simplified overview of compatibilist ideas. Unfortunately the video doesn't go into the details of the reasoning of compatibilists, but it's still a good introduction.

Sam Harris clearly states that he doesn't believe in compatibilism. But his ideas about the consequences of not having free will such as still having moral responsibility for your actions sound a bit like the compatibilism Dennett argues for. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems like Harris' and Dennett's opinions differ only in terms of how you define free will.

Final notes

So far I personally think that compatibilism is not a very satisfying theory because it kind of redefines free will to be just "practical" free will, and not the complete free will we feel we have (or maybe are taught to have?). However, no free will is not very "satisfying" either. I still need to study the compatibilist idea more before I can dismiss it and I'll start by reading Freedom Evolves to understand Dennett's idea more.

I would love to hear of a different theory that let's us be fundamentally free even if it turns out determinism is true. But it seems like this is not easily possible. This makes me feel less significant and "magical". Nevertheless there is still one piece of magic I can hold on to: the mystery of consciousness (a.k.a. the hard problem, which, incidentally, Dennett also disputes).

Let's also remember that our intuitions about our own brain might be completely wrong and not reflect what is actually going on behind the scenes. Neuroscience might be the only way to shine more light into the free will discussion. But who knows if we even have enough brain capacity to understand our own brain.

Anyhow, we are the most "free" beings in the universe that we have observed so far, so in that sense I think we can call ourselves pretty free!